[Voterescue] One-Party Texas Counties??!

[Karen Renick]

Below is a message from David Van Os about the one-party counties in 
Texas he sent to the VoteRescue mailing list last night, but I did not 
receive it. (David Rogers forwarded it to me after he mentioned it in a 
conversation we had this morning. Thanks, David, yet again.)

I apologize to those who have already received it, but I felt it 
necessary to resend in case others have not received it, as well.

We will be sending our VoteRescue Radio announcement later today, but I 
wanted to let you know that Richard Hayes Phillips is confirmed to be on 
the first hour of the show.  The show runs from 2-4 pm every Sunday via 
the internet at www.wtprn.com.  In central Austin, you can listen on 
your car radio at FM 90.1.  In north Austin, I think it is broadcast on 
100.1, but I'm not 100% sure about that. These are micro FM stations 
that don't have a large signal range.  If you'd like to hear a past 
show, you can listen through the "Show Archives" on the wtprn website.  
Just scroll to VoteRescue Radio and then click on the year and then the 
date of the show.

Karen



Subject:
Re: [Voterescue] One-Party Texas Counties??! SoS has some'splainin' to do!
From:
"David Van Os" <david at vanoslaw.com>
Date:
Sat, 5 Jan 2008 22:51:41 -0600

To:
<DARogers at aol.com>, <karen.renick at grandecom.net>, 
<voterescue at voterescue.org>


Armstong, Hansford, and Roberts are the 3 counties in Texas that as of 
now don't have Democratic county chairs. They are all in the upper 
Panhandle. So they didn't have Democratic primaries because there was 
nobody to hold one. In general elections the Democratic vote typically 
ranges from about 12% to about 22% in those counties. (As of 2006 there 
were about 7 or 8 counties that didn't have Democratic county chairs, 
but the palpable changing of the tide has led Democrats to come out in 
several of them and volunteer to serve as county chairs and organize a 
local Democratic party. For example, there is now a Democratic county 
chair in Ochiltree county for the first time in about 15 years, 
and Ochiltree County held a Democratic primary this year for the first 
time since then.)
 
There is an even greater number of rural West Texas and rural South 
Texas counties that don't have Republican county chairs, with some of 
them being Democratic counties in national and statewide elections and 
others being Republican counties in national and statewide elections. To 
explain more, an interesting quirk about rural Texas is that, outside of 
South Texas, in both eastern and western rural counties, there are quite 
a few counties where the last top-ticket Democrat that carried them was 
Jimmy Carter in 1976, but where the offices of county government are 
still held 100% by Democrats just like they have been ever since 
Reconstruction ended in 1877. It is just long, deep tradition. In county 
government offices, everybody runs in the Democratic primary and the 
elections are decided in the Democratic primary - even though the 
majority of the voters are Republican voters for the purposes of 
everything above the level of county government.
 
But in most rural South Texas counties, the huge majority of voters are 
simply Democrats period, for all purposes, and there is nobody to run as 
a Republican because no Republican could possibly get elected to anything.
 
David Van Os
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://voterescue.org/pipermail/voterescue_voterescue.org/attachments/20080307/35738f2d/attachment.html