2008 Election Postmortem: Texas House District 3

Continuing our postmoretem look at races across Texas, we’re turning our attention to Texas House Districts, where we’ll start with House District 3.

State Rep. Mark Homer (D-Paris) was re-elected in Texas House District 3–a district that includes Lamar, Delta, Red River, Hopkins, and Titus Counties–with 51.72 percent of the vote. It was a race that never should have been this close and was undoubtedly impacted by the fact that Barack Obama was at the top of the ballot for Democrats and energized Republican turnout.

Here are this year’s results:

And the 2006 results:

For all intents and purposes, Homer should have had an equal or higher margin than he polled over Hollingsworth in 2006. Voters soundsly rejected Hollingsworth in 2006 for a myriad of reasons, none of which actually depreciated in the two years since Homer’s landslide victory.

HD 3 has always been a “lean Republican” district at minimum, but a result like this was only possible thanks to factors that didn’t even involve Homer and Hollingsworth–namely Obama at the top of the ticket.

Let’s take a look at the results county-by-county:

Hopson got his winning margin in Lamar County, where he trumped Hollingsworth by almost three thousand votes. Red River County also helped him. Lamar and Hopkins are the largest counties in the District, but in Hopkins, Homer was down by almost 700.

Now, let’s compare presidential performance to Homer’s performance:

Homer out-performed Obama in every single county. In Lamar County, he out performed Obama by more than 5,000 votes. His performance was closer to Obama’s in the other counties, though still significantly higher. He outpeformed Obama by about 500 votes in Delta, by about 800 votes in Franklin, by about 2,500 in Hopkins, by about 1,100 in Red River, and by about 1,3500 in Titus.

Without the ability to access precinct-by-precinct results or straight-ticket voting for this district (if anyone reading has it, please email it to us!) we can clearly concur that Obama’s presence at the top of the ticket hurt downballot candidates in this district. However, we can’t tell if a surge of straight-ticket Republican voters hurt Homer.

Homer himself attributes the closer win to a negative campaign run by Hollingsworth:

Homer said the closeness of the race shows negative campaigns work.
“Maybe we are too trusting of people,” Homer said. “Maybe whatever is written on a page or we hear on a radio spot or on a telephone we take as factual instead of going out and doing some research.”

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