Trump Faces No Voter Virus Retribution
as GOP Dodges Down-Ballot Lightning

Lubbock Doctor Dies from Coronavirus

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor
November 5, 2020

A coronavirus that's surging in Texas at summer epicenter rates didn't turn out to be the game-changing issue that it had been cranked up to be based on the votes that were cast in the state's two most infected metros in the general election on Tuesday.

As Texas recorded its highest number of new COVID-19 cases in three months on Wednesday, the pandemic didn't seem to be evident from a partisan perspective in the hottest Texas spot in so far in the second wave when Democrat Joe Biden scored 68 percent of the vote in El Paso County where Hillary Clinton had 69 percent in 2016,

The virus spiked to a record level in El Paso County on Wednesday with 3,100 new infections - almost twice the previous high point for positive tests in a single day. The New York Times had El Paso rated early Thursday morning as the second hottest metro in the nation in the rate of new cases.

El Paso and Lubbock have both been ranked among the 20 major American cities with the highest daily new infection counts throughout the past few weeks. The NYT virus trackers have El Paso and Amarillo listed fourth and sixth in the nation respectively this morning in terms of places where the counts of new virus cases are rising the fastest.

But Lubbock County voters didn't attempt to hold President Donald Trump responsible for the latest virus outbreak that's intensified in recent weeks as one of the 20 U.S. metros with the highest number of new cases per capita and hospitals that are overwhelmed by a covid patient surge that they're not equipped to handle. Trump corralled 66 percent of the vote on Tuesday night in Lubbock County exactly like he'd done there against Clinton four years ago.

The coronavirus crisis could have had some bearing on the suburban vote in Texas where Democrat Joe Biden fared a few points better on average than Clinton. But Trump performed substantially better than he had in 2016 in major Texas border locations and other parts of South Texas that had been major burial grounds for coronavirus victims during the summer with some of the highest rates of death in the country.

There appeared no assigning of blame to the president at the polls in Maverick County where the border city of Eagle Pass had the highest proportional number of virus infections in the U.S. until being passed in the past week by the Trump country bastions of Bismark, North Dakota, Sioux City, Iowa and Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Quite the contrary. Trump garnered 44 percent of the Maverick County vote on Tuesday after failing to reach 21 percent there in the duel with Clinton. Biden claimed 54 percent of the vote on Tuesday in Maverick County where Barack Obama and Clinton had received more than 77 percent vote in the 2012 election and the vote four years after that.

Biden finished about 10 points lower than Clinton had in the Rio Grande Valley where Hidalgo and Cameron are the state's 7th and 13th largest counties and rank 2nd and 5th in Texas in the total number of deaths from covid infections respectively. Nueces County - the Texas location that had been the hottest spot here in the first half of the summer during the second virus surge - awarded almost 51 percent of the vote in the 2020 election after he'd barely won there with less than 49 percent four years earlier.

After refusing to put up a fight against the coronavirus while all but pretending that it did not exist, Trump faced little or no electoral retribution in Texas where he beat Biden by almost 6 points with more than 52 percent of the vote on Tuesday. Trump had defeated Clinton here by 9 points when the national Democratic Party wasn't making an effort to win here like it did this time around with an unprecedented flow of funds to the Texas House and congressional battlefields.

Biden's focus on Trump's ineptitude during the pandemic and increasingly erratic behavior as the race neared an end might have been the most important factor in his apparent success as the national level as the winner of the popular vote with an Electoral College edge with several battleground states up in the air early Thursday morning with ballots still being counted.

But the fingerprints of a president who'd been major baggage for down-ballot Republicans in the last two cycles were nowhere to be found on the GOP ticket in 2020 despite the one-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Democrats had dropped in their laps with Trump's amazing performance throughout the pandemic.

Texas leads the nation in the total number of covid infections that have been recorded in 2020.