Inspired by PDiddie's recent post about which statewide Democrats are worthy of his vote this year, I've been thinking about how I'll be voting in some of the races he doesn't mention: in particular, for Texas Governor, US Senate, and US House. If you know me or have read this blog, you may know that I despise the US partisan duopoly, also known as the two-headed Corporate Party. In this midterm electoral circus, and with no Green candidates on the ballot, I despise it enough to vote for Libertarians in races where I don't find the Democratic candidate an acceptable alternative—or in safe seats like Sheila Jackson Lee's US House District TX-18, where I live. Today I decided to look into whether anything egregiously daffy appears on the Issues pages of some Libertarian candidates who will appear on my ballot in November. A glance at the Texas Libertarians' Candidates page, my first visit there since May, reveals instantly that
Governor Despite some positions with which I disagree, I could envision choosing Mark Tippetts for governor. Democrat Lupe Valdez has all but disappeared from the scene, whilst at the tippy-top of the ticket Beto-Bob has sucked up most of the oxygen. Since I'm on record stipulating that advocating Medicare for All or a Single-Payer health system would be my criterion for whether a candidate gets my vote, this excerpt from Tippetts's website is kind of a deal breaker (emphasis mine): Government should neither provide, control, nor require health care. I do not believe that people have a right to be provided with healthcare at other peoples’ expense. Bruce A. Dixon is scratching his venerable head over this, and I share his puzzlement. He and his comrades at Black Agenda Report looked at the websites of 31 Congressional primary-winning candidates endorsed by one of three post-Bernie progressive advocacy groups: Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress. They found that 21 of those 31 websites' issues pages say literally nothing—or at least nothing markedly progressive—about international policy or issues of war & peace. Since I have found Dixon to be a reliable source of information and progressive commentary, at first I figured I'd just take his word for it. In his article, he includes the URLs of those issues and platform pages, but does not include hyperlinks to them, and I was feeling to lazy to copy and paste them. Then curiosity overcame laziness, and I checked a few of the 21. Sure 'nuff, these sites are conspicuously and eerily silent on those topics. Why Such a Big Hole in the Platform? Dixon speculates as to the reasons for this silence, as well as the Sanders-esque omissions of these topics on the sites of OR and JD in particular (numbers in parentheses mine): There are only two possibilities. Either (1) two thirds of our progressive Democrats running for Congress this year really are true believers in the US right to make up its own facts, to declare offshore law free zones like Guantanamo, to invade other countries at will, killing millions and wreaking incalculable havoc upon their infrastructure, societies and ecologies like in Southeast Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and just don’t want to say it out loud, or (2) our progressive Democrats don’t believe it but imagine they need to remain silent and pretend to be true believers in the US empire to get elected. Either way, two thirds of the new blue wave of progressive Dem congressional candidates believe they can get away with silence on foreign affairs. There are days I'm really glad I got on Our Revolution Harris County's mailing list. Today is one of those days. I haven't been to any of the county or state OR meetings since February, and I have my doubts about whether OR's leadership will think outside the bipartisan box. I also wish that they had chosen a .org domain rather than .com, but whatevs. Nevertheless, I support their mission of developing and promoting progressive candidates for public office.
UPDATE: Our Revolution, Texas Gulf Coast Region, has released its list. It has all the same names, plus a few additional for offices on ballots in Brazoria and Fort Bend Counties. Their email does not provide a web link. This past weekend, in lieu of its monthly meeting, OR-Harris held its endorsement forum for the 2018 general election. Here is the list of candidates endorsed, for offices in Harris and surrounding counties. It pleases me to see that Lina Hidalgo got the nod for Harris County Judge, not that I expected otherwise. Do you notice anything odd about the list? I'll give you a few seconds. That's right: nobody for US Senate, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, any of the state executive offices, of the State Board of Education; nobody for Congress in Districts 7, 9, 18, or 22, just to name a few. Rock DJ-emerita Dayna Steele, running in District 36, has exhibited sufficient progressive bona fides to meet OR's criteria. It's easy to forget that political organizations of this type do not endorse candidates who do not first seek their endorsement. Consider it common courtesy: You wouldn't want an unsolicited endorsement from an organization whose mission you oppose. I learned the hard way that nobody gets the Houston GLBT Political Caucus's endorsement without submitting an official written request. It help if you show up at their meetings, as many of the candidates in OR's list did. If I can find more information on whether the O'Rourke, Hernandez, Collier, Pannill Fletcher, Sri Preston Kulkarni et al campaigns even bothered to ask, I'll post a follow-up. If I were on the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, I wouldn't be hot to endorse this year's Democratic darling for US Senate; from what I've read, Rep. O'Rourke seems more interested in winning over Republican voters than progressives anyway. I do so like the photo on the HealthCare page of his website, with folks holding MEDICARE FOR ALL! signs, challenging O'Rourke to cosponsor H.R. 676 or at least explicitly add an Improved Medicare for All plank to his platform.
There were going to be three, but now I can't find the third one.
Texas and Florida, the two most populous states in the US South, constantly compete in a variety of areas. Most prominently, the debate about which state has the bigger and scarier cockroaches (palmetto bugs, whatever) never seems to end. Both continually top each other in the most inexplicably crazy news story department: Florida is ahead, as Texas still hasn't found anything to beat bath-salt-crazed residents eating people's faces.
Amen, Quetzal. Originally, that's all I was going to say. But, as often happens, Quetzal Cáceres's post got my analytical juices flowing, and those juices took the form of words.
The goal of wresting the Democratic Party from the clutches of its corporate masters and turning into a true party of peace and justice is a noble one. The goal of returning it to the days of FDR, LBJ, or even JFK is a misguided one. From what I've read, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sincere in her socialist leanings. She has some knowledge of the implications of advancing a socialist policy agenda, and why people (voters or not) will embrace socialism if they feel that capitalism has failed them. Does she know everything about it? No, but then who really does? I also perceive that her message gets muddled by the people who feel that they have a right to use or co-opt her voice. won't you please come to chicago for the help that we can bring
Yesterday, in some primary elections, Progressives got a little more to cheer about. The Intercept provides the most thorough recap I've seen thus far (with a little editorializing because it's The Intercept).
These mostly Millennial-age candidates may talk like, well, a bunch of Millennials, but, like, once you get past the cadences of their speech, it emerges that, like, they really know something about policy. They may not get everything right, but they are using their platforms to advocate passionately for a government that takes care of people and the environment, that sees human beings as more than just donations and votes, that can halt the damage from humanity's worst ecocidal tendencies (to borrow a word from Caity Johnstone). For that I salute these young candidates, even if they are running as Democrats. Fifty years ago this month, a crowd of mostly Baby Boomers gathered in Chicago, in a mass demonstration against the Democratic Party's nomination process, among other things. Since then, the party has changed a lot, in multiple directions, but the net change has been for the worse. The Baby Boomers have taken over both parties, and the vision of peace and justice that the demonstrators brought to Chicago is far from realized. Progressive and radical activists still demonstrate at these quadrennial conventions, in smaller numbers, and usually within the designated Free Speech Zones. Perhaps the Millennials can do what their parents and grandparents could not: forge a true people's party, either with the Democratic Party's infrastructure or by creating something entirely new. I don't hold out much hope for them #GreenEntering en masse. I thought about including this information in the previous post, because it is tangentially related to it, but decided that it needed its own entry. This is mostly copied and pasted from my Facebook post: California is a "jungle primary" state, in which multiple candidates from all parties (and No Party Preference) compete in the first round, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election. See full results from California's jungle primaries here. If you are a Progressive living in Greater LA—especially Greater East LA—I urge you to do what you can to help these young Greens. If you live elsewhere, send them what disposable cash you can.
The headline says it all: GPTX did not get the required number of petition signatures. That just means that it's time to begin getting the infrastructure in place for a successful petition drive in 2020.
If you signed it this year, thank you. If you voted in a primary and thus could sign it, please consider NOT voting in a primary in 2020. And spread the word. Wednesday I did promise a piece on the Fletcher-Moser primary runoff in TX-7, but I don't really have a lot to say about the race itself. The result was unexpected more because of Lizzie Pannill Fletcher's 2-1 margin of victory than because she actually won it: 67.08% for Fletcher, 32.92% for Laura Moser. Considering that they received about 29% and 24% respectively in the seven-way first round, this looks like a case of the other candidates' supporters voting for Anyone But Moser.
While the Democrats' runoff for the gubernatorial nomination split 3% of the registered voters statewide, about 4.26% of registered voters in District 7 turned out to choose between Fletcher and Moser. In March the figure was about twice that. So congratulations to Ms. Fletcher for amassing 11,000-plus votes Tuesday. She'll need a lot more than that to knock off nine-term incumbent John Culberson. I had no dog in the TX-7 primary fight, having neither lived nor worked in TX-7 since the early '00s, Culberson's first term. However, I have many friends and acquaintances who do live and vote there, and, Congressional districts being drawn as they are in Harris County, I travel through portions of it frequently. This race illustrated and exemplified for me what I call the Phenomenon of False Extrapolation: the notion that you can construct the bigger picture on an issue from experiences in your own little slice of the world. In the Greater West University area, where I might occasionally travel on two wheels or four, yard signs for Moser seemed to far outnumber those for Fletcher during the past two months. Various media outlets, including some truly progressive websites, churned out profiles of the race that made it seem much closer. The progressive articles cast Moser as the aggrieved party in the conflict, playing up the angle of how the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee published opposition research to thwart Moser just before the March primary. The nationwide attention Moser received after the DCCC story broke did not translate into sufficient vote support in May any more than all the yard signs in West U, Southside Place, Southampton, and Upper Kirby. There is so much more to TX-7 than the parts that Rice University professors and aging bohemians call home. There's also a whole lot of Far West Houston and Spring Branch and Cypress-Fairbanks, where I don't travel much. But while we're talking about false extrapolations, some habitual Democrats got all enthused about how the primary turnout in Texas was about as even for the two corporate parties as it's been since Republicans ran the table in 1994. In TX-7, about 34,000 turned out to vote in the March Democratic Primary, compared to about 40,000 on the Republican side. Compare that to the equivalent figures in 2014: about 7,000 (to choose between three-time nominee James Cargas and relative unknown Lissa Squiers—and oh yeah, for Governor etc.) and 38,000, respectively. So obvs, there's a Democratic renaissance brewing in TX-7, right? You know, the district that has sent Republicans to Washington since the 1960s? And Fletcher may ride the Blue Wave right to the US Capitol? Cool your jets, Democratic friends. Remember that Texas has open primaries. We don't know how many Republicans crossed party lines to vote in the Democratic Primary, regardless of which candidate they most wanted to see Culberson beat. By the same token, we don't know how many nominal Democrats voted in the Republican primary in an attempt to thwart Culberson. Even in these extraordinary times, you cannot look at 34,000 versus 40,000 and conclude that Fletcher will draw 46% of the vote in November, let alone defeat the Republican incumbent. Unlike yesterday's prediction about the gubernatorial contest, I'm not ready to declare the TX-7 race over, because I'm actually hoping that Fletcher will make a lot of noise in the next five months and show the world what a weenie Culberson is. But Culberson has not hitched his wagon to the Trump Train, so he does not engender the kind of revulsion that Trump does. The Republican establishment will circle the wagons around the weenie and carry him comfortably to a tenth term. The only statewide primary runoff race decided yesterday in Texas was the Democratic primary race for Governor. After more than a million voters spread their votes among nine candidates in March, fewer than half a million came back for Round Two, or less than 3% of the nearly 16 million registered voters in this state. Ultimately, about 1.5% of registered voters in Texas came out to nominate Lupe Valdez to run against Greg Abbott.
Oh joy. Participatory democracy FTW. I looked into the numbers for the Congressional races on both sides—especially the Democrats vying to knock off John Culberson in CD-7 in a primary race that drew national attention—but I'll leave that for a later post. It's a little harder to gauge the total Republican turnout, due to the lack of a statewide race on that side. However, according to the current figures, 158,708 cast votes in runoffs for six Congressional seats; 73,088 in seven State House races. You can't just add those totals together, since there may have been some overlapping jurisdictions. Turnout in those Congressional elections ranged from almost 44,000 is CD-5 (East Dallas and points southeast) to just over 2,000 in CD-29 (some heavily LatinX portions of Harris County where Republicans are rare as hen's teeth). Rest assured that this is not another blog entry about sucky turnout figures and the virtues of Instant Runoff Voting. We've done plenty of those. Nor is it about former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez apparent lack of political acumen since she announced her candidacy. LatinX and LGBT groups gave her a long look, found that there was no there there, and endorsed conserva-Dem Andrew White instead (the one PDiddie refers to as "Average White Guy"). |
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