Looking for a Fast Car

We’ll have to wait a month or more to see how state legislative leaders handle a budget that’s bound to grow 30 percent or more.

It often happens in races for the Texas House and the Texas Senate: Losers spend more than winners in tight races. Not always, but often enough to make this exercise interesting.

The blue wave that swept the country on Election Day wasn’t as obvious in Texas, where Republicans won all of the statewide offices on the ballot and held all but a couple of seats in the congressional delegation and the state Senate.

Face it: This is a political off year. There’s one race at the top of the ballot, and the polls, if they’re right, have been remarkably stagnant for a long time. There’s movement back there in the race for second, but the overall outlook is a lot like it was months ago. There’s one race in the Legislature that could change how things operate — it’s in the Senate — and a handful of races in the House that look to change the partisan makeup only slightly. Most of the statewide races are yawners, though it’s a nervous time for Republicans at the low end of the statewide ballot.

Without Houston lawyer John O’Quinn, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell wouldn’t be on television during the last three weeks of this election cycle.

A half-cent increase in the sales tax could be used on a local option basis to lower property taxes, according to the head of the governor’s task force on appraisal reform.

Old School: Politicians complain about the “filter” of the news media, a gripe usually leveled when they had something good about themselves or nasty about the opposition that they couldn’t convince anyone to run.

Start this look at Texas House races with the usual caveats: Partisans — the people who tell us about this stuff — are always wrong about some of the races on their “hot” lists. Some won’t pan out. Some might pan out when nobody’s looking. It’s a head vs. heart thing.