GOP historic victory holds back Democratic hopes for "blue wave" in Texas Senate | 2018 elections



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On the first day of the election, Gallego and Gutierrez split the Democrats and Flores came in first with 10 times the votes of his next closest opponent. Then, with only seven weeks between the primary and the parliamentary elections, his campaign was out of date.

They hit 20,000 gates, made 100,000 calls, and visited all 17 counties in six weeks, Mackowiak said. A retired gamekeeper with ties to South Texas, Flores ran as an anti-abortion, pro-gun Tejano. And he ran like he was not attending a Democratic bastion, while Republicans accused the Gallego camp of taking for granted Hispanic voters.

"The Democrats simply do not understand, they are deaf to the tone," said Blakemore. "They think South Texas is a group of Hispanics who will do what they said."

Mackowiak said that when they will have detailed returns in the coming weeks, he expects Flores' position on abortion to have helped them choose a good number of Hispanic Democrats: "The problem of life is important ".

Flores has raised over $ 307,000 in seven weeks, with considerable donations from Patrick ($ 125,586), land commissioner George P. Bush ($ 10,000) and the powerful conservative group Empower Texans ($ 25,000). pushed by the highest elected representatives of the state.

The Republicans wanted to win because they considered it was their best chance for a long time to overthrow a blue district of the Texas Senate. But they also knew that taking the seat would give them insurance by November, when they could lose a Senate seat in Texas or two.

The exact distribution of the number of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate is important because of the three-fifths rule. In 2015, at the biennial meeting of the Legislative Assembly, Patrick amended the Senate Rules to allow 19 members to block debate on any bill. The change effectively gave the 20 Senate Republicans a lock on the life and death of every bill drafted by a legislator.

With the victory of Flores, there are now 21 Republicans in the Senate. This means that three Democrats will have to beat the GOP holders in November to break the qualified majority, which would be a huge political uprising. Garcia, the party leader, said that it was the only job they were focusing on now.

"It is extremely important to break the majority Republican majority in the Senate," said Garcia. "In the end, the Democrats must come together."

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