MERCURY STAFF
General Election returns yielded no surprises in the three U.S. Congress districts that overlap Hays County, nor in the county’s two Texas Senate districts.
All of the county’s U.S. House seats and its Texas Senate seats lie in districts with almost insurmountable advantages for one party or the other. Those that include western parts of the county (CD-25, CD-21 and SD-25) are Republican locks; those that include the eastside (CD-35 and SD-21) are Democratic strongholds.
Former San Marcos Mayor Susan Narvaiz, a Republican, was defeated soundly by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat, to represent newly created CD-35, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio along Interstate 35.
Doggett won 105,260 votes (64 percent) to Narvaiz’s 52,686 (32 percent) with Libertarian and Green Party candidates splitting the remaining four percent.
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House judiciary committee, carried San Antonio-based CD-21 with 60.6 percent of 307,856 votes. In Hays County, Smith picked up 9,096 votes (55.1 percent) of 16,503 Hays County residents who voted in the race.
In CD-25, which includes the western half of Hays County, former Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams, a Weatherford Republican, gathered 58.5 percent of the votes in his district, which meanders from Fort Worth to the caliche backroads of Wimberley and subdvisions of Dripping Springs. In Hays County, Williams won 12,581 votes (61.7 percent) to Democrat Elaine M. Henderson’s 6,750 (33.1 percent) and Libertarian Betsy Dewey’s 1,059 (5.2 percent).
Most of Hays County, meanwhile, will be represented in the Texas Senate by physician and Tea Party figurehead Donna Campbell, who moved to New Braunfels little more than a year ago to run in Senate District 25 against state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, whom she bested in the primary runoff this summer.
In Tuesday’s General Election, Campbell won 231,699 votes (65.6 percent) to Democrat Jon Courage’s 12,1544 (34.4 percent).
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Laredo Democrat, easily won re-election in Senate District 21, which includes a sliver of Hays County mostly east of Interstate 35. The senator won 67.6 percent district-wide over Republican Grant Rostig and Libertarian Joseph Morse. In Hays County, Zaffirini took 6,612 votes (59.5 percent).
