Election Day is about six weeks away, and if you haven’t registered, the clock is ticking in Texas. The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 7, and it also might be a good idea to double check your registration, according to election officials.
Before that deadline, you can check your status by going to votetexas.gov.
Early voting is also just a few weeks away — it starts on Oct. 21. There are some well-known candidates on the ballot, incumbents who have name recognition and deep pockets.
But there are also some Texans you might call long shots, who think they might actually have a chance at winning. They believe a changing state with more people from big cities moving to rural areas and newcomers from other parts of the country now in Texas might just give them the edge to win.
There are other reasons long-shot candidates are running, even if they don’t claim victory in November.
Edward McKinley, who covers state politics at the Austin bureau of the Houston Chronicle, said his reporting grew out of his efforts working on voter guides.
“We were just looking at some of these folks running in districts that we wouldn’t traditionally think of as competitive,” he said. “And then when we got into the data analysis, we looked at districts that were within about seven points in 2022 races.”
McKinley said that redistricting is also a factor in the number of long-shot races that Texas has on the ballot statewide.
“The districts are redrawn every 10 years based on the new U.S. Census data. And because Texas uses political processes to draw those maps as opposed to an independent, nonpartisan commission, there’s a really strong incentive for Republicans, who control the political process in the state, to simultaneously maximize the number of seats that they have, as well as how safe those seats are,” McKinley said. “And the way that you do that is by allocating your voters as effectively in the districts as you can around the state.”
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More safe seats means more long-shot races, McKinley explained.
“One good example is Desiree Venable out in Bastrop. She’s a dog breeder of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. She’s young, she’s smart. She’s taking a look at the maps, and she said that she thinks that she’s out in Bastrop, which is just east of Austin, and she believes that people are moving out of Austin quick enough into the districts that it might actually swing blue faster than people expect,” he said.
“So despite the fact that the Republican won reelection there by a lot last time around, she thinks she’s got a good chance. So she’s knocking on a lot of doors, making a lot of phone calls and running hard to win.”
There are also potential political benefits for a candidate or their party, even if the candidate doesn’t pull off an upset this election cycle.
“These long shot candidates break down into two camps. There’s the sort of true believers that think, ‘hey, it’s going to be different for me. I have a reason to believe that I can actually flip this seat.’ And obviously, everybody wants to win. But the other candidates generally define success as something else other than winning,” McKinley said.
“So they might want to be kind of sharpening their party’s message on a particular issue or to a particular demographic. They may be trying to recruit volunteers or build out the party’s database statewide. Or it could be for them personally over time and they might run again for another office. And they’ve gotten their name out there and promoted themselves.”
There’s a lot of ancillary benefits to running, McKinley said, especially for Democratic candidates who can pitch in on statewide party efforts.
“When you think of the Democrats running a statewide candidate, let’s say you have local Democrats in rural races that lean very far Republican, (who is) building out the party’s voter registration database, their volunteers,” he said. “These are all pieces that can kind of work together to build toward the party’s success over time in the state.”
As for the results we can expect, McKinley said it’s too early to predict anything. But he isn’t writing off a long-shot surprise somewhere in Texas just yet.
“I’m not very well equipped for the punditry,” he said. “I guess I would say that that’s in terms of the strategy. I mean, I think campaigning is sort of campaigning. You know, it’s knocking on as many doors, making personal connections with voters as much as possible. I think there’s a lot of people that are really passionate and are working really hard in the state.”
