State Government

Early voting in the April runoff elections runs Monday through Friday of next week (that’s March 31-April 4). The pickings are slim, and you’re loopy if you think turnout will look like it did in the first week of March.

Nothing like a proposal to cut $262.8 million from a state program to get negotiations going.

State election officials have asked for an investigation of voting in a Republican House race that was decided by just 38 votes.

Texas Republicans have never had a primary like this one. They got a quarter of a million more voters to the polls this year than they did in the presidential primaries four years ago.

The early voting tsunami is great for political scientists, but it sure makes elected and wanna-be-elected officials nervous. It’s big, but it’s impossible right now to know who’s voting and how, whether the voters are new, whether Republicans are voting in the Democratic primary, whatever. It’s a big, fat question mark. For incumbents, that sort of uncertainty is maddening.

Quick take on the presidential debate in Austin: Hillary Clinton didn’t halt or reverse Barack Obama’s momentum, and that’s what she needed to do.

A week before the start of early voting in the March 4 party primaries, Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama in Texas by eight percentage points and John McCain leads Mike Huckabee here by four — a statistical tie — according to polling done for the Texas Credit Union League.

You can always find a candidate in Texas whose campaign blueprint is dependent on a rare or unprecedented event.

From the sidelines, a handful of state judges could shake up the elections for their colleagues on the field.

The ballots are more or less complete, pending court actions and dirty tricks and all the usual stuff. And the annual courtship between the vampires and the blood banks — candidates and financiers — is well underway.