By Juan Montoya
We have always liked Carlos Cascos.
His frankness, his open-door demeanor, and his down-to-earth personality has made him an attractive alternative to the behind-the-scenes, smoke-filled-room attitudes of machine-politician Democrats of Cameron County.
In any other election cycle, the crossover vote – between 20 to 22 percent – would propel him to victory over any Democrat. But this is not your usual election-year cycle. This is the year of Betomania.
So far, 23,260 voters have trekked to the early-voting polling places in the first four days of the 11-day voting period. That is just under the 25,750 presidential election-year turnout of November 2016.If the trend continues through the rest of the early voting, it will be very difficult for Cascos' crossover votes to overcome the very last year of the palanca vote.
In a sense, the last year of palanca votes plus the Betomania enthusiasm may doom this very Cameron County-unique crossover phenomenon that has propelled Carlos to the top county seat at the Dancy Building.
We're not in love with Eddie Treviño, by any means. His tenure as BPUB legal counsel is still affecting the ratepayers of the city with excessive utility bills to pay for the yet-unseen Memorandum of Understanding between the city and Tenaska for the Electric Plant to Nowhere. But Cascos has stated he would not make that a campaign issue. So be it.
We had not seen this type of mania exhibited across South Texas since the Tony Garza days when three Democratic Party commissioners crossed party lines to defeat Ray Ramon.
Now the boogie man isn't Ray. It's Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and the knee-jerk right-wing reactionaries like John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell and the like. It's the dog-whistle racism of the nation's Republican Party which may have thrown the wet towel on the Cascos candidacy.
We could be wrong. But let me tell you a little story.
Not long ago, an elderly couple mistakenly threw their mail-in ballots in the trash. In any other time they would have just blown it off and forgotten about voting. But this year, because they wanted to vote for Beto, they called their son to take them to fill out the affidavits that they had thrown away their ballots and wanted to vote in person at an early-voting site.
The Beto phenomenon is very real, especially here in South Texas. He may not win the statewide race north of Sarita, but the local races along the Rio Grande will be affected by the mid-term turnout. Like I said, before, we hope we are wrong. But the indices are all there.
In fact, Cascos supporters have gone as far as publicizing lawn signs for Beto and Carlos as if to show the dichotomy in Brownsville.
The massive voter registration effort by the Democrats combining with Betomania are the makings of a Perfect Storm that might just wipe out the crossover vote that has made Cascos county judge time and time again.
We know we are going out on a limb with this, Cameron County being Cameron County. Let's see what the voters finally say.