As each election for public office nears, the mass media reminds us that elections are both highly-charged symbolic rituals of democracy and key procedural components of our political institutions. Both aspects of elections - symbolic and procedural - serve critical functions at all levels of our political system.
Given the importance of elections, it's not surprising that they are also a major focus of collective fretting and extensive analysis and commentary. Why don't more people vote? Why do they vote the way they do? Why are campaigns so expensive and so negative? Why is the media so obsessed with polls?
In Texas, concerns about voting and elections are colored by political changes in recent decades (discussed at length in the Texas Politics chapter on Political Parties). Texans display many of the same basic tendencies of voting and non-voting as other Americans. The contests and characters on display in the 2008 campaign provided ample illustration of the particular forces at work in the Texas electoral universe. The Republican Party remains dominant after a decade that saw battles over congressional redistricting, intense and sometimes bitter campaigning among candidates both within and between the parties, increasingly expensive campaigning up and down the ballot, and the continuing courtship of the growing Latino population, to name just the most prominent factors.
Nationally the election of Barack Obama and of a Democratic US House and Senate appears to suggest a growing Democratic power. Texas, however, bucked national trends and voted firmly for Republican John McCain and will send a majority Republican delegation to Congress.
The 2010 election began with unprecedented turnout in the Republican primary, generated by interest in the high visibility race between two prominent Republicans -- Governor Rick Perry and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison -- and a surprisingly successful insurgent candidate, Debra Medina. Perry won 51% in the primary vote in an election that attracted over 1.4 million voters on the Republican side.
Bill White emerged from a much more one-sided contest to earn the Democratic nomination in the gubernatorial contest. The videos in the box on the side of this page feature excerpts from a discussion of the results of the campaign by three leading political journalists in the state: Gromer Jeffers, Jr., of The Dallas Morning News, Harvey Kronberg of The Quorum Report, and Ross Ramsey of The Texas Tribune.
In the general election, Perry defeated White by a large margin, and in the process raised his national profile. Along with several other state governors, Perry's name is being floated as a possible Presidential candidate in 2012, despite the Governor's protestations during the campaign that he is not interested in national office. Whatever role Perry -- and by extension Texas -- play in the presidential election cycle now underway, the 2010 mid-term elections clearly indicate a resurgent national Republican party, and the reconsolidation of Republican dominance in Texas after the Democratic gains in the state in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
