Some offbeat election news, scatter-shot

-- Darrell Castle, the Constitution Party's presidential nominee -- "on thirty-five state ballots (twenty-four, actually) and maybe the only social conservative running" -- has the ultimate putdown to those who still parrot the fallacy that a vote for the lesser evil is your only option.

“People say, ‘Well I have to vote for the lesser of two evils because if I don’t Mrs. Clinton may get elected,'” he says. “But I speak to a lot of Christians, and I tell them as a Christian you cannot do that if you have some regard for scripture because Romans 3:8 says you’re prohibited from trying to achieve a good result by doing evil.” 

There you go, evangelicals and Ted Cruz supporters.  Get Castle's polling moving upward.

-- I had a bizarre conversation with a California Berniecrat who is voting for Clinton because he isn't certain whether Clinton could carry his state (a fairly delusional thought, unless you just can't believe the polls or fear the election is going to be hacked by the Russians, or something).  Bizarre, at least, until I read this.

Whether Donald Trump is entitled to California's 55 Electoral College votes would be called into question if Trump wins the state's popular vote, a Trump-supporting third party and election law experts are warning.

It's an unusual situation and everyone seems to agree there's a potential problem, but they disagree on the severity and likely resolution if Trump defies polls and wins the state.

[...]

The problem arises from the fact that Trump is nominated by both the Republican Party and the state branch of the American Independent Party, and the two parties did not agree on a joint slate of electors, Just two names overlap on lists submitted earlier this week, bringing the total number of Trump electors to 108.

California ballots will list the two nominations together near Trump’s name, with “Republican, American Independent” or some abbreviation – and ballots don't list individual electors. But if on the evening of Nov. 8 it becomes clear he has won the state, the two nominations will net Trump nearly twice the number of electors allowed.

Go read it; it's kinda fun.  And not so much bizarre, but about as possible a scenario as a swarm of undocumented immigrant conservative Yetis helping the GOP hold the line in Orange County.

-- I think writing in Bernie Sanders' name is ridiculous and a little sad, but I do not think that any vote cast is a wasted one.  This is debatable, however, as I will explain in a moment.  But for now, and as a matter of public service ...

In Texas, a write-in vote for any candidate in any office who has not been certified by the state of Texas is a vote that will not appear in the official canvass.  Strangely, there will be a record of it kept by your county clerk, but that will not be made public.  Perhaps the clerk's office would respond to a FOIA request and announce the number of votes cast for Hypnotoad, or Jesus Christ, or Mickey Mouse for President some time after the election.  Otherwise we'll never know how many votes were "wasted" in this fashion ... the only way you can waste a vote, other than by not casting it at all.

To the latter: over 50% of the American people will waste their votes in this manner, as they remain unregistered to vote, and about 50% of those registered, give or take a few, will likewise fail to get themselves counted.  Those who do not exercise their citizenship are doomed to be governed by their inferiors, so the saying goes, and have earned no right to complain.

-- I have seen some really interesting voting rationales by some 'friends' on Facebook.  The most creative one recently was a woman who said she could not vote for Jill Stein in Texas because the GP "doesn't do party-building" between presidential elections (an atrociously misinformed statement coming from an otherwise bright but binary-thinking progressive Democrat).  In the same paragraph she said she would vote for down-ballot Greens "to show support for having additional options".  That's really something, isn't it?  A Catch 22 that she puts herself into and takes herself out of at the same time.  I suppose the Greens should be happy with whatever vote for them she can muster.

A rationale that a fearful or recalcitrant liberal might employ in deciding to vote for Hillary in a close county -- like Harris -- might be in order to help the Dems retake majority status, with the presiding judges in all precincts and at early voting locations.  Note that this would have nothing to do with turning Texas blue, as it won't.  Similarly, and as the anonymous person mentioned in the previous graf has indicated she will do, here's the best reason to vote for Jill Stein and the Green candidates running in Texas (there will be four or five dozen on the ballot throughout the state, not all of them on your ballot, because they're running for county offices and things like SBOE, which are multi-county in a specific region):

If Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka receive 5% of the national vote, the Green Party will qualify for general election public funding in 2020 that will be worth over $10 million dollars.

Securing 5% of the popular vote will also guarantee state ballot access lines for the next election cycle, saving the Green Party time and money that could be spent where (the GP) needs it most. 

Charles Kuffner, as you might have guessed, is contemptuous.  It is indeed going to be one giant leap for mankind if the Greens can pull it off, as someone on another celestial plane once said.  With respect to those who would rather focus on a brand new Congress, I applaud the efforts of BernieDems, etc. in working to reform that party on the inside, but I spent the past ten years heavily involved in that effort, and you can see the fruits of that harvest came in spoiled rotten every single year.  Been there, done that, just took the forty T-shirts I got for it to Goodwill.

I would sooner join al-Qaeda and try to reform it from within.  A decade of my life spent demonstrating the definition of insanity is far too much.  I'm going to do something different from now on.  I'd be happy to have your help if you're so inclined.

Libertarian candidates falter

Gary Johnson seems to be having a personal crisis.  AKA meltdown.

In an interview on CNN early yesterday [...] Johnson explains why if "crossing 'i's and dotting 't's" on international political leaders and geography is more important than the policy itself and than admitting mistakes, he’s not meant to be president (but if honesty and peace are what voters want, then he is).

Jeremy Binckes at Salon told Johnson he looked 'jittery' and 'in need of sleep'.

If it makes you feel any better, your excuse makes sense, even the way you phrased it on CNN: “OK so I point out an elected leader that I admire, and then all of a sudden I have to defend them against things that I’m not even aware of,” Johnson said. “If that’s a disqualifier to run for president, so be it.”

I hate to break it to you, but that’s sort of what international politics is about. The U.S. has allies, and they sometimes come for dinner. It’s really not good if you insult them on their special day.

... (Y)ou also tried to explain away your gaffes by saying that you have “never been in politics before.” Are you forgetting that you were a two-term governor of New Mexico, and that you actually ran for president in 2012 (as a Republican first, then as a Libertarian after you couldn’t get in the debates)?

You’re starting to see the truth here, though, when you say, “I guess I wasn’t meant to be president.”

It’s understandable. Running for president is hard, even if you’re running as the candidate for the “we want to vote for a Republican, but not that Republican” crowd — and especially if it seems that you haven’t done your international relations homework.

But back to how you’re feeling. You look jittery. You need sleep. If only there were something you could take to make you nice and sleepy, and, ya know, mellow out a bit.

This comes alongside Bill Weld's odd capitulation.

Gary Johnson’s hapless running mate, William Weld, is essentially giving up on the presidential race and wants to spend its last few weeks attacking Donald Trump.

The same day Johnson admitted he’s not keeping up with world affairs, Weld told The Boston Globe Trump is his only priority from now until November 8.

[...]

The Globe said Weld also hinted that he might abandon the Libertarian Party altogether, although he said he’s “certainly not going to drop them this year.”

Still, he said his priority after the election could be working with Republicans like Mitt Romney to rebuild the GOP.

When Weld, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, joined Johnson on the Libertarian ticket, he said he would be a Libertarian for life and fight to make sure his running mate became the next President of the United States.

But Weld apparently wised up after Johnson’s month of stunning gaffes, with the third-party contender consistently failing to know anything about current events or foreign affairs. When Johnson couldn’t name a single world leader he admired during an MSNBC town hall, Weld stepped in as his hype man, reminding him of a couple names.

Johnson spent his Tuesday morning arguing on national TV that his ignorance about the world could be a virtue, because it would prevent him from sending soldiers to dangerous countries.

Weld last week told MSNBC he’s “not sure anybody is more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States.”

Kind of a humiliating way to wind down a presidential campaign, isn't it?

No winners

Pence 'won' on style -- he didn't sniffle or vomit on the table -- and Kaine 'won' on substance, but he was unpleasantly aggressive and interrupted far too much.

(I)t was as if two different Donald Trumps showed up at Longwood University on Tuesday night.

There was the Trump to whom Kaine kept pivoting in every answer, and eagerly interrupting Pence to prosecute: the Trump who called Mexican immigrants “rapists”; the Trump who spent years perpetuating the “outrageous and bigoted lie that President Obama is not an American citizen”; the Trump who has “again and again praised Vladimir Putin” as a “great leader”; the Trump who “believes that the world will be safer if more nations have nuclear weapons”; the Trump who has “claim[ed] that NATO is obsolete”; the Trump who “went after John McCain, a POW, and said he was not a hero because he had been captured”; the Trump who has “called women ‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘disgusting.’”

This Trump, Kaine argued, “demeans every group he talks about” and is the kind of “fool or maniac” who “could trigger a catastrophic [nuclear] event.”

Then there was the Trump that Pence kept evoking every time he responded to Kaine’s parries with a sad shake of his head or rueful chuckle: the Trump who “didn’t say” this or “never said” that; the Trump who doesn’t consider Mexicans rapists, but rather sees the current immigration system as a “heartbreaking tragedy”; the Trump who isn’t bigoted, but rather “fully support[s]” community policing; the Trump who might misspeak every once in awhile, but only because “he is a businessman” and “not a polished politician.”

In short: a kinder, gentler Trump.

As usual, the zero-sum Beltway pundits will declare one vice presidential wannabe the winner of Tuesday’s debate. But ultimately, it’s up to voters to decide which of the two Trumps on display better aligns with reality, at least as they see it — and that more than anything else will determine the effect, if any, of Kaine and Pence’s performances.

In truth, both candidates did well, because they both did what they came to Farmville to do.

The very fact that the debate was more of a referendum on Trump than Clinton should count as a win for Kaine. With his constant interruptions and clockwork attacks, Kaine forced Pence to talk about Trump a lot more than Pence forced Kaine to talk about Clinton. That was the point. In a battle between two historically unpopular presidential candidates, the one the election becomes about is the one who’s more likely to lose. Consider that nearly every unflattering Trump quote that Kaine cited was factually accurate — despite Pence’s dodges and more-in-sorrow-than-anger objections — and you have plenty of fodder for a few more “Yes, Trump really said X” news cycles. And that, in turn, could be enough to convince a few more swing voters that Trump is temperamentally unfit to serve as president — which is, of course, the Clinton campaign’s ultimate goal.

A key example of Kaine’s executing this strategy came early in the debate. After the Democrat rattled off a list of Trump’s various offenses — McCain, Judge Curiel, rapists, “‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘disgusting'” — Pence countered that Trump’s insults were “small potatoes compared to Hillary Clinton,” who called “half of Donald Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables.’”

Kaine was ready with his rebuttal.

“And she said, ‘I should not have said that,’” Kaine replied. Then he seized on the fact that Trump has never expressed similar regrets as an opportunity to run through Trump’s greatest hits yet again.

“Did Donald Trump apologize to Sen. John McCain? Did Donald Trump apologize for calling women ‘slobs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘disgusting’? Did Donald Trump apologize for taking after somebody in a Twitter war and making fun of her weight? Did he apologize for saying that President Obama was not a citizen of the United States?

“You will look in vain to see Donald Trump ever taking responsibility for anything and apologizing,” Kaine concluded.

Here's another place where the two talked past each other.

Thanks to his running mate’s long history of divisive remarks — and Kaine’s incessant reminders of them — Pence had the harder task Tuesday: making Trump seem tolerable (and tolerant) to voters who still haven’t made up their minds about him.

So rather than defending the indefensible, Pence simply decided to pretend that it didn’t exist.

One exchange — about ISIS and foreign policy in general — stood out. After Kaine battered Trump relentlessly on the subject — “He does not have a plan. He trash-talks the military, ‘John McCain is no hero,’ ‘The generals need to be fired,’ ‘I know more than them,’ ‘NATO is obsolete’” — Pence tried to brush it off.

And here's another of Pence's disarmingly condescending putdowns.  "Did you work on that one for a long time?", before ...

“That had a lot of creative lines in it,” he laughed.

“See if you can defend any of it?” Kaine snapped.

But Pence refused to take the bait. Instead, he gave “this president credit for bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” then pivoted to a generic conservative attack on Obama’s foreign policy ...

Kaine had the far easier case to prosecute, and did so well.  Pence just dodged.  But the governor looked "presidential" while doing so, and that's what stood out to the talking heads afterward. (Update: More debate viewers thought they'd rather have a beer with Pence.  And so it goes.)

It is a credit to Pence’s skill as a political communicator — he worked for several years in the 1990s as a conservative radio and television host — that he was able to pull off this sort of 180-degree turn without inducing whiplash. He was polished, disciplined and steady. He seemed calmer than Kaine, and considerably more polite. He sounded empathetic. He spoke in talking points, but delivered them as if they were thoughts that had just occurred to him. And most important, Pence realized that the best way to defend Trump was not with words — which he rarely offered up — but rather by leaving viewers with the impression that Mike Pence is everything they fear that Donald Trump is not: decent, grounded, consistent. If that guy’s also going to be in the White House, how crazy could things really get?

Vice presidential debates rarely, if ever, affect the outcome of an election. The most they can do is “change the narrative” until the presidential candidates debate again.

It may be, then, that while Kaine won on points, Pence won on style — and both, in the end, conjured up the Trump they intended to conjure up. The story of those two Trumps will be the story of the rest of this race.

I had forgotten that Pence made his bones by being a Rush Limbaugh wannabe before entering politics.  And there were a few "I wish Pence was the nominee" Tweets from regretful conservative #NeverTrumpers.  Been there, seen that (Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin; and also from Democrats in the past: Joe Biden -- yes indeed, and in this cycle too -- and Lloyd Bentsen).  On policy, Pence is Trump without the swagger and bombast, and this was his audition for 2020.  Mark it; he'll be in the thick of the GOP scrum in four years.  (Update: No More Mister has an insightful rebuttal to my -- and Chris Matthews', whom I don't watch any more -- prediction about Pence.)

Ajamu Baraka's debate performance was more thoughtful, IMHO.  Alas, the only candidate of color, the only veteran, the only person willing or able to discuss or even acknowledge American hegemony was -- just as Kaine and Pence -- preaching to his choir.  And frankly it's a shame that the Libertarians have gone into hiding for these affairs; William Weld could have made things interesting by joining Baraka in Democracy Now's after-debate, instead of doing his solo bit.  I barely saw any Libs participating in the Twitter feed.

All four veep prospects represented well enough to make the case for their running mates, but the needle won't be moving over the remaining thirty-four days.  These, even more than the presidential faceoffs, are just pep rallies for red and blue cheerleaders.  During the course of the evening on Twitter, the #HipHopAwards broadcast on BET trended higher than the #VPdebate.  That alone should tell the full tale about the optics of two old white men quarreling about women's reproductive freedoms, or improving police tactics and making significant reforms to criminal justice without mentioning the words 'Black Lives Matter' in seeking a solution to the nation's most compelling social crisis.

Yeah, the system isn't rigged; it's broken.

Veep debate scattershooting

-- Snoozefest or something substantive?  You decide.  I'll be live-Tweeting it so you don't have to watch; just check the Twitter feed, top right, if you're inclined.  If you're as intelligent as you have demonstrated just by reading here, you should stop watching teevee news about the presidential election.  I am not kidding.  You'll be less scared, more calm, and better able to enjoy the cool weather, your pumpkin spice whatever, the MLB playoffs or the fall festivals or just life in general if you do.  Seriously.

-- The insiders are saying that the Trumpbatross around Pence's neck is too heavy a lift.  Democracy Now! will feature the Green Party's Ajamu Baraka participating in the debate, as Jill Stein did with Clinton and Trump last week.

-- Voting is already under way -- always two words, please; it's not your underwater underwear, after all -- in 20 states plus the D. of C.  Mail ballots are going out and being returned in Harris County and throughout Texas (the deadline to register to vote is fast approaching; visit your nearest taco truck.  Hopefully there'll be one on every block next election).  These ballots are important tools for the Democrats and Republicans, as most of these voters are seniors, strongly partisan -- which is to say they vote straight-ticket -- and very reliable.  The Ds have upped their game statewide and erased the R's advantage in recent cycles due to the workhorse efforts of people like Glen Maxey.

-- This is, by a long distance, the worst thing I have read in the entire 2016 cycle.  After reading all of it -- turgid, ponderous, uses every single logical fallacy in the book -- I must say that I certainly hope I read nothing worse.  And then he doubled down on it today.

Here's Fred Rogers with some advice to that guy.

And here's Ted Rall speaking for me.

To my many friends and readers who plan to vote for Hillary Clinton: please stop bullying me.

Also please lay off other people, progressives and liberals and traditional Democrats and socialists and communists, citizens who identify with the political left, who plan to vote for Dr. Jill Stein or stay home.

I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump. I agree with the mainstream liberal consensus that he should never hold political power, much less control over nuclear launch codes. He’s dangerous and scary. But that doesn’t mean I have to vote for Hillary Clinton. ...

1. The main reason that I’m not going to vote for Hillary Clinton is the same exact main reason that I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump: I don’t vote Republican. Being age 53, Nixon was the first president I remember. Hillary Clinton’s politics (and her paranoia and insularity) remind me of Richard Nixon’s. I can’t bring myself to think of a Democrat as someone who solicits millions of dollars from Wall Street or votes with crazy Republicans (like George W. Bush, whose stupid wars she aggressively supported) to invade foreign countries just for fun. She plays a Democrat on TV, but we know the truth: she’s a Republican.

[...]

3. There’s a big difference between an impressive resume and a list of accomplishments. Hillary has the former, not the latter. I hold her resume against her: she has held tremendous power, yet has never reached out to grab the brass ring. As senator, her record was undistinguished. As Secretary of State, she barely lifted a finger on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contributed to the expansion of the Syrian civil war, and is more responsible than almost anyone else for destroying Libya. What she did well she did small; when she went big she performed badly.

[...]

5. She still hasn’t made an affirmative case for herself. By clinging to President Obama, she’s running as his third term. The standard way to pull this off is to present yourself as new and improved: the old product was great, the new one will be even better. Her campaign boils down to “I’m not Donald Trump.” No matter how bad he is, and he is awful, that’s not enough. Watching her in the first presidential debate, at the beginning when Trump was besting her over trade, I kept asking myself: why doesn’t she admit that the recovery is good but has left too many Americans behind? Why hasn’t she proposed a welfare and retraining program for people who lose their jobs to globalization? A week later, the only answer I can come up with is that she has no imagination, no vision thing.
6. She has made no significant concessions to the political left. Frankly, this makes me wonder about her intelligence. Current polling shows that the biggest threat to her candidacy is losing millennial, working class, and Bernie Sanders supporters to the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson. She would not have this problem if she’d picked Sanders as her vice presidential running mate. Even now, she could bag the millennial vote by promising the Vermont senator a cabinet post. Why doesn’t she? For the same reason that she won’t embrace the $15-an-hour minimum wage (she gets $225,000 for an hour-long speech but wants you to settle for $12) — she’s a creature of the corporations and therefore the political right. She’s not one of us. She doesn’t care about us.
7. My vote is worth no less than the vote of someone who supports a major party nominee. So what if the polls say that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be elected president? Why, based on those polls, should I strategically vote for someone whose politics and personality I deplore? By that logic, why shouldn’t they change their votes to conform to mine? I have my vote, you have your vote, let Diebold add them up.

I don’t have a problem with you if you plan to vote for Hillary. This year is the best argument ever for lesser evilism. But the fact that we are selecting between two equally unpopular major party presidential standardbearers indicates that the two-party system is in crisis, if not broken. We need and deserve more and better options. The only way to get them is to start building viable third parties — voting for them, contributing money to them. What better time to start than now?

Anyway, there’s absolutely no way that my refusal to vote for Hillary will put Donald Trump into the White House.

That is game, set, and match.  But here's your memory jogger, just in case.

It is indeed a very strange presidential election this year

Dr. No has quasi-endorsed Jill Stein.

Ron Paul, whose 1988 Libertarian presidential bid and two Republican bids made him the "liberty movement's" best-known figure, told MSNBC today that he couldn't support Gary Johnson for president and saw reasons to back the Green Party's Jill Stein.

"If you tend to lean toward progressivism, you can lean toward the Green Party," Paul said. "She's probably the best on foreign policy."

Bold emphasis mine.  There are two videos at the link well worth watching for context if you're open-minded, as in not subsumed by binary logic.  It's hard to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing; it probably doesn't impact much either way, as with most endorsements these days.  Paul is most certainly correct that actual progressives (not the Hillary Clinton kind) should not be considering voting for Johnson, but that might be a blind hog/acorn kind of correct.

Anyway... can someone get this for me as a mask for Halloween?

Who leaked Trump's tax returns?

Bonddad first:

Here's the really important point:  The key to this news story is a single piece of information among literally thousands of numbers and individual data points.  Whoever leaked this information knew enough about taxes to know what to leak and no more.  

If I was going to make a guess: someone really close to Trump who was intimately familiar with Trump's finances and who also didn't have a professional code of confidentiality.

If You Only News initially suspected it was Trump's daughter, Tiffany.  Then they got a little more plausible with Hair Furor's ex, Marla Maples.  Josh Marshall didn't offer any names but provided background, quasi-legal and personal, and No More Mister expanded on that.

It really doesn't matter who leaked them; Trump is over.  Finished.  Kaput.  Stop being afraid he's going to win.  He isn't.  He can't.  He has eliminated every single pathway to an Electoral College victory, almost all of them by his own hand.

The Russians are not going to hack the election.  (They are simply unable to do so.  This is Democratic propaganda.)  Women and Latin@s and squishy Democrats who only vote every four years will turn out in droves to vote against him.  Every voter living in a non-battleground state -- there are at least forty of them, and their number will increase as this election turns into a landslide for Clinton -- is hereby emancipated from the scare tactics of every Jackass from Obama on down to vote their principles in order to make sure Madam President gets the message: use the next four years to achieve real progress on the issues you say we can't, or else get primaried from the left and be a one-termer.

Clinton won't have an opponent so weak, so awful, and so self-destructive next time.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is anticipating a more reality-based debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence tomorrow night as it presents the best of the left of Texas from last week.

Off the Kuff looks at the sharp increase in voter registration numbers around the state.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos is thrilled to learn that Houston-area taco truck owners are registering voters: Houston taco trucks serve up Tex-Mex and voter activism.

Back to Ohio for PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, along with some words from Hillary Clinton about Sandernistas from behind closed doors, and a few voting provisos for those in Harris County.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is sick of Republicans siding with the rich and powerful over the health and well being of Texas citizens. Look to the Texas Legislature to be the great corrupt fixer.

Socratic Gadfly tackles the claim that third-party voters assert there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats, and finds it wanting.

Egberto Willies passes along the Annie's List endorsements of Democrats running for Harris County's DA, Kim Ogg, tax assessor/collector Ann Harris Bennett, and the Dallas County incumbent sheriff, Lupe Valdez.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston took note of the Harris County clerk's taunting of the Fifth Circuit's ruling on voter ID.

Texas Leftist feels encouraged about the Astrodome's long-term prospects after the Harris County commissioners voted to construct a two-level parking garage in the underground portion.

Neil at All People Have Value offered his artist's statement as public artist in Houston and America. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

=================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Grits for Breakfast asks what we should teach ninth-graders so that police won't shoot them, a subject John Oliver finds thoroughly depressing.

The Texas Election Law Blog writes about the travails of voting by mail.

The Houston Press catalogs Ken Paxton's obsession with LGBT issues.

Politifact Texas checked Hillary Clinton's statement linking tax cuts and the Great Recession of 2008, and found it 'mostly false'.

Popular Resistance profiles the Texas activists that fought KXL who are now girding up to stop the Trans-Pecos pipeline in West Texas.

Lone Star Ma focuses on the 13th of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

Better Texas Blog calls for a renovation, not a complete teardown, of Texas' school finance system.

BOR interviews Stephanie Chiarello Noppenberg, the creator of the political satire variety show Over the Lege.

Eileen Smith watched the debate so you didn't have to.

And Space City Weather declares Texas' hurricane season (probably) over.

Sunday Funnies

Ohio, what Clinton really thinks of Sanders supporters, and voting in Texas

Ohio, the state I thought would be the most interesting to watch in this cycle, is turning out to be as stale as day-old white bread.  A very good account of the demographics of the Buckeyes and their impact on the 2016 election.

After decades as one of America’s most reliable political bellwethers, an inevitable presidential battleground that closely mirrored the mood and makeup of the country, Ohio is suddenly fading in importance this year.

Hillary Clinton has not been to the state since Labor Day, and her aides said Thursday that she would not be back until next week, after a monthlong absence, effectively acknowledging how difficult they think it will be to defeat Donald J. Trump here. Ohio has not fallen into step with the demographic changes transforming the United States, growing older, whiter and less educated than the nation at large.

And the two parties have made strikingly different wagers about how to win the White House in this election: Trump, the Republican nominee, is relying on a demographic coalition that, while well tailored for Ohio even in the state’s Democratic strongholds, leaves him vulnerable in the more diverse parts of the country where Clinton is spending most of her time.

Ohio missed the diversity train ... so they're taking the Trump one instead.

But its Rust Belt profile, Trump’s unyielding anti-trade campaign and Clinton’s difficulty energizing Ohio’s young voters have made it a lesser focus for Democrats this year, even as it remains critical to Trump’s path to the White House. As Clinton’s aides privately note, the demographic makeup of Florida, Colorado and North Carolina, which have a greater percentage of educated or nonwhite voters, makes those states more promising for Democrats in a contest in which the electorate is sorted along bright racial and economic lines.

And with a once-competitive Senate race in Ohio turning into a rout for Rob Portman, the Republican incumbent, Democrats can quietly pull back from the state with little fear of down-ballot consequences.

Clinton has recently surged back into the lead in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina ... but not in Ohio and Iowa.  One of the clearest reasons is that those two states remain overwhelmingly Caucasian.

But even some of the state’s proudest boosters acknowledge that Ohio, which is nearly 80 percent white, is decreasingly representative of contemporary America.

“Ohio, like a melting iceberg, has slowly been losing its status as the country’s bellwether,” said Michael F. Curtin, a Democratic state legislator and former Columbus Dispatch editor who is an author of the state’s authoritative “Ohio Politics Almanac.”

He continued: “It’s a slow melt. But we have not captured any appreciable Hispanic population, and there has been very little influx of an Asian population. When you look at the diversity of America 30 to 40 years ago, Ohio was a pretty close approximation of the country. It no longer is.”

[...]

“If the Republican Party looks more like the Trump coalition and the Democratic Party looks more like the Obama coalition, then the states Democrats must win will no longer be Ohio and Iowa (91% white in 2012),” said David Wilhelm, a manager of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign and a former Democratic national chairman who lives in suburban Columbus. “They will be Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.”

Much more there about how Republicans have a winner in fair trade -- as opposed to free trade -- if they can figure out how to leverage it into votes outside their white, rural, conservative caucus in all states, not just Ohio.  For the record: the cleaving of rank-and-file union membership who favor Trump and his populist and nativist rhetoric on trade and immigration, and the union leaders who continue to support the Democrats, is where the fault line lies.  Like the San Andreas, it's way overdue for a big split.

Update: Larry Sabato with the deep Buckeye dive.

-- Here's what Hillary Clinton really thinks about the Sandernistas, on audiotape from behind closed fundraiser doors.

"There is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates," she said. "And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel."

[...]

"Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement," she said. "They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future."

Clinton added: "If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing."

Gonna be awfully difficult to blame the Russians for this.  Still feel like voting for her, millennials?  And Hillbots: still don't get why they don't?

Hillary Clinton does not support single-payer health care; Young voters do. Clinton is among the more hawkish members of the Democratic Party; Young voters are not. Clinton is a capitalist, and even within a capitalist party, she is in both perception and in practice unusually comfortable with capitalism’s worst practices. Millennials, by contrast, reject the entire economic system by a bare majority. They are no great fans of financial institutions or free trade.  This should not be surprising in a year when very few voters of any age group are particularly enthusiastic about their prospects.

[...]

I would like to suggest that the threat these young voters pose to technocratic liberalism is not the possibility of electing Donald Trump. Despite Clinton’s flagging numbers, her chances of success remain high. Rather, the fear is that if younger voters really are committed to a host of ideological positions at odds with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, then that Party, without a Trump-sized cudgel, is doomed. It should not escape anybody’s notice that politics by negative definition—the argument, at bottom, that “we’re better than those guys”—has become the dominant electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, and that despite the escalation of the “those guys” negatives, the mere promise to be preferable has yielded diminishing returns. At some point, the Democratic Party will either need to embrace a platform significantly to the left of their current orthodoxy, or they will lose.

There are only so many times one can insist that young voters capitulate to a political party’s sole demand—vote for us!—in exchange for nothing.

You actually have one pretty good choice left

Now would be a great time for millennials -- and every other generation, for that matter -- to vote Green in a non-swing state, of which there are at least forty.  You want better, more progressive Democrats?  Take my word: after ten years of working my ass off for that within the Democratic Party, the only way it will ever happen is without them.

-- Look who is on the ballot for more voters than Evan McMullin.  She's not on the Texas ballot, so you won't read much about her from Texas sources of information.   But you won't hear much about her at all anywhere, because she's, you know, an actual practicing socialist.

-- Speaking of ballots, you can find your sample one now if you live in Harris County.  We have one of the longest ballots in the nation, so start your research now and post a question in the comments about any specific race you may have.  I will have a P Slate post prior to the start of early voting, but may only touch lightly on downballot races due to various time constraints.

-- Speaking of early voting, it begins three weeks from Monday.  You still have ten days to register or change your address, if necessary; and remember that unless the SCOTUS grants some unexpected relief to Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton at the very last minute, you won't need your picture ID to vote.  But if you DO NOT have a photo ID, be prepared to sign an affidavit stating such and bring your voter registration card or something like your utility bill that verifies your address.  Just in case there are some Republicans acting like assholes.

Under no circumstances should you vote provisionally.  Step out of line and call the Texas Voter Suppression Hotline for assistance.

The Daily Jackass: Barack Hussein Obama

This space had been reserved for Howard Dean and his diagnosis of Trump's sniffles Monday night as evidence of a cocaine problem, but in a come-from-behind victory at the wire ... congratulations, Mr. President.  You earned it.

“If you don’t vote, that’s a vote for Trump,” Obama said in an interview on the Steve Harvey Morning Show. “If you vote for a third-party candidate who’s got no chance to win, that’s a vote for Trump.”

This might be too complicated.  Let's check in with Ted (Keanu).

Still a little deep.  What say you, Most Interesting Man in the World?

Obama's having a pretty rough final year, what with being the lone ranger supporting the TPP, getting his veto overridden yesterday, a disturbingly silent voice on the increasing number of racial confrontations in the nation's streets as police continue to gun down unarmed black men like it's open season, scolding people about tarnishing his legacy and now this.

And can anyone explain the genesis of the idea that the Hatch Act should exclude the president and vice-president?  The law is all but toothless anyway; those who violate it -- like Julian Castro -- can simply say they didn't mean to and suffer no consequence (save a political one, of course).

Here's hoping the president can avoid pulling any more Kanye Wests from now to Election Day.

Trump's male chauvinist piggery

That's what we called it back in the day.  Today the preferred words are 'sexism' or 'misogyny', and Trump is certainly a misogynist.  Both words apply to much of Trump's base -- I won't use the d-word; think that's a step too far -- and the tea party/alt-right/whatever they're calling themselves this week.  He long ago maxed out this voting demographic, and now this bit with Miss America might be sealing the losing deal for him.

Tuesday, Trump refused to back down from his criticism of Machado, telling "Fox and Friends" in an interview that she had "gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem."

"She was the winner and you know, she gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem. We had a real problem," Trump said. "Not only that, her attitude, and we had a real problem with her, so Hillary went back into the years and she found this girl -- this was many years ago. And found the girl and talked about her like she was Mother Theresa. And it wasn't quite that way but that's OK. Hillary has to do what she has to do."

Hard to see that temperament resounding with 53% of the electorate.  Statistical note: that 53% figure is from 2013 and is likely to increase in five weeks.  And of the nine states where men make up more than 50% of the population, only two are battleground states.  So there's a whole lot of wasted Trump votes in those red states.  The gender gap is real, and Trump is expanding it.

I know that there's a cottage industry full of bankruptcies predicting the demise of Hair Furor (I went real early myself), but there's precious little time for the Barking Yam to recover from his debate faceplant, no matter what the online polls say.

Trump picked the wrong weekend to stop sniffing glue

Other than being distracted by his sniffling, I was amused by the evening's developments (not highly entertained, but I always keep my expectations pretty low for these).

Yes, Clinton won, and her polling should reflect that in a few days.  Historically the underdog has usually won Round 1, so that's another plus for Clinton.

And my candidate staged a very busy and effective virtual debate in real time, lifting her into the Trending on Twitter before the debate began with her expulsion from the Hofstra University campus, and sustaining that momentum late into the evening.

There's a lot of spinning and some good analysis that I'll update this post with later.

Update:

Here's a montage of Trump sniffling at tonight's #debate https://t.co/0HCcJPsxqt pic.twitter.com/leidFP8jBl

— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) September 27, 2016

Who lost the debate? America.

Expanding the Debate: Jill Stein "joins" Trump and Clinton in Democracy Now!'s virtual merge

The First Debate Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance passes along Heat Street's exclusive betting guide, Moms Rising's bingo card, and the drinking game rules for the first presidential debate this evening.  But before it begins, Houston-area partisans, show up at the Harris County District Attorney debate, between Kim Ogg and Devon Anderson, from 6:30 until 7:30 p.m. on the near southwest side.

Socratic Gadfly "invites" members of Anonymous to hack the TV feed of the presidential debate on Monday, and John Coby at Bay Area Houston has the media's guide for delivering a win to Trump.

Off the Kuff marvels at the latest order from Judge Nelva Ramos in the voter ID lawsuit.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos is thrilled by the poll that shows Hillary Clinton ten points ahead of Donald Trump in Harris County: Hot Damn, Houston! We can do this.

A discomfiting conclusion about Ted Cruz folding to Dan Patrick and endorsing Trump was drawn by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

As the Republican Congress fiddles, the Zika virus marches on Texas. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is continually appalled at the Republican war on health care and the well being of citizens.

Neil at All People Have Value pointed out that Ann Harris Bennett would be a far better Harris County Tax Assessor-Voter Registrar than failed incumbent Mike Sullivan. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Asian American Action Fund advances a fundraiser later this week for one of its favored candidates, Rep. Tammy Duckworth (IL-US Senate).

State Rep. Ron Simmons will address the Lewisville Chamber of Commerce regarding the forthcoming legislative session and various transportation matters, reports the Texan-Journal.

Texas Leftist is a little taken aback by the number of teachers slated to lose their jobs under Trump's education plan.

And Dos Centavos humble-brags about the two albums he reviewed that were nominated for the Latin Grammys.

=====================

More blog posts from around Texas!

The Houston Communist Party, in coordination with the Houston Socialist Movement, plans a counter-protest against the "White Lives Matter" protest next Saturday, at the Anti-Defamation League's southwest Houston office.

Forrest Wilder at the Texas Observer laments the state of the media, but not that of journalism.

Karisha Shaw at Strength in Numbers has a view of intersectionality through the lens of a queer black woman.

Grits for Breakfast offers a suggestion to the Texas House committee contemplating a racial profiling aspect to police stops: limit searches to reduce public dissatisfaction.

Swamplot updates the court room battle between two oyster harvesting companies over Galveston Bay's reefs as the bay recovers from the spring flooding.

Pages of Victory explains why the Trans-Pacific Partnership exemplifies his loss of respect for the Democratic Party.
  
Lone Star Ma focuses on the twelfth of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Colleen Aune (a former member of the Rice Marching Owl Band) and Dan Solomon have their say on the MOB's controversial halftime show during the Rice-Baylor game.

Raised On The Rail provides a handy map of Houston restaurants near light rail stops.

The Lunch Tray alerts us to a disturbing report about teens and hunger.

The Austin Chronicle and the Texas Freedom Network both remind us that SBOE member David Bradley is a huge jerk.

And the TPA wishes Tom "Smitty" Smith a happy and healthy retirement.

Sunday Funnies

Ted Cruz, Trump, and Dan Patrick

I don't care whether Ted Cruz has suffered any damage -- any at all, in any way -- with his endorsement of Trump.  It's obvious to me that the man cares about nothing except the next election he's running in.

But it's instructive that it was our lieutenant governor who pushed him off the fence with notice that he would be "left in the rearview mirror" if he didn't endorse the Republican nominee.  What that tells me is that Cruz was intimidated by the realization that he might be primaried in 2018 by someone running to his right.  (Fear is a mutha, ain't it?)

But.  Someone running to the right of Ted Cruz.  Who could win.

Let that sink in.

"Keep Calm and Vote Green: Fascism is not coming"

Thanks to Paul Street at Truthdig for telling it like it is, using the boy who cried 'wolf" analogy:

Every four years, liberal-left politicos scream wolf about how the Republicans are going to wreak plutocratic, racist, ecocidal, sexist, repressive and war-mongering hell if they win “this, the most important election in American history.” The politicos conveniently ignore the plutocratic, racist, ecocidal, sexist, repressive and military-imperial havoc that Democrats inflict at home and abroad in dark, co-dependent alliance with the ever more radically reactionary Republicans.

Democrats fail to acknowledge their preferred party’s responsibility for sustaining the Republicans’ continuing power, which feeds on the “dismal” Dems’ neoliberal abandonment of the nation’s working-class majority in service to transnational Wall Street and corporate America. They commonly exaggerate the danger posed by the right-most major party and (especially) the progressivism of the not-so-left-most one.

It’s not that the liberal and progressive politicos lie about the presence of wolves. The wolves are out there. But they include Democratic wolves in fake sheep’s clothing joined with Republicans in what Washington journalist Mark Leibovich calls “the ultimate Green Party.” The nation’s capital, Leibovich notes, has “become a determinedly bipartisan team when there is money to be made. … ‘No Democrats and Republicans in Washington anymore,’ goes the maxim, ‘only millionaires.’ ” 

I watched Bill Maher last night (something I haven't done much ever since he came out as one of those Paul Ryan/Chris Christie/chicken or fish fuckwads).  One of the panelists was Lanhee Chen, a Republican who cannot vote for either Trump or Clinton.  His response to Maher regarding who he was voting for began with "I live in California, just like you" before he was interrupted and attacked by World War Z author Max Brooks with "Supreme Court".

Chen gets most everything about policy wrong IMO, but gets it right about the Electoral College; Maher and the rest of his panel (save the odious Neera Tanden, who gets it completely and exploits the fear factor associated with not voting for Clinton) do not.

The more American liberals and progressives (vote for the lesser evil; it has a track record, after all), the more the Republican right wing is emboldened, the further the Democrats move into ideological and policy territory formerly held by Republicans, and the more dire the American and global situation becomes. LEV is a viciously circular, self-fulfilling prophecy that itself holds no small responsibility for the ascendancy of horrible Republican presidents and other terrible things like the tea party and Donald Trump phenomena. [...]

I am not so inured to the quasi-neofascistic evil of the Trump phenomenon and the ugly prospects of a Trump presidency—especially on the ecological level—that I cannot understand why many fellow leftists would mark a ballot for the hideous imperial corporatist Hillary Clinton to block Herr Trump. The intra-left bloodletting that takes place on a regular quadrennial schedule over the difficult question of how best to respond to the United States’ plutocratic electoral and party system certainly does not serve the progressive left cause. Let us join together after the latest quadrennial extravaganza to build and expand a great popular movement with a list of demands and the introduction of an election and party system that deserves passionate citizen engagement.

The debate is Monday.  Clinton's polling has gathered strength again.   Don't be one of those cowards who is too scared to vote for a better Democratic Party -- by voting for the Green Party -- in a non-battleground state.

I see your Charles Blow and raise you Ralph Nader

Blow blew it here with his lecturing, primarily aimed at African American millennials but scattershot at everybody who thinks like me.  So in corresponding piss-value response to everybody that thinks like him (and is sharing it on FB and shit), let's feed him some Nader.

"Sanders hasn’t returned a call from me in 18 years. He is a lone ranger. He doesn’t like to be pushed into more progressive action than he is willing to adhere to. As a result, millions of his voters now are in disarray. They don’t know where to go. They’re cynical. Some will go Democrat. Some will support Libertarian, Green. Some will stay home. And so this huge, wonderful effort that he launched is now aborted. It’s dissipating."

If Sanders doesn't like being pushed to the left, then why would he dare try to push his caucus to the right?  This is the entire premise set forth over a year ago, when he was rumored to be 'exploring' a run for president.  That it would end with him sheepdogging progressives onto the Clinton bandwagon.  We all saw this coming.  We hoped for something different, but no.

"And the idea of calling a third party 'spoiler,' using the First Amendment right to run for office, is a politically bigoted word and should never be tolerated by the American people, because everyone has an equal right to run for office. Everyone is going to get votes from one another. So they’re either spoilers of one another or none of them are spoilers.

[...]

"Well, it’s wrong from a First Amendment point of view, first of all. You should never tell anybody to shut up. And when you run for office, it’s free speech, petition and assembly. It’s the consummate use of the First Amendment. But here—it’s a scapegoating. The Democrats could never get over how they couldn’t beat this bumbling governor from Texas, who couldn’t put a paragraph together and has a horrible record—children and women and pollution, etc., policy, right?"

AMY GOODMAN: "You’re talking about George W. Bush."

RALPH NADER: "George W. Bush. So they scapegoat the Greens. So here’s how it goes: 300,000 registered Democrats in 2000 in Florida voted for Bush—blame the Greens. Thousands of people were misidentified as ex-felons by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state for Jeb Bush, governor of Florida—blame the Greens. The butterfly ballot, which was very deceptive and got people to vote for exactly the opposite candidate in South Florida—blame the Greens. Scalia’s political 5-4 decision, which blocked the Florida Supreme Court’s full recount in Florida—blame the Greens. The Electoral College took the victory in the popular vote from Gore—blame the Greens. Gore loses his Tennessee state, where he represented in Congress for years—blame the Greens. It’s total scapegoating. It’s disgusting that extremely smart people, who happen to be Democratic Party apparatchiks, like Howard Dean, who’s now in a corporate firm that lobbies for the healthcare and drug industry, by the way, and never identified as such by The New York Times and others who quote him—he is now reviving this 2000 nonsense."

Two things seem real easy to understand to me: Hillary Clinton is Jeb Bush, with Poppy and all of W's neocons on board.  And if Trump still manages to win, it's Clinton's fault exclusively for being a bad candidate running an even worse campaign.

The more people like Blow (and Charles Pierce) want to play hardball with a candidate drawing 3%, the harder the ball is going to get.  It might come to a head next Monday night in upstate New York.

These fucking Jackasses are wearing. me. out.

UH releases poll with 10-point Clinton lead in Harris County

If you recall, I made fun of the lady at the beauty shop over a week ago for advancing this exact rumor.  So she gets to feed me some crow.

Poll results released today by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs show that Hillary Clinton has a 10-point lead over Donald Trump among registered voters in Harris County, the largest county in Texas and third largest in the nation. Clinton leads Trump 42 percent to 32 percent, with nine percent supporting Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, two percent backing the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and 15 percent undecided.

If the numbers hold, it would represent the widest margin of victory for a Democratic presidential nominee in Harris County since 1964, the year Lyndon B. Johnson was elected president. He received 59.5 percent of the Harris County vote.

Clinton’s lead narrows to only four points, 43 percent to 39 percent, among voters who say they are extremely likely to cast a ballot this November.

The "extremely likely" screen, with the four-point lead, is probably the closest to accurate, FWIW.  Even if ten is the margin, I simply don't think it can hold all the way to Election Day, but it's more than enough to give blue partisan hopes a big boost.

The rest of the poll's results, however, won't (bold is mine).

The UH Hobby School poll finds no evidence of national Republican concern that Trump’s unpopularity within the party will negatively effect down ballot races. In the race for Harris County District Attorney, among the voters extremely likely to cast a ballot this fall, incumbent Republican Devon Anderson narrowly bested Democrat Kim Ogg, 30 percent to 29 percent, while incumbent Republican Ron Hickman led Democrat Ed Gonzalez 36 percent to 30 percent in the contest for sheriff. A plurality of voters is unsure about their preference for district attorney (47 percent) and sheriff (36 percent).

A year ago during the mayor's race, UH returned a similarly strange polling result:  Sylvester Turner with a ten-point lead, Bill King and Adrian Garcia tied for second, Chris Bell a close fourth, and a massive quantity of undecideds.  The November general election results were wildly different, with Turner 32%, King 25, Garcia 17, Ben Hall 9, and Bell 7.

I pooh-poohed their poll then, and I'm pooh-pooh-ing these two county results now.

Update II (9/23): Charles says I'm confusing my Cougar polls here.  Fair enough; I sit corrected.  I still pooh on both.

For one thing, that's an enormous number of GOP split tickets.  Even with the high unsure/undecideds, something appears to be very off if Hickman is leading Gonzalez by six while Clinton leads Trump by ten.  I would have expected the opposite in the sheriff's race to be true, in fact, irrespective of the presidential.

This is a data point, but an awfully strange one.

Update (9/23): The mighty Kuffner has weighed in, and disapproves of the poll to some greater degree than I do.   No issues with his take.  But I thought about these numbers awhile overnight, and did some back-of-the-envelope math: if 100% of the Harris County electorate represents 1,000,000 voters (Charles will probably have a guess at turnout later and it will be higher than this; my number is extremely conservative) then by virtue of UH's poll, Clinton is ahead of Trump by 100,000 votes, and Ron Hickman leads Ed Gonzalez in the race for sheriff by 60K.

This doesn't seem plausible in a sampling that is 50% D, 45% R, and 5% I (page 5).  It would suggest there is a very large number of Democrats in Harris County -- joined by Republicans, for that matter --  who would be splitting their tickets Clinton and Hickman.  (Significantly less so Clinton and Anderson in the DA's race; everybody understands that one will be very close all the way to Election Night).

Could there really be tens of thousands of blue and red partisans in the county voting Hillary for president and Ron Hickman for sheriff?  I'm just not buying that.