EDINBURG — A voting guide the Hidalgo County Democratic Party distributed in Precinct 4 omitted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.
The guide asks voters to cast their ballots for either the entire Democratic ticket or the Democratic nominees in various state and local offices. In three of Hidalgo County’s four precincts, Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth, is included. But she was bumped in the Precinct 4 editions to make room for Constable J.R. Gaitan, the only Democrat who appears on one but not all county ballots.
“Because of the large number of candidates, both statewide and countywide, we were just unable to fit all candidates while still focusing on our local candidates,” county Democratic Chair Ric Godinez wrote in an email.
“For example, to highlight Gaitan (who runs only in Precinct 4) we had to sacrifice space for one of the statewides,” he wrote. “Because Battleground Texas was pushing Sen. Davis primarily with plenty of literature, we felt we could get more coverage and bang for our buck for the entire Democratic Ticket (you will notice even in this piece, as in all our pieces, we are encouraging voters to make a straight party vote) while focusing on our local candidates in that precinct.”
The campaign of Davis’ Republican opponent, Attorney General Greg Abbott, sent a news release Monday morning with an image of the flier. The email included the fact that Davis lost Hidalgo County, and other South Texas counties, in the Democratic primary to Corpus Christi Municipal Judge Ray Madrigal. The flier, the Abbott campaign email said, showed Davis still lacked support in the Rio Grande Valley.
Dismissing the Abbott camp’s assertions that Hidalgo County Democrats were distancing themselves from Davis, campaign spokeswoman Rebecca Acuña predicted in an email that the Democrat would “decisively” win South Texas.
“This is just the Abbott campaign’s latest pitiful attempt to distract from his hostility to South Texas," she wrote.
LOCAL VOTING
On the first day of early voting across the state, voter turnout in Hidalgo County was higher than it was four years ago for the last gubernatorial election.
Monday, 7,083 came out to vote in the county — 2.2 percent of all registered voters. That’s up from 2010, when 6,239 cast ballots on the first day of early voting, according to data from the county’s Elections Department.
The Elections Department annex building in the middle of Edinburg buzzed with activity late Monday afternoon. Car horns honked at the several candidates for school board and their supporters who lined Closner Boulevard, shouting and waving at voters turning into the parking lot. Campaigners said the site had a steady flow of voters all day, and the line reached out the door and into the parking lot for a few minutes around 5:30 p.m.
With 864 voters, it was the busiest polling site in the county Monday.
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