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".

Ajamu Baraka at UTD on Friday, TSU on Saturday

Say this for the Greens: they clearly understand that because the Texas Democratic Party is so lame, the best opportunity for collecting the most votes is right here.

-- See Ajamu Baraka speak at the University of Texas-Dallas on Friday, October 28.  Details here.  Introduced by one of my very favorite Congressional candidates, Gary Stuard, running in the 32nd (incumbent Pete Sessions, no Democrat filed).

-- And on Saturday, October 29, at Texas Southern University.  Details here.

In his own words, speaking about the Green Party's Southern Strategy.

We have to recognize, as we struggle to dismantle this system, we also have to survive. We have to build dual power where we confront and utilize the state and local level to win real concessions for the people, while we also make sure that we have independent structures outside of the state and we’re building within these independent structures additional survival programs. So what we have for example is Cooperative Jackson in Jackson, Miss., that’s committed toward building real worker co-ops. Those kind of efforts we need to support, and if we had nominal state power, we have in our platform a program to provide real, direct federal support to worker cooperatives and businesses as part of a transitional program.

We also believe we’ve got to have federal intervention to address the astronomical rates of unemployment among people of color—both in the urban area but in the parts of the country that people seem to forget about, the rural areas. And the grinding unemployment and grinding poverty that we find. We have to force local and state governments to address this specific reality that face black youth and black working-class people in general. While we struggle, we have to build structures, and one of the structures there for the taking is, in fact, the Green Party structure.

What I’m engaged in right now is a Green Party Southern strategy where we suggest specifically to black folks in the South that you have an instrument that can be used if you want to challenge the power of the Democrats in the various states to mount a real opposition to the control of the Republicans. Even in those states where you have Republican political control, there’s still a lot of collaboration with the Democratic Party. People are comfortable playing that role and they’re not really providing a real challenge to these Republican governors. If you want to have real opposition, you have to have a structure in place to engage in real oppositional politics. The Green Party can be that force that provides an instrument of direct challenge and to also place pressure on those black Democrats that continue to sell out the interests of black communities by collaborating with white power in the South.

Does this sound like white privilege to you?  All your conceptions about what the Green Party is and stands for have been turned on their ear.  If you're still undecided on whom to vote for at the top of your ballot -- but especially if you're thinking about writing in Bernie Sanders (just ten states will count those, and none of them are Texas) -- take another look.

Turnout swollen as voters wish to be done with this election

Pro tip: voting early stops the flood of junk to your mailbox.  (The state runs a program every night marking early voters each day as out of the pool, so for example, I cannot go back and vote again today.  Or tomorrow.  Or on Election Day.)

Monday's turnout of 67,471 in-person voters shattered the (Harris) county record of 47,093 set in 2012 for the first day of early voting. Another 61,543 mail ballots had been returned as of Monday, bringing the total number of early voters so far to 129,014 in Texas' most populous county.

Records were also broken by substantial margins in counties such as Dallas and Tarrant, which reported first-day turnouts of about 43,000 each. Bexar and Travis counties reported about 30,000 first-day voters apiece.

Also in Nueces (heavy D not so much) and Denton (formerly blood red but these days a little more purple).  Update: And via Chisme: Williamson, Bastrop, and Hays, the suburban (R-dominant) counties surrounding Austin and Travis County.  Charles's post keeps us up to date on the minutia of the first voting day in this cycle; my experience yesterday at the Bayland Park EV location in southwest Houston has me rethinking what I should be forecasting as to how things might turn out for Texas and Harris County.

That photo above (courtesy Chron) is what my usual EV poll, the Fiesta Mart on South Main at Kirby Drive, in the shadow of NRG Stadium, looked like yesterday about 1 p.m. as I pulled in to find parking.  Out the door, across the front, and wrapping around the corner of the building to some distance I could not see.  That photo -- and this next one more clearly -- shows the line doubling back, serpentine-style.

I don't know whether that was earlier or later in the day.  All I know is when I saw that queue -- again in just single file, not back and forth as the photos show -- I turned my truck toward the exit and headed for Bayland.

Experience has taught me that Fiesta has a small area for voting, a smaller number of voting machines (less than 24) and that a line out the door generally means a line snaking down the aisles inside the store.  In 2008 I waited 45 minutes to cast my ballot during EV's first week, the longest I've ever stood on queue to vote, and my wife waited about the same time on the only Saturday of early voting.  In 2012, a larger turnout than four years' previous, it took us both about half an hour to vote together at Fiesta.

Bayland has more parking, more e-Slates (yesterday, about 36), which means an extra election clerk manning a third JBC, the machine that prints the four-digit access code the voter uses to sign in to access his or her ballot.  (A more detailed description of this process is here.)  As I parked and walked in, I asked some of the card pushers outside if they were getting any reports about the wait time.  I also asked some voters as they made their way past me to their parked cars.  The consensus was an hour-ish, in some case 90 minutes, and one person said 'two hours'.  That gave me pause, but I ambled on toward the end of the line anyway.

It became rapidly clear to me that this would be a long wait, but it appeared to be steadily moving along and so I queued up, read my phone for 10 or 15 minutes and then took note of the fact that the Bayland poll also had the line folding back on itself through several meeting rooms inside the community facility.  The longer I waited, the more I wished I had not, although there were many voters much older than me sticking it out, and there were plenty of chairs in each room to sit and wait, so I hung on, though my feet and back were both aching after the first hour.

The rationale for enduring this should be obvious by now.

"We just want to get it over with," Sam Tabb said as he stood in line at a polling station in Pasadena. "We will be glad when this whole thing is over. It's just been a real zoo. In my lifetime, it's probably the worst election ever."

Brandy Holmes, a 31-year-old engineer who said she'd marked Monday on her calendar weeks ago, echoed that sentiment. "Let's just get this over with."

It was another hour and fifteen minutes before I reached the clerk's tables, and having performed this pollworker task myself in many elections in the past, immediately noted the bottleneck: the clerks at the sign-in table were moving the mass of weary voters far too slowly.  While there were three rows of twelve e-Slates, each row with its own JBC clerk, the e-Slates themselves were mostly unoccupied; at least eight of the voting machines on each row were standing vacant, waiting for a voter.  I found that to be inexcusable but did not offer a complaint.  (At Fiesta, a voter typically has to wait a minute or two for an e-Slate to become available after signing in and getting a PIN).

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart said he'd expected a record-breaking turnout of as many as 55,000 voters, but that even he was surprised by the number who actually came out.

Stanart said his office did receive numerous complaints about long lines at early-voting spots. He recommended that those planning to vote this week check the turnout numbers by location at HarrisVotes.com and head to a spot with low turnout to avoid long lines.

Elections officials will be sending extra laptops to select locations on Tuesday in order to speed up the process, Stanart said.

The lines started forming early and stayed long throughout the day, snaking around buildings at polling places at several locations. By the afternoon, Harris County election officials said voters were casting 6,000 votes per hour. As the polls closed, people were still in line at some places.

It turns out I probably would have had a shorter wait had I stayed at the supermarket: as the County Clerk's spreadsheet revealed last night, Fiesta processed under 1300 voters, well behind its usual top ten heaviest county boxes, while Bayland had over 1900.  No telling how many folks saw long lines at both polls, and elsewhere throughout the county, and did not bother.

Perhaps the slowdown wasn't those clerks' fault, though.  Some voters had questions that bogged things down a bit; some were slow to produce ID, but none that I saw were being forced into the 'affidavit of reasonable impediment' to producing photo ID-route.  While my wait was about to come to an end, I asked one of the officiating clerks about that process and she said those voters would have to defer to a side table, complete the affidavit... and then go to the back of the line.  The clerk at that table was playing a game on her phone.

Here it is important to note a truism with respect to long waits at polling places.

Reminder that when you see hours-long voting lines in cities, that's not democracy in action, it's voter suppression in action. https://t.co/pLzK0UltRn

— Adam James Platt (@AdamPlatt1999) October 21, 2016

We've known this sort of thing has happened at least since Election 2004, when despite the HAVA's enactment in the wake of the debacle that was Election 2000, several factors -- among them Ken Blackwell, Diebold, and specifically black precincts in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati -- threw Ohio to George Walker Bush.

Voter suppression, you see, is even more difficult to prove than so-called voter 'fraud'.

(Is the system 'rigged', as Trump has stoked the fears of?  The right answer is: it always has been, in some form or fashion, small or large -- from the time of Landslide Lyndon and before -- all the way to the present day.  It's just that the only people complaining about it are the ones who think it's rigged against them, and that changes from one election to the next.)

So let's hope that this blue wave poised to sweep Texas, boosted perhaps even by the so-far mythical Latino surge, isn't going to be intimidated by Republican efforts to build -- or hold their fingers in -- the dike against it.  And speaking of water, bring a bottle with you, maybe a snack, possibly your medications, to the poll when you get ready to cast your ballot.

So for the money shot: that ten-point lead in Harris County no longer looks like an outlier, and it's a pure tossup that Texas flips, unless voter turnout starts to wane through the rest of the EV period or on Election Day itself.  Nate Silver still doesn't think so, but I feel like I need to hedge my longstanding skepticism.  I think it's within the Democrats' grasp ... but they could still fumble it.

Update: DBC with "Texas Swingin'? I Ain't Buyin' It."

Update II: Here's more goat-entrail reading from EV Day One from Texas Monthly and the Chron (tl;dr: it's still too early to say, but the trends are interesting).