Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Hyperventilating over Kesha Rogers

There's a lot of that going on in the the blogosphere and social media this morning as a result of yesterday's poll results.  This is one of those times when the disconnect among the various caucuses in the Texas Democratic Party is painfully on display.

Black people vote for their own, y'all.  How many different ways does it need to be said?  How many times does it have to happen before y'all get it?

There's an extensive network of African American e-mail listservs (locally, D-MARS has one, Carroll Robinson has started another called Texas Politica, there are several others I'm not a member of) and they focus on their community's news.  They talk about the issues that aren't getting talked about anywhere else.  If you aren't on these lists or aren't reading the email you get from them, then you don't know these things.

Kesha Rogers is benefiting from the fact that there are no other African Americans at the top of the Texas ballot (and no, I'm not including Steve Brown at Railroad Commissioner because that's a down-ballot race).  She has by far the highest name recognition among the four US Senate hopefuls.  She has been on the ballot in Fort Bend County a couple of times, was the nominee for the Dems against Pete Olsen in 2010, she ran for chair of the Texas Democratic Party in 2006.  There's been lots of news online about her over the years.

I mean to say lots and lots of news stories about Kesha Rogers over the years, nearly none of it favorable.  What's that someone said about all publicity being good?  This same lack of understanding about what's really going on is also present in the Lloyd Oliver campaign for Harris County district attorney.  There are plenty of people who know why he won the nomination two years ago, and why he's campaigning the same way as he did two years ago.  It seems as if a whole bunch of insider Democratic Caucasians are the ones most confused about this.

Trust me when I say -- as a middle-aged white guy, mind you -- that black Democrats in Texas know exactly who Kesha Rogers is.  And if the TexTrib has properly sampled black Dems (not oversampled them) in their polling... then the results shouldn't be all that surprising to anyone.

You don't have to like it, but there it is.  In black and white.

Update:  Splitting the black caucus from the GLBTQ caucus is something some white folks know how to do.

3 comments:

Gadfly said...

Hinojosa tells the faithful not to vote for Rogers. Will this cause a backlash of some sort? http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2014/02/state-democratic-chair-dont-vote-for-rogers.html/

PDiddie said...

No way to tell. In 2006, when Barbara Radnofsky was pushed into a runoff with perennial candidate Gene Kelly, she ran ads saying, "the dancer is dead"! In 2012, when Gray Yarbrough made the runoff with Paul Sadler, it was generally believed that his name is what got him there.

These things are wildly unpredictable (just like the TexTrib polling, alas).

Tony Wicher said...

I think Kesha Rogers is the only real Democrat in the race, that is a Roosevelt, New Deal Democrat of the kind that won big majorities in Texas before Democrats forgot who they were. Hinojosa is an idiot at best, Democrats under his leadership have zero chance of winning in Texas, and Obama is a phony who needs to be impeached. If Kesha wins the Democratic nomination in Texas it will signal the end of Obama, and good riddance! We must purge this foul Wall Street slime from our party and return to the principles of Roosevelt and Kennedy!