The Comey Effect (and toons)

Is the Big Nothing actually Something?

While FBI Director James Comey's email bombshell may not dent Hillary Clinton's White House chances, Democrats fear it might shorten her coattails and threaten their prospects of retaking the Senate.

Comey's decision to publicly announce a new front in the Clinton private email server investigation so close to the election has come under fire from Democrats and even some Republicans.

Its impact on the presidential race may be marginal, since Clinton has built up a comfortable cushion of electoral votes and Donald Trump pools poorly with some key demographic groups.

But small disruptions in tight down-ballot races could have a big impact and the Democrats' aggressive response to Comey belies their concern that his move could cost them at the polls.

"It's certainly not helpful," said Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Roy Temple. "It kind of pollutes the Democratic brand in a way that's unnecessary, simply because it doesn't actually involve any new information, which is why the frustration at Comey is so high right now."

... (S)ome say that they think the FBI news has foreclosed the possibility of the kind of election triumph that seemed within reach just a few weeks ago.

"It moves us closer to the middle of the bell curve in terms of possible outcomes," said one Democrat working on Senate races, granted anonymity to speak candidly, and who noted that polls had been tightening anyway before the news.

Patrick Murray, the director of the independent Monmouth poll, agreed. "While the email news does not play a decisive role in the presidential contest, a couple of points on the margins could be having a critical impact on tight down-ballot races," he said.

Could this be a reason that turnout in Harris County slumped on Saturday and Monday?  Or was that just the Halloween/Dia de Los Muertes phenomenon?  Has the supply of early voters been exhausted?  As usual, we'll just have to wait and see.  But Comeygate almost eclipsed Brazilegate.

CNN says it is "completely uncomfortable" with hacked emails showing that former contributor and interim Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile shared questions with the Clinton campaign before a debate and a town hall during the Democratic primary, and has accepted her resignation.

Hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks show Brazile, whose CNN contract was suspended when she became interim DNC chair over the summer, sharing with the Clinton campaign a question that would be posed to Hillary Clinton before the March CNN Democratic debate in Flint, as well as a possible question prior to a CNN town hall, also in March. 

In a statement, CNN spokeswoman Lauren Pratapas said that on Oct. 14, the network accepted Brazile’s resignation. 

Democrats are quick to remind us that nothing was rigged.  (As I wrote last week about my personal early voting ordeal, it's been rigged for decades, centuries even.)

But if it makes you feel better, you should just go on thinking that someone is telling you a story about Democrats and Republicans being all the same.  If you're scared of pretty much everything that's happening right now, just repeat your calming zen-like affirmation that Democrats and Republicans are not the same (despite the recent accumulating mass of evidence that they are).

Meanwhile, everybody has a last-minute GOTV strategy.

And our media will go on focusing on the things that really matter.

The Weekly Wrangle

Have you voted yet?  In bringing you this week's round up of the best of the Lone Star left, the Texas Progressive Alliance wants to know.

Off the Kuff compares current and older poll results to evaluate the argument that Texas Democrats should not get too giddy.

Socratic Gadfly calls Mark Miller, the Libertarian candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, a dangerous alternative, and calls out any and all state-level Democratic fixtures endorsing him instead of Green Martina Salinas over Grady Yarbrough.

As if to contradict Gadfly, Texas Leftist changed his endorsement from Green to Libertarian after receiving Mark Miller's candidate questionnaire.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos learned that elections are rigged in a certain way. The rigging is called voter suppression and gerrymandering: Where the Real Rigging Takes Place.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders why Texas Republicans hate women and children so much. Funerals for miscarriages? Giving tax cuts to corporations while stiffing health care for children?

Turnout in Harris County and across Texas and the country swelled as Americans chose to end the 2016 presidential election as early as humanly possible. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs wrote about his personal experience voting early at one of Houston's heaviest polling places.

Dos Centavos advanced the "Tacos and Votes" rally held this past Saturday to assist GOTLV efforts in Houston.

Egberto Willies trotted out the Daily Beast's tired "privilege" argument against Jill Stein, and both got "straight up butchered" for it by Caitlin Johnstone at the Inquisitr.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston thinks he sees Texas Republicans abandoning Trump.

Texas Vox reports that Public Citizen and three other groups are urging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to halt their review of the license application for a high-level nuclear waste dump in Andrews County in West Texas.

Neil at All People Have Value said that if you see a gap, you should fill it in yourself. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

And Lewisville gets its first ramen restaurant, reports the Texan-Journal.

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

Culturemap Houston helped reveal Anthony Bourdain's Houston myth-shattering in the most recent episode of Parts Unknown, and Eater Houston has the five best moments from the show.

The Rag Blog eulogized Tom Hayden, one of the nation's most influential liberal political activists, who passed away last week at the age of 76.

David Collins advanced Ajamu Baraka's visit to Houston over the weekend, where the Green Paarty's vice presidential candidate spoke at Texas Southern University and campaigned at the Palm Center early polling place.  (More photos here.)

Somervell County Salon asks if Texans believe in good government.

Lone Star Ma wants to know what your voting plan is.

Grits for Breakfast despairs over the degraded state of Texas high criminal court elections. (This is about the truly awful candidates for the Texas Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals, about which I have railed repeatedly.)

The TSTA Blog calls on Dan Patrick to put his money where his mouth is on special education.

Mimi Marziani argues that Texas still has a long way to go to get it right on voter registration.

Paradise in Hell wonders how many more Republican judges will switch parties.

Zachery Taylor is convinced that Hillary Clinton is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers has the third installment of his Chronicles of an Angry Black Queer: "The Big Ole Fag".

And Pages of Victory gets to vote in person, instead of by mail as in years past.

Sunday 'Back from the Dead' Funnies

More early voting analysis

Whopper, supersized.

Harris County residents cast more ballots in the first four days of early voting than five states did in the entire 2012 presidential election.

Locally, the number of ballots cast over those days was 45 percent higher than the same period four years ago. Other parts of the state, which sported the nation's lowest turnout in 2014, have seen similar growth.

[...]

In the 15 most populous Texas counties, turnout in the first three days of early voting equaled one-third of total turnout in 2012, said Derek Ryan, an Austin-based Republican data consultant. In some less populous counties, he said, polling places have been "just completely swamped, they aren't used to seeing this many people show up to vote."

And it's not just Texas.

"We're seeing reports of record turnout for this point in time across the country," said Michael McDonald, director of the United States Elections Project. "You (Texas) are really off the scale compared to the other states."

I got the following off the (Democrats') Senate District 17 Facebook page, posted there by their chairman, Tom Gederberg.

Updated Harris County Early Voting and Mail Ballot Results for Friday

So far 374,679 people early voted in Harris County (and each days number was greater than the previous day: 67,471 on Monday, 73,542 on Tuesday, 76,098 on Wednesday, 76,329 on Thursday, and 81,239 on Friday) and 77,445 people have so far turned turned in a mail ballot!

There is a slight lag in getting the data loaded into VAN. So far, VAN has data on 276,292 early voters and on 63,293 mail voters. If you assume that people who have a 2016 DNC Dem Party Support v2 score of over 50% is a likely Democrat and those with a score under 50% is a likely Republican, here is how the voting looks in Harris County so far:

VAN Early Total: 276,292
Likely Democrat: 150,530 (54.48%)
Likely Republican: 125,762 (45.52%)
VAN Mail Total: 63,293
Likely Democrat: 35,063 (55.40%)
Likely Republican: 28,230 (44.60%)

One note of caution. Our percentages have gone down from yesterday. Yesterday, our early vote percentage was 56.47% and our mail vote percentage was 56.26%. Also, these percentages are only as good as the 2016 DNC Dem Party Support scores in VAN.

I am disinclined to believe that Friday's development w/r/t Hillary's latest email thing is going to influence a measurable amount of those who have not yet voted.  This is not the October Surprise some have been waiting for, and even if it were, I simply don't think it will sway many people.  The Democrats I know have demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore, minimize, or give credence to her many scandals, flaws, foibles, and policies that are anathema to progress.  They have applied their own coat of Teflon to Madam President, and I do not expect their beliefs are going to change very much over the next ten days ... or even the next four years.

Back to the turnout: the EV numbers have indeed been increasing every day, and today's total will be the highest perhaps seen for the period.  With more data and more granular analysis, the easier it becomes to divine a wave election.

"The first four days looked pretty good for local Democrats," said (UH's Dr. Richard) Murray, who has studied Harris County voting patterns since 1966. "More female, more ethnic, less Caucasian."

The county's turnout so far has been 57 percent female, Murray said, compared with the typical 54 percent, which he called "probably something of a Trump effect."

Stephen Klineberg, founder of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said the county's Democratic shift was a long time coming.

He pointed to a 2016 study by the Institute, which showed Harris County had been evenly split between Democrats and Republicans since studies began in 1984.

In 2005, 35 percent of respondents identified as Democrat and 37 percent identified as Republican. In 2016, 52 percent identified as Democrat and 30 percent as Republican.

That change was mostly due to population growth and changing party affiliation among Latinos, who make up 51 percent of the population under 20 in Harris County, he said.

"Pundits have been predicting this for years," Klineberg said. "There are some indications that we are beginning to see signs of that inevitable transformation in this election year, earlier than most pundits expected."

Let's hope all these Democrats are NOT voting straight-tickets.  Too many lousy statewide judicials that don't deserve a single vote, after all.  More at the Chron's link, and more later as the numbers come in from over the weekend.

Election scattershooting

-- Harris County and Texas turnout continue to break records.  Marc Campos still doesn't know what's happening, so here's the breakdown for Harris County's five heaviest boxes, my guess as to how they lean, and from the SoS, Texas' fifteen-largest counties' turnout as of Wednesday.

1. Metropolitan Multi-Service Center (known colloquially as 'West Gray') with 12,802 (heavy D).
2. Juergen's Hall Community Center with 11,945 (heavy R).
3. Bear Creek Park Community Center with 11,625 (heavy R).
4. Champion Forest Baptist Church with 11,488 (heavy R).
5. Bayland Park Community Center (where I voted Monday) with 8,656. (more D than R).

Close behind are Jersey Village City Hall (R), Kingwood Library (heavy R), and Nottingham Park (heavy R), all with more than 8000 early votes cast as of last night.

Since we're just spitballing, I'd have to say that the Republicans in Harris County might not be in as much trouble as we've been portending.

Click on it for a clearer picture or go here. Note that Harris County's turnout is 50 percent larger than second-place Dallas County.  This is why the emphasis on the state's largest county is so great.  The metro counties -- Harris and Dallas, then Bexar and Travis -- are more blue than red, but third-largest Tarrant and the suburban DFW counties of Denton (6th) and Collin (7th) are crimson-colored.  The three counties that round out the top ten are blue: El Paso, Hidalgo, and Fort Bend (which is actually purple, but trending azure and there are high hopes for a flip).

-- Alas for excited Democrats, a glob of recent polling appears to show the the prize of Texas' 38 Electoral College votes just out of Clinton's reach.

-- Still think there's a big difference between Democrats and Republicans, especially in Texas?  You really need to revisit that thinking.

-- One of the more under-reported stories of late has been the polling deflation of the Libertarian ticket.  This week Johnson-Weld hit three percent; less than two months ago it was ten.  It appears that's one of the places Hillary Clinton has siphoned votes from as she has surged, and the message to millennials about moving over from Gold to Blue seems to be working.

Update: Johnson's more recent meltdowns, captured on camera by HBO and The Guardian, aren't going to help him.

-- The Justice Department is coming to monitor Houston polls for 'irregularities".

Six teams of Justice Department officials will be dispatched to observe Election Day voting at 75 polling locations in Harris County as part of an investigation into allegations that the county failed to provide reasonable access to mobility-impaired voters.

Harris County will field its own teams on Election Day as part of an arrangement approved Thursday by U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett.

Bennett, however, told county officials that he found it "deeply disturbing" that Justice Department observers saw a visibly armed county investigator with a badge filming an elderly African-American woman with a walker entering a polling place this week for early voting.

"That's voter intimidation," the judge said, ordering the Harris County Attorney's Office to provide written notice explaining how it plans to avoid a repeat of the scenario.

-- Texas Leftist's endorsements were mostly Democrats, but he did work in a couple of Greens -- Martina Salinas (Texas Railroad Commission) and Joe McElligott (HD-127) -- and a couple of Republicans.  He apparently missed the memo on the shitty Dems running for the state Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals.  Socratic Gadfly knocked down the fervor for the Libertarian running for the Railroad Commission.

-- Wonder Woman flies her invisible plane to Houston to stump for Hillary today.

On Friday, October 28, Actress Lynda Carter, television’s original Wonder Woman, and Hillary for Texas will host a phone bank with supporters in Houston. Carter knows that Hillary Clinton will continue to lift up American children and families while fighting against Trump’s dangerous and divisive rhetoric. At the event, Carter will discuss how supporters can mobilize from now until Election Day to ensure that Hillary Clinton becomes the next President of the United States.

With more people voting in this election than any in history, Carter will urge Texans voters to take advantage of in-person early voting. Voters can check their registration status and learn more at iwillvote.com.

Media planning to cover the event are asked to RSVP to Miryam Lipper at mlipper@hillaryclinton.com.

Hillary for Texas - Phone Bank with Actress Lynda Carter

WHEN:  3:00 pm – Friday, October 28

WHERE: Headworks International, 11000 Brittmoore Park Dr Houston, Texas 77041

PUBLIC RSVP HERE

I'd absolutely be willing to get roped with the Lasso of Truth, but the words coming out of my mouth would still be "I have already voted for Jill Stein".