Friday, October 26, 2018

Spooky early voting updates


-- From Grits, from Monday afternoon (should have made it into the Wrangle), under the subheadline "The least-discussed vulnerable Republican on the ballot".

Grits does not expect Beto O'Rourke to win. But if he were to pull off the upset, many other dominos could fall in succession as a result, with at least three Republican senators, Texas' Attorney General, and potentially even the Lt. Governor at risk. Another race likely to flip if Dem turnout goes that high is Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Incumbent Sharon Keller won her primary with only 52% of the vote, and CCA races have consistently been among the lowest vote-getters over the years among Republican statewide officials. There is no Libertarian in the race, so the Democrat, Maria Jackson, should get all the anti-incumbent vote. If, on election night, the US Senate race at the top of the ticket is competitive, or heaven forbid, Beto pulls an upset, check down the ballot for this race; it may flip, too.

Statewide judicial contests are vital to tilting Texas away from one-party rule.  If you cannot vote for a Republican or a Democrat, these races are the only ones where I would endorse -- half-heartedly -- your voting for a Libertarian where there is one running.

I am long on record as being in full-throated support of all of the Democrats running for judge, from the top of your ballot to the bottom, in whatever county you may reside.  And two ballots from my household were cast that way on Monday morning.  With one exception: Harris County Probate Court #4.  The Chronicle op-ed board agrees with me; don't vote for the Democrat (I undervoted because I don't vote GOP no matter what).

-- A straight-ticket vote in Harris County leaves some races undervoted.  If that's your intention, fine.  Just be sure you check it carefully before you hit the red 'cast ballot' button on your e-Slate.

Voters are reporting odd problems on both the Republican and Democratic side of straight-party voting in Texas.

Mickey Blake was one of the voters in those early voting lines in Houston earlier this week.

"I hit straight Democratic ticket," Blake said.

She says she expected all Democrats to come up on her screen, especially Rep. Beto O'Rourke, but when she got to the last screen to review her choices, she noticed a problem.

"It's all Democratic except for Ted Cruz was checked," Blake said. So she backed up and did it again. And again. "I tried it a third time and the same thing happened," she said.

The same thing happened to Cordell Hosea in Fort Bend County.

"When I got to the end, I just so happened that I glanced at the screen, I saw Ted Cruz was selected as my senator," Hosea said.

He too voted straight ticket Democrat.

But hey, it's a bipartisan issue.  Voters 'on both sides', according to our Greg Abbott-appointed state elections administrator -- his name is Rolando Pablos, for Ted Oberg's information -- are to 'blame'.

But it's not just a Democrat problem. Voters who select straight-party Republican unselect Sen. Cruz and wind up voting for no one. Either way, officials say it's a rare issue that happens, but not to everyone.

It's popped up across Texas often enough for the Secretary of State to put up a statewide advisory on Monday to every Texas election advisor.

The Secretary of State calls it 'operator error.'

Nope.  Not in Fort Bend County, anyway. (bold is mine)

"We've heard from voters over a number of elections about this," said Ft. Bend County Election Administrator John Oldham.

Oldham says it's a problem he's seen for years.

He even told the Secretary of State about it years ago and it's still happening.

"It's not a glitch, it's a user-induced problem that comes from the type of system that we have," Oldham said. "I think both sides could be equally hurt."

It's unclear how widespread it is.

"As long as you don't hit the red button to cast, then you can get some assistance from the poll watchers," Hosea said.

Oldham tells us he recalls the problems for at least six years and says he's talked to the Secretary of State more than once about the problem. It has not been fixed aside from signs provided by the Secretary of State to warn voters to check their selections.

Oldham also said he was able to replicate the issue in his offices after multiple attempts.

"I'm really disappointed with the State of Texas," Hosea told us.

Sam Taylor, at the Texas Secretary of State's office, tells 13 Investigates the problem is "user error" and not something their office could fix. Taylor suggests a vendor could or should handle any upgrades, but the state has not asked vendors to do so.

Oldham and another election expert tell 13 Investigates that in some states, pop up screens warn straight ticket voters if they purposely or accidentally select a candidate of the other party. Texas has no such electronic warning.

Oldham in Fort Bend County told us it is most likely caused by voters simultaneously twisting the selection dial and pushing the enter button. It may not even be purposeful, but done by voters in a rush who don't realize they are still interacting with both.

That's why the SoS is calling it user error.  Expect some "Democrats too dumb to vote" comments from the #FakeBombs Republicans.

Brad Friedman is on it.  Stan Stanart is not.  Vote for Diane Trautman.

-- The TexTrib's last poll before the election is not good news for Team Donkey.

... but in TX07, everybody appears to be in a dead heat, according to the Upshot.


I believe LPF can pull this one out if EV stays strong next week.
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Thursday, October 25, 2018

#MAGAbomber, #FalseFlag, #FakeBombs


Twitter is where all the breaking news action continues to be, especially if you don't want to be spoon-fed the headlines from the teevee talking heads.  But it's important to avoid -- i.e., mute or block -- the trolls and cyberbullies.  Your personal data isn't going to be stolen and if you employ a good adblocker you won't see any spam.  Last I checked, only about 15% of the general pop had an account, so it's still somewhat of an insider's track.  Mrs. Diddie is telling me things every morning she's watching reported that I read last night.  Stay ahead of the curve.

But you also need to be able to recognize satire from serious, and disinformation, propaganda, and #FakeNews -- real fake news -- from truth.  And some good folks, like Buzzfeed here, don't enjoy having to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So with that ... I spent a little time yesterday morning false-flagging the false-flaggers.






They're still hard at work this morning, though.


More funny like that here.

The usual suspects were first out of the gate; Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, followed closely by John Bolton butt buddy Frank Gaffney, and then MAGATwitter went rabid with it and eventually Fox News started working in the magic words, going from 'sympathy vote' to guests to Tucker Carlson laughing about the pipe sent to George Soros.

Oh yeah, the most powerful Democrat of them all, the man who was first on the mailing list, also got featured in a House GOP attack ad two days after the bomb at his home was discovered.

Ted Cruz, true to form, piled on. (video there)

(MSNBC's Chuck) Todd brought up the breaking news to the Texas senator, who claimed that the bombs were part of a Democrat scheme while blaming the media for focusing too much on Donald Trump.

“The media always focuses on the president,” Cruz said. “There are too many Democratic politicians that are actively encouraging this.”

The GOP appears to be terrified of the surging early sympathy vote.  That counter-prop machine the vast right-wing groupthink can deploy at a moment's notice is truly something to behold.  The Democrats quite obviously have neither the skill nor the will to fight like this in the realm of social media opinion-shaping.  Perhaps if they're not too scared of being shot or blown up they can manage their very own anti-Kavanaugh bump at the ballot box anyway.  #BumpVotesNotBumpStocks?  There's another weaponized boogeyman under the conservatives' collective bed, however; the swelling #MigrantCaravan of Hondurans headed for the southern border, slated to arrive on Election Day (according to Fox's Stuart Varney), ready to vote illegally.


Oh wait, I got Varney wrong; he thinks that's "working FOR the president".

Yes, it's certainly hard to keep track of the daily conservative conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, the NRA's Dana Loesch reminds you to take your gun(s) to the poll(s).  To protect yourself from all of these #AngryMob progressives... interrupting your meal at a public restaurant.

Trump said something about all of this last night, but it was about 'media hostility'.

In scripted remarks at a Wednesday night rally in Wisconsin, the president vowed to catch the perpetrator, while calling on the media to end "constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories".

(Trump) also called for more civility in public life, saying: "Those engaged in the political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective.

"No one should carelessly compare political opponents to historic villains, which is done often."

However, the president made no specific reference to the intended recipients of the packages.

Obviously he didn't like the Hitler and Mussolini references.  Thanks for clearing that up, Creepy Porn President.  That should be helpful in calming everybody down.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Texas EV scattershots

-- This poll has Congressman WhataBeto trailing Senator Serpent Covered in Vaseline by four percentage points, 50-46, with the MoE at 4.  No crosstabs at the link.  The Lib, Neal Dikeman, polled 2% and 2% are undecided.

At first glance this would look like good news, but note that GSA Strategies is affiliated with Citizens United, and both are, shall we say, "progressive" outfits.  So there's a leetle bias.

Except for this one, there's been no fresh polling for nearly two weeks.  Update: As this was posted, the TexTrib via Progrexas has Reuters/Ipsos/UVA's latest, showing Cruz by 5, which is an increase of three points over their survey a month ago.  

Real Clear Politics (without the influence of either of the above yet) has the rolling 30-day average at Cruz +7.  Texas Politics Project (Blank and Henson at UT, also for the TexTrib) has history back to April, but the song remains the same.

#TrumpRally and #EarlyVoteTexas should be influencing actual vote counts now, but we can keep divining tea leaves and interpreting cabrito entrails until Election Day.  Just keep in mind that the polls could be as wrong as they were in 2016.

-- O'Rourke gets an assist from the Librul Media in the form of a town hall with Tweety.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews is coming to the University of Houston next week to interview U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke for his “Hardball College Tour” special.

Matthews announced during his Tuesday night broadcast that he plans to record an hour-long interview with Sen. Ted Cruz's Democratic opponent a week before the November election on Oct. 30 at Cullen Performance Hall.

After Matthews' on-air announcement, tickets were made available through the school’s website. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. while the taping begins at 6 p.m., the site reads. Attendees are prohibited from bringing “promotional or political affiliation displays.”

And another pop culture merger for the Democrat.


Artist Chris Rogers has been at work on the mural for weeks, according to progress documented on his Instagram, but he put the finishing touches on it just as early voting began in the state.

The mural, located in East Austin, features O’Rourke, a rising Democratic star, standing in front of a Texas flag with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal a “B” emblem, reminiscent of Superman’s “S.”

“Out of the darkness comes the light,” Rogers wrote of the mural, which is entitled “Beto For Texas.”

Rogers said that the mural took 40 hours to paint, according to Austin Monthly.

I thought Election 2018 was going to be all about Texas Latin@s and Lupe Valdez, but I'm going to be wrong about that, of course.  As Beto goes, so go Texas Democrats, as we all know now.

-- You should check this fellow's Twitter bio and then read the numbers here.


Ryan's Tweet here indicates that a lot of people who don't usually vote in midterms are voting -- almost 30% of those who have already cast an early ballot.  After just two days.  The TexTrib has raw numbers for Harris and Dallas Counties.


I don't underscore Harris just because I live and vote here or because it's the largest county in Texas, blahblah.  It represents about a fifth of all the Democratic votes cast in the state.  And you may have read that new voter registrations here shattered records.  So the reports this week of hour-long waits at EV locations in Harris County -- and for that matter, across Texas -- could be something the polls are missing.  But this NBC account says "hold on there, blue wave" (emphasis mine):

Republican-affiliated voters have outpaced Democratic-affiliated voters in early voting in seven closely watched states, according to data provided by TargetSmart and independently analyzed by the NBC News Data Analytics Lab.

GOP-affiliated voters have surpassed Democratic-affiliated ones in early voting in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee and Texas, the data showed.

[...]

In Texas, 53 percent of early voters had a Republican affiliation, compared with 43 percent who had a Democratic affiliation and 4 percent who were not affiliated with either party.

[...]

Women voters have outpaced men voters so far in ... Texas (59 percent to 41 percent), (and) urban voters have outpaced rural and suburban voters in Arizona and Texas.

Here is the important qualifier to this data.

As of Oct. 22, over 5 million votes have been cast early or absentee in the 2018 midterm elections nationwide.

This piece, dated Monday 10/22 and helpfully time-stamped at 2:49 p.m. (probably EST) does not include any in-person votes for Texas.  That is to say: these are all mail (aka 'absentee') ballots, and party affiliation is reflected (at least in Harris) by efforts of those at the county party level who push to identify and augment those numbers during the voter registration period.  You may recall that Harris County Republicans used to have a big advantage in this regard, but Harris Democrats have considerably whittled that down.

Update: Local political consultant Mustafa Tameez expanded on the problems with the TargetSmart data in his Tweet linked here.

So while there may be considerations for other states in the article to be concerned about w/r/t to "Blue Wave", Lone Star worries are overblown, to this reporter's POV.  At this time.

-- Perhaps you noticed that Michael Avenatti quietly canceled his Texas anti-Trump counter-rally.  (Avenatti's Tweet about doing so, and at least two mentions by TexTrib reporters that I bookmarked, have also disappeared.)  Perhaps you noticed that he's been keeping a (somewhat) lower profile for the past week or so, since his client lost her defamation lawsuit against Trump.

Back here I speculated (doubtfully; scroll to the end) about whether local deep-pocketed Democrats attending his Harris County Dem money bag drag would mention his responsibility -- ascribed accurately or falsely -- for the Kavanaugh bump Republicans seem to be enjoying.  That fundraiser, on 10/16, happened the day after DNC chair Tom Perez was also in town helping the HCDP with some cheerleading, a geographically proximal coincidence that largely escaped public notice.

I should have put two and two together.  Two being Harris County judicial kingmakers Gerry Birnberg and Dave Matthiesen, who together with Perez -- and let's say, for purposes of rounding, at least one other Houston legal eagle who wrote a $2500 check for VIP entry -- very likely cornered Avenatti and asked him to please freeze it.  For the sake of the downballot, you know.

Check Avenatti's Tweet feed above, scroll back in time to about the 16th and then forward, see if you think he heard a message somebody sent him.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

I would pay to see that fight

Greg Abbott v. Vlad Putin, in a leg-wrestling contest as part of a decathlon of 'World's Most Powerful Dictator' events.  On pay-per-view.  What should the Vegas line should be?


At a rally on Monday night, the governor of Texas declared himself 'more powerful' than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Greg Abbott was warming up the crowd for President Donald Trump at the Toyota Center in Houston when he bragged that his state's economy is the tenth-biggest economy on the planet.

"By comparison, the Texas economy is larger than Canada -- it's larger than Australia. And get this, the Texas economy is even larger than the economy of Russia," the Republican governor told the crowd.

"That makes me more powerful than Putin!" he boasted to applause.

You might be forgiven if you thought this was going to be a rally for 'Beautiful Ted' Cruz.

Now perhaps General Abbott and his Army were simply volunteering for service in the War on Russian voter electoral fraud.  In Trump's one-hour and eighteen-minute address to the faithful last evening -- Senator White Castle only spoke for thirteen minutes; your clearest tell he was an afterthought -- Our Greatest President Ever did not mention scrapping the intermediate nuclear missile treaty that is provoking tension with his Kremlin BFF (or so both Fox and  Democrats keep telling us.  He did repeat some fake news about a middle class tax cut before Election Day.)

But I don't want to digress from our Dear Paraplegic Leader's boast.

Let's give the Guv some credit for maintaining an ideal body weight and trim figure after all these years off his feet.  Isn't it remarkable how many calories a man can burn being a total sociopath?  He might not have been nimble enough to avoid being struck by a falling tree when he was young, but in the decades since, he's carefully watched his diet and has no discernible middle-age paunch.  I would hazard a guess that's without being able to do any sit-ups.  I'll also bet that he can take a body blow from the Russian Bear if they decide to spar a few rounds.

Who do you think wins in a 90-second lightning round fundraising competition?  We can ask Charles Kuffner to be the judge of the campaign finance reports.

Probably no distance running, but a 50-yard dash/roll could be interesting.  Gymnastics, like those Olympic rings or parallel bars, or better yet, monkey bars.  A hand over hand climb gives Abbott too much of an edge, I suspect.

A pandering-to-your-millionaires faceoff would be close.  Call it Plutocratic Pugilistics.  Separate from the Money Chase above, this contest would be determined by how much you could promise to do in exchange for a government position ("Tap That Crony") or a relaxation of regulations, rather than a monetary donation.  The minimum acceptable standard would have to be Trump's own recent world record; his awarding of the South African ambassadorship to Mar-a-Lago member and handbag designer Lana Marks sets a pretty high bar for Abbott and Putin to clear.

I can't handicap this match.  Who gets home field advantage?  Is it a best of five, or seven?

This could be the almost-ultimate Battle of the Ages.  Armageddon, Jr.  World War 2.5, televised on Fox, emceed by President Reality TV, for all the Nationalist marbles.  Sponsored by the NRA (they have large and equal bets on both sides), the Southern Baptist Convention, and Super Poli-Grip.

These people will buy and swallow anything.
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