- to organize the metropolitan counties* that do not have active chapters and
- to find at least 500 new Green Party apparatchiks in Texas by the fall of 2016.
Meanwhile, on the political front, it appears we have some catching up to do.
It occurs to me that I did not post links to the official results of the 4 November general election: Harris County and Texas. The results for my race are on page 26 of the Harris County tabulation, whether in PDF or HTML format.
The best electoral news for Greens in Texas is that GPTX gets to keep its ballot line for 2016. We accomplished this by earning at least 5% of the vote in at least one statewide race. Thanks to Democrats not nominating anyone for three judicial seats, we got at least 5% in all three. Judith Sanders-Castro busted through the 10% barrier in her race for Court of Criminal Appeals, the first Green candidate to do so in Texas.
We also transcended a mighty barrier in a four-way race (Democrat, Green, Libertarian, and Republican): Martina Salinas breached 2% in the race for a Railroad Commission seat, our first candidate since 2000 to achieve that. In 2014, unlike 2000, there were no Mighty Ralph Nader coattails for our candidates to ride.
There's plenty more of interest in these results, especially the performances of Kenneth Kendrick for Agriculture Commissioner and Emily "Spicy Brown" Sanchez for US Senate.
The largest metropolitan counties mentioned above include, but are not limited to
Harris (Houston)
Dallas
Bexar (San Antonio)
Travis (Austin)
Tarrant (Fort Worth)
El Paso
Collin (Plano)
Denton
Williamson (Round Rock/Georgetown)
Hays (San Marcos)
Fort Bend (Sugar Land/Richmond)
Brazoria (Pearland)
Galveston
Montgomery (Conroe/Woodlands)
Webb (Laredo)
Nueces (Corpus Christi)
Cameron (Brownsville)
Hidalgo (McAllen)
Lubbock
Taylor (Abilene)
Jefferson (Beaumont)
McLennan (Waco)
Several of these counties (Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, and Webb in particular) have active Green Party organizations already, but those county chapters will try to attract new members.
Green candidates did especially well in the heavily Latino counties of the Rio Grande Valley. Those counties in the extreme south of the state are ripe for the picking. Turnouts in the Valley ran from 12% to 20%, but as Webb County has demonstrated, those who do bother to vote are very politically aware.