October, 2016:

Lawsuit filed against Bexar County over voter ID info

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Still the only voter ID anyone should need

An advocacy group has filed a lawsuit against Bexar County for misinforming voters about the state’s voter ID rules.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), filed the lawsuit Friday afternoon on behalf of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP). MALDEF attorneys argue that since Monday, October 24, the first day of early voting, Bexar officials have given out false information about Texas’ voter ID rules in polling places across the county and on a recorded message to voters on the elections website.

The faulty information, MALDEF attorneys say, does not reflect the current court-ordered voter ID rules and could discourage eligible voters from casting their ballots. The current rule lets any Bexar County resident vote, even if they don’t have one of seven state-issued photo IDs. Voters can sign a sworn statement at the polls confirming they don’t have an ID, and show another document that proves their residency (like a bank statement).

In previous elections, Texas residents were required to show a photo ID before voting. U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos tweaked the requirements for the November 8 election after ruling that the state’s original voter ID rules intentionally discriminated against black and brown voters. Ramos had demanded the state spend at least $2.5 million to swiftly educate voters on the new rules. Texas officials, however, put that money toward posters and pamphlets with misleading information that made these rules appear unchanged.

According to the lawsuit, Bexar County has failed to closely follow Ramos’ orders. MALDEF attorneys have demanded the county replace the incorrect information immediately.

After SVREP staffers heard about the incorrect posters and documents at Bexar polling places on Monday, they alerted the county’s elections
administrator, Jacque Callanen. Callanen held a press conference on Tuesday, insisting that all incorrect signs had been taken down.

But on Thursday, the attorneys allege, nine voting locations still displayed posters displaying invalid voter ID laws and had elections staffers giving false ID information.

See here and here for some background, and here for MALDEF’s press release. Though there have been various problems reported around the state relating to voter ID and the way the requirements are communicated, this is the only legal action I know of. By the end of the day Friday, the judge in this suit had granted a temporary restraining order to MALDEF that among other things orders Bexar County to remove the incorrect signs and make sure other materials are up to date. Hopefully everything was fixed over the weekend, but whatever the case I would not be surprised if this in not the last time we hear these complaints. KSAT and KRWG have more.

BOMA for recapture

Oct 31st, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

7 comments

A group that represents property owners who would be directly affected if the recapture vote goes down and detachment results has endorsed a Yes vote on the recapture referendum.

A local trade association for commercial property owners has come out in favor of a controversial vote that would send millions of local tax dollars to the state to be distributed among poorer school districts.

The local chapter of the Building Owners & Managers Association warned this week that rejecting the so-called recapture measure could saddle some of the city’s premier commercial properties with higher tax bills and make them less competitive. BOMA’s local head says there are simply too many unknowns.

“It’s a huge concern for commercial real estate,” chapter CEO Tammy Betancourt said.

[…]

On Nov. 8, voters will be asked to authorize the coming recapture payment. But Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has called on voters to reject the measure in hope lawmakers will make meaningful changes to the school funding system during next year’s legislative session.

That’s a gamble Betancourt does not want to take. If the recapture is turned down, the most valuable properties within HISD’s boundaries would be reassigned to another, as-yet-undetermined district for property tax purposes. Depending on the rates in the recipient district, owners could see their already soaring tax bills rise even more.

That could affect scores of high-profile properties, including downtown’s Houston Center, Pennzoil Place and Chase Tower. Betancourt said some owners could face an unfair competitive advantage if they are paying a different tax rate than their neighbor.

“It puts the whole market into question,” she said.

Moreover, the ballot measure does not appear to be widely understood.

“It seems like the bulk of the people aren’t aware of the issue,” said Brett Williams, director of property management for Houston-based PM Realty Group, which owns and manages commercial properties. “This kind of came out of nowhere for us three or four weeks ago.”

Well, I’d say the first time people started paying attention to this was about a month ago when the Chron first urged a No vote on the referendum, so to that extent this has snuck up on them. The HISD Board voted to put the measure on the ballot in August and three members of the Board were speaking out against it in early September, so it was possible to see some of this coming before then, though I doubt anyone would have expected this level of interest or antipathy. It’s a tough position for them to be in, but that’s part of the logic that underpins the No-vote advocacy – detachment is such a bad option and property owners will hate it so much that it will increase the pressure on the Lege to Do Something about it. We’ll see if they can gain any traction or if they’ll wind up playing the role in Austin that has been envisioned for them by referendum opponents.

Collin County won’t fight its special prosecutor bill

Oct 31st, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

For now, anyway.

Best mugshot ever

The Collin County Commissioners Court on Monday voted to take “a careful review” of the cost of prosecuting Attorney General Ken Paxton, while appealing to residents to set aside emotions and avoid attacking the court’s future decisions.

“Regardless of how any vote comes down today, or future votes come down, one thing I’m confident of is the integrity of my colleagues on this court,” Commissioner Chris Hill said just before the unanimous vote was taken. “There is a very important and fine line that must be drawn between the politics of this case and the justice of this case.”

[…]

Ahead of Monday’s meeting, Paxton’s supporters called on the five members of the commissioners court either to refuse to pay future bills or immediately appeal the Tarrant County judge’s order.

The court took neither step Monday. They instead unanimously passed a resolution (see below) that keeps open their options until the prosecutors submit their next bill.

“Resolved: The Collin County Commissioners Court is committed to taking a careful review of future fee awards and is committed to taking the necessary steps to protect our opportunity to seek appellate review of an order exceeding the local rules to implement the Texas Fair Defense Act, which may include a formal request to stay any such successive order and filing a writ of mandamus in a court of appeals.”

Hill has been outspoken in his opposition to the prosecutors’ hourly rate. In past votes, he and Commissioner Susan Fletcher have voted against paying the fees associated with Paxton’s case, but they have been outnumbered each time.

On Monday, Fletcher appealed to the civility of her constituents, saying, “There are times when legislative bodies have differences of opinion, and this is one of them.”

County Judge Keith Self, who leads the court, urged the commissioners to keep in mind their duty to follow the rule of law.

“We do have a case here that has mixed politics and law. There’s no doubt about it,” Self said. “We have to be very careful as a commissioners court not to be seen to, or even attempting to, place our thumb on the scales of justice in this case.”

Good to know that all that legislative meddling hasn’t worked. Yet. This is one of those times when the state should step in and take autonomy away from the counties. I understand why Collin County doesn’t want to get saddled with this expense, but it’s just too damn bad.

Endorsement watch: What’s the matter with Waxahachie?

Oct 31st, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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Donald Trump goes one for Texas in newspaper endorsements.

Hillary Clinton

While recent polls suggest Republican Donald Trump is just a few points ahead of Democrat Hillary Clinton among Texas voters, the presidential race is far more lopsided among the state’s leading newspapers.

Among the editorial boards of the top 40 newspapers across the state, only one — the Waxahachie Daily Light — has endorsed Trump. On Oct. 17, the newspaper, which has a circulation of less than 5,000, endorsed Trump, writing that “any other choice for President of the United States would be an irresponsible and dangerous one.”

Meanwhile, several of the state’s largest papers — including the Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio-Express News — have endorsed Clinton. The Dallas Morning News endorsement drew national attention as the newspaper’s editorial board noted it had not endorsed a Democrat for president in more than 75 years.

“We’ve been critical of Clinton’s handling of certain issues in the past,” the Dallas Morning News’ editorial board wrote. “But unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has experience in actual governance, a record of service and a willingness to delve into real policy. Resume vs. resume, judgment vs. judgment, this election is no contest.”

Several other Texas papers, including the Austin American-Statesman and the San Angelo Standard-Times, have said they will not endorse in this year’s presidential race.

On Friday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s editorial board took the unusual stance of recommending voters reject Trump but abstaining from endorsing any of his opponents.

I doubt this makes any difference, and I’m more amused than anything at the way some of these papers heroically avoided making a choice. Given some of their audiences, I guess I can’t really crime them for weaseling out. Consider this a nice piece of pub trivia to keep in your back pocket, like “who was on base when Bobby Thompson hit his famous home run to win the 1951 pennant for the New York Giants?”

(Oh, you want the answer? Whitey Lockman and Clint Hartung, who was pinch-running for Don Mueller. And Larry Jansen was the winning pitcher, in relief of Sal Maglie. You’re welcome.)

Weekend link dump for October 30

Oct 30th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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“The 2016 campaign may have reached dispiriting new lows, but voter registration in America has soared to new heights as 200 million people are now registered to vote for the first time in U.S. history.” That’s a 33% increase – over 50 million registrations – since 2008.

Who wants a Game of Thrones/Westworld crossover?

Some rare photos of Mickey Mantle on the occasion of what would have been his 85th birthday.

Carol Burnett + Amy Poehler = awesome.

“The base was abandoned when the scientists stationed there were poisoned by polar bear meat in 1944 and had to be rescued by a German U-boat.”

“Cave art from the Ice Age has helped solve the mysterious origins of Europe’s largest land mammal.”

Sometimes it’s hard to be a Republican woman.

Apparently, the daily fantasy sports industry isn’t doing so well. The good news is we ought to see fewer of their awful commercials.

RIP, Tom Hayden, anti-war activist and Chicago 7 defendant.

“Donald Trump didn’t start this. He just did what he always does, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it and promote it.”

RIP, Louise Cooley, wife of famed heart surgeon Denton Cooley.

“I do not believe that anyone ever converted to Christianity as a consequence of reading any of Jack Chick’s gospel tracts. But I do believe that thousands of Christians were converted by them into something else — something more like the ugly dishonesty and nasty triumphalism that were those tracts’ main attributes. He helped persuade such Christians that bearing false witness against their neighbors should be the hallmark and cornerstone of their religion.”

“My question to you is: Is it just us? Or have you found that you (or others you know about) have been knocked out of your usual level of work productivity because of this election as well? Has obsessively refreshing poll trackers and political feeds and Twitter kept you from the timely performance of your duties, or, if you still manage to get stuff done on time, is it still a challenge to keep your mind on task? More than usual?”

Have Sean Hannity and Bat Boy every been photographed together? Asking for a friend.

The Donald Trump campaign is a live-action update of the 90’s era ABC TV show Dinosaurs.

“But it is a testament to the politics of our times that Paul Ryan, the most conservative Speaker in the history of the country, won’t be conservative enough for a solid core of his own party in Congress, and is under siege from his party’s presidential nominee and acolytes. And the dynamic in the House will be an early window into the Republican civil war that will follow if Trump loses.”

Law & Order: The Donald Trump-Inspired Episode won’t air till after Election Day.

“Against all the modern disasters, Trump’s campaign represents a rebellion of the aged—a bygone generation’s last furious gasp against modernity.”

I confess, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for professional Republican women who are just now noticing how terribly sexist the world can be and how little their male politicians care about it.

RIP, Vine, killed by Instagram and Snapchat.

Sometimes, local news stories are the most entertaining.

Republicans: Still worried about the Trump effect in Texas

Oct 30th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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The continuing story.

Texas Republicans are slowly coming to grips with the unthinkable: Hillary Clinton has a shot at winning the nation’s most iconic red state.

The odds are long, they say, in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic for president in 40 years. But in recent polling data and early voting results, they are also seeing signs of the perfect storm of demographic and political forces it would take to turn Texas blue.

According to some Republican and nonpartisan pollsters, Donald Trump is turning off enough core GOP constituencies and motivating Hispanic voters in ways that could pump up Clinton’s performance to higher levels than a Democratic nominee has seen in decades. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state in a 16-point blowout. The current spread is just five points, according to the the RealClearPolitics polling average.

“I think that Texas is competitive this year,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based GOP operative. “I think it’ll be much closer than usual. I think it’s because of the Trump factor.”

Steinhauser still expects Trump to end up on top. But the very idea that Texas — which gave Romney a nearly 1.3 million-vote winning margin — might be in play is an affront to some Republicans, a notion that would have seemed preposterous at the beginning of the election year. Texas is the beating heart of the modern Republican Party, and the cornerstone of any GOP nominee’s electoral strategy. It’s also home to the last Republican president, George W. Bush, and to two serious recent GOP contenders for the White House, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry.

[…]

There’s still no indication that Clinton will even make a concerted effort to win the state’s 38 electoral votes. Allies described limited paid media buys touting her Dallas Morning News endorsement; one of her top Texas surrogates, 2014 gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, has largely been deployed to more competitive swing states.

Davis was skeptical of Clinton’s odds of winning the state this year, saying it’s too soon to read much into early voting figures or polling.

“It’s certainly the case that there’s a perfect storm right now, where we have a candidate, Donald Trump who’s particularly reviled by Latinas, African-Americans and women,” she said, pointing out that even a whisper of hope for Democrats this year could pay dividends in down-ballot races and in future elections.

Trump’s candidacy, she said, will be used as a bludgeon in 2018 when a slew of elected Republicans — from Abbott to Cruz — seek reelection. And any inroads Democrats make this year, Davis said, could encourage other Democrats to seek office.

“I think it could,” she said. “A lot of people in Texas who are considering running statewide in the future are going to be closely watching what the indications are coming out of this election and re-analyzing the possibilities of when it makes sense to try to launch again a statewide race in Texas. I think we’re going to see a lot of new Hispanic voters in this election, African-American voters and of course fair-minded Anglos that we can build a coalition around.”

Republicans aren’t thinking that far ahead. They’re busy fretting over the possibility that even if Trump wins, a weak finish could leave a trail of vanquished down-ballot Republicans behind.
“Would [Democrats] rightly consider it a moral victory if Trump were held to single digits in Texas? Maybe,” said Travis County Republican chairman James Dickey. “But the real question is, if the margin slides from double digits to low single digits, who else becomes jeopardized?”

Three points to make here. One is what James Dickey says, which is simply that races that Republicans won comfortably when Mitt Romney was carrying the state by 16 points might not be so comfortable if Donald Trump is winning by three. And two, as Wendy Davis says, this does give Democrats a starting point and rallying cry for 2018. If Donald Trump can motivate people to vote this year, then maybe he can help motivate them to vote in 2018. There’s a lot more to it than that, but you have to start somewhere.

These are things we’ve discussed before. The third point I want to make is to note the dog that hasn’t barked. In 2012, Republican pollsters Mike Baselice and Chris Perkins released results that showed Mitt Romney with a comfortable lead in the Presidential race in Texas. Both polls were firmly in the range of the others that were made public, and both were pretty accurate on both the margin and the percentage for Romney and President Obama. Neither has released a poll result this cycle. I’m sure they have conducted polls this year – they’re top-level Republican operatives, they work for Republican campaigns, this is literally what they get paid to do, it beggars the imagination to think they haven’t done polls this year. Yet they haven’t released any poll numbers this year. Why do you think that might be true? The obvious answer is that their data would confirm what all the other polls have been saying, which is that this is a historically close race. It’s even possible they’re seeing worse numbers than what the other polls have shown. Surely if they had data to contradict the current narrative of a close race, it would be in their interest to put it out there. The fact that they haven’t done so isn’t conclusive of anything, but it sure as hell is suggestive.

Election Day observers coming from Justice Department over ADA complaints

Oct 30th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

That’s a complicated headline for this story.

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.

The filming was meant to record the accessibility of the site, a county attorney said, explaining she was surprised to hear the investigator was in close proximity to voters and that his sidearm was visible.

The judge also asked whether there had been any complaints of ADA violations during early voting, which began Monday in Texas. Harris County officials said it had neither seen nor heard of any, but the Justice Department legal team said it knew of four complaints so far, in addition to the incident of the woman with the walker.

The details were revealed during a hearing Thursday in Houston in a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the county of civil violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act because it doesn’t provide appropriate parking, ramps, sidewalks, entry ways, voting space and other mandatory accommodations at voting sites.

The county says it has fielded no such complaints and denies its polling sites are out of compliance with ADA regulations.

“They have taken the position that there is a systemic problem,” said Laura Beckman Hedge of the Harris County Attorney’s Office. “We believe this is a fishing expedition.”

See here for the background. Basically, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit back in August that charged Harris County with not having sufficient access to polling places for disabled voters. They had previously notified the Harris County Clerk in 2014 of the problems they had identified, and filed the lawsuit after not receiving an answer that satisfied them in time. This was the first activity that I know of related to this lawsuit since then. Obviously, nothing is going to be resolved before this election, but it will be interesting to see what the Justice Department’s findings are afterwards, and how the county responds to them.

Chron overview of HD26

Oct 30th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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Back to Fort Bend for a look at another legislative race.

Rep. Rick Miller

Incumbent state Rep. Rick Miller can describe his political perspective in five words: “I’m a Christian, conservative Republican.”

His opponent in November, political newcomer and Democrat L. Sarah DeMerchant, takes a different stance: “It’s not about my personal beliefs, wants and desires.” She aims, she said, to be a candidate of the people.

Still, Miller believes he has served the community in a way it likes. Residents first elected Miller to the state House District 26 seat in 2012, when he won with 63 percent of the vote. In 2014, the candidate triumphed again, with 70 percent. Though he does not take re-election for granted, he said he is optimistic he will prevail.

Sarah DeMerchant

The Fort Bend County district that Miller and DeMerchant are vying to represent encompasses most of Sugar Land, plus all or part of several unincorporated communities, including Cumings, Pecan Grove and New Territory.

It is an area Miller, a leadership consultant and former Navy officer, says he dedicates about 90% of his time to serving. “My job is being a state representative,” he said, “and I take it very, very seriously.”

DeMerchant, however, wants residents “to take a stand,” and said she has an advantage over her opponent — who drew attention last year when his openly gay son challenged his stance against Houston’s anti-discrimination ordinance — because of what she said was her ability to listen to a diverse group of people.

As is usually the case, HD26 is not a swing district. John McCain carried it 61.5% to 37.8% in 2008, Mitt Romney followed with a 62.9% to 35.9% win in 2012. Between potential shifts in Presidential preferences in Fort Bend and the pro-Democratic trend of Asian voters, there’s definitely room for this gap to close.

On a side note, there’s a world in which this district really is a swing district. There were a couple of proposals during redistricting in 2011 that drew HD26 as basically 50-50, at least under the pre-2010 election results. Maybe we’ll see something like that in 2021.

Early voting, Day Six: A good first week for Democrats

Oct 30th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

There’s still a week to go, but so far, so good.

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.

Now, the question is, will it continue? If it does, Harris County could see close to 1 million people – almost half its registered voters – cast ballots before election day.

“There’s so much more voting this time than we’ve ever seen,” said Richard Murray, a veteran pollster at the University of Houston.

[…]

“The first four days looked pretty good for local Democrats,” said 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.”

This Chron story goes into more detail about the gender mix of early voters so far. With maps, which everyone likes.

Of course, Latinos alone are not driving Harris County’s surging early voting turnout.

Some of the highest turnout has come from Houston’s suburban ring, including Katy, Cypress and Kingwood, areas with typically high Republican turnout.

“Everybody is voting,” Murray said. “It’s not that the Anglo vote has fallen, it’s just that others have risen more than they have.”

[…]

Democrats in general tend to lag in early voting, experts said. This year, Houston Democratic consultant Greg Wythe said, has been “pretty remarkably different from whatever happened in the past.”

“Normally, we’re losing at this point,” he said. An analysis of this week’s early voting results suggests 54 percent of turnout so far has been Democratic. That mirrors a recent poll by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs, which showed a slight lead or statistical tie for Democrats in countywide races.

Greg has been my source for the pronouncements I’ve made about how the first four days have been good for Dems. He tells me that Friday was also a good day, making the Dems five for five for that first week, and that early indicators are positive for Saturday as well. For what it’s worth, Saturday is usually the best day for Democrats during early voting. In 2014, the Saturday was about the only good day the Dems had. It may be that the pattern is different this year, I don’t know yet. I’m sure Greg will tell me when he knows for sure.

To put this in some perspective, here’s what the last two Presidential races looked like:


Candidate       Mail    Early    E Day    Total
===============================================
Romney        43,270  349,332  193,471  586,073
Obama         31,414  337,681  217,949  587,044

McCain        41,986  297,944  231,953  571,883
Obama         24,503  368,231  198,248  590,982

Mitt Romney was at 51.5% in early and absentee voting; Democrats caught up on Election Day and mostly won in the county. It was 2008 that was the big early voting year for Dems, as Obama carried a 53.6% lead into Election Day, then held on with both hands and Dems had basically run out of voters. Early voting has clearly gone well for Dems so far this year, apparently even better than it was in 2008. The question of who remains to vote on Election Day is one we can’t answer right now.

Of course, there are nearly 350,000 more registered voters in Harris County now than there were in 2008, and nearly 300,000 more than there were in 2012. We’ve discussed that before, and it is reasonable to expect that turnout would be up even without anything strange happening. A few turnout projections to consider:

61.99% of 2,234,678 = 1,385,276
62.81% of 2,234,678 = 1,403,601
63.00% of 2,234,678 = 1,407,847
64.00% of 2,234,678 = 1,430,193
65.00% of 2,234,678 = 1,452,541

The 2,234,678 figure is total registered voters in Harris County. Turnout in 2012 was 61.99%, and in 2008 it was 62.81%. The others are speculative. The point here is that turnout north of 1.4 million is hardly a stretch. and it’s not out of the question that from Saturday on there could still be a million people left to vote. We are, as they say, in uncharted territory.

The Day 6 EV totals had not arrived in my inbox by the time I went to bed. I’ll update this later when I have a chance and the data.

Saturday video break: Mockingbird

Oct 29th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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Peter, Paul & Mary sing a well-known lullaby:

That’s from an album of children’s songs called “Peter, Paul & Mommy”. iTunes calls it “Mockingbird”, YouTube calls it “Hush, Little Baby”. I embed, you decide. Eminem borrows from that song for this song of the same name:

I’m kind of meh on this, but it’s one of Olivia’s favorites, so I have heard it A LOT. I figure you’re either an Eminem fan or you’re not, but he does make effective use of the lullaby here.

Crosswind/Statesman: Trump 45, Clinton 38

Oct 29th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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One more poll result, because why not.

In the wake of recent polls indicating that deep red Texas might be a toss-up in the presidential race, a new Crosswind/American-Statesman Texas Pulse poll conducted Saturday through Monday shows Republican Donald Trump with a 7-point lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Lone Star State

According to the survey of 800 likely Texas voters conducted by Crosswind Media & Public Relations and Pulse Opinion Research, Trump has 45 percent support to 38 percent for Clinton and 7 percent for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and 10 percent not sure. (The poll didn’t offer Green Party candidate Jill Stein as an option.)

“Texas is not yet a toss-up state, but Hillary is giving Trump a run for his money,” said Thomas Graham, CEO of Crosswind, a Texas-based public relations firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

[…]

In perhaps the most surprising result of the new poll, Trump, whose treatment of women has become central to Clinton’s critique of him and his candidacy, had a larger lead with Texas women than with Texas men. Trump is ahead 43 percent to Clinton’s 39 percent with men, and 46 percent to Clinton’s 38 percent with women.

The starkest contrast in the poll was among generations. Clinton is way ahead of Trump — 51 percent to 28 percent — among likely voters 18 to 39 years of age. Trump leads Clinton 48 percent to her 35 percent among voters 46 to 64 years old, and he carries voters 65 and older by a whopping 71 percent to 25 percent ratio.

“It would appear that in Texas, many moms who are supporting Trump have children supporting Clinton,” Graham said.

Trump is winning white voters by a margin of 57 percent to Clinton’s 25 percent. Johnson receives 8 percent of their support.

Clinton is leading Trump among black voters, 77 percent to his 17 percent, and leading among Hispanic voters, 56 percent to Trump’s 24 percent.

This poll shows a slightly wider lead in Texas for Trump than other recent polls like UT/Trib poll that was done at the same time, but beyond that it’s in line with everything we’ve seen so far. If a seven-point lead for Trump – which keep in kind is still less than half of Mitt Romney’s margin of victory in 2012 – is being seen as a disappointment by Democrats, that tells you something about the state of expectations at this point. This poll was conducted between Saturday and Monday, meaning that it’s almost certainly the last public poll to be done before voting started. Any subsequent polls should also ask respondents if they have already voted and if so for whom, which may perhaps give a more accurate picture of where things are.

Republicans take their desperate shot at limiting same sex marriage

Oct 29th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

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Pathetic.

After coming out on the losing end of a United States Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, Texas Republican leaders are now looking to the Texas Supreme Court to narrow the scope of that landmark ruling.

Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday filed an amicus brief with the Texas Supreme Court urging the all-Republican court to reconsider a Houston case challenging the city’s benefits policy for married same-sex couples. It appears they’ve set their eyes on the Houston case as a way to limit the effect of the high court’s ruling.

The Texas Supreme Court has already had a say in the case challenging Houston’s benefits policy, which was extended to same-sex spouses of city employees. In a 8-1 ruling, the court in September declined to take up the case, letting stand a lower court decision that upheld the benefits for same-sex couples.

In asking the Texas Supreme Court to re-open the Houston case, state’s leaders in their brief also urged the court to clarify that the case that legalized same-sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges, does not “bind state courts to resolve all other claims in favor of the right to same-sex marriage.”

In Obergefell, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that marriages between couples of the same sex cannot be prohibited by states, overriding Texas’ long-standing ban on same-sex marriage.

Abbott, Patrick and Paxton in their brief argue that Obergefell does not include a “command” that public employers “take steps beyond recognizing same-sex marriage — steps like subsidizing same-sex marriages (through the allocation of employee benefits) on the same terms as traditional marriages.”

See here and here for the background. I have no idea why they think the Supreme Court is any more likely to take this up now than the last time, but what do I know. And if this does somehow make it past the State Supreme Court, I have a feeling the federal courts will be there to swat it back down. I don’t even know what to say at this point, so go read this statement from Equality Texas about this fiasco. The Press and the Current have more.

Chron overview of HD29

Oct 29th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Over to Brazoria County for this one.

Rep. Ed Thompson

A Bernie Sanders’ liberal is taking on one of the most conservative members of the Texas House of Representatives in District 29 in Brazoria County, presenting voters with, perhaps, the starkest contrast between candidates of any race in Texas.

Democrat John T. Floyd, 48, who was a Bernie Sanders’ state delegate, is challenging Republican Ed Thompson, 65, who earned a 98 percent rating from the ultra conservative Eagle Forum.

The candidates may offer the most radically different visions of government of any race in Texas, said Elizabeth McLane, chairwoman of the government and economics department at Alvin Community College.

Floyd is making an audacious challenge in the most conservative of Texas’s 21 largest urban counties, McLane said. Even so, Democrats’ chances are better than ever and are likely to keep improving as the district becomes more urbanized.

John Floyd

District 29 stretches roughly from Beltway 8 south to FM 2004, with the city of Pearland covering the north end of the district, Manvel and Iowa Colony in the northeast, Alvin in the east central and Liverpool farther south. Nearly half the district’s population of 176,000 is in Pearland.

Nearly all the district’s growth is in west Pearland, which is trending Democrat. East Pearland is the oldest part of the city and dominated by traditional conservatives, as are the two other largest cities, Manvel and Alvin. The rest of the district is largely rural.

The expanding and increasingly diverse population in Pearland could make Republican control of the district difficult within five to 10 years, McLane said.

Floyd is a knowledgeable and articulate lawyer who could benefit from the population boom, making him the strongest candidate the Democrats have fielded for the house seat in more than a decade, she said.

Let’s maintain some perspective here, because this isn’t a swing district. John McCain carried this district 62.6% to 36.6%, and Mitt Romney did a little better, winning it 63.3% to 35.4%. It may well be that the demographics are going in a Democratic direction, but until we see that in an election result it doesn’t mean much. Floyd’s candidacy will provide an interesting data point in a longstanding debate – is it better in a non-hospitable district like this to find a candidate for the minority party who is a reasonably close ideological fit, or one who provides a clear and consistent contrast between the choices? The former approach tends to be the more common one, but that’s not what we have here. I’ll be sure to check and see what the numbers have to say when it’s all over.

Early voting, Day Five: Maybe the lines will be shorter next week

Oct 29th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

13 comments

Resources will be mobilized to ameliorate things.

Harris County will add staff and equipment to early voting locations next week to help cut down long wait times fueled by a record surge of voter turnout, County Clerk Stan Stanart said.

Typically, people head to early voting to skip the lines of Election Day, but voters since Monday in Harris County have overwhelmed many early polling places, resulting in waits of more than an hour in some locations. Big counties across the state also reported record turnout this week.

“After more than a year of one of the most conflict-ridden and divisive presidential campaigns we have ever seen,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, “there was clearly some pent up demand among a segment of voters to go out and cast their ballots.”

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, pointed out close countywide races for sheriff and district attorney and “the ongoing discussion about Texas being in play as a battleground state on the presidential level.”

“Competitive elections drive turnout,” he said, because people feel their vote means more.

Stanart on Monday said he had expected a record-breaking Day One turnout of around 55,000. Actual turnout hit more than 67,000, and on Wednesday it was 76,000.

On Thursday, Stanart said wait times had begun to decrease as staff got in the groove of running an election. The number of votes processed per hour grew from 6,000 on Monday to 7,500 on Wednesday, he said.

“They always are rusty for the first couple of days, and usually it’s not a big deal,” he said, adding that this year “people are voting in droves.”

Here’s the Day 5 EV report, and the updated spreadsheet. There were 81,239 in person votes cast yesterday, and yes, that’s another record. In fact, it’s the third busiest day ever, after the final EV days in 2012 and 2008. That brings the record-setting first week to a grand total of 374,679 in person votes; it’s 452,124 when you add in mail ballots. But mail ballots don’t make you wait in line, so the staff and equipment numbers at each location will matter. For comparison purposes the first five days of early voting in 2012 yielded 260,274 votes, and in 2008 it was 220,046. And in both cases, the last five days were considerably busier. There were another 337,389 votes cast in 2012, and another 364,060 in 2008. It’s a guess, but I’d predict a 50% total increase for the last five days, or about 550,000 total votes.

That’s kind of nuts, and I could totally be wrong, but who knows? If I am right, that means a bit more than a million votes would be cast early, which is about a one-third increase over 2012. Given that the first five EV days this week saw a 44% increase over 2012, I don’t think that’s out of line. Extending that all the way out, I’d say this portends a final overall turnout of 1.4 million to 1.5 million, which would be a boost of 200,000 to 300,000 over 2012. Again, I could be way off. Maybe Week 2 will slow down, or at least not have the same kind of increase over Week 1 that we’re used to seeing. As they say about sports, this is why we play the game. I guess my bottom line is that you should still expect to wait if you haven’t voted yet. It won’t be that bad, but do plan to take some time for this.

Friday random ten: Ladies’ night, part 19

Oct 28th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I knew this Songs By Women thing would take me past the election, but it’s beginning to feel to me like it has some meaning, you know?

1. Un Dia – Juana Molina
2. It’s A Heartache – Juice Newton
3. Consolation Prize – Julie Doiron
4. Somewhere Over The Rainbow – Julie Murphy
5. Pull Me Out Alive – Kaki King
6. Differently – Kat Parsons
7. Village Green Preservation Society – Kate Rusby
8. Best Song Ever – Katie Armiger
9. Jumping Trains – Katie Herzig
10. Walking On Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the Kinks’ original version of “Village Green Preservation Society”, but Kate Rusby’s version is so good I’m not sure I need to. I loved “Walking On Sunshine” back in the day, and still really like it. I have no idea why Katrina and the Waves never had a second hit.

UT/Trib: Trump 45, Clinton 42

Oct 28th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Even the UT/Texas Trib poll shows a tight Presidential race in Texas.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump held a three-percentage-point lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton on the eve of early voting in Texas, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, had the support of 45 percent of likely Texas voters, compared with 42 percent for Clinton and Tim Kaine; 7 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson and William Weld; and 2 percent for the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. The remaining 5 percent said they would vote for someone else for president and vice president.

“This is the trend that we’ve been seeing in polling for the last two weeks,” said Jim Henson, co-director of the UT/TT Poll and head of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

In spite of the closeness of the race and the margin of error, the number of polls showing similar distance between the candidates, with Trump in front, “is probably a telling us where this race really stands,” Henson said. Close, with a Trump lead, in other words.

The survey was in the field from Oct. 14 to Oct. 23; early voting in Texas began Oct. 24.

Trump was ahead with men, 46 percent to 39 percent, while the two candidates each had 45 percent of women’s support. While 93 percent of Democrats support Clinton, 83 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of independents support Trump. Only 19 percent of independents said they support Clinton. And there is a big divide on racial and ethnic lines: Trump led Clinton 57 percent to 28 percent among white voters, but Clinton led 95 percent to 4 percent among black voters and 56 percent to 33 percent among Hispanic voters.

Trump’s voters are split when asked for the reason behind their vote: While 47 percent said they want Trump to be president, 53 percent said their position would better be explained as not wanting Clinton to become president.

Clinton’s voters were more positive about their own choice, with 66 percent saying they want her to be president. Still, 34 percent of those voting for Clinton said they were with her because they don’t want Trump to be elected.

“The lack of enthusiasm amongst Republicans is remarkable,” said Joshua Blank, who supervised the poll. He said the Democrats are voting in favor of their candidate while more Republicans are voting against their opponent than are voting for Trump.

Again, a lot of this is what we have been seeing all along, with a little extra boost from the apparent enthusiasm gap. If we step into the Wayback Machine and set it for late October of 2012, we see that the final UT/Trib poll had Romney leading Obama 55-39. That was dead on as far as the gap between the two candidates was concerned, but underestimate their totals by about two points each. Make of that what you will. This poll, like the Statesman poll that also came out this week and which I will blog about tomorrow, was conducted before early voting started. If there are any further polls for the cycle, I hope they will ask people if they have already voted and if so for whom.

Council ratifies Turner’s pension plan

Oct 28th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

From the inbox:

Mayor Sylvester Turner

On a 16-1 vote, Houston City Council has endorsed Mayor Sylvester Turner’s historic package of pension reforms. The vote clears the way for the City to move forward in partnership with the pension systems to seek legislative approval of the reforms.

“I am bubbling over on the inside,” said Mayor Turner. “I am thankful to everyone who has helped get us to this point. That includes City Council, the pension systems, our City employees and many others. This plan is historic, transformative and budget neutral. We are solving our pension problem permanent and we are doing it without needed a tax rate increase. There is no other plan out there offering the same benefits. The Houston solution can be the model for other cities with similar challenges.”

The police, fire and municipal pension systems all signed off on the package of reforms prior to today’s City Council vote, marking the first time that the City and all of the pension groups have been united.

The plan immediately reduces the City’s nearly $8 billion pension debt by over 30 percent and then sets a 30-year fixed payoff schedule for the remaining $5.3 billion of debt. This immediate reduction is accomplished through a combination of benefits changes that include scaling back cost-of-living adjustments, higher employee payroll contributions and phasing out of the Deferred Retirement Option Program, known as DROP, which allows employees to accept retirement benefits while continuing to work for the City. In return for the concessions, the City has agreed to issue $1 billion in Pension Obligation Bonds to make up for years of prior underfunding of the pension systems.

“It is a big deal that employees have agreed to these benefit changes,” said Turner. “I know this has not been easy, and I thank each of them for their patience, understanding and service. This plan will provide stable and sustainable retirements at an affordable cost to the taxpayers who foot the bill. Retirees won’t have to worry if the check will be there.”

Moving forward, predictions about the anticipated performance of pension system investments will be based on a more conservative seven percent assumed rate of return. If there are market changes that cause costs to exceed pre-agreed limits, there is a mechanism to force additional changes in benefits to bring everything back in line. A requirement that both sides share information will ensure compliance with the required 30-year payoff schedule.

State Senator Joan Huffman and State Representative Dan Flynn are expected to carry the Houston pension legislation. Bill filing for the 2017 legislative session begins mid-November 2016.

See here and here for the background. CM Mike Knox was the lone No vote, saying he couldn’t support it without there already being a bill written. The Chron story fills in a few details.

Turner secured the political chip of a prompt and lopsided endorsement by using an impassioned speech to persuade Councilman Michael Kubosh to remove his “tag,” a parliamentary maneuver that would have delayed the vote. Kubosh had said he initially tagged the measure at the request state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who has called for a delay until more information was available on the reform plan.

“Either you all are going to represent the people of the city of Houston or – I’m going to borrow your term Councilmember Kubosh – are you going to represent political interests? I stand with the people of the city of Houston,” Turner said. “I was voted (in) to represent their interests, not some party affiliation or some political interest or somebody who wants to be mayor.”

Turner’s comments plainly were directed at Bill King, who was runner-up in last year’s mayoral race and who joined Bettencourt at his news conference. The duo said the detailed reform proposals were public for too short a time and too vague to be properly vetted, particularly a key “corridor” provision that would force benefit cuts in the future if a market downturn led the city’s payments to increase above a specified threshold.

King and Bettencourt say the city should switch new hires to retirement savings plans similar to 401(k)s, but acknowledged a well-written “corridor” provision could offer the same benefits to the city.

[…]

Most council members, however, referenced the briefings they had received on the plan and echoed Turner’s point that no public speaker in the six weeks since the reform outline was first announced had appeared before City Council to criticize it.

“I want to make sure the public understands we have been briefed, and it wasn’t a 24-hour-ago briefing,” Councilwoman Brenda Stardig said.

Councilman Dave Martin, like Stardig, a conservative, offered even stronger comments.

“I did not vote for you. I did not support you. I’m supporting you 100 percent on this,” Martin told Turner. “I think it’s ridiculous for people to criticize this plan. It’s been transparent; it’s been thorough. We’ve been diligent. We don’t need any more information. Maybe the state does, but do your homework.”

Yeah. Just as a reminder, the Kinder Institute has analyzed the plan, so we are not operating in an information vacuum here. I’m sure if Sen. Bettencourt had called the Mayor’s office and asked for a briefing, he’d have gotten it. But it’s easier to preen than it is to prep, so here we are. My guess is we’ll see bills get pre-filed for this, probably in November, so we’ll know soon enough what that will look like. The next question is who will support it and who will try to kill it. The games have just begun.

The Trump effect on the SBOE

Oct 28th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

The Trib covers some familiar ground.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau

At least one SBOE race is “very much in play,” said Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones. He’s referring to District 5, where Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau is attempting to unseat incumbent Republican Ken Mercer for the third time. The district reaches from Austin to San Antonio, extending northwest to cover several Hill County counties such as Llano and Kerr.

While Mercer — a fixture of the board’s far-right faction — is still the favorite to win, Jones noted the district is now “pink, not red” after the latest round of redistricting. With Trump also headlining the ticket, “the race stands to be the most tightly contested SBOE general election contest in more than a dozen years,” Jones wrote in an email.

Several recent polls show Trump is statistically tied with Democrat Hillary Clinton in GOP-friendly Texas.

Bell-Metereau, 66, a Texas State University English professor and former Fulbright scholar, notes that Mercer’s margin of victory has gotten smaller each time she’s run against him. In 2012, with Green and Libertarian party candidates on the ticket, Mercer, 61, an IT project manager and former state representative from San Antonio, won re-election with 51 percent of the vote. This year, there are only three candidates on the ticket, including Libertarian Ricardo Perkins, providing even more hope to Bell-Metereau.

“People are starting to look at the Republican brand with a little more skepticism,” she said. “I can’t help but see it as helping me.”

[…]

Dakota Carter

Jones said District 10, where Democrat Judy Jennings is challenging incumbent Republican Tom Maynard of Georgetown — also for the third time — is in play, too, although to a lesser extent. The district is wedged between Austin and Houston.

“Maynard remains a very heavy favorite to win in a district where Republicans enjoy a 10-point cushion even in the worst of times (pre-Trump worst of times, at least),” he said. “At this point, the best Democrat Judy Jennings can likely hope for is to keep Maynard’s margin of victory in the single digits.”

Maynard, 52, is one of the more moderate Republican education board members. The former school board member now heads the Texas FFA Association, a youth group focused on agriculture. Jennings, 62, formerly worked in the accountability division at the Texas Education Agency and now oversees assessment at Resources for Learning, an education consultancy.

Ten of the 15 board members are Republicans. With Trump at the top of the ticket, the margin of victory for incumbent Republicans in other races — SBOE and otherwise — may also be slimmer, Jones said.

Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning organization that closely monitors the education board, agreed.

“SBOE districts are so gerrymandered that general elections often aren’t competitive, but I think it’s true that the Trump disaster has at least the potential to shake things up in a lot of races up and down the ballot,” he wrote in an email, adding that “it probably helps challengers that some state board members sound so much like Trump.”

Dr. Dakota Carter, the Democrat trying to unseat Republican board chairwoman Donna Bahorich, said “I think a lot of people are going to be very surprised Nov. 8.” Libertarian Whitney Bilyeu and Laura Palmer, a Green Party candidate, also are in the race.

“Unfortunately, what happens is these school board positions don’t get a lot of attention and usually go the way that several of the more well-known races go,” Carter said. “And so I think Donna has a real shot of this being her only term.”

I’ve discussed these three very races before. I’d love to see Mercer lose; he won in 2012 by less than ten points in a year when Mitt Romney was carrying Texas by 16, so you have to think that race will at least be closer this time. As with everything else, the question is how much of this is due to Republicans not voting for Trump but otherwise pushing the R button, how much is due to Rs not turning out, and how much is due to higher Democratic participation. If there’s enough of the latter two, Mercer and maybe one or both of the other two could be in trouble. We’ll know soon enough.

Texas gets VW lawsuit settlement money

Oct 28th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Not bad.

Texas will receive more than $190 million for environmental mitigation under a multibillion-dollar settlement in the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal approved by a federal judge in San Francisco on Tuesday. Volkswagen buyers will have the option of buybacks or repairs.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer authorized the $15 billion agreement, which was first detailed this summer. It awards hundreds of million of dollars to dozens of states and includes a $10 billion buyback program to compensate consumers who bought Volkswagen Group vehicles, including Audis. Under the settlement, the German automaker will establish a $2.7 billion trust fund for projects designed to mitigate environmental harm caused by excess emissions from its vehicles. It also has agreed to pay Texas $50 million in civil penalties and attorneys’ fees for violating a state consumer protection law that bans deceptive advertising.

[…]

Environment Texas called on the state to invest the money in state programs aimed at getting exhaust-spewing or diesel-powered vehicles off the roads, along with rebates to entice people to buy eco-friendly electric vehicles.

“Given Texas’ continuing struggle to reduce harmful air pollution, the state needs to make a greater investment in clean air and the VW funds can help us get there,” the Austin-based group said in a statement. “However, it may be tempting for legislators to play shell games with the VW money and swap it out with dedicated clean air funds, resulting in no net gain for air quality. That would be a harmful mistake.”

See here and here for some background. Terms of the settlement, which covers about 32,000 cars sold in Texas, can be found here. If you might be one of those VW purchasers, you can look up how this affects you. You won’t get full buyback price, but you will get something.

Note that this is not the end of the line for VW litigation. Harris County filed a lawsuit against VW on its own before the state did; Dallas County did so as well. The state wanted them to drop their actions, but they did not. Because those suits were filed in state court, not federal court, they were not part of this agreement. I’ve asked the Harris County Attorney’s office for more information on where that stands. This is what they told me:

There’s no court date set at this time. Here’s some additional details:

The parties have started taking depositions of VW fact witnesses, and we expect those depositions to continue to be scheduled.

We have started reviewing documents that VW has produced in this matter.

The Federal settlement addressed the consumer claims and EPA’s claims for environmental remediation which are different than the civil penalties that Harris County is seeking.

In a recent ruling, Judge Sulak (in Travis County) declined the State of Texas requests to dismiss the claims that the Texas counties that filed after the State filed its claims against VW. The State of Texas is seeking to appeal that ruling. Because Harris County filed its claims prior to the State of Texas, the State of Texas has recognized that its argument on this issue does not apply to Harris County.

So there you have it. More on the federal settlement is here.

Early voting, Day Four: Just the facts

Oct 28th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Here is your Day 4 EV report, and here as always is the spreadsheet that tracks early voting in Presidential elections going back to 2004. Long story short, another record-breaking day, with about the same volume (just over 76,000 in person votes) as on Wednesday. We are at over 366,000 total votes after four days. At this pace, we will surpass the entire 2004 early vote total on Saturday, and the entire 2008 total on Tuesday. There is a point at which we will run out of voters, but that point is not here yet, and may not happen till Election Day itself.

Day Three was another win for Democrats in Harris County as per the available data. Greg Wythe answered a question from two people in the comments to yesterday’s post that explained how people like him arrive at such conclusions. Here’s the link he provided if you want to know more.

That’s all I’ve got for today. I’ll do some more analysis over the weekend.

Voter ID problems still abound

Oct 27th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Hardly a surprise.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

This much is clear after two days of early voting in Texas: Legal wrangling over the state’s voter identification law is stirring confusion at the polls.

Amid Texans’ mad dash to polling places this week, the front end of 12 days of voting before Election Day, civil rights groups and some voters are questioning how some county election officials are portraying the state’s voter identification requirements, which a federal judge softened in August.

Among the complaints in pockets of Texas: years-old posters inaccurately describing the rules — more than a dozen instances in Bexar County — and poll workers who were reluctant to tell voters that some could cast ballots without photo identification.

Though it’s not clear that anyone walked away from the polls because of misinformation or partial information, civil rights advocates called the sporadic reports troubling.

“Not everybody is an aggressive voter. Some people are shy and laid back, and if you’re told you have to have an ID, it might cause them to get out of line and go home,” said Jose Garza, a lawyer working for groups challenging the state’s strict 2011 voter ID law.

[…]

Now, after two days of early voting, some complain that local elections officials are only further muddying Texans’ understanding.

In Bexar County, for instance, lawyers for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said they spotted outdated posters — those describing the strict 2011 ID rules without the new caveats — hanging in at least 14 of the county’s 43 polling places at various points during early voting.

“This is a situation where the Secretary of State produced [updated] materials, and you can find them online,” said Nina Perales, the group’s vice president of litigation. “The idea that polling place supply boxes were being filled with the wrong posters is so incredibly frustrating for people who have been working on this issue for years.”

Donna Parker, a spokesman for Bexar County Clerk Jacque Callanen, said Tuesday afternoon that the old posters had since been replaced with accurate ones.

But Perales disputed that the problem was fixed, saying that her group spotted eight polling places on Tuesday that still had misleading info — outdated posters either hanging alone or adjacent to the updated signage.

Here’s an eyewitness account of a problem that occurred in Harris County. I’m willing to give the election workers the benefit of the doubt. It’s been very busy, all of this is new, and Lord knows there has been a rash of misinformation coming from the state. But that’s the point – the state has been acting in bad faith, and that attitude has been echoed by some local officials, most prominently our own Stan Stanart. The fact that there is confusion should not come as a surprise – it’s practically guaranteed. It’s all of a piece with what is happening all around the country, and the motivation for these actions is plain as day. All of this needs to be stopped, and I hope it’s high up on Hillary Clinton’s agenda after the election. The Texas Civil Rights Project and ThinkProgress have more.

Business owners tell Dan Patrick to back off on bathrooms

Oct 27th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Donald who?

Oct 27th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Never heard of him.

As national polls show Hillary Clinton widening her lead just two weeks before the presidential election, Texas Republicans mostly have gone silent about the candidate at the top of their ticket, presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Trump’s Texas campaign chairman, is the only one who seems to be pushing The Donald’s candidacy much in public. On Monday, he tweeted a get-out-the-vote message to Keep Texas Red with the #TrumpPence16 hashtag at the end.

Other elected officials who earlier were public in their support of the candidate now are circumspect about referring to him, a not-uncommon tactic that political observers say is aimed at protecting down-ballot candidates when the party nominee is running behind in the home stretch of a presidential election.

“When a campaign starts, everyone wants to be up there on stage with the nominee to get attention for their campaigns,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University who has studied campaigns for years. “But when things start going south, in politics, you have no friends any more. That’s what you’re seeing with Donald Trump right now. He doesn’t have a lot of friends left.”

On Monday, more than a dozen elected officials in Texas who earlier publicly supported Trump declined comment on whether they would be out campaigning for him in the final two weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

[…]

For many Texans, including more than a dozen who were touring the Texas Capitol on Monday, the absence of Trump’s name in the final campaign days is a blessing.

“Unfortunately, even though he’s right about a lot of things, especially about needing to throw out the political establishment in this country, no one wants to hear from him now because he’s radioactive,” said Sharon Ridener, a San Antonio resident who says she will vote for GOP candidates but will not cast a ballot in the presidential race. “As much as I hate to say this, Hillary Clinton has won. Let’s move on.”

WillaLee Moseley, of Dallas, echoed that: “I’m a Republican, but I’m through hearing from him. And about him.”

That’s the danger for the Trump campaign, and possibly for the Republicans as a whole. If enough Rs do what Sharon Ridener did, then maybe Hillary Clinton really could carry Texas. And maybe there are some slightly less-committed Republicans than WillaLee Mosely who just decide not to bother showing up. It’s early days, but keep those possibilities in mind. As for Dan Patrick, he should be forced to wear his unwavering support of Donald Trump like a cheap suit for the rest of his life. Every time any Texas Democrat speaks of or to him, they should mention Patrick’s BFF Donald Trump as well. Any time Patrick tries to invoke morality or religion or any other sense of righteousness in his rhetoric, he should be met with a full litany of the things he happily overlooked to support his man Donald. Let us never, ever forget about that.

Texas blog roundup for the week of October 24

Oct 27th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

The Texas Progressive Alliance celebrates the start of early voting as it brings you this week’s roundup.

(more…)

Early voting, Day Three: The case for pessimism

Oct 27th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

Dave Mann tells Texas Democrats to put those rose-tinted glasses away.

On Monday, the Real Clear Politics site declared that Texas is up for grabs in the presidential election. The shift comes after a series of polls showing a tight race in the state between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and makes for a dramatic image on the site’s election tracking map, where Texas is no longer colored its usual red but is now the dark gray that connotes a “toss up.” For Democrats, seeing their state change color on one of the most widely read and respected campaign outlets—after decades of Republican dominance and years of unfulfilled hopes that Texas might turn blue—must be cathartic. And it might be tempting to view this sudden shift to competitiveness as the start of Democrats’ long-hoped-for return to relevance, as a turning point.

Well, they should keep the cork in the champagne, because Texas remains a Republican state.

As my colleague R.G. Ratcliffe pointed out, the Texas polls are close not because of a huge spike in Democratic voters—Clinton’s numbers are roughly in line with Obama’s totals from 2008 and 2012—but because Trump’s support has cratered. He’s drastically under-performing previous Republican presidential nominees. John McCain and Mitt Romney garnered 55 percent and 57 percent of the vote in Texas, respectively. Trump is polling 10 to 12 points below that.

[…]

While it’s true that the national GOP looks like a smoking ruin right now, the state party remains fairly strong. It still has huge advantages over Texas Democrats in money, organization, and candidate depth, and Republicans start every statewide race with at least a ten-point edge, if not more. And if you’re thinking that built-in advantage may be shrinking, keep in mind that we’re just two years removed from an across-the-board Republican blowout of nearly 20 points. In Wendy Davis, the Democrats had their best known and best funded candidate in years, and she lost to Greg Abbott by nearly a million votes.

It’s also worth remembering that most statewide offices in Texas come up for election in non-presidential years in which the electorate generally tends to be whiter and older—in other words, more Republican.

The one caveat is the potential increase in Latino voters. R.G. wrote on Monday that more than 530,000 people with Latino surnames have registered to vote since 2012, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office. It’s not hard to envision Trump’s candidacy increasing the number of Latino voters who turn out to vote in Texas, offering Democrats the opportunity to begin building a coalition that could one day make them competitive again. But capitalizing on that opportunity requires the difficult party-building, community-organizing, voter-turnout work that Democrats in this state haven’t exactly excelled at in recent years.

In other words, two years from now—without Trump at the top of the ticket—Texas Republicans will once again be heavily favored to sweep the statewide offices.

See here for my discussion of RG Ratcliffe’s article. First, let me say that I agree with Dave Mann in that it’s at least premature, if not downright silly, to call Texas a swing state right now. It’s a lot closer than we’re used to seeing it, but the numbers aren’t there for swing state status. The Real Clear Politics average for the two-way race has Trump leading by 4.6 percentage points. FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s lead at 6.2 after applying their secret sauce. Out of thirteen poll results that I’ve tracked, only that one wacky WaPo/Survey Monkey one from September had Clinton in the lead, by one point. I think to be a real swing state, your polling average has to be within, say, two or three points, with more than one result disagreeing with the others about who’s in the lead. Texas doesn’t make the cut on either of those.

That said, I think Mann is underplaying how well Clinton is doing, both in absolute terms and relative to Obama. The more recent polls have shown her increase her total more than Trump has done. I split the thirteen poll results I’ve tracked into pre-October and October results and averaged each. That works out as follows:

Pre-October: Trump 42.0, Clinton 35.7
October: Trump 46.2, Clinton 41.5

Clinton has gained 5.8 points in the average to Trump’s 4.2, cutting the margin in the average from 6.3 to 4.7. Moreover, she’s considerably ahead of where Obama was in the October polls from 2012:

October 2012: Romney 55.8, Obama 39.0

You can also use the YouGov tracker for a direct comparison. The election eve result in 2012 had Obama at 38%. As of yesterday, Clinton was at 41.4; she was up at 42.0 over the weekend. And remember, that 2012 YouGov result underestimated Obama by three and a half points. It’s possible they’ve changed their model to account for that, but it’s also possible they’re underestimating Clinton.

I don’t want to get too deep into that, because as the Devil can use scripture for his own purposes, one can read whatever they want into an individual poll. The thing is, though, we also have actual votes that have been cast, which really do tell us something. I can tell you that Democrats have done much better so far in Harris County than they did in 2012, and have won each of the first two days of early voting, after winning with mail ballots. Some of this is surely regular voters getting out there earlier than usual, and I don’t have the same data on the rest of the state, but just as surely Harris County isn’t an anomaly.

What I’m getting at is this: I think one has to strain to argue that Hillary Clinton won’t exceed Barack Obama’s vote total from 2008. I think she’s got a very good chance to exceed his vote percentage, though I’m not ready to declare that as a sure thing. We may argue afterwards if the increased vote total I expect Clinton will get represents a real bump in Democratic turnout, as 2008 for Obama did compared to 2004, or just a raise that was proportional to the overall population growth. But I don’t think we’ll be arguing over whether or not she did outperform him, in 2008 as well as in 2012.

As for 2018, I’m going to wait till this one is in the books before I get into that. It’s true that Donald Trump won’t be on the ballot, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be used as a motivating tool. It’s also true that while 2014 was a disastrous year for Texas Democrats, it wasn’t just a Texas problem. National conditions had a big effect on state elections in 2014, and in 2010 and 2006 and 2002 and so on, for that matter. What will national conditions be like in 2018? You’re a lot smarter than I am if you know the answer to that today.

Anyway. Early voting turnout was even higher on Day Two than it was on Day One. That’s actually in line with the historical pattern, as you can see from the handy early voting tracker spreadsheet that I’ve so thoughtfully included for you. Day Two was busier than Day One in all three previous Presidential years. Day Three was busier than Day Two in 2012 and 2008, too. And guess what? As you can see from the Day 3 EV report, Day Three was busier this year than Day Two was, too. It’s like there’s an established pattern or something, it’s just a matter of at what level. Another 76,098 in person votes, with 5,646 mail ballots arriving, and 287,134 total votes cast so far. The Day Three amount in 2012 was 197,987. We’re going to run out of voters eventually, but we could get an awful lot of votes cast before that happens.

Judicial Q&A: Judge RK Sandill

Oct 26th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

(Note: I ran a series of judicial Q&As for Democratic candidates in contested primaries earlier this year. I am now doing the same for the candidates who were unopposed in March, which includes most of the sitting incumbent judges. As always, this is to help you the voter know a little bit more about the candidates on your ballot. I will be publishing these in the order I receive them. You can see the Q&As and interviews I did for the primaries on my 2016 Election page.)

Judge RK Sandill

1. Who are you and in which court do you preside?

Judge R.K. Sandill. I preside over the 127th Civil District Court.

2. What kind of cases does this court hear?

The civil courts preside over matters that include commercial, personal injury, consumer and tax litigation. The matters range in value from $500 and above. The civil courts also deal with issue related to health warrants, medical emergencies, and matters as odd as allowing for the reinternment of human remains.

3. What have been your main accomplishments during your time on this bench?

Since taking office in January 2009, I have tried over 200 cases and disposed of more than 12,000 matters. I have worked hard to improve docket management, jury relations and to facilitate the litigation needs of counsel and their matters. As one of the first judges in Harris County to adopt e-filing, I have also worked to utilize technology as a tool to improve the litigation process. I believe strongly in respecting all who appear in my court, as well as their time and resources. As such, I was pleased to be rated “well qualified” or “qualified” by over 77% of respondents in the 2016 HBA Judicial Qualifications poll.

4. What do you hope to accomplish in your courtroom going forward?

I strive continually to improve my courtroom work and make the 127 th work as efficiently and effectively as possible for those who appear there. By allowing FaceTime and Skype to be used to call witnesses, I will continue to leverage technology to alleviate costs and time constraints for litigants. I am also exploring the possibility of having hearings and status conferences in this same manner.

5. Why is this race important?

Our civil courts are a critically important aspect of our judicial system. They offer citizens the chance to have their day in court, with a trial before a jury of their peers. The public forum offered by the courts allows for transparency. In the last ten years, we have seen a shift away from transparency when it comes to resolving disputes. Because of this, we need to elect and re-elect high quality judges to these benches so that the public trust remains in our constitutionally protected judicial system.

6. Why should people vote for you in November?

I believe my experience and record of success as Judge of the 127 th District Court merit my re-election. I have consistently received high ratings from the attorneys who practice in Harris County courts. As the first and only judge of South Asian descent in Harris County, I bring valuable diversity of background and experience to our local judiciary. Further, because of my varied experience (grew up in a military family and a cancer survivor), I bring different perspective to the Harris County judiciary.

Further, because I work hard, understand the issues before me and attempt to make all those that appear in my courtroom feel welcomed and respected, I have the respect of the lawyers that appear before me. This election cycle I have been endorsed by the Houston Lawyers’ Association, the Mexican American Bar Association of Houston, and the Association of Women Attorneys, which comprise all the non-partisan legal organizations that endorse in Harris County. For all these reasons, plus because I love what I do, I ask the people of Harris County to vote for me in this election.

Pension deal approved by firefighters

Oct 26th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

18 comments

It’s a big deal, though it’s hardly a done deal yet.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

For the first time ever, the Houston firefighters’ pension board agreed Monday to accept benefit cuts for current workers and retirees, potentially paving the way for a solution to a 15-year-old crisis that has threatened to bust budgets and weaken the city’s financial stability.

By a 7-2 vote, the firefighters panel joined the police and municipal pension boards in agreeing to give up some benefits in exchange for certainty in a complex deal that would eliminate underfunding of Houston’s three retirement systems in 30 years.

The reform package, which Mayor Sylvester Turner heralded as a “historic turning point,” heads to City Council for approval on Wednesday, then to the Legislature, which controls city workers’ retirement benefits.

Although passage of the reform in Austin is far from a foregone conclusion, Turner was optimistic the deal would survive any legislative turbulence.

“For the first time ever, all three pension systems have been willing to work with the city in a very productive manner. We’re all on the same page and moving forward as a united front,” Turner said at a press conference. “We are closer than ever to solving what no one else has been able to solve over the last 15-plus years. The finish line is certainly within reach.”

The mayor’s declarations were firmer than those of fire pension chairman David Keller.

“I think it substantially moves it forward, but there’s still a lot of road to go,” Keller said. “It’s certainly no end. It’s kind of a beginning.”

A statement released by the fire fund after the vote called the agreement a “non-binding framework,” and no trustees elected by active or retired firefighters appeared at Turner’s press conference.

See here for the background. There’s a lot of talk later in the story about maybe filing a lawsuit over this – by Andy Taylor, of course, who has never turned down a possible payday – but the more immediate concern is about ensuring a bill passes through the Lege to ratify this. I have been of the opinion that if the city made a deal with the pension funds, the Lege will be willing to ratify it. That was under the assumption that none of the stakeholders would lobby against it, which may not be the case here. For now, though, I’ll stick with what I said up front – this is a big deal. Now it’s on Mayor Turner and the city’s lobbyists to finish it. The Mayor’s press release is here, and an easy-to-read executive summary of the changes to all three plans is here. The Urban Edge has more.

Still talking about recapture

Oct 26th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This Chron story from Monday adds a bit more to the recapture discussion.

As one Houston school board member sees it, the district’s November ballot measure regarding the state-mandated forfeiture of local tax dollars offers no good choice for voters.

“Do you want to be shot in the head or stabbed in the back? Both are not pleasant,” trustee Mike Lunceford said of the options.

The Houston Independent School District has been deemed so property wealthy that for the first time it must forfeit local property tax revenue – an estimated $162 million next year – to the state to help fund poorer districts. By Texas law, however, the district first needs voter approval to send away the money. The Houston district’s estimated recapture payment is expected to increase to $257 million in 2018 and to top $1 billion over four years.

The idea of willingly giving local property tax dollars to the state, especially when three-quarters of HISD students come from low-income families, is unacceptable to Mayor Sylvester Turner and other leaders who are urging voters to oppose the Nov. 8 ballot measure. The opposition strategy is an admitted gamble that lawmakers will be persuaded to revamp the state’s school-funding system in the 2017 legislative session.

“The Legislature moves when its back is up against the wall, especially on big issues,” Turner, a former legislator, said this week.

The bet, of course, may not pay off. For one, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican from Houston, does not support the opposition’s approach.

“If the HISD board doesn’t like the current school-finance system, they should come to Austin to work constructively to change it,” Allen Blakemore, a spokesman for Patrick, said in a statement to the Houston Chronicle. “Instead they lead their voters to make a political statement at a significant cost to the taxpayer.”

[…]

Turner has criticized the ballot language as misleading and suggested it could be challenged in court, just as the city was sued in 2015 over its measure concerning term limits. He added that “any half-way decent attorney” could sue on behalf of commercial property owners if their property was sent to another school district. Campaign advertising urging opposition to the ballot measure states that the proposition “is about shutting down neighborhood schools.”

The Houston district has not released how much money it would have to cut from the budget in future years because of recapture.

“We have to make the natural assumption that some of the schools are going to close, some of the programs are going to go away,” said Jeri Brooks, spokeswoman for the vote “against” campaign.

The state never has had to resort to property detachment for taxing purposes. Galveston voters rejected that district’s recapture proposition several years ago, then approved it in a future election.

The Houston school district could hold another election in May – five months into the legislative session – if necessary.

First, let’s be very clear that the suggestion from Dan Patrick’s office that the HISD board “should come to Austin to work constructively to change” the school finance system is risible. Putting aside the fact that Patrick is obsessed with vouchers and bathrooms, it will be a cold day in August before he lifts a finger to help HISD in any way. To the extent that the “no on recapture” crowd has any hope, it’s that they will inspire people around the state to put pressure on their Reps and Senators to Do Something, to which obstructers like Dan Patrick will have to accede. It’s a triple bank shot with a combo to sink the eight ball, but at least it’s a plan, and it recognizes that nothing will happen without external pressure.

The bit about Galveston and possibly having an electoral do-over is very interesting and something that I had not seen or heard before. I’d like to see some confirmation of that, because if HISD could re-vote once it becomes clear that the Lege isn’t going to do squat, then that changes the calculus.

As for Mayor Turner’s claim about the ballot language, all irony aside the language is mandated by the same law that mandates recapture. That was one of the things I discussed with David Thompson in my interview with him, because the language seemed so weird to me. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be struck down – it is very clear by now that the Supreme Court respects the local electoral process only when it feels like it – but it should be noted that this language didn’t come from nowhere.

It’s important to remember that where all of this comes from is the Legislature.

The state of Texas might well spend less on public education in the next budget than in the current one thanks to increasing local school property taxes.

School financing works like a waterbed: Push down on one side and the other side rises. Raise the local share of spending and the state doesn’t have to spend as much.

In Texas, property values are up. With them, revenue from property taxes is rising. For a given level of state spending, that means the locals are paying more and the state doesn’t have to spend as much.

That means, in turn, that state lawmakers don’t have to sweat rising costs like the locals do. And it frees some of those state lawmakers to holler at the locals for rising taxes even as those higher local revenues help the state skate through a tough budget.

[…]

According to the Legislative Budget Board, state aid for education rose to $19.59 billion for this fiscal year from $18.24 billion in 2008. That’s an increase of 7.4 percent. But local revenue — generated by property taxes — rose to $26.25 billion this fiscal year from $18.2 billion in 2008, an increase of 44.2 percent.

Ten years ago, the state and local share of the cost of public education in Texas was virtually even — around 44.8 percent each. Federal money accounted for 10.3 percent. Now the locals pay 51.5 percent of the total, the state pays 43.6 percent and the federal government covers the remaining 13.8 percent, according to the LBB’s 2016-17 Fiscal Size-Up.

Rising costs have fallen disproportionately on local districts over the past 10 years. Local property tax bills have risen accordingly, and now state lawmakers are stirred up, promising to somehow get a leash on behalf of those taxpayers.

Here’s another funny statistic from that same LBB report. The number of students attending Texas public schools on the average day has risen 16.8 percent over the past decade, to over 5 million. In 2008, each kid cost the locals $4,219 per year. The state’s cost was $4,226. The feds paid $970, for a grand total of $9,415.

The grand total is now $10,111 — up $696 from 2008. The feds pay $1,015. The locals pay $5,209 — almost $1,000 more per student than they were paying a year ago. And the state? It pays $3,887 per student, or $339 less than it was paying 10 years ago.

Fixing this problem really does start with the Legislature, plus the recognition that if we want something done right, it will not be cheap. However you vote on the recapture referendum, keep that in mind and be sure to only support candidates in 2018 and beyond who understand and are willing to address that reality.

Help a crony out?

Oct 26th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Collin County, y’all.

Best mugshot ever

Collin County lawmakers debated intervening in Ken Paxton’s legal woes by pressuring county leaders to cut funding for the case, according to a series of private text messages exchanged last week.

Taxpayers in Paxton’s home county are on the hook to pay for his prosecution, which has dragged on for months as he’s appealed three felony indictments for violating state securities laws. Local Republican leaders have expressed concern about the case’s six-figure cost but have said the law leaves them no choice but to pay up.

But five Collin County lawmakers thought otherwise.

In a series of texts sent last week, which The Dallas Morning News obtained through open records laws, they discuss how to persuade County Judge Keith Self to violate a court order requiring him to pay three special prosecutors.

Should they send a signed letter to the Commissioners Court? Should they get lawyers involved? Or should they simply pressure Self to refuse to pay the prosecutors, a decision for which he could be found in contempt of court?

“All of us agree (hopefully) on the end goal. Question is what can we do to move the ball toward that goal line,” Plano Republican Rep. Jeff Leach sent in a text on Monday, to which Rep. Matt Shaheen responded, “I’ll ask Keith [Self] if they lowered the fees and discuss options to stop payment.”

“Perfect,” Leach texted back. “Let him know we are here to help — not hurt. If Keith got sent to jail for this — I’d be the first to bail him out.”

This is Exhibit A for why having a central Public Integrity Unit is a good idea. Now, in this case, the PIU in the Travis County DA’s office did investigate, and declined to pursue charges because they determined that the alleged crime did not occur in Travis County and thus was not in their jurisdiction. I don’t know if this situation was affected by the recent legislation that took a lot of these investigations away from the PIU in Travis County, but I do know that if the Travis County DA were doing this prosecution, we wouldn’t have Ken Paxton’s buddies trying to short-circuit it. If we’re going to have these prosecutions handled by home counties, we need better laws to prevent this kind of meddling. If a special prosecutor is needed, that special prosecutor should have fairly wide latitude to request funding to complete its job.

Early voting, Day Two: How long can we keep this up?

Oct 26th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Texas Monthly crunches some numbers from Day One:

Digging further into the numbers, it seems as though the long-whispered awakening of Texas Democrats happened, at the very least, on day one. GOP consultant Derek Ryan, who published a detailed report on the affiliations of Texas’s early voters, examined the voting history of Monday’s voters, and what he found was notable. Of the votes cast, 36.8 percent of them were from people who had previously voted in the Republican primary, while 32.8 percent of them had voted in the Democratic primary. The rest were split between people who had previously voted in general presidential elections but not party primaries (22.3 percent) and those with no election history whatsoever (8.1 percent).

We don’t know how those voters with history in party primaries are inclined to vote in the general election, but the mere fact that the numbers for Republicans and Democrats are only four points away from one another is significant in and of itself. As our own Erica Greider pointed out on Twitter Tuesday afternoon, Republican primary voters outnumbered Democratic primary voters by a whopping 2:1 margin. So on day one of early voting, a whole lot more of the Democrats who voted in the primaries felt the need to rush to the polls than the Republicans did.

There are other things we can glean from the early voting totals. The gender split here is vast: At least 54 percent of voters on Monday were women, while men made up 42.2 percent of the day’s electorate (the other 3.8 percent are unknown). That could be tricky for Trump, as Nate Silver’s imagined women-only electoral map analysis pointed out—Trump’s biggest base of support comes from men, and if men aren’t casting ballots at the same rate as women, he may have a lot of ground to make up.

And ultimately, all of this analysis is moot if the turnout numbers level off by the end of the week. It’s possible that we’re mostly going to see the same people vote in 2016 as we did in 2012. If that’s the case, the 8.1 percent of voters who haven’t previously cast general election ballots will be notable, but probably not significant enough to tilt the election.

Couple things here. First, the thing to keep in mind about the voters with no primary history is basically what Greider says. There have been a lot more Republican primary voters in recent elections than Democratic primary voters, so the pool of non-primary voters is proportionally more Democratic than the voting population overall since you’ve subtracted so many more Republicans from it. One of the harbingers of doom for Democrats in 2010 during early voting was exactly this – a large portion of these voters had not voted in the 2008 primary, which in Harris County at least meant they almost had to be non-Democrats, since the Dem primary turnout had been so large that year. These non-primary voters aren’t certain the be Dems, but they are more likely to be Dems than a random sample of all voters would be.

Having said that, many of those 2008 Dem primary voters still exist in the population, so this inference only goes so far. That analysis by Derek Ryan only specifies “previous R/D primary voters”; it does not specify “in one or more of the past 3 elections”, which would limit the scope to post-2008 primaries. It’s common to limit this sort of thing to the last three elections, but it’s not universal – the data exists in any database a guy like this would be using. I just don’t know for sure what Ryan has in mind.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen an analysis of the in-person Harris County Day One vote that said 31% of voters had voted in at least one of the last three Republican primaries (that is, 2012, 2014, and 2015), with 32% having done the same in at least one Dem primary. That was in person only, so about half the total vote so far. Further analysis of the whole data set using other metrics suggests the Dems have a pretty decent lead at this time, which is unusual in that it’s usually the Rs who get out more on Day One and via mail. But this is only one day, and things do change over time. There’s a lot of early voting to go, and a lot of votes to be cast. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

Here are a couple of maps of where early voters came from for Day One and mail ballots. Here’s the Day Two EV report, which as you can see shows an increase in turnout from Monday: 73,542 people showed up Tuesday, an increase of a bit more than 6,000 from Monday. Add in another 2,834 mail ballots, and a grand total of 205,390 people have already voted in Harris County. (Including me – I voted at the SPJST Lodge for the first time. I’ve now voted in six different EV locations. Maybe I should try to collect them all.) I don’t know what the partisan mix looks like yet, but you can see the updated spreadsheet and make your own guesses. Have you voted yet?

Interview with Bill Baldwin of Keep Heights Dry

Oct 25th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

As you know, there will be a referendum on the ballot for a very limited electorate this year, to alter the existing ordinance that enforces a dry zone in the historic Houston Heights to allow the sale of beer and wine for off-premise consumption – for retailers, not for restaurants and bars, in other words. This referendum, formally known as City of Houston Proposition 1, was placed on the ballot by a petition drive led by the Houston Heights Beverage Coalition, which in turn was backed by HEB, which has announced its intention to open a store in the old Fiesta location on North Shepherd at 24th if this referendum passes. I did an interview with Steve Reilley of the HHBC back in June when petitions were still being circulated to clarify some questions about this. At the time, I noted that I was unaware of any organized opposition to this effort.

Well, formal opposition to this effort does exist, and it’s called Keep The Heights Dry. I’ve seen a few of their yard signs around the neighborhood in recent weeks. Their argument as you can see on that Facebook page is one part preservationist and one part neighborhood protection, and last week they reached out to me to see about doing an interview. Bill Baldwin, who has a real estate office on Heights Blvd at 16th Street, is one of the leaders of this opposition effort and the person I spoke to about it. Here’s the conversation:

Interviews and Q&As from the primaries are on my 2016 Election page. I will eventually get around to updating it to include links to fall interviews.

Judicial Q&A: Barbara Gardner

Oct 25th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Barbara Gardner

1. Who are you and what are you running for?

I am Barbara Gardner, and I am running for the 1st Court of Appeals, Place 4.

2. What kind of cases does this court hear?

The Courts of Appeals, made up of 14 districts across the State, hear and write opinions on every type of law: car wrecks, real estate, commercial disputes, probate, employment, divorce, criminal misdemeanors – everything except felonies, which go straight to the Court of Criminal Appeals.

3. Why are you running for this particular bench?

The Courts of Appeals have become biased in their opinions, mostly looking for ways to rule for large corporations, to the disadvantage of individuals and small business. These courts generally decide the result they want, and then “shoe-horn” the law to fit that result. Also, they take away too many juries’ verdicts. I am running because I can bring balance and a better, fairer perspective to the 1st Court of Appeals.

4. What are your qualifications for this job?

I graduated #1 in my law school class; I have been a trial lawyer for over 30 years and have handled cases all the way up to the US Supreme Court. I was a law clerk for a federal judge when I finished law school. Also, I am board certified in Labor and Employment Law by the Texas Board of Specialization. I believe that Courts should follow the law, and they are not doing that very well. Some of my other accomplishments include:

• “Best Lawyers in America” (Employment Law), 2007–2016

• “Highest Possible Rating” in Legal Ability & Ethical Standards by Judiciary & Bar members, Martindale Hubbell 2015-2016

• “Texas Super Lawyers,” 2007–2016

• “Texas Top Lawyers,” 2012-2016

• “Women Leaders in the Law,” Fortune Magazine 2015

• “Top-Rated Lawyers in Labor & Employment,” Fortune Magazine 2013

• “The Best Women Lawyers in Texas,” 2013

• “Texas’ Best Lawyers,” 2009–2013

• “Top 100 Trial Lawyers in Texas” 2012

• “Top Lawyers,” Corporate Counsel, 2008-2011

• “Houston’s Top Lawyers,” 2006, 2007, 2011

• “Top Lawyers for the People,” 2007

• AV-Preeminent rating by peers in Martindale Hubbell

• Interviewed as expert several occasions on Houston’s Fox 26 News TV

• Former Partner & Head of Employment Law Section of Lam, Lyn & Philip

• One of founding principals and partner of Tucker, Vaughan, Gardner & Barnes

5. Why is this race important?

This race is extremely important because the Courts of Appeals’ written opinions constitute the law that controls every Texas citizen’s rights and conduct. There is a very limited right to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. Even though the State Legislature writes statutes, the statutes may be a few sentences or a page or two in length. Then the Court of Appeals writes a long opinion about what the statute “really” means. Also, there are many laws that are not based on any statute, such as negligence, car wrecks, bad injuries and death. Those are based on the “common law” which the Courts of Appeals write.

Currently, more than half of the justices on the 1st Court of Appeals initially were appointed by the governor to get on the court, including my opponent. Most people know very little about Courts of Appeals, and so those appointed stay there for many years.

It is the job of the Court of Appeals only to determine whether the judge in the lower court made a legal error. The Courts of Appeals go far beyond that and take the case into their own hands, deciding many times a completely different outcome than the jury’s verdict.

Even if one tried to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, more than half of those judges also were hand-picked and appointed by the governor. As I mentioned above, the governor chooses those who will carry out his pro-big business philosophy.

We need a change.

6. Why should people vote for you in November?

I am well qualified as described in #4 above. I know the courtroom like the back of my hand. And I am not beholden to the governor or big business. I will apply the law correctly and fairly, not because of any political persuasion.

CBS/YouGov: Trump 46, Clinton 43

Oct 25th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

7 comments

Texas is being tracked as a battleground state. I can’t even believe I just typed that.

Hillary Clinton holds a three-point lead over Donald Trump in Florida, while in Texas – a state that has voted Republican by wide margins in recent years – Trump leads by a mere three points.

[…]

In 2012 Republicans won a double-digit victory in Texas, as they often do; it’s one of the most reliably Republican states in the nation. Today Texas is close, and is more a story of Trump underperforming rather than Clinton over-performing typical Democrats, and why despite the tightness it may still be difficult for the Democrats to actually get those last points and win the state outright. Clinton is doing about as well with key groups as President Obama did in 2008, but Trump is under-performing the Republican benchmarks by roughly ten points among white men, white women, and college whites in particular. Many of those not with Trump are unsure or voting third-party rather than Clinton.

In 2008 then-candidate Obama lost white men in Texas by more than fifty points and Clinton is down 35 points today. That’s still a big gap but the sheer number of voters that represents is part of the reason for the difference in the race. Meanwhile, Hispanics in Texas, who are supporting Clinton, say they feel very motivated to vote this year.

Scroll down for the polling data. Much of what is there is stuff we have talked about before. Clinton has consolidated Democratic voters better than Trump has done with Republicans. 93% of Dems are with Clinton, with four percent for Trump, one percent for Gary Johnson, and one percent for “someone else”, while only 84% of Rs are voting Trump, with 7% for Clinton, 5% for Johnson, and 2% for “someone else”. Clinton leads among all voters under 45, with a 21-point lead with the under-30 crowd. Trump as noted isn’t doing as well among white voters as Republicans have done in the past, but he is once again weirdly above 30% with Latino voters. I continue to believe those results are off, and that we’ll see numbers more in line with national Latino preferences once we have actual data. But look, the big deal here is that Texas is being tracked as a Florida-like battleground state. Who would have thunk it?

On a side note, Real Clear Politics has Trump leading Clinton 44.2 to 39.6 in the two-way race and 43.6 to 38.8 in the four-way race, while FiveThirtyEight has it at Trump 49.1, Clinton 43.9. That would be the highest total for a Democrat in a Presidential race in Texas since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976.

The Trump effect and the State Supreme Court

Oct 25th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

The Trib touches on a subject I addressed awhile ago.

Three Republican members of the Texas Supreme Court running for re-election are facing Democratic challengers who say they may have a chance in the solid-red state with Donald Trump at the top of the ballot.

Democrats point to recent polls that show Trump beating Hillary Clinton by just four points in Texas to explain a possible shift in Lone Star State politics. The Democratic National Committee announced plans in September to open headquarters in Houston to capitalize on the presidential race as a way to help down-ballot candidates.

But only one of the Democratic candidates for Texas Supreme Court — Dori Contreras Garza — has raised even close to enough money to be competitive. And even her bid is a long shot in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the court since 1994. The court has nine justices who are elected statewide to staggered six-year terms.

The rest of the story is a profile of the three races and the candidates in them. The premise about fundraising is more than a little ridiculous because in all four of the cases cited, the amount raised by the candidate in question was less than $100K, which is basically a drop on a sidewalk in August. I mean, that’s modest money for a district City Council race in Houston. It literally would have zero effect on a statewide campaign, which for these races is all about getting one’s name out before the voters. I guarantee you, nobody who isn’t a political junkie or personally acquainted with a given candidate will have any idea who they are.

So, as is so often the case, these races will be determined by overall turnout. I’ve already shown how in a scenario where the margin between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is small, the chances that one or more downballot Democrats could be elected grow, as Democratic candidates have seen less of a dropoff in their vote total from the top of the ticket in recent years. I wrote that post after a poll came out showing Trump leading Clinton by six points. More recently, we have seen polls where Trump’s lead was two, three, and four points. That could be overstating how close the race really is, and it may well be that there are other factors such as a higher than usual share of Republicans who will support Clinton but not any other Democrat that will ensure the GOP statewide hegemony remains intact. But as I said in that earlier post, it is not crazy to think that a Dem could win statewide this year. And if one or more do, it won’t be because they raised $10K more than their opponents.

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