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September 28th, 2021:

Interview with Maria Benzon

Sep 28th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Maria Benzon

We move over to District V today for a conversation with Dr. Maria Benzon. Benzon is a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School who got bachelors and masters degrees at UT and a PhD in Educational Psychology at UH. She has been a math teacher and department chair in HISD and an assistant principal at the Southwest Schools, and has been an education researcher and teacher to teachers at UH and elsewhere. Our interview is below.

(Note: There’s a third candidate in this race, Caroline Walter, who has no online presence that I could see and is an anti-masker, as this report from a recent candidate forum makes clear. I did not try to find her for an interview.)

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Sue Deigaard, District V
Anne Sung, District VII
Elizabeth Santos, District I
Janette Garza Lindner, District I
Matias Kopinsky, District I
Bridget Wade, District VII

First proposed Congressional map is out

Sep 28th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

It’s a thing.

Texas lawmakers on Monday released their first draft of a new congressional map for the next decade that includes two new districts in Austin and Houston — metropolitan areas with diverse populations tht fueled much of the state’s population growth over the past 10 years.

Republicans constructed this map with incumbent protection in mind — a strategy that focused on bolstering Republican seats that Democrats targeted over the last two election cycles rather than aggressively adding new seats that could flip from blue to red. However, the map does in fact strengthen Republican positioning overall, going from 22 to 25 districts that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The number of districts that voted for Joe Biden would shrink by one, from 14 to 13.

Texas members of the House GOP delegation were closely involved in the drawing process and approved the map last week, according to two sources close to the Texas delegation.

While many incumbents appear safe in these maps, others were drawn into districts that overlap with one another — for example the proposed map pits Houston Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw against Democrat Rep. Sylvia Garcia. It also pits two Houston Democrats — Reps. Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee — against each other.

The maps were proposed by state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, who leads the chamber’s redistricting committee.

[…]

Huffman’s first 38-district proposal would widen the gap between the parties, creating 25 districts that voted for Trump in 2020 and 13 that voted for Biden.

The racial makeup of the congressional maps is also expected to change as Texas added two new congressional seats based on last decade’s population growth, which was mostly driven by people of color. Based on eligible voters, the current map includes 22 districts with white majorities, eight with Hispanic majorities, one with a Black majority and five that have no majority. The newly proposed map includes 23 districts with white majorities, seven with Hispanic majorities, none with a Black majority and eight that have no majority.

Available data can be found here. Patrick Svitek has some numbers, which I’ll summarize briefly:

– Of the 14 districts carried by Biden in 2020, 12 were carried by him under this map. The exceptions are Republican-held CD24, which goes from Biden +5 to Trump +12, and Democratic-held CD15, which goes from Biden +2 to Trump +3. That may make CD15 the new CD23, which went from Trump +1 to Trump +7.

– Of the two new districts, CD37 in Travis County is deep, dark blue (Biden +53), while CD38 in Harris County is Trump +18. Let’s just say I don’t think it will remain that red over time.

– Regardless of what the story says, it seems clear to me that Reps. Crenshaw, Green, Jackson Lee, and Garcia would run in and win the same-numbered districts as they have now.

– Reps. Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher get much bluer districts. Maybe that makes them vulnerable to primary challenges, I don’t know. Rep. Henry Cuellar in CD28 gets a district that is less favorable for his 2020 primary challenger, Jessica Cisneros.

– Overall I think I agree with Michael Li:

This map uses the same strategy as the Senate and SBOE maps in that it shores up a Harris County incumbent (in this case Crenshaw) by extending his district into Montgomery County, and shores up some other incumbents (see in particular Reps. Williams in CD25 and Carter in CD31) by making their districts more rural. As the meme says, it’s a bold strategy, we’ll see how it works for them.

The Chron focuses on the Harris County piece of this, with the following observation:

A spokesman for Wesley Hunt, a Republican who ran against Fletcher in 2020, said the former Army helicopter pilot would run for the new District 38 seat if lawmakers were to adopt the initial map proposal.

Hunt had previously announced he was running in 2022 but had yet to settle on a district while awaiting the proposed map.

That sound you hear is me rolling my eyes, and yes I am rolling them hard enough for it to be audible. The Texas Signal has more.

I regret to inform you that Dave Wilson will be back on the HCC Board of Trustees

Sep 28th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
14 comments

From Campos:

Commentary was scrolling through the November 2 ballot for races in Harris County. I got to the HCC Trustee races and bam, I saw a Dave Wilson running in District 6. Running unopposed. The district is on the westside. Surely it had to be another Dave Wilson.

I texted my friend, HCC Trustee Adrianna Tamez and she confirmed it was the same Dave Wilson. How does this happen?

Adrianna also said there was a write-in candidate also in that race. It really doesn’t matter.

How does this happen?

You can see the candidates list here. None of the non-incumbents had filed a finance report for July, so they were below the radar. District 6 is currently held by John Hansen, who did not file for re-election. The write-in candidate is Jim Noteware, last seen as the losing plaintiff in a lawsuit over ballot language for the 2017 pension bond referendum. As I understand it, he didn’t fill out his candidate application correctly, and apparently there wasn’t time for him to fix it. You’ve heard me rant about that before, so just assume I did it again.

Noteware did manage to file for status as a write-in candidate, which just simply means that any write-in votes cast for him will be officially counted, as opposed to a write-in vote for “Mickey Mouse” or “Shelley Sekula-Gibbs”. The odds that he can win as a write-in, even against a sack of pestilence like Dave Wilson, are not good. Yes, I know, incumbent Trustee Eva Loredo won as a write-in back in 2009. The difference is that there were no other candidates in the race, so all she needed was literally one vote. (She got 532 votes, including one from me, out of nearly 11K ballots cast in the district.) Wilson will get a bunch of votes for being the only listed candidate. It’s possible that Noteware could beat him, but it would take a massive campaign to inform voters of why not to vote for Wilson as well as why and how to vote for Noteware. That ain’t happening, and so we will be stuck with the repulsive menace that is Dave Wilson for another six years. I’m sorry to have to ruin your Monday like this, but here we are.

PS – Yes, I know, this is a different district than the one Wilson won back in 2013. It’s also different than the one he ran for in 2019, having resigned from the office he held so he could establish residency in the other district. Our residency laws are meaningless, and Wilson doesn’t represent anyone but himself, so what does it matter what district he runs for? One warehouse is as good as the next. It’s all the same to him.