The elephant in the room, at the polling place, in Austin, in D.C. ...
(W)hat to do about a political system where a small and extremely conservative portion of the population is basically picking the leaders for the rest of the state? In theory, it’s supposed to be a self-correcting, but that’s reliant on general election voters restoring balance when either party goes too far astray. (Texas Politics Project director Jim) Henson says the problem is Texas Democrats.
“The weakness of the Democrats as a balancing factor in general elections has gone from being a temporary condition to almost a structural feature of the political system right now,” he said.
This means if the Democrats don’t start winning statewide offices, then Texas politics will shift even further to the right. Another solution is for more Republicans, the moderates in the party, to start showing up to vote in their primary.
Or maybe more Democrats could vote in the GOP primary. Or perhaps the Earth will burn this pestilence off its face and a new species, one more concerned with empathy and self-preservation, will take its place in a few million years.
Since I'm not voting in the primary for the first time in my life, I guess I'm betting on the latter.
It's a grim state of affairs for the Donks. Just check the latest polling from the
TexTrib and
UT, out this morning.
Some will say it's just another data point, but the trend is crystal. And if
Beto is a drag at the top, then everybody else is in trouble.
It's been twenty years since
John Cornyn and
Rick Perry swept the "Dream Team" of
Ron Kirk and
Tony Sanchez, and during that time blogs rose and fell, Twitter and Facebook were born, but Texas remains the same, except further to the right.
Dan Patrick upended
David Dewhurst,
Sid Miller replaced
Todd Staples,
Greg Abbott moved up from the SCOTX to the OAG and then the Governor's Mansion, and the
Lege went full-bore nuts.
Meanwhile Tex Dems focused on "a few targeted races", like SD-10 (
Wendy Davis,
Konni Burton,
Beverly Powell, some Republican next) and HD-134 (
Martha Wong,
Ellen Cohen,
Sarah Davis,
Ann Johnson). When they could win a seat in Congress it inevitably was an oil-soaked Blue Dog like
Lizzie Fletcher replacing some putrid conservative like
John Culberson, with the shitlibs cheering 'progress'.
I spent a decade of the best years of my life in that losing fight, and another decade half in and half out of it. No More. I'll try to find some Donkeys to vote for in November, but I'm absolutely certain they won't make their choices easy for me.
This ain't it either, for reasons that should be obvious. I note that no member of the Texas Progressive Alliance has mentioned this event as of yet.
More about this rally from
Austin Sanders at the
Austin Chronicle and
Adam Serwer of
The Atlantic, and from
Fiorella Isabel and the
DSA rally that followed. Continuing in this vein:
Giberto Hinojosa has been an unqualified disaster for the TDP, but electing
Kim Olson to replace him would
end the party (which is not such a bad thing to consider, IMO. Let the
Texas Greens have the urban regions and the Donks can get their asses whipped in the boondocks). Candidly I see the next chair being
Carroll Robinson. I've been wrong before, though.
Moving on to Tex-Cons behaving badly (a topic I blogged extensively
last Thursday).
If you're going to spend as much time talking about newspaper endorsements as
Kuffner does, you ought to acknowledge the obvious: they're the conservatives behaving badly here. In running for a seat he doesn't live in,
Wesley Hunt is just following the example set by
James Cargas.
Shifting to ecological updates and leading with the ones having to do with the lingering effects of the freeze from a year ago (last week's post on the freeze that saved Abbott is
here; and the rest of my environmental posts are
here).
And a few criminal and social justice posts (a larger Wrangle of these appeared
last Friday).
And my soothers (more were posted
last week).
