Lindsay Dun

As the national and international discussion of the larger role of Facebook and other social media applications rages in the wake of Russian subversion, the ongoing Cambridge Analytica revelations, and Mark Zuckerberg's appearances on Capitol Hill, attention has shifted away from the more mundane uses of Facebook by real live elected officials. 

Even with all the current angst about Facebook data as a backdrop, we are interested in how members of the #TXLege use the social media platform given its nearly ubiquitous use by elected officials in the state. One-hundred-forty-one members of the Texas House and 28 Texas Senators posted on public campaign Facebook pages where they designated themselves as a “politician” or a “public official” during the 2017 Session. This makes Facebook a venue for interactions with constituents as well as a forum for public interaction with the legislature as a whole.

Democrat Gene Green of Houston's retirement brings the number of Texas legislators not returning to the nation's capitol to six as the filing period for office began over the weekend. While Green is only the second Democrat to announce that he won't be returning to the U.S. House of Representatives (along with Beto O'Rourke, who is instead running to replace Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the upper chamber), each recent announcement by Republican Congressmen has resulted in a new round of speculation about what these retirements mean for 2018. The questions are both local – like who is going to fill these seats and how will those replacements reverberate down the ballot – but also global, about the 2018 Election, the Republican Party, and the potential impact of Donald Trump. While these are both interesting and worthy lines of inquiry, a simpler question to ask first is:  what the usual Congressional churn looks like in the Texas delegation?