Today is the runoff for this year’s primary elections, and across the great state of Texas, most registered voters are going to ignore it.
It’s an interesting collective apathy, given that there are two high-profile Republican runoffs in which today’s victor will almost certainly proceed to win the general election in November. For that matter, there are a couple of runoffs on the Democratic side that shouldn’t be dismissed as exercises in futility: the victors will probably not prevail this year, but will have a legitimate claim to being considered standard-bearers for an opposition party that is trying, in full view of a disaffected state and a skeptical nation, to establish itself as electorally viable.
It’s further evidence, I guess, that no one has ever summarized Texas politics as aptly as the historian T.R. Fehrenbach, who once wrote, in an effort to explain our nonchalance about some midcentury debacle, that politics “did not impinge heavily on private life.”
Those of us hanging around on BurkaBlog, though, are presumably among the roughly 10% of Texan voters who take a different view of things, so please use the comments thread below to offer your predictions, field reports, last-minute campaign pitches, and so on. We’ll post about the results as they come in, with some analysis of what it all means tonight or tomorrow. And for anyone who hasn’t voted yet, remember that you can check your voter registration and your polling locations at the Secretary of State’s site.
