My NewsBusters colleague Tom Blumer has pointed out how old media outlets have failed to report on the stunning shift in the Reuters/Ipsos poll showing the midterm election choices swinging towards the Republicans. Not only is much of the mainstream media ignoring polls showing this shift they are also failing to report on evidence on the ground in elections themselves that enthusiasm for the Democrats is waning.
One such significant bit of evidence occurred in the recent Texas primary runoff elections in which Democrat turnout hit a record low. This was reported by the Texas Tribune, normally a liberal cheerleader for the Democrats to the extent that they refrained from reporting on a significant setback in the Wendy Davis campaign in 2014 when she was running for governor in that state. However, even the Texas Tribune can't hide the sad truth as it reported on May 22 that Voter turnout in a Texas Democratic gubernatorial runoff hasn’t been this low in nearly 100 years:
Democratic voters made some history of their own. And it wasn't pretty.
As of 11 p.m. Tuesday, just 415,000 Democrats had cast ballots in the gubernatorial runoff. For reference, that's a decline of almost 60 percent from the 1 million Texans who cast ballots in the March Democratic primary.
That's the largest primary-to-runoff decline — and the smallest number of ballots cast — in the 14 Democratic gubernatorial primary runoffs held since 1920. That year, 449,000 Democrats voted, according to Texas Election Source's analysis of Texas State Historical Association data.
The next day, May 23, the Texas Tribune published an equally bleak report, In these four Texas counties, no one voted in the Democratic primary runoffs:
Voter turnout in Tuesday’s runoffs was abysmal. Fewer than 450,000 Texans cast ballots in the race, compared to 1 million that voted in the Democratic primary.
That trend was particularly clear in four small, rural counties – King, Lynn and Hall counties in Northwest Texas and McMullen County in South Texas – where not a single person voted in the Democratic runoffs. Each county had only one matchup on their May 22 ballots: the gubernatorial race between former Dallas County sheriff Lupe Valdez and Houston businessman Andrew White.
So far nothing in the national MSM about this big Democrat fizzle in Texas. Of course, if it had been the Republicans who fizzled in the runoff election turnout, you could be sure that fact would be blared out in a big way as part of their Blue Wave shtick.
