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February 21st, 2023:

What will it take to keep those ten appellate court benches we won in 2018?

Feb 21st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

As you may recall, Democrats won a ton of Appellate Court races in 2018. Ten of them, in fact, five each on the First and Fourteenth Courts of Appeals, the first such victories since winning a lone bench in 2008. These victories gave Dems a 5-4 majority on each court, and it seemed there would be more to come. We did (barely) win two of the four races in 2020, with one exceedingly close loss and one less close loss, but we went 0 for 4 this year. In 2024, all ten of those benches we won will be on the ballot again. As the title says, what do we need to do to hold onto them?

The appellate courts cover multiple counties. For the First and Fourteenth, those counties are Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Colorado, Fort Bend, Galveston, Grimes, Harris, Waller, and Washington. I’m sure you can guess which of those favor Democrats and are needed for Team Blue to win. I’m going to look back at the four most recent elections to see if we can put some numbers on that.

I put all the county numbers for these races into a spreadsheet, which is my default starting move for a post like this, especially when I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with it. After a minute, I decided to go with the obvious, which was to separate the counties into those that are good for the Dems and those that are not, and see what that told me. We start with 2016. I think the methodology will be clear.

2016 bad counties – 105K to 112K
2016 Harris + FB – 22K to 67K

The “bad counties” are the eight red ones. What I did was add up the Republican and Democratic votes for each candidate in those races – there were four that year, as there were this year – and then took the difference. What you see above is the range for each, so the vote deficit for these counties goes from 105K to 112K. I’m just eyeballing everything and not being too particular about it, this is close enough for these purposes. I then did the same thing for Harris and Fort Bend counties, to see how big the Democratic surplus was in each race. Again, you can see the result.

Obviously, the Democratic candidates lost the four races. The closest they got was trailing by about 39K votes, and the farthest apart was about 89K votes. No big mystery here. The same is true for 2018, except with the exact opposite result:

2018 bad counties – 83K to 90K
2018 Harris + FB – 121K to 174K

Two things are different in 2018. One is that every Democratic candidate won Fort Bend County in 2018, by over 12K votes in each case. While Hillary Clinton carried Fort Bend County by 17K votes, downballot candidates didn’t do as well, and all four Dems trailed there by a little bit. The other difference is that the surplus in Harris and Fort Bend far exceeded the deficit from the eight “bad” counties, and all ten candidates won.

You might notice at this point that the range of outcomes in Harris plus Fort Bend is quite wide in both years, much wider than the range for the red counties. You may also recall the vast hand-wringing campaign about the scurrilous effects of straight-ticket voting in those years, in which Democrats swept Harris County. How awful it was for democracy that these swarms of Democratic voters were mindlessly hitting one button and putting all these non-judges onto our benches. If you don’t know or don’t remember all of the things I had to say about this line of thinking back then, you can probably surmise it from what I’ve just said here. The numbers tell the tale. ‘Nuff said.

2020 bad counties – 122K to 127K
2020 Harris + FB – 108K to 156K

You might have thought in looking at the numbers for 2016 and 2018 that a split result could occur, given the wide ranges. That’s exactly what happened in 2020, as noted above. I spent a lot of time obsessing over these four super-close races two years ago, and don’t have anything new to say. Go read those posts if you haven’t or if you don’t remember them.

2022 bad counties – 100K to 102K
2022 Harris + FB – 9K to 38K

And here we are for this year. You may note that now two elections into the no-straight-ticket-voting era, the range of outcomes in both sets of these counties is the smallest. Indeed, three of the four races were actually in the Dem +34K to +38K range, with one outlier. For whatever the reason fewer people split their tickets, even though they had no choice but to vote (or not) in every single race. Please take a moment to imagine me with a very smug look on my face.

Okay, we can move on now. The lesson we can learn from all this is that we need to maximize the Democratic vote in Harris County if we want to win these races. Not exactly rocket science, but the data is as clear as it could be. The cumulative deficit from the “bad” counties has been edging upward, but the Democratic potential in Harris County – even all by itself, though Fort Bend should be an asset as well – is more than enough to overcome it. Look, Biden won Harris County by 218K in 2020. MJ Hegar, who didn’t do nearly as well, still won Harris by 136K. Even in 2020, the two losing candidates would have won with Hegar’s margin.

Which brings me to the second point of interest, which is really hammering the message home about voting all the way down the ballot. I will show in another post that the undervote rate doesn’t correlate with partisan performance, at least in county judicial races, but with the appellate courts including all those Republican counties, it’s imperative to maximize those margins.

Again, that’s the case now as well. Beto won Harris County by 105K in 2022. With that margin, three of the four Dem candidates would have won by a couple thousand votes. It would have been a tossup for William Demond, I didn’t do the math more rigorously than what you see here, but he might have won. The potential was there.

Now, given the vast sum of money spent by wingnut richies to smear Democratic judges, it may be that was at least as big a challenge as undervoting was. I don’t have the data to make a judgment about that, but the possibility certainly exists. All we can do about that is fight fire with fire. I don’t think we’ll face that kind of concentrated spending in 2024, but it will be a Presidential year, so anything goes.

Two other things can make a difference as well. One is Fort Bend, which was positive for Dems in 2018 and 2020, but not in other years. Dems were down 2K to 7K in 2016, and down 2K to plus less than 1K in 2022. In the two good years, Dems carried Fort Bend by over 10K votes in each race. That helps, and I have hope it can be better than that in 2024.

Of the bright red counties, six of them are small, and while they have steadily become redder over the years, the net effect is fairly small. The two big red counties are Brazoria and Galveston, and they have acted distinctly differently over the last few elections:

Brazoria:

32K to 36K in 2012
33K to 35K in 2016
33K to 35K in 2020

23K to 26K in 2018
25K to 26K in 2022

I went back to 2012 to add in another Presidential year data point. We have held our ground in Brazoria, which is educated and suburban enough to show a few tiny signs of moving a bit blue recently, at least at the top. I would suggest that it’s worth the effort to put some money into the Dem-friendly areas of Brazoria in 2024, for the purpose of squeezing out as many Dem votes as possible. If we can at least keep the deficit here from growing – or better yet, if we can shrink it be a couple thousand votes – we can take a bit of pressure off of Harris and Fort Bend.

At the other end of the scale is the problem known as Galveston:

23K to 27K in 2012
33K to 36K in 2016
41K to 42K in 2020

25K to 28K in 2018
32K to 34K in 2022

Galveston keeps on getting redder, and it’s big enough and growing enough for that to have an effect. I don’t have any great insight here, nor do I have much confidence that Dems could take action to mitigate against this. Maybe I’m wrong about that, I don’t know. I just want to point out the problem, so we know what we’re up against.

So there you have it. The path to retaining these judges is there. We know what to do, and we know where the opportunities and dangers are. It’s a matter of execution from here.

Why should Ken Paxton’s whistleblowers suffer for his sins?

Feb 21st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

That’s the question their lawyers ask in a DMN op-ed.

The only criminal involved

The whistleblower suit is currently pending at the Texas Supreme Court on appeal of an esoteric argument made by the attorney general. Recently, the Office of the Attorney General and the whistleblowers reached a settlement where the whistleblowers would receive $3.3 million to compensate them for lost wages, compensatory damages and attorneys’ fees incurred in the 2-year-old court battle.

The Texas Legislature must now decide whether to approve payment of the settlement. If the Legislature does not approve payment, the case will return to court, taxpayers will pay millions more in attorneys’ fees and even more for damages and plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees if, as expected, the whistleblowers win a jury verdict. The attorney general’s office has already paid its private lawyers approximately $500,000 in attorneys’ fees and the parties have yet to even conduct discovery because of the appeal.

Some have criticized the settlement as “hush money” or argued that it would prevent the public from learning the details related to the accusations. This is incorrect. The whistleblowers have already provided tremendous detail in their 129-page lawsuit, which is a public document. Also, the settlement does not prohibit the whistleblowers from discussing the case or cooperating with law enforcement.

The suggestion that the whistleblowers should be forced to continue their lawsuit so discovery in the suit can be used to investigate the attorney general’s conduct is also unfair. The whistleblowers did their part. They reported illegal conduct to law enforcement and, in return, lost their careers. It is law enforcement’s job to investigate these allegations, which it appears they continue to do. Likewise, the Legislature has tremendous authority to demand documents and testimony from Paxton and those in his office, but it has not.

Why should the whistleblowers, who have already sacrificed their employment and already spent more than two years in court, be asked to spend even more resources and time to investigate the alleged conduct, when the FBI and the Texas Legislature have a mandate and countless resources available to do so?

See here and here for some background. The assertion about the Lege holding Paxton accountable aside – you probably heard my guffaw from the comfort of your home – they do made a decent point. That said, it is well within the Lege’s purview to approve the settlement and then cut the AG’s budget by an equal amount, which is what I would argue. We’ve heard some tough talk from some legislators and from Speaker Phelan. It’s all talk for now, and their track record isn’t too encouraging. But there is a clear path that does honor what the whistleblowers did – and by the way, y’all should keep on talking about it, in lots of detail and in front of crowds, as often as you can – while still exerting a modicum official disapproval on the waste of space known as Ken Paxton. It’s on the Republicans in the Lege to take it.

Some rocky times for Texas’ cryptocurrency miners

Feb 21st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Their boundless optimism never wavers, however.

Cryptocurrency miners began flocking to Texas in the past five years, drawn by the state’s low energy costs and relaxed regulations. As they began setting up shop, lawmakers and local officials were touting the boom as an economic lifeline for the state’s struggling rural communities where many landed.

Nearly 30 crypto mines set up shop in Texas, big data centers that consume tremendous amounts of energy to run banks of computers humming away to mine new bitcoins.

But now, many — if not most — are struggling to stay afloat amid the plummeting value of the commodity they create and soaring electricity costs.

“Bitcoin miners are operating under the very slimmest of margins right now,” said Lee Bratcher — president of the nonprofit Texas Blockchain Council. “There are not many bitcoin miners that are making profits similar to what we would have seen. The bitcoin mining industry, as a whole, is tightening the belt.”

That’s a big turnaround from 2021, when bitcoin’s value peaked at $68,000 and miners collectively earned more than $60 million a day, according to data from Blockchain.com. By the end of 2022, the value had plummeted to less than $17,000 — and miners’ take was $10 million a day. As a result, mining companies that borrowed millions to set up during the bull run now are facing uncertain futures. Several have gone bankrupt. Others are trying to sell off assets. Some have started returning equipment to bankers who financed it.

Shares in Riot Platforms Inc., which operates the state’s largest bitcoin mine northeast of Austin, are down about 60 percent from this time last year. They closed Thursday at $6.13.

Still, many in the crypto mining industry and those who support it remain optimistic it can weather the downturn, saying that it provides a side benefit for Texas as a means of managing the state’s electrical grid, which can also be an occasional source of substantial revenue for the mining companies.

[…]

[Bratcher] estimated that bitcoin mining created about 2,000 direct and 20,000 indirect jobs statewide.

“It’s still contributing to the Texas economy at a pretty significant clip,” he said. “The miners are still following through on their aspirations to be good citizens and good corporate citizens.”

Opponents, though, have decried crypto miners as profiteering on the state’s electrical grid while generating a dubious product.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow and economics lecturer at the University of Houston, said crypto enables bad actors to avoid local and state taxes and hide activities when engaging in criminal activities. And bitcoin miners, he said, have been striking moneymaking deals with the state’s struggling power grid to buy energy at low rates to make bitcoins.

“They remind me of used car salesmen,” he said during a recent interview.

[…]

Murtuza Jadliwala, an associate professor who taught an undergraduate class on cryptocurrency at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said he supports research into the “groundbreaking” blockchain technology — a digital ledger that enables bitcoin by recording the history of transactions. But he’s not a fan of bitcoin itself.

“Do we need cryptocurrencies in our life? I don’t think so,” he said. “There are already good forms of currencies that humans have gotten used to.”

As part of his academic research, Jadiwala has interviewed state comptrollers around the nation to assess economic arguments for bitcoin mining.

“From the states’ perspective, I presume bitcoin mining can be profitable as a business,” he said. “In Texas, we already have pollution and a climate crisis, and on top of it you’re creating this additional pressure on a delicate energy ecosystem. Is it worth it? It might have been worth it if it’s basically doing something good for humanity. I personally don’t see that.”

The Texas cryptominers’ problems mirror those elsewhere, which I hope isn’t too much of a surprise to anyone. But the fall of FTX a few months ago, which is one cause of the current woes but by no means all of them, didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm, so there’s no reason to believe that the “we just have to ride this out” mentality is going anywhere. Much of the growth of cryptomining in Texas has been in rural areas, and I continue to wonder what will happen if the gravy train derails. Maybe if things slow down that will answer some of the questions about electricity use that have been raised. Until then, I’m just going to keep an eye on this. I remain highly skeptical but oddly fascinated by the whole thing.