Officially, the Texas presidential primary is next Tuesday, but in reality, it’s well underway thanks to the state’s liberal early voting rules. And if early voting is any indication, the year-long pattern of heavy and disproportionately Democratic turnout in the primaries will be continued in the Lone Star State. Check this out from today’s Dallas Morning News:
Six days into early voting – and with a week left – about 360,000 voters in the state’s 15 largest counties have cast early or mail-in ballots in the 2008 Democratic primary, compared with 120,000 in the Republican primary.
“It’s the intensity. The energy we’re seeing,” said Diana Broadus, election judge at one of Dallas County’s busiest early-voting locations, in Oak Cliff.
“They are coming in ready to vote. They want to make sure their vote is going to count.”
And they’re doing so at a record pace.
“We have already surpassed the total early-voting numbers for both the 1996 and 2000 elections,” said Scott Haywood, spokesman for Texas Secretary of State Phil Wilson. “At this point, it is a record.”
Both parties are seeing much higher turnout than four years ago – but it’s the numbers in the Democratic primary that are turning heads.
Democratic voters have so far dominated the early voting in Texas’ 15 largest counties.
Depending on how things turn out, there will likely be some speculation next Tuesday about which Democratic candidate benefitted the most from early voting. But putting that aside, it’s never a bad sign when voters rush to the polls.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.