Texas, compared to other states, has a notoriously apathetic electorate.

This year, though, there are signs that we might actually bother to turn out for the general election. An additional 1.6 million people have registered to vote in Texas since the last midterm election cycle, in 2014 — some 400,000 of them since March, according to the Texas Secretary of State.

That might reflect enthusiasm for Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke, the U.S. Representative from El Paso who is seeking to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. O’Rourke specifically is generating a lot of enthusiasm among Texas voters, but the same is true of many downballot Democratic candidates.

Grieder: Democrat Kulkarni is putting Tom DeLay’s old House seat in play

Republican candidates are capable of generating enthusiasm too, of course, but most of them aren’t. And the GOP is playing defense, in this context. There are sleeper races strewn all over the ballot, I suspect. It’s just hard to keep track of them all. There’s a copy of Harris County’s sample ballot on my desk, at the moment. It’s 18 pages long.

Consider the Congressional races. Texas has 36 seats in the U.S. House, 25 of which are currently held by Republicans, and Democrats are contesting every one of those races. Many of them are strikingly well-qualified. Eight of them outraised their Republican opponents in donations in the third quarter of this year.

What I’d like to highlight, though, is that every single one of the candidates for Congress in Texas this year is competing in a district that was drawn by Republicans. The same is true of this year’s candidates for seats in the Texas House of Representatives. The GOP has overseen the state’s redistricting process for the past 20 years.

The result is that the state’s congressional and legislative races are bound to be more competitive than they seem, because the seats that are currently held by Republicans aren’t actually as red as they appear. They were engineered to favor that outcome. That’s the entire purpose of partisan gerrymandering.

Grieder: Texas Republicans have outkicked their coverage with gerrymandering

Under normal circumstances, though, gerrymandering tends to have a suppressive effect on candidate recruitment. That’s one of the reasons it works. It’s also one of the reasons so few of Texas’s congressional races have been seen as pickup opportunities for Democrats in the midterm elections.

There are three Republican incumbents who represent districts that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. John Culberson, facing Democratic challenger Lizzie Fletcher in the Houston area’s 7th District, is one of them. The others are Pete Sessions of Dallas, facing Democrat Colin Allred in the the 32nd Congressional District, and Will Hurd of San Antonio, facing Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones in the 23rd Congressional District that stretches into West Texas.

In the rest of this year’s races, though, the empirical evidence is a bit more cryptic. Past election result aren’t particularly illuminating, and could easily be misleading. Republican Ted Poe, of Atascocita, is retiring at the end of this term representing the 2nd Congressional District, for example. In 2016, he was re-elected easily, beating his Democratic opponent by more than 20 points. But that Democrat, Pat Bryan, didn’t exactly have a well-organized campaign, much less a well-funded one.

My impression, which might be wrong, is that Bryan just wanted to give voters an option. As a Texas voter who now lives in that district, I appreciate his commitment to civic participation. But as a journalist, I find that such things necessarily complicate my ability to do political analysis.

Grieder: Could Texas turn blue in 2018? Stranger things have happened

Our Republican leaders insist that Texas is a red state. President Donald Trump will no doubt make that same claim during the rally he’s holding in Houston Monday, ostensibly in support of Cruz’s campaign. I can’t exactly prove that the claim is wrong, using the data at hand.

But Republican leaders are very determined to convince us that Texas is a red state. That wouldn’t be necessary if it actually is one, since Texas definitely has that reputation.

Also, if Republican leaders were confident they could rely on the notorious apathy of Texas voters this year, there would be no reason for them to invite Trump to lecture us—much less join him on stage as he does.

And we haven’t had competitive elections for a long time, in Texas. That much is known.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the apathy was related to that, somehow — or if it turns out that Texans are more likely to vote when we actually have options.

erica.grieder@chron.com