Posted by 
As the Political Parlor speculated on election night might happen, second place finisher Don Webster has dropped out of the race for the HD 22 Democratic nomination making Butch Taylor the party’s nominee.
Butch Taylor’s race against GOP nominee Wayne Johnson will now be decided March 6 since there is no runoff. (Otherwise, it would have been April 10 after a March 6 runoff.) Taylor was only a few votes short of having a majority in the Democratic primary for the seat, and Webster had garnered barely 25% of the vote in a field of five candidates.
Democrat Albert Hall died five days after being re-elected to the seat in November. The GOP would like to pick up the House seat where they are outnumbered 61-43, and House Minority Leader Mike Hubbard has declared that “the Democrats are scared to death about House District 22.”
As noted here before, Democrats had easily three and a half as many voters turn out for the primary as Republicans did and had three candidates get more votes than the GOP winner Wayne Johnson.
Related Articles:
Legislative Dispatch
Purple Dot Connection
2010 Big List
2010 Senate Elections
2010 House Elections
Press Releases
[...] We will also be looking with interest to see the turnout numbers for each party. It would be a mistake to infer too much from them particularly if turnout is light, but they will allow the fun of speculating on how partisan the district has become. For example, Republicans expressed some hopes of picking up the House District 22 seat after Democratic Rep. Albert Hall died last November. But when the Democrats turned out three-and-a-half times as many voters as Republicans did in the primary, you got the sense that the district did not have as many active Republicans as the GOP hoped. Democrat Butch Taylor went on to claim the seat in the general election by a wide (58%-42%) margin. [...]