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July 5th, 2020:

Weekend link dump for July 5

Jul 5th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

“Three and a half years into his presidency we know so much that it raises the question: What do we not yet know about Donald Trump?”

One thing we do know: He’s been a racist for an awfully long time.

“Policing must evolve, and it can do so by developing a Guardian culture. Guardian policing, which has been championed by notable police leaders, has been defined as a service-oriented approach that emphasizes protecting community members from unnecessary indignity and harm, including the potential indignities and harms that can result from policing itself.”

“What To Look For In A Face Mask, According To Science”.

“Mafiosi may impose primitive honor codes, but as Comey observes with no small fascination, these are nevertheless codes that apply to everyone. How long could a mob boss as capricious and untrustworthy as Trump last before his lieutenants revolted and replaced him with someone more competent?”

RIP, Leonard Scarcella, who served as Mayor of Stafford, TX, for fifty years.

“If you live in a state outside of the hot zones, don’t let your governor get puzzled by the fact that things aren’t getting better worse yet.”

RIP, Manuel “Cowboy” Donley, Tejano music pioneer.

Expect there to be more R-rated animated movies as a result of COVID-19.

I haven’t used cash or hit an ATM since March. I don’t plan to abandon the greenback permanently, but for now, no one’s taking it, and so we adjust.

MLB player Ian Desmond has something to say.

“As we move forward with 2020 baseball, it’s important to think critically about how sports should be covered this year. The way we talk about 2020 sports will have to be fundamentally different from how we’ve talked about it in the past, because sports are fundamentally different”.

RIP, Carl Reiner, legendary writer, director, actor, author and 12-time Emmy Award winner. Here are many tributes to the man, and of course Mark Evanier has something to add.

Coronavirus has killed the Costco half-sheet cake, and I just don’t know anymore.

RIP, Johnny Mandel, Oscar and Grammy winning composer who wrote the theme song to M*A*S*H.

Brett Kavanaugh truly made a fool out of Sen. Susan Collins.

“Trumpism has been an historic assault on our civic and democratic order. We cannot simply have it become a normal part of our history. A chief part of the President’s corruption has been abusing his powers to hide his wrongdoing. We can’t move forward without undoing those crimes and unwinding the lies.

“Those of us who work in retail are held to far higher standards of conduct than most big city police officers.”

RIP, Hugh Downs, Emmy-winning broadcaster who hosted 20/20 and the Today Show.

“The Washington [NFL team] said Friday they were beginning a thorough review of the team’s controversial nickname, a stunning step that came just one day after a prominent corporate sponsor called for a change and after years of refusing to consider such a move.” (The “prominent corporate sponsor” is FedEx, which has naming rights on the team’s stadium.)

The fifty percent challenge

Jul 5th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

An interesting point from Amy Walters.

President Trump is at the most precarious political moment of his presidency. Or at least, the most precarious since the summer and fall of 2017 when, in the wake of Charlottesville, the failure to repeal Obamacare, and escalating tensions with North Korea, the president’s approval ratings were mired in the mid-to-high 30s. It was only the success of the tax cut bill at the end of 2017 that brought Trump’s approval ratings back into the 40s, where they’ve remained ever since.

Today, his overall job approval rating sits at 41 percent. Not as bad as 2017, but certainly a dangerous place to be this close to re-election. Of course, this has been a consistent pattern with this president. Like a hammer which only knows how to bash a nail, Trump has one speed. He has never been interested in broadening his base — only in mobilizing it and growing it by targeting and turning out as many Trump friendly non-voters as possible. In states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where non-voters are more likely to be white and working class, the theory is that Trump can win by expanding the pool of Trump partisans, rather than trying to win back (or win over), more traditional and frequent voters.

As such, his ability to win re-election is centered on him being as close in his job approval ratings as his popular vote showing in 2016. The closer he sits to 46-48 percent job approval rating in October, the better chance he has to squeak out another narrow Electoral College win. But, when he gets much below 45 percent, his path to Electoral College victory gets more and more narrow.

[…]

Lots of folks short-hand the results of the 2016 election by highlighting Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton instead of his actual vote share. For example, hearing that Trump carried Iowa by 9 points sounds impressive, until you learn that he did so while taking just 51 percent of the vote. Clinton underperformed Obama’s 2012 vote share in more states than Trump over-performed Mitt Romney’s share of the vote. And, in 2018, GOP gubernatorial candidates in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa all took mostly the same percent of the vote Trump did in their states two years earlier. In Ohio, for example, Trump took 51.3 percent of the vote; two years later, Mike DeWine took 50.4 percent.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand if Trump’s vote share in 2016 was his ceiling, or whether he has room to grow.

Let’s take this idea and apply it to the data we have for Texas. Since the March primaries, in which Joe Biden effectively clinched the nomination, there have been ten public polls of our state:

UT/Trib, April 25
DT/PPP, April 29
UT-Tyler/DMN, May 3
Emerson, May 13
Quinnipiac, June 3
PPP/TDP, June 4
PPP/PT, June 23
Fox, June 25
UT/Trib July 2
PPP/Emily’s List, July 2

All of them included an approval question on Trump in addition to the horse race question, though in a couple of the polls I really had to hunt through the data to find that exact question. Here’s how the approval numbers for each poll stack up against the “vote for” numbers:


Poll    Approve   Vote
======================
UT/TT        49     49
DT/PPP       46     46
UTT/DMN      45     43
Emerson      46     47
QU           45     44
PPP          46     48
PT/PPP       48     48
Fox          50     44
UT/TT        46     48
PPP          46     46

Avg        46.7   46.3

With the exception of the Fox poll (in which the “disapprove” number was 48 for Trump), the approval number and the “vote for” number are very close. What that suggests, at least if you agree with Walters’ thesis, is that Trump seems to have a ceiling on his support, which in Texas you may recall was only 52.2% of the vote in 2016. Trump’s margin of victory in Texas in 2016 was as large as it was in part because a significant portion of the vote went to other candidates. That’s usually not the case in presidential races here, as we see from the past four races in Texas:


Non-two-party vote totals

Year    Total
=============
2004    0.67%
2008    0.85%
2012    1.45%
2016    4.52%

Of course, in the three elections before that, Ralph Nader (2.15% in 2000) and Ross Perot (22.01% in 1992, 6.75% in 1996) had a much bigger effect. My point here is simply that the “none of the above” options this time around are much less known and thus much less likely to draw significant levels of support. That makes Trump’s struggle to get near (let alone over) fifty percent in Texas that much more urgent.

Now just because people don’t like Trump doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him, or that they will vote for Joe Biden. Biden does better than Trump overall in approval numbers, and unlike 2016 when Trump won a large majority of the people who disliked both of the major party candidates, Biden is dominating that vote this year. Still, he has a lower overall “vote for” number than Trump does, and as folks like G. Elliott Morris document, there are many dimensions to this question, and the underlying basics still favor Trump in our state. The big picture is that we’re in a close race here, and it won’t take much more slippage on Trump’s part to make Biden a favorite. It also won’t take much of a bounce on Trump’s part to put him firmly in the driver’s seat. For now, it’s close, and it will likely stay that way.

Of course there’s a lawsuit against Abbott’s mask order

Jul 5th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

And of course it involves the usual suspects.

The day Gov. Greg Abbott’s mandate that face masks be worn in most public places across Texas went into effect, a GOP activist and group of conservatives filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block it.

In the lawsuit, filed Friday in Travis County District Court, Houston GOP activist Steven Hotze, former Republican state Rep. Rick Green, former chair of the Republican Party of Texas Cathie Adams and two Houston business owners argue that Abbott’s executive order and the law that gives him the authority to issue it are unconstitutional.

The lawsuit was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston attorney and former chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, who has been involved in previous challenges to Abbott’s executive orders. It seeks both a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction against Abbott’s order, which it argues is “an invasion of liberty.”

“Today a mask, tomorrow a hazmat suit — where does it stop? Everyday GA-29 is in effect, the government tramples on the liberties of Texans,” the lawsuit reads.

[…]

The lawsuit questions the science behind wearing face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19, calling it “uncertain.” It points to changing guidance on wearing masks, and suggestions that people who wear face masks for extended periods of time experience reduced oxygen levels.

Public health experts and virologists have debunked similar claims, including that face masks do not reduce oxygen intake. A recent study worked on by researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin found that wearing a face mask is one of the most effective ways to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.

The lawsuit also points to the more than 2,000 COVID-19 related deaths that have occurred statewide, arguing that a majority of Texans survive COVID-19. As of Thursday, the Texas Department of State Health Services showed at least 2,525 COVID-19 related deaths had been reported.

Compared to “approximately 180,000 deaths in Texas, caused by multiple diseases and accidents” reported by DSHS last year, COVID-19 “has been a trivial cause of disease and death in Texas” the lawsuit reads.

We knew this was coming, didn’t we? This suit also makes claims about the mask order violating the state constitution, in a similar fashion to what the nine million other lawsuits Hotze and Woofill have filed have made. I rounded up all the ones I was aware of here. Apparently – not surprisingly, but I hadn’t seen any other mention of it – they also filed suit against Judge Lina Hidalgo’s business-focused mask order. You can see a bit of this latest lawsuit here.

I think my favorite bit in this lawsuit, ahead of the science denial and cherry-picking, is the blithe dismissal of over 2000 deaths so far in Texas due to COVID-19. I will remind you, Hotze and his co-plaintiffs are among the most fanatical anti-abortion zealots in the state, because in that context all life is precious to them. Never is the old saw about Republicans valuing life only until the point of birth more clearly expressed than when Steven Hotze does it.

And yet there’s so much more to the Steven Hotze experience.

In the days after George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis last month, as massive protests against police brutality spread across Texas and other states, conservative power broker Steve Hotze of Houston called Gov. Greg Abbott’s chief of staff to pass along a message.

“I want you to give a message to the governor,” Hotze told Abbott’s chief of staff, Luis Saenz, in a voicemail. “I want to make sure that he has National Guard down here and they have the order to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting like they have in Dallas, start tearing down businesses — shoot to kill the son of a bitches. That’s the only way you restore order. Kill ‘em. Thank you.”

The voicemail, which The Texas Tribune obtained Friday via a public information request, came on the weekend of June 6, several days after Abbott activated the Texas National Guard as some of the protests became violent. It is unclear whether Saenz responded, and Abbott’s office declined to comment on the voicemail.

What a guy, huh? And such a wonderful exemplar for modern Christianity, as practiced by mostly conservative white people. I will just note that while the Trib may have gotten that voicemail via a public information request, it surely was not the case that someone at the Trib idly mused to themselves that now was a good time to make a public information request for recent voicemails received by Greg Abbott’s staff. Someone tipped them off about it, and kudos to them for doing so. The man is a plague, and has been for a long time. It’s the Republicans who need to realize that and find ways to diminish the power he wields.

Here’s a Census data preview

Jul 5th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Guess what? The same trends we saw ten years ago are still trending.

Texas’ Hispanic population has grown by more than 2 million since 2010, according to new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau, and the state’s demographer now predicts that Hispanics will be the state’s largest population group by mid-2021.

An annual gain of 201,675 between July 2018 and July 2019 pushed the count of Hispanic residents to more than 11.5 million, the census estimates show. Although annual growth has slowed slightly in recent years, the new figures put a sharp point on how quickly the Hispanic population continues to climb. The annual growth in Hispanic residents has outpaced the combined growth among white, Black and Asian residents every year since 2010.

Texas still has a bigger white population — up to 11.95 million last year — but it grew by just 36,440 last year and by about half a million since 2010. White population growth has been so sluggish this decade that the increase in the number of Asian Texans, who make up a small share of the total population, has almost caught up with the increase in white Texans.

The latest estimates could be the last to come in before lawmakers embark on redrawing the state’s congressional and legislative maps in 2021 to account for population growth — a fraught exercise that has previously led to drawn-out litigation over claims that new maps discriminate against voters of color who are behind the state’s growth. During the last redistricting cycle, Hispanics accounted for about 65% of that growth. With a year of growth left to be accounted for, their share of Texas’ population increase since 2010 is at nearly 54%.

The story included this table of population growth figures:


Race       2010 pop    2019 est   Increase
==========================================
Hispanic  9,460,921  11,525,578  2,064,657
Black     2,899,884   3,501,610    601,726
White    11,428,638  11,950,774    522,136
Asian       960,543   1,457,549    497,006

There must be a collection of people who don’t fall into any of these categories, because if I do the math on the Increase totals, “Hispanic” represents 56% of it, not 54%. White population growth is all of 14% of the total. This is very much in line with where we were in 2010. Now of course, these numbers are estimates, and the collection of the official Census data has been greatly hampered by the pandemic as well as the Trump administration’s relentless hostility towards immigrants, which included the now-defunct effort to put a citizenship question on the form. If the data we get next year differs radically from these figures, we’ll know why.

The headline reason for Census data is of course redistricting. Texas expects to get another three seats in Congress in 2021, though that could be affected by an undercount. Be that as it may, this is a good place to remind you to listen to my interview with Michael Li about the redistricting lawsuits from the past decade. I will have a new interview for you on the topic of redistricting for Monday, with Rep. Marc Veasey, who was one of the plaintiffs in that litigation.

2020 Primary Runoff Early Voting, Day Four: Driven by Democrats

Jul 5th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Early voting took Friday and yesterday off, but resumes today. Here’s where we stand after the first four days:


Election     Mail    Early   Total   Mail %
===========================================
D primary  15,101   25,254  40,355    37.4%
R primary  16,528   24,778  41,306    40.0%

D runoff   32,309   21,536  53,845    60.0%
R runoff   19,405    6,568  25,973    74.7%

The Day Four runoff EV file is here, and the final EV turnout report from March is here. Both Dems and Republicans have been consistent in terms of in person voting, with the daily in person totals for Dems ranging from 5,048 to 5,718 and Republicans from 1,489 to 1,816. Dems do have more and higher profile runoffs, including the US Senate, so don’t draw too much inference from these totals, other than to observe that Dems seem to be willing so far to show up and vote despite the risk. In person voting becomes a larger and larger share of the total vote as we go along and get farther from the day one blob of absentee ballots. Week Two is where the action really starts, and it is highly unlikely Dems will be able to keep pace with March turnout. The comparisons are also going to get a little wonky due to the days off – indeed, the first four days for March were Tuesday through Friday, as Monday had been Presidents’ Day. I may need to fudge things a bit moving forward. However you slice it, while mail ballots have given Dems a boost in July, it’s still the Republicans who depend on them more. Again, make of this what you will.