Borris Miles or Senfronia Thompson for SD-13?

In a true 'lesser of two evils' matchup tomorrow morning at the CWA hall, I must confess that I'll be slightly less unhappy if Miz T prevails, but I don't think she will.  Unless there is a backlash against him that has flown under my radar, I expect to be calling my statehouse representative, Borris Miles, Senator.

Miles has been an extremely frustrating guy to support based on his -- 'erratic' is the kindest word I can use -- behavior since being elected to the Texas House.  He's hard to dislike personally, however.  Thompson has been, as the Chronic board noted in their fulsome endorsement, top-shelf as a legislator and a representative for her House district, but more of the people voting in this election live in Miles'.  And they love the guy, warts and all.

By the way, the Chron overlooked or ignored this unflattering NYT article from 2011 about Senfronia's skill at playing both sides, even when it comes to morally ambiguous issues.

My main question about this race centers around a projected whip count: the numbers of precinct chairs in HD 146 (Borris') versus HD 141 (Senfronia's) that are within SD-13's boundary lines.  I pulled the list from each House district's website and compared them to the Senate district's and counted 41 of Miles' and 18 of Thompson's.  Accounting for the fact that these chairs aren't necessarily sure things for their respective reps, that there are vacancies among the precincts, and that somebody's numbers -- mine or the state of Texas' -- might be off, Miles still likely has a 2-1 base vote lead over Thompson going into Saturday morning's election.

With 95 precinct chairs (or so) doing the electing -- and let's just say ten fewer than the 58 votes Miles is claiming -- he has enough to declare victory on the first ballot.  I do not think he'll win on a first ballot with four or five names on it, but he should prevail on the second.

That's my prediction; let's see how right or wrong I am.

RNC circus plans coming together

These elephants and clowns are going to be some kind of entertaining.

A night highlighting the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. An appearance by onetime football star Tim Tebow. A presentation detailing former President Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.

Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee, has been promising a different kind of Republican National Convention, and plans obtained by The New York Times show that he is eager to put his showbiz stamp on the party’s gathering, even as he struggles to attract A-list talent.

If there's not enough room on their TiVO to record the whole thing, maybe they'll offer a DVD for five hundred bucks or so, a contribution perk like PBS does.  Saul Relative to how much the rubes can get fleeced for.

The list, which is subject to change, as obtained by The New York Times:

Monday, July 18: A Benghazi focus, followed by border patrol agents and Jamiel Shaw Sr. (who became an outspoken advocate for tougher immigration laws after his son was killed in 2008 by an undocumented immigrant). Sen. Tom Cotton, Rudy Giuliani, Melania Trump, Sen. Joni Ernst and others.

Tuesday, July 19: A focus on the economy: Dana White, president of U.F.C., the professional fighting league; Asa Hutchinson, governor of Arkansas; Michael Mukasey, the former United States attorney general; Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a vice-presidential possibility; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; Tiffany Trump and Donald Trump Jr.; and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Wednesday, July 20: Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (who tangled on television with the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper after the Orlando, Fla., nightclub massacre); Eileen Collins (the first woman to command a space shuttle mission); Newt Gingrich; Sen. Ted Cruz; Eric Trump; professional golfer Natalie Gulbis; and the nominee for vice president.

Thursday, July 21: Tebow; Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma; Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman; Gov. Rick Scott of Florida; Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel; Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a private-equity real estate investor; Ivanka Trump; and lastly the presidential nominee himself.

These are the prime-timers; the full list includes Speaker Paul Ryan, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, more senators and Congress critters, and B-list conservative celebrities such as Marcus Luttrell.

There is some news to be gleaned here.

(W)hat is striking, as much as who is on the list, is who is not. Several figures Mr. Trump had said he would invite to speak, like the boxing promoter Don King and Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, were not included. Neither was Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, a hugely popular figure in the key state of New Hampshire.

And this.

Even as they finalized the list this week, Mr. Trump’s campaign aides and party officials were also working behind the scenes to stave off any challenges to his nomination on the convention floor next week.

Yeah, that.  Stands as much chance of happening as Bernie Sanders being nominated by the Democrats.  The delusions really bloom in this heat, don't they?

(T)he chance that Mr. Trump’s opponents could muster enough support to deny him the nomination is remote. The biggest hazard that Mr. Trump and the leaders of the Republican National Committee are trying to contain is how messy the process could become — and how much damage his campaign could sustain.

Starting on Thursday morning, delegates will begin to debate a series of proposals to change the party’s rules. Those proposed changes could include a provision that would allow delegates to vote their consciences in selecting the Republican presidential nominee, instead of voting in accordance with the outcomes of the primaries and caucuses in their states, as most state party rules require.

If you're not too busy playing Pokemon Go, you might check your Twitter feed late morning and see if anything develops along these lines.  News might break, after all.

Seriously, though, about the convention.

The conventions used to be crucially significant news events, so the news media covers them extensively. A couple of hours’ worth of primetime speeches are on network television, and several hours more are shown on cable news channels.

Because the convention will be televised, lots of important politicians from around the country want to come speak at it. Because lots of important politicians will be there, lots of lobbyists and interest group leaders are there to stage events too. That further increases the convention’s appeal to the media, which find it to be a target-rich environment for interviews, and the extensive national media attention gives further incentives to political influencers, stars, and wannabes to show up.

The extensive media attention itself makes the conventions significant campaign events. In their book The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter, Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson show that polling leads are considerably more predictive after conventions than before. Usually the party that holds its convention first gets a "bounce," and then the party that goes second gets its own "bounce." The net effect of those two convention bounces is a significant political event that meaningfully drives the outcome in November.

This is why you don't fret polling until the kids go back to school, folks.  Two things you should do in mid-to late August: slow down in school zones and start to give the polls more credibility.  Also see this; trust Nate Silver to let you know when it's time to freak out. 

All that said, the upshot of turning conventions into a week-long display of party unity is that they are pretty boring. Any one speech can be quite interesting on its own terms. But the vast majority of them simply blend together, recitations of the same key beats over and over and over again in slightly different tones of voice.

This is what makes the idea of a Donald Trump convention so exciting.

For one thing, many of the key party luminaries whom you’d normally expect to be featured speakers aren’t supporting him. Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush won’t be speaking. Neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich has endorsed Trump yet, so we won’t have that party unity display either. A huge raft of GOP elected officials are skipping the convention, and it’s not entirely obvious that a young up-and-coming Republican politician really wants to keynote this event.

At the same time, while Trump has no real knowledge of or interest in American public policy, he does have extensive experience in the field of reality television.

Normally parties nominate a presidential candidate with the opposite portfolio of skills (Ronald Reagan had demonstrated proficiency in both policy and Hollywood), which is probably wise from a governing standpoint but has led us to a dreary dead end in terms of conventions. By the same token, while Trump would likely be a disastrous president he could be an excellent convention organizer.

Since modern conventions are essentially just long television shows with no real political content, it seems natural that politicians would stage boring ones while the star of NBC’s The Apprentice could stage an amazing one.

If he pulls it off, the Dems will once again clutch their pearls and faint.  For the price of that entertainment value, I'm counting on it.

Revolution News, Vol. 9: change of venue

Father's Day was the most recent of these, so we're overdue for an update.

After the pair appeared at the joint rally, the Guardian asked Sanders supporters: what now?

We received 375 responses on readers’ plans for their November vote. And despite the show of solidarity with Clinton on Tuesday, Sanders’ fans aren’t all convinced the presumptive Democratic nominee is who they will now support: Green party nominee Jill Stein was the most popular among reader respondents, with 171 new supporters, more than double the number who said they would move their support to Clinton.

A write-in vote for Sanders was also a popular option, with just 20 respondents opting for Trump. These results aren’t necessarily a representative sample, and they differ significantly from a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday, which found that 85% of Sanders supporters intended to vote for Clinton.

 

How Bernie Sanders supporters plan to vote in November

Source: Guardian | Graphic: Jan Diehm/The Guardian

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

171/375 = 45.6%, so this anecdotal survey indeed produces a wildly different result from Pew's recent scientific poll, also referenced yesterday in an update and linked via The Guardian in the third graf above.  What to make of such a vast discrepancy?  What you like.  For now, it's just another data point.

"Donations to Stein campaign increase exponentially":

Since Tuesday morning, the Green Party has received over $80,000 in contributions, over half of which comes from first-time donors, and half of which comes in the form of contributions under $50. Tellingly, about 615 of those contributions totalled $27, the exact number commonly trumpeted and solicited by the Sanders campaign during his revolutionary grassroots funding movement.

“There’s been an explosion of Berners coming in through every portal of the campaign, and it’s really exciting,” Stein told US Uncut in a phone interview. “There is so much courage out there to stand up to the marching orders handed down by the usual suspects.”

Stein’s social media accounts have also seen tremendous growth and engagement in the past 24 hours. A recent livestream posted to the Stein campaign’s Facebook page has been viewed over 300,000 times in less than a day. Her page itself has added approximately 44,000 new likes in the past week. Her Twitter account has over 145,000 followers as of this writing, increasing by the tens of thousands just this week, with 5.6 million impressions on July 12-13 alone. There have also been 10,000 new signups for her email list since yesterday.

And according to web traffic ranking site Alexa, Jill2016.com has been climbing steadily in popularity since January, with rapid monthly growth since March. The search term “Jill Stein” has also seen a hockey-stick increase on Google Trends since the endorsement:

Duopolists will scoff at the $80K figure, but will probably be swallowing a little harder the next time they look at a quarterly campaign finance report.  The ultimate goal for the next 60 days or so remains; 15% in the national polling, leading to Stein's inclusion in the presidential debates, the schedule for which was announced this week (the first is slated for September 26).  In order to be in the debates, her name needs to be included in the polls.  Time is short.  You may petition the Commission on Presidential Debates for redress of this grievance at this site.

According to Stein’s website, her campaign has secured ballot access in 23 states and Washington, DC, and petition signatures are currently being collected for ballot access in 27 others. Stein said her campaign has “many irons in the fire” and will be on “90 to 95 percent” of ballots after petitions are delivered to various Secretaries of State.

In the end, despite being labeled as a “spoiler” candidate by Clinton supporters and staunch Democrats in a winner-take-all political system, Stein is optimistic about her chances if she’s able to communicate her message to a national TV audience at the general election debates.

[...]

“If that word gets out, that can be a very powerful motivator for those people to vote for my campaign, and that’s a plurality of votes.” Stein continued. “In the words of Alice Walker, ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.'”

I can't say I'm overjoyed about HA Goodman's conversion, but here it is (apply the blind hogs and acorns rationale).

Fear is the ultimate weapon of establishment Democrats and people who want nothing more than for you to “fall in line.”

I’ll admire and respect Bernie Sanders forever, but I’ll never “fall in line” and vote for anyone advised by Henry Kissinger, or Bush’s neoconservatives. As Robert Kagan stated regarding Clinton’s foreign policy, “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue…it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Sorry, not voting for a Democrat with a “neocon” foreign policy.

Give Jill Stein a look, and give her platform serious consideration. Around half of Bernie voters according to Bloomberg in late June will never vote for Hillary; a far more accurate assessment in my view than recent claims of the majority flocking to Clinton.

Whatever the percentage of conversions happens to be, there's some serious momentum now for Stein, and one of many Berning Questions is how far can she take it.