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Now that I have my Samantha Bee post out of the way, let's move on to some major excitement.
Jill Stein will be swinging through Texas next week! Two weekends later, running mate Ajamu Baraka will grace Dallas (28th) and Houston (29th). Stein's Houston appearance will be at the Last Concert Café, 1403 Nance Street in the Warehouse District. The fun starts at noon. The Green presidential nominee will likely address the crowd somewhere around 4 pm. We can't say what time she will arrive, but she'll be flying in from El Paso that morning. Here's the Facebook event. Get on it. Invite others. Let's make this a campaign appearance to remember for generations. We do not have venue information or times for Baraka's appearance. Stay tuned. Do what you know you ought to do. Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice? There is a nearer neighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way. Please excuse the lengthy exposition below, with its scant source material.
Unitarian Universalists are proud boat-rockers. Speaking truth to power is encoded in UU theology. UU's trace their religious ancestry back to theologians and activists who were considered heretics in their time. More recently, the movement has been identified first with "liberal Christianity," which changed over time to "liberal religion" because a large percentage of UU's self-identify as humanist, agnostic, atheist, or pagan. At various times in US history, Unitarians and Universalists have vocally opposed war and slavery. UU churches in the South opened their doors to black worshipers and visitors when segregation was the law. UU churches across the US were among the first to welcome LGBT congregants and ministers. UU's also tend to be knowledge-workers: academics and teachers, doctors and lawyers, artists and architects. Although they represent about 0.1% of the US population, UU's make up a huge chunk of America's intellectual 1%. A huge majority of UU's in the US are active Democrats. Conversation at coffee hour sometimes turns to politics, and everyone can safely assume that everyone else is at least liberal, if not a practicing Democrat. Quite a few of us UU's consider ourselves progressive, economically and socially to the left of the Democratic mainstream. Yeah, So? Now that we have established that we are taking about very smart, open-minded people, let's get to the substance of this post. Within the UU movement, there is a rather unsettling degree of unwritten orthodoxy. My impression, from 20 years as a practicing UU, is that it's easier for a typical UU Democrat to understand that some UU's are Republicans than that some of us are Green or Libertarian. Some have trouble wrapping their formidable minds around the concept of "third parties." This binary "either/or" thinking is a baseline human trait, but it is also a form of intellectual laziness, especially for people who recognize the falsity of the gender binary.  It's at least partly in how you interpret it, of course. It's also partly the smallish sample sizes. But by gum, the Public Policy Polling national survey for August 2016 has Jill Stein rising from 2% in May, June and July to 4%.
The 4% figure complements this week's NBC News/SurveyMonkey results. Stein maintains a 5% standing on NBC/SM, which uses much larger sample sizes and thus attains a smaller margin of error. The two polls differ widely on Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, who earns 11% on NBC/SM and a mere 6% on PPP.  "You down with PPP?"
"Yeah, you know me." I'm trying to imagine an older, not-so-Internet-savvy Texan hearing "Deez Nuts" from the recorded voice of the pollster, and not being able to process those two syllables in any language. This isn't the only major revelation in the latest Public Policy Polling survey for Texas. First, there is also the question of whether ACORN will steal the election for Hillary Clinton. Fortunately or not, only 24% responded that it will; 39% said no, and 36% were not sure. In case you weren't sure yourself, ACORN was driven to extinction in 2010. Yesterday, I observed that the Green Party ticket has yet to experience any post-convention "bounce." The bounce phenomenon isn't usually associated with minor parties, but this is not a normal election year. Let's see if, after tonight, the poll numbers Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka show a bit more elasticity.
Tonight, Stein and Baraka get more than the standard five-minute interview on CNN. The fun begins at 8 pm Central Daylight Time, and lasts an hour minus commercial breaks (so probably 35 minutes). Harris County Greens & Green-leaners will gather at Midtown Bar & Grill, 415 West Gray Avenue, beginning at 7 pm for a watch party. What to Watch For: Wow, this item actually mentions Instant Runoff Voting as the cure for the "spoiler effect." Jill Anti-Science? Like the "spoiler" accusations, this trope refuses to die. It was cute when it was confined to clickbait sites and social media; it is far less cute when CNN and other major news sources decide to repeat it, even if to explore it from both sides. Saying "just because we can doesn't mean we should" about a scientific advance or practice is not opposition to science in general, but to unwise applications of science. Keyword searches on CNN for Jill+Stein and Ajamu+Baraka include the original announcement of the Town Hall broadcast. The numbers in the polls don't mean anything, especially in presidential preference polls. The real picture is likely well outside the margin of error, and the margin of error is already pretty significant when your candidate is polling in single digits.
The numbers in the polls mean everything, especially when the Presidential Debate Commission has set a bar of a 15% average in a specific set of polls in order to participate in televised debates. The latest NBC/SurveyMonkey poll shows Gary Johnson at 11%, up from 9% two weeks ago, and inching toward that 15% mark (probably not inching fast enough). The same poll shows Jill Stein treading water at 4%, even with millions of potential votes from disaffected Bernie Sanders fans since the Westminster Kennel Cl—er, Democratic Dog & Pony Show in Philadelphia. With Stein's NBC/SM numbers unchanged, her Real Clear Politics average remains at 3.0%; Johnson moves up to 8.5%. I had expected Stein to receive a bigger bounce from the Democratic Con at the end of July than from the following week's "The Revolution Might Be on C-SPAN" Green Convention. After all, the Sanders delegates' walkout made for a pretty big news story and comic fodder for Samantha Bee. Neither convention really provided Jill much of a boost. None of the polls that RCP tracks have Stein above the 5% threshold nationally, the minimum for locking in matching funds for the Greens' next nominee. Optimistic Greens and other #JillNotHill partisans might add the 1.2% margin of error to the NBC/SM figure to put her at 5.2%. It's not empty optimism when you look at the poll's methodology, including the demographic breakdown and the overabundance of land lines contacted. At least the Stein/Baraka campaign can point to more victories on the ballot access front: As of this week, Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka are fairly well assured of having their names on ballots in 30 states, with more than 70% of the population. There are still more states in play. Stay tuned, as the clické goes. Today is 1 August 2016.
Thursday, 4 August 2016, the Green Party US's Presidential Nominating Convention and Annual National Meeting commences. The convention, entitled Houston, We Have a Solution—Vote Green 2016, will occur about three miles from my dwelling, at the University of Houston's main campus. This year, unlike 2012, and 2004, I am not a delegate to the convention. However, I will be staffing the registration desk. While typing this entry, I am filled with a very positive mixture of excitement and anxiety. This could be the convention that launches the Green Party into the national consciousness to stay. On the other hand...nope, not gonna say it. While I'm not really given to describing for the public what my partner and I do in bed, I am perfectly willing to divulge this:
Last night, through the miracle of smartphone technology, we watched video streaming of Jill Stein addressing a crowd at FDR Park in Philadelphia. It was an intimate moment that we shared with a couple thousand other Facebook users. A torrent of thumbs-up and heart icons flowed right to left across the screen of the phone. The majority of comments scrolling by were not just supportive, but filled with ALL CAPS love. You can peruse some of the Philadelphia videos on Jill's Facebook page.  During summers, Houston's TORSO (Thirty and Over Recreational Soccer Organization) runs 8-v-8, short-field soccer games on Sunday evenings. Yesterday I played some midfield for my team, in an attacking role on the left wing (fancy that). I'm normally a defensive player or goalkeeper, but we've just recruited a keeper who knows the craft. As I took the field in the first half, a teammate told me, "Be as offensive as possible—without talking politics."
LOL. I'm proud to say that our team, Houston International FC, wears green jerseys, and I was the first to suggest it. We have almost as much ideological diversity on the team as cultural diversity, but I don't think any of us is a fan of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. I got through the rest of the game and afterward without even a sideways joke about politics. There are better things to talk about with a crew like this one: football (of any kind) and beer are always winning topics. My Sunday began, however, with a look at Facebook. The first item that I saw was a posting of Keith Olbermann's tweet about Jill Stein. Good ol' Keith, a man too passionate and intelligent to hold a job on any network, has tweeted that Jill Stein is a "threat," whose very presence in the presidential race puts us at risk of a Trump presidency, and asked her to "please withdraw." As a Green, I see that as progress. You know the Gandhi litany: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." We're already at the "fight" stage. This year, the Democratic establishment is actually doing all three at once. It certainly wouldn't do for Hillary Clinton herself, or even her staff, to acknowledge in words the existence of the Stein campaign. That's the "ignore" tactic. The odds are pretty tall against anyone on camera uttering the words "Jill Stein" or "Green Party" at this week's Democratic National Convention. The speakers will focus their attention on burnishing the Democrats' tarnished image and attacking the Trump-Pence ticket. The laughing-at (Stephen Colbert & his ilk) and fighting (Olbermann et alii) come from hatcheteers in the liberal wing of the Media-Industrial Complex. (I'm eager to see whether Samantha Bee actually mentions Jill Stein by name in the coming weeks.) If reputable polls were showing that Stein was making the horse race uncomfortably close in too many swing states, Olbermann might have a point. But it's discouraging how many smart people, those who know how the Electoral College works, conveniently forget their Electoral College education when they smell "spoilers." Even Bernie Sanders has fallen victim to that. Don't EVEN mention Nader-2000-Florida, cuz I've had to Greensplain that myth-conception far too many times in the past 16 years. Folks, the greater evil isn't Donald J. Trump, as horrendous as he may be. The real evil is this tyrannical corporatist duopoly known as the two-party system. Forcing voters to choose between center-right and fringe-right does not add up to democracy. More choices, and some form of Instant Runoff Voting, would help inject more robust democracy into this republic.  Even with the news of Bernie Sanders endorsing Hillary Clinton's candidacy, and the resulting stampede of Sanders's supporters toward Jill Stein and the Greens, the latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll shows Stein still hovering in the vicinity of 5% nationwide.
Any bets as to whether that number increases substantially, and how much, in the next few weeks? The NBC/SM poll is notable for having a considerably larger sample size, and thus a smaller margin of error, than most of the academic polls like Quinnipiac and Monmouth. That sample does skew affluent and white, since, per conventional wisdom, actual voting does as well. About 8% of the respondents identified as "Black," and about the same as "Hispanic/Latino," whereas both of these ethnicities compose nearly twice that percentage of the total US population. As we have noted previously:
Mystery & intrigue, y'all. Could Dr. Stein be that "someone else" for, say, 7% of the voters? |
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