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Precinct analysis: State House 2022

Mar 20th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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We have data.

Texas Democrats and Republicans are beginning to gear up for a presidential election cycle in which opportunities to flip seats for Congress and the Legislature appear limited.

It’s a natural outcome after Republicans redrew legislative and congressional district boundaries in 2021 to shore up their majorities for the next decade, stamping out most districts that had turned competitive by the end of the last decade. Most of the remaining competitive territory was in South Texas, which is predominantly Hispanic, and where the GOP poured almost all their resources in 2022 — to mixed results.

On paper, there are few obvious pickup opportunities based on an analysis of the governor’s race results in each district. Among U.S. House seats, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke did not carry any districts that are currently held by a representative from the other party. The same was true in the Texas Senate. And among state House districts, Abbott and O’Rourke each won only one that is currently controlled by the opposing party.

The statewide election results often provide a helpful guide of how a district is trending given that they often represent the highest-turnout contest in a district.

The size of the battlefield in 2024 could depend on the top of the ticket, which will be the presidential race. President Joe Biden is expected to run for reelection, and the Republican frontrunner to challenge him is former President Donald Trump, whose 2016 and 2020 runs yielded some of the closest presidential races in Texas in recent history. His closest competitor for the nomination is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not launched a campaign yet but is widely expected to jump in.

There are other factors for the down-ballot contests that remain to be seen.

Even though Abbott signed off on redistricting in 2021, the lines could still change for the 2024 election. Various groups are suing over the maps, alleging things like intentional discrimination and efforts to dilute voters of color, and they are currently awaiting a trial in federal court in El Paso. On the line in the case are boundaries for seats such as a San Antonio state House seat currently held by GOP Rep. John Lujan; that seat is a top battleground in the Texas House.

My initial view of the new map, which looked at the past elections of the decade, is here, and an index of my look at the results from the 2020 election under the old maps is here. I’ll look at the other types of results in future posts, but today we focus on the State House. The 2022 data for the new map is here.

The gist of this story is that the Republican redistricting was very effective and that there aren’t many competitive districts, which means we’re headed for some boring elections, much as we had in the first couple of cycles last decade. That’s slightly less true for the State House than it is for the other entities, and I think the 2024 environment will at least differ enough from last year to produce some variance.

I’m presenting the districts of interest in two groups. One is the competitive Dem-held districts, the other is the same for Republicans. I’ve sorted them further into districts where Abbott or Beto took less than 55%, and districts where they won between 55 and 60 percent. With all that said, here we go. First up are the closer districts currently held by Dems.


Dist  Abbott   Abb%    Beto   Beto%
===================================
022   17,170  44.5%   20,822  54.0%
034   18,285  47.0%   20,128  51.7%
070   27,581  45.9%   31,749  52.8%
074   18,915  48.7%   19,218  49.5%
080   20,611  51.9%   18,249  46.0%

035    9,867  39.9%   14,517  58.7%
036   10,835  39.0%   16,525  59.4%
039   12,056  40.0%   17,686  58.7%
041   17,364  43.5%   22,125  55.5%
045   26,119  38.9%   39,783  59.2%
076   20,148  39.8%   29,705  58.6%
078   21,133  41.4%   29,140  57.0%
092   14,217  40.2%   20,680  58.4%
105   13,086  42.1%   17,515  56.4% 
113   17,848  41.2%   24,854  57.4%
115   22,605  42.1%   30,334  56.5%
135   16,443  40.0%   24,121  58.6%
144   11,566  43.3%   14,683  55.0%
148   15,451  41.2%   21,460  57.2%

As the story notes, the Republicans somehow failed to field a challenger to Rep. Tracy King in HD80, an oversight I expect they’ll fix in 2024. They made the same mistake in 2010 with then-Rep. Allan Ritter in HD21, but Ritter, an old school conservative rural Dem, rectified their error by switching parties. King, whose district is considerably bluer than Ritter’s was, seems unlikely to follow suit; among other things, he’s been pushing to raise the age to buy automatic weapons from 18 to 21, which puts him at odds with Republican orthodoxy. Never say never, and if the district continues a trend towards the red King could be amenable to such overtures, but for now I don’t see that happening.

For the others, HD70 is a newly-drawn Dem district, and I’d expect it to get bluer over time. HD74, which Rep. Eddie Morales won by 11 despite its closeness at the statewide level, was modestly blue based on 2020 results and should be more so in 2024, though if that isn’t true then expect a bigger fight later on. HD34 was purple-ish before redistricting, and as with HD74 I think it will be bluer next year, but again keep an eye on it. The one district that I think will become more vulnerable over time is HD22, in Jefferson County, which has a declining population and much like Galveston County in the 2000s and 2010s a reddish trend over the past decade. I’d like to see some effort made to shore it up, but I don’t know enough about the local conditions to know how feasible that is. Feel free to chime in if you do.

None of the other districts concern me. The Latino districts, I’d like to see what they look like in 2024. They’re all actually pretty spot on to the 2020 numbers, which given the overall lackluster Dem showing in many areas is moderately encouraging. The rest of them are in overall strong Dem areas, and I don’t expect any reversion of past trends.

Now for the Republican-held seats that Dems might like to target:


Dist  Abbott   Abb%    Beto   Beto%
===================================
037   20,551  51.1%   19,202  47.7%
052   41,813  52.5%   36,500  45.8%
063   35,831  54.8%   28,630  43.8%
094   34,479  54.7%   27,557  43.8%
108   46,796  52.6%   41,022  46.1%
112   35,245  50.6%   33,467  48.0%
118   25,172  48.5%   25,952  50.0%
121   40,300  51.1%   37,368  47.4%
122   47,856  54.7%   38,491  44.0%
133   33,195  54.4%   26,971  44.2%
138   31,077  54.1%   25,464  44.3%

014   27,936  56.9%   20,207  41.1%
020   48,367  56.5%   35,743  41.8%
025   31,545  59.3%   20,785  39.1%
026   36,266  57.7%   25,683  40.8%
028   38,940  58.1%   27,061  40.4%
029   33,393  58.8%   22,579  39.7%
054   23,763  59.7%   15,463  38.8%
055   28,125  58.4%   19,322  40.1%
057   37,715  58.1%   26,311  40.5%
061   39,753  56.1%   30,211  42.7%
065   41,487  56.9%   30,451  41.7%
066   41,464  56.9%   30,421  41.8%
067   38,127  56.3%   28,647  42.3%
089   38,701  57.5%   27,643  41.1%
093   34,136  57.6%   24,310  41.0%
096   35,260  55.2%   27,877  43.6%
097   36,059  55.2%   28,336  43.4%
099   31,869  58.6%   21,719  39.9%
106   41,639  58.3%   28,875  40.5%
126   35,835  59.4%   23,627  39.1%
127   39,102  58.5%   26,791  40.1%
129   37,118  56.8%   27,144  41.5%
132   35,079  57.0%   25,603  41.6%
150   33,857  58.3%   23,303  40.1%

I think it’s fair to say that the failure to win back HD118 was a big disappointment last year. I’ll use a stronger word if we get the same result in 2024. HD37 remains the subject of litigation – if there’s anything on the agenda to address it in this legislative session, I am not aware of it at this time. It had a slight Democratic tilt in 2020 and will clearly be a top target next year. As will HDs 112 and 121, with 108 and 52 a notch below them, though 108 is starting to feel a bit like a white whale to me. All things being equal, Dems should be in position to make a small gain in the House next year, with some potential to do better than that, and given everything we’ve seen since the dawn of time, the potential to do a bit worse as well.

The farther-out districts are mostly those we had identified as targets following the 2018 election, with a few adjustments for the new map. They’re all in counties and regions that had been trending Democratic. For the most part, I expect that to continue, but that doesn’t have to be monotonic, nor does it have to be at a fast enough pace to make any of these places actually primed to flip. I’ve said before that the way Tarrant County was sliced up it gives me “Dallas County 2012” vibes, but whether than means that a bunch of districts eventually flip or they all hold on if by increasingly tight margins remains to be seen. We’ll know more after 2024.

In theory, there won’t be many truly competitive districts in 2024, like there weren’t last year. The national environment, plus the higher turnout context, plus whatever yet-unknown factors may be in play will surely affect that, by some amount. I’d like to see an optimistic view for next year and get as many strong candidates in as many of these districts as possible, but that’s far easier said than done. This is not that different than how things looked after the 2012 elections, and we know how things went from there. Doesn’t mean anything will go any particular way or on any timetable, it’s just a reminder that there’s only so much we can know right now. I’ll have some thoughts about the other district types going forward. Let me know what you think.

The unhinged abortion pill lawsuit hearing

Mar 16th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
No comments yet

What a shitshow.

The future of medication abortion in the United States remains up in the air after a federal judge heard arguments Wednesday in a suit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s long-standing approval of mifepristone.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk said he would rule “as soon as possible” on the challenge brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative, anti-abortion law firm.

ADF is asking Kacsmaryk to suspend — and ultimately withdraw — the FDA’s approval of the medication, which would have nationwide implications, especially in states where abortion remains legal. In the hearing, a lawyer for ADF conceded that this would be unprecedented, but argued that the court had the authority to intervene to prevent harm.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice and Danco Laboratories, the pharmaceutical company that produces generic mifepristone, argued that the lawsuit is meritless.

Granting a preliminary injunction would be “depriving patients and doctors of a safe and effective drug,” argued Julie Straus Harris, with the DOJ.

Since it was initially approved in 2000, mifepristone has been found to be overwhelmingly safe and effective for terminating pregnancies. Citing that body of evidence, the FDA has recently relaxed restrictions on the medication, which is used in the majority of the abortions in the United States.

In the suit, ADF is representing anti-abortion medical organizations and doctors who argue they have been harmed by having to treat patients who have experienced adverse effects from the medications — and that they anticipate increased harm as a result of these loosened restrictions.

They also argue the drug was initially approved improperly under an FDA regulation that fast-tracks drugs that treat serious illnesses.

“Pregnancy is not an illness,” said Erik Baptist, a lawyer for ADF, in Wednesday’s hearing. “Mifepristone doesn’t treat anything.”

Kacsmaryk, appearing to give weight to that argument, listed off all the drugs that were approved under this regulation before mifepristone, most of which treat HIV and cancer. Separately, he summarized Baptist’s argument as asking the court to “deem one of these not like the others.”

The hearing, which ran more than four hours in Kacsmaryk’s Amarillo courtroom, covered a wide range of arguments. But the central question before Kacsmaryk is not as much about abortion as it is about administrative procedure — and whether the plaintiffs have any right to bring this lawsuit at all.

See here and here for the background. I can’t overstate how ridiculous this all is, and that includes the extreme restrictions on coverage of the hearing, for which you literally had to be there or at a single courthouse in Dallas, but only a handful of people were allowed at the courtroom, and cellphones were banned, so no live-tweeting. All for a hearing at which one hand-picked judge could severely curtail access to abortion for millions of women across the country, based on vibes. I really hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see anything in the coverage I’ve read to suggest this guy will do anything other than what he clearly wants to do. We’ll find out soon. Jezebel, the Associated Press, Slate, Daily Kos, and NBC News have more.

UPDATE: From Slate, “If Kacsmaryk rewrites the history of mifepristone’s approval as grounds to pull it from the market, his decision should command no respect or acquiescence from anyone—not the FDA, not abortion providers, and certainly not the public at large.”

The hearing for that unhinged abortion pill lawsuit is today

Mar 15th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Like I said, brace yourselves.

A federal judge in Texas will hear arguments Wednesday in a closely watched dispute that could halt distribution of a key drug used for medication abortion and disrupt access nationwide, even in states where reproductive rights are protected.

The case before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk was brought in November by a conservative legal organization on behalf of anti-abortion rights medical associations and targets the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decades-old approval of the drug mifepristone, one of two medications used to terminate an early pregnancy.

The associations have requested Kacsmaryk order the FDA to withdraw its 2000 approval of mifepristone, arguing the agency erred when it gave the green-light to the drug under a regulation that allows accelerated approval of medications for “serious or life-threatening illnesses.”

But the Biden administration has warned that such a step would harm patients who rely on abortion pills and further strain state health care systems, particularly in places with clinics already grappling with overcrowding as a result of abortion restrictions in neighboring states.

The parties will have two hours apiece to press their arguments before Kacsmaryk, and the judge laid out a host of issues for them to discuss Wednesday, including whether the associations have the legal standing to sue, whether an injunction would serve the public interest and the regulation under which mifepristone was approved.

Kacsmaryk could issue his decision on the associations’ request for a preliminary injunction any time after the hearing, though a quick appeal to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is expected.

[…]

In papers filed with the court, the anti-abortion rights groups claimed the FDA exceeded its regulatory authority to approve mifepristone and has over the years removed safeguards by changing the dosage and route of administration in 2016, and lifting an in-person dispensing requirement to allow the pills to be mailed in 2021.

“The FDA took these actions by running roughshod over the laws and regulations that govern the agency and, more importantly, protect the public from harmful drugs,” they argued.

The Biden administration countered that the challengers’ request for the court to withdraw approval of mifepristone is “extraordinary and unprecedented.” Administration lawyers said they have been unable to find any case where a court has “second-guessed FDA’s safety and efficacy determination and ordered a widely available FDA-approved drug to be removed from the market — much less an example that includes a two-decade delay.”

Taking aim at the associations’ claim that the FDA improperly accelerated approval of mifepristone without substantial evidence of its safety, Justice Department lawyers noted that the 2000 approval of the drug came more than four years after manufacturer Danco submitted its application.

The drug maker, too, told the court that forcing the FDA to withdraw its long standing approval of mifepristone would not only “seismically disrupt the agency’s governing authority as to whether drugs are safe and effective,” but also put Danco out of business.

“The public has no interest in a hastily cobbled together, and overtly political, attempt by private parties to wrest control of the drug approval process from the United States agency responsible for it — an agency that has acted deliberately, thoughtfully, and consistent with its authorizing statute and implementing regulations,” the company said.

See here for the background. Plenty of legal types have written at length about how specious and flimsy the plaintiffs’ arguments are, and how utterly lacking their claim of standing is, so I’ll just note that and move on. Whether any of that matters to this wingnut judge or not will only be known after his ruling. As for the coverage of this ridiculous lawsuit, TPM among others provided insight:

TPM has obtained, and is first to report, the transcript from the status conference, which was conducted over the phone.

The case centers on the Food and Drug Administration’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, a drug often prescribed with misoprostol to induce abortions. Anti-abortion groups are trying to get that approval revoked, which could send the drug’s availability into flux.

After some typical housekeeping, Kacsmaryk leans on the lawyers to keep the hearing quiet.

“Because of limited security resources and staffing, I will ask that the parties avoid further publicizing the date of the hearing,” he said. “This is not a gag order but just a request for courtesy given the death threats and harassing phone calls and voicemails that this division has received. We want a fluid hearing with all parties being heard. I think less advertisement of this hearing is better.”

He said that the case so far has brought “a barrage of death threats and protesters and the rest.”

“So we will have standard security protocols in place, but I’ll just ask as a courtesy that you not further advertise or Tweet any of the details of this hearing so that all parties can be heard and we don’t have any unnecessary circus-like atmosphere of what should be more of an appellate-style proceeding,” he added.

He then told the lawyers that he was going to purposefully keep the hearing off the docket until the day before the hearing, to keep it as under the radar as possible — a move that prompted questions and objections by observers when discovered. A Department of Justice lawyer on the call sought clarification about whether the hearing would be made public at some point Tuesday.

“To minimize some of the unnecessary death threats and voicemails and harassment that this division has received from the start of the case, we’re going to post that later in the day,” Kacsmaryk replied. “So it may even be after business hours, but that will be publicly filed.”

The absolute best case scenario here is that in the end this was all a massive waste of time and energy. Here’s hoping. CNN, ABC News, and CNBC have more.

The unhinged abortion pills lawsuit will take place in darkness

Mar 13th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Nothing about this is good.

The Texas judge who could undo government approval of a key abortion drug has scheduled the first hearing in the case for Wednesday but took unusual steps to keep it from being publicized, according to people familiar with the plans.

The hearing will be an opportunity for lawyers for the Justice Department, the company that makes the drug and the conservative group that is challenging it to argue their positions before U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. After they do, the judge could rule at any time.

Kacsmaryk scheduled the hearing during a call with attorneys Friday, said multiple people familiar with the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. Kacsmaryk said he would delay putting the hearing on the public docket until late Tuesday to try to minimize disruptions and possible protests, and asked the lawyers on the call not to share information about it before then, the people said.

Public access to federal court proceedings is a key principle of the American judicial system, and Kacsmaryk’s apparent delay in placing the hearing on the docket is highly unusual. The judge and his staff did not respond to emails requesting comment on Saturday evening.

The lawsuit seeks to revoke Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in a medication abortion. The case has garnered widespread attention and protests.

A decision by Kacsmaryk to suspend FDA approval of mifepristone would immediately prompt major changes in how many abortion clinics across the country provide care. Some are planning to immediately switch to a misoprostol-only protocol, while others are planning to offer only surgical abortions. Any decision would likely be appealed to the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, and possibly to the Supreme Court.

[…]

Kacsmaryk told the attorneys that he also wanted to delay publicizing the hearing because courthouse members have received threats in the wake of the lawsuit, according to the people familiar with the call. Several people close to Kacsmaryk say the judge and his family have faced security threats since he ascended to the federal bench in 2019, and those threats have intensified ahead of the abortion pill ruling.

Before and after the Friday phone call with lawyers, The Washington Post repeatedly called and emailed Kacsmaryk’s chambers seeking information about it, but received no response. Kacsmaryk’s chambers also did not respond to a request that reporters be allowed to join the call.

Kacsmaryk was nominated by President Donald Trump and is known for his conservative views on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.

By waiting to publicize the time of the hearing, Kacsmaryk and his staff could make it difficult for the public, the media and others to travel to the courthouse in Amarillo. The remote, deeply conservative city has few direct flights except from Dallas or San Antonio and is at least a four-hour drive from any of the state’s major, heavily-Democratic cities. Still, over 150 abortion rights advocates gathered there on a Saturday in mid-February to voice their support for abortion pills.

I noted this lawsuit when it was filed. There’s been a metric crap-ton of analysis and punditry and increasingly dire warnings about this lawsuit and the pernicious effect of court-shopping, and I’ll leave it to you to google around for all the screaming into the void you can handle. It’s possible that this maneuver means that Kacsmaryk has at least a dim idea that his actions have the potential to cause a massive shitstorm. It also may just be that he doesn’t care to deal with the media and he has the power to make his wishes come true. Either way, brace yourselves.

UPDATE: Chris Geidner has more.

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.

What I want from the next HCDP Chair

Feb 6th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

As you know, the Harris County Democratic Party will soon have a new Chair. And as you know, I am a Democratic precinct chair, which means I’m one of the several hundred people that will vote on who that is. So as a public service to you, and as my way of telling the candidates what will influence my vote, these are my priorities for the next HCDP Chair.

1. Start with a goal of 1 million Democratic votes for Joe Biden in 2024, and really aim for 1.1 million. Hillary got 700K votes in 2016. Beto got 800K in 2018. Biden (and Ed Gonzalez) got 900K in 2020. There’s already more than 2.5 million registered voters in Harris County, up about 100K from November 2020, and I expect there to be over 2.6 million by next November. Sixty-five percent turnout (we were at over 68% in 2020) gets 1.7 million voters total (up less than 50K from 2020), and hitting one million Dems would mean taking almost 59% of the vote for Biden, which so far is the only real reach here as he was at 56% in 2020. Beto got to 58% in 2018.

What I’m really aiming for is a net of at least 300K for Biden in Harris County; he was at plus 218K in 2020, after Beto was at plus 200K in 2018. If we want to talk about making Texas competitive for Biden, and whoever our 2024 Senate nominee may be, that’s the kind of Dem advantage in Harris County we’re going to need, at a minimum. That’s the kind of vision I want from the next Chair, and I want there to be a plan to go along with it.

2. Improve performance in base Democratic areas. Harris County went from being evenly matched in 2012 to the strong blue county it is now in large part because Dems have vastly increased performance in formerly dark red places. I’ve said this before, but Mitt Romney won 11 State Rep districts in 2012, and he won them all with over 60% of the vote. In 2020, Donald Trump only won two State Rep district with 60% or more, HDs 128 and 130, and he won nine overall with HDs 134 and 135 being won by Dems.

But Democrats didn’t do as well in a number of dark blue districts in 2020 as they had in 2016 and 2018, and as we saw in 2022 it was in those districts where Beto fell short, often well short, of his 2018 performance. We need to turn that around. Part of this is that we have a vibrant Democratic club structure in place, with a lot of that participation coming in the formerly red areas. There’s a lack of clubs, and thus neighborhood-based outreach, in a lot of traditional Democratic areas. It’s also a dirty secret that some Democratic elected officials in those areas do very little to help with GOTV efforts. Achieving the goal set in item #1 will require an all-hands-on-deck mobilization. I want to know what the next Chair intends to do about that.

3. Find ways to partner with Democratic parties in neighboring counties. I know the job title is “Harris County Dem Party Chair”, but we abut a lot of other counties, and in quite a few places the development just sprawls over the border, making the distinction between the two of lesser value. There are also a lot of offices that include parts of Harris and parts of one or more neighbors: CDs 02 and 22, SBOE6, SDs 07 and 17, and all of the Firth and 14th Courts of Appeal benches, of which there will be ten Democratic incumbents on the ballot next year. We should find ways to collaborate and cooperate to help our candidates in these races.

In counties like Brazoria and Montgomery, population growth near the Harris County border has led to some burgeoning Democratic turf, mostly around Pearland for the former and around the Woodlands for the latter. I also believe that Conroe is starting to become like Sugar Land, a small but growing urban center of its own that we ought to see as such, and seek to build alliances there. In Galveston and to a lesser extent Waller, the growth has been in redder areas, and we need to find the allies there who likely feel isolated and help them connect with and amplify each other. In Chambers and Liberty, anything we can do to help slow down the small but steady Republican advantage will help.

My point is that 10-20 years ago, as Democrats were starting to assert power in Harris County, it was still quite common for Dems in the then-dark red areas to believe they were the only ones like themselves there. A big part of what the county’s organizing, and the growth of the local clubs, has done is to dispel that notion and allow people the chance to enhance their communities. Anything we can do – in a collaborative, “how can we help?” manner that respects the people who have been doing their own work there for a long time – to help with that will help us all.

4. Threat management. I’m being deliberately provocative here because I think this is urgent and I want people to see the dangers. We know there’s a lot of disinformation and propaganda aimed at non-English speaking communities – we’ve seen the websites and Facebook posts, and we’ve seen the mailers and heard the radio ads. We know that “poll watchers” with malign intent are out there. We’ve just had multiple winning candidates get sued by their losing opponents, and many of them were left scrambling to pay for lawyers to defend themselves in court. We’ve faced previous legal challenges over voting locations and voting hours and mail ballots and on and on. For the latter at least, we’ve had a strong response from the County Attorney, but we can’t assume that will always be the case. We need to be aware of past and current threats to our elections and candidates, we need to be on the lookout for emerging threats, and we need to have a plan and dedicated staff and resources to respond to them.

This is where my thinking is. I don’t expect the candidates for HCDP Chair to have fully formed answers to these problems, but I do hope they agree that these are urgent matters and deserve attention. They may have other priorities and I’m open to that, I just want to be heard. So far the two candidates that I know of – Silvia Mintz and Mike Doyle – are the only two that have come forward. I’ll let you know if I hear anything more on that, and you let me know what you think.

Can we finally end Ken Paxton’s egregious court-shopping?

Jan 30th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

File this under “About damn time”, even if it eventually comes to naught.

The only criminal involved

As soon as President Joe Biden entered the White House, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an unprecedented campaign of obstruction to block his agenda in the courts. Paxton took advantage of a quirk—really, a loophole—in the federal judiciary: A state can pick the specific judge who will oversee its case by filing in a small division where only one judge sits. Using this strategy, Paxton has positioned his cases before a rotating cast of the same conservative judges, most of them nominated by Donald Trump. They have dutifully played their role in this pantomime of litigation, issuing an unending series of sweeping injunctions that block Biden administration policies nationwide for months or years.

On Thursday, the administration finally said: enough. In response to yet another Texas lawsuit exploiting this loophole, Biden’s Justice Department called out Paxton—and, implicitly, the judges playing along with his scheme. The DOJ highlighted Texas’ “blatant” and shameless “judge-shopping,” urging a transfer to another court “in the interests of justice.” Naturally, Trump-nominated Judge Drew Tipton is unlikely to oblige; that is, after all, why Paxton hand-picked him for this lawsuit. But the DOJ’s filing marks a new phase of battle against Republicans’ judicial gamesmanship: The Justice Department is playing hardball in the lower courts, forcing compromised judges to address their own complicity in a cynical partisan chicanery.

As soon as President Joe Biden entered the White House, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an unprecedented campaign of obstruction to block his agenda in the courts. Paxton took advantage of a quirk—really, a loophole—in the federal judiciary: A state can pick the specific judge who will oversee its case by filing in a small division where only one judge sits. Using this strategy, Paxton has positioned his cases before a rotating cast of the same conservative judges, most of them nominated by Donald Trump. They have dutifully played their role in this pantomime of litigation, issuing an unending series of sweeping injunctions that block Biden administration policies nationwide for months or years.

On Thursday, the administration finally said: enough. In response to yet another Texas lawsuit exploiting this loophole, Biden’s Justice Department called out Paxton—and, implicitly, the judges playing along with his scheme. The DOJ highlighted Texas’ “blatant” and shameless “judge-shopping,” urging a transfer to another court “in the interests of justice.” Naturally, Trump-nominated Judge Drew Tipton is unlikely to oblige; that is, after all, why Paxton hand-picked him for this lawsuit. But the DOJ’s filing marks a new phase of battle against Republicans’ judicial gamesmanship: The Justice Department is playing hardball in the lower courts, forcing compromised judges to address their own complicity in a cynical partisan chicanery.

The underlying lawsuit in Texas v. Department of Homeland Security is another frivolous effort to shift control over border policy from the executive branch to a single federal judge. Paxton has pulled this off before: In August 2021, he persuaded another Trump-nominated judge, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, to block Biden’s repeal of a Trump policy that forced U.S.-bound migrants to remain in Mexico. Kacsmaryk even forced U.S. diplomats to negotiate with Mexican officials under threat of sanctions. Texas’ new suit, filed on Tuesday, seeks to do something similar. The state is infuriated by a new agreement between the Biden administration and Mexico regarding migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela. (The U.S. cannot send these migrants back to their home countries.) The agreement compels most of these migrants to stay on the Mexican side of the border. But it allows a small number of them to enter the U.S. legally—and remain here for a limited period—if they are vetted and have financial supporters in the country already.

This policy, first implemented in December, has already contributed to a dramatic reduction in unlawful entry among migrants from the four relevant nations. But Texas is furious that the new rules will allow some migrants to enter the U.S. lawfully. So its lawsuit asks the judiciary to strike down the entire policy, blowing up negotiations between the Mexican and American governments.

Paxton strategically filed the suit in the Victoria Division of the Southern District of Texas, where exactly one judge sits: Tipton, not just a Trump nominee but also a longtime Federalist Society member. This is the seventh case that Paxton has positioned before Tipton. The first, filed two days after Biden’s inauguration, sought to block the new president’s 100-day halt on deportations. Tipton swiftly granted a nationwide injunction against the pause.

Paxton’s suit is also the 25th time he has exploited the single-judge loophole to get a case before an ideological ally in Texas, according to statistics meticulously compiled by law professor (and Slate contributor) Steve Vladeck. (That count shoots up when you factor in suits filed in other red states with single-judge divisions, like Louisiana.) This plot goes way beyond any Democratic forum-shopping under Trump. Democrats filed in favorable district courts and hoped they drew a left-leaning judge. Paxton, by contrast, zeroes in on a handful of divisions within districts where he is guaranteed to draw a hard-right judge.

The Justice Department is asking for the case to be moved to either Austin or Washington, DC, on the theory that as the plaintiff is the state of Texas and the defendant is the USA, the case should be heard where one of them “resides”, which is to say one of their capitals. Alternately, the Justice Department asks for the suit to be moved to another division within the Southern District of Texas, one that has multiple judges in it, so the case can be randomly assigned as per the norm, instead of going to one of Paxton’s pet judges by default. I have no idea what the likelihood of that is – clearly, Slate author Mark Joseph Stern isn’t optimistic – but it can’t hurt to ask, if only to see what kind of weak justification is given for denying the request. I don’t know if this is appealable, but if it is I’d expect the Justice Department to go for it, since why not. It’s worth the effort and if nothing else it may at least put a little sand in Paxton’s gears. Anything is better than what we have been doing.

Mifepristone can now be offered at retail pharmacies

Jan 4th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good news, for at least some of the country.

For the first time, retail pharmacies, from corner drugstores to major chains like CVS and Walgreens, will be allowed to offer abortion pills in the United States under a regulatory change made Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration. The action could significantly expand access to abortion through medication.

Until now, mifepristone — the first pill used in the two-drug medication abortion regimen — could be dispensed only by a few mail-order pharmacies or by specially certified doctors or clinics. Under the new F.D.A. rules, patients will still need a prescription from a certified health care provider, but any pharmacy that agrees to accept those prescriptions and abide by certain other criteria can dispense the pills in its stores and by mail order.

The change comes as abortion pills, already used in more than half of pregnancy terminations in the U.S., are becoming even more sought after in the aftermath of last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning the federal right to abortion. With conservative states banning or sharply restricting abortion, the pills have increasingly become the focus of political and legal battles, which may influence a pharmacy’s decision about whether or not to dispense the medication.

The F.D.A. did not issue an announcement but planned to update its website to reflect the decision. The two makers of the pill, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, released statements saying the agency had informed them of the action.

The action is the latest step taken by the federal government to expand access to abortion pills by easing some of the restrictions that have applied to mifepristone since it was approved in 2000.

In December 2021, the F.D.A. said it would permanently lift the requirement that patients obtain mifepristone in person from a health provider, a step that paved the way for telemedicine abortion services which conduct medical consultations with patients by video, phone or online questionnaires and then arrange for them to receive the prescribed pills by mail.

On Tuesday, the F.D.A. officially removed the in-person requirement from its regulatory rule book for mifepristone, leaving in place the remaining two requirements: that health providers be certified to show they have the knowledge and ability to treat abortion patients and that patients complete a consent form.

See here for some background. My understanding of the action taken in 2021 was that it allowed mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth. I’m a little fuzzy on how much of a difference-maker this announcement is, but whatever it is, every little bit helps. Just, you know, not everywhere.

Whether large pharmacy chains and local drugstores would opt to make the pills available was not immediately clear Tuesday. The steps for pharmacies to become certified to dispense mifepristone are not difficult, but they involve some administrative requirements that go beyond the process pharmacies use with most other medications, such as designating an employee to ensure compliance. Given the time and resources required by those steps, some pharmacies may not consider it worthwhile to offer a medication that only a small percentage of their customers may use.

But while abortion pills may constitute a small percentage of a pharmacy’s sales, they could have a big impact on its public profile. Calculations about public perception and the highly polarized political landscape are also likely to influence a pharmacy’s decision.

In about half the states, abortion bans or restrictions would make it illegal or very difficult for pharmacies to provide abortion pills.

In states where abortion remains legal, pharmacies may face customer demand for the medication or public pressure from abortion rights advocates and health providers. National chains could decide to offer the medication in those states while not providing it in their stores in restrictive states.

I can say with 100% certainty that you won’t be able to walk into your local CVS here in Texas and find any mifepristone. The real question is what the Lege will try to do to prevent people from going out of state to get any kind of abortion care, or to punish people not in Texas who provide that care; the corollary questions will be about what the courts will do with the resulting litigation. We’re still a few months out from that, but it’s coming. In the meantime, at least some people will get to benefit from this.

Precinct analysis: The better statewide races

Dec 30th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread
Hidalgo versus Mealer

As noted before, Greg Abbott got 490K votes in Harris County, far less than the 559K he received in 2018 running against Lupe Valdez. Of the other six races for statewide executive offices, three were similar in nature to the Governor’s race and three were friendlier to Republicans. This post is about the first three, and those are the races for Lite Guv, Attorney General, and Ag Commissioner. For those of you whose memories stretch back as far as 2018, yes those were the three best races for Dems after the Beto-Cruz race for Senate as well. Let’s look at the numbers.

Lieutenant Governor


Dist  Patrick  Collier     Lib
==============================
HD126  35,244   23,460   1,482
HD127  38,578   26,405   1,691
HD128  31,548   13,748   1,148
HD129  36,347   26,966   1,802
HD130  44,307   20,934   1,434
HD131   5,886   24,670     933
HD132  34,417   25,498   1,374
HD133  31,931   27,421   1,396
HD134  28,262   51,502   1,828
HD135  16,373   23,514   1,050
HD137   7,690   13,164     650
HD138  30,328   25,534   1,383
HD139  11,536   31,304   1,246
HD140   5,850   12,681     647
HD141   4,494   20,290     851
HD142   8,641   25,030   1,043
HD143   8,469   15,270     804
HD144  11,551   14,029     854
HD145  12,368   32,031   1,449
HD146   8,285   33,018   1,148
HD147   8,809   36,618   1,383
HD148  15,383   20,840   1,065
HD149  11,923   19,315     824
HD150  33,548   22,898   1,431

CC1    65,573  204,223   7,632
CC2    94,272  105,549   6,218
CC3   214,555  146,441   8,815
CC4   107,368  129,927   6,251
							
JP1    58,698  126,202   5,083
JP2    21,608   29,498   1,599
JP3    34,975   41,776   2,126
JP4   166,204  128,604   7,578
JP5   137,161  147,432   7,185
JP6     4,941   17,062     885
JP7    11,370   65,643   2,250
JP8    46,811   29,923   2,210

Dist Patrick% Collier%    Lib%
==============================
HD126  58.56%   38.98%   2.46%
HD127  57.86%   39.60%   2.54%
HD128  67.93%   29.60%   2.47%
HD129  55.82%   41.41%   2.77%
HD130  66.45%   31.40%   2.15%
HD131  18.69%   78.34%   2.96%
HD132  56.16%   41.60%   2.24%
HD133  52.56%   45.14%   2.30%
HD134  34.64%   63.12%   2.24%
HD135  40.00%   57.44%   2.56%
HD137  35.76%   61.22%   3.02%
HD138  52.98%   44.60%   2.42%
HD139  26.17%   71.01%   2.83%
HD140  30.50%   66.12%   3.37%
HD141  17.53%   79.15%   3.32%
HD142  24.89%   72.10%   3.00%
HD143  34.51%   62.22%   3.28%
HD144  43.70%   53.07%   3.23%
HD145  26.98%   69.86%   3.16%
HD146  19.52%   77.78%   2.70%
HD147  18.82%   78.23%   2.95%
HD148  41.25%   55.89%   2.86%
HD149  37.19%   60.24%   2.57%
HD150  57.96%   39.56%   2.47%

CC1    23.64%   73.61%   2.75%
CC2    45.75%   51.23%   3.02%
CC3    58.02%   39.60%   2.38%
CC4    44.09%   53.35%   2.57%
			
JP1    30.90%   66.43%   2.68%
JP2    41.00%   55.97%   3.03%
JP3    44.34%   52.96%   2.70%
JP4    54.96%   42.53%   2.51%
JP5    47.01%   50.53%   2.46%
JP6    21.59%   74.55%   3.87%
JP7    14.34%   82.82%   2.84%
JP8    59.30%   37.90%   2.80%

Attorney General 


Dist   Paxton    Garza     Lib
==============================
HD126  35,146   23,166   1,681
HD127  38,480   26,208   1,817
HD128  31,566   13,692   1,110
HD129  36,386   26,643   1,914
HD130  44,397   20,427   1,713
HD131   5,857   24,875     694
HD132  34,454   25,125   1,539
HD133  31,901   26,700   1,898
HD134  28,201   50,706   2,371
HD135  16,314   23,615     964
HD137   7,704   13,091     643
HD138  30,154   25,204   1,732
HD139  11,438   31,372   1,145
HD140   5,605   13,078     466
HD141   4,487   20,489     610
HD142   8,580   25,228     859
HD143   8,346   15,595     594
HD144  11,375   14,337     662
HD145  12,220   32,097   1,425
HD146   8,320   32,991     999
HD147   8,731   36,766   1,206
HD148  15,221   20,981   1,035
HD149  11,876   19,423     706
HD150  33,382   22,726   1,595
							
CC1    65,204  204,223   7,257
CC2    93,611  106,606   5,426
CC3   214,042  144,575  10,162
CC4   107,284  129,131   6,533
							
JP1    58,125  125,740   5,522
JP2    21,364   29,906   1,317
JP3    34,843   42,072   1,833
JP4   165,760  127,783   8,087
JP5   136,969  146,132   7,898
JP6     4,815   17,369     687
JP7    11,411   65,835   1,804
JP8    46,854   29,698   2,230

Dist  Paxton%   Garza%    Lib%
==============================
HD126  58.58%   38.61%   2.80%
HD127  57.86%   39.41%   2.73%
HD128  68.08%   29.53%   2.39%
HD129  56.03%   41.03%   2.95%
HD130  66.73%   30.70%   2.57%
HD131  18.64%   79.15%   2.21%
HD132  56.37%   41.11%   2.52%
HD133  52.73%   44.13%   3.14%
HD134  34.70%   62.39%   2.92%
HD135  39.89%   57.75%   2.36%
HD137  35.94%   61.06%   3.00%
HD138  52.82%   44.15%   3.03%
HD139  26.02%   71.37%   2.60%
HD140  29.27%   68.30%   2.43%
HD141  17.54%   80.08%   2.38%
HD142  24.75%   72.77%   2.48%
HD143  34.02%   63.56%   2.42%
HD144  43.13%   54.36%   2.51%
HD145  26.72%   70.17%   3.12%
HD146  19.66%   77.97%   2.36%
HD147  18.69%   78.72%   2.58%
HD148  40.88%   56.34%   2.78%
HD149  37.11%   60.69%   2.21%
HD150  57.85%   39.38%   2.76%
			
CC1    23.57%   73.81%   2.62%
CC2    45.52%   51.84%   2.64%
CC3    58.04%   39.20%   2.76%
CC4    44.16%   53.15%   2.69%
			
JP1    30.69%   66.39%   2.92%
JP2    40.63%   56.87%   2.50%
JP3    44.25%   53.43%   2.33%
JP4    54.95%   42.36%   2.68%
JP5    47.07%   50.22%   2.71%
JP6    21.05%   75.94%   3.00%
JP7    14.44%   83.28%   2.28%
JP8    59.47%   37.70%   2.83%

Dan Patrick (481K votes) and Ken Paxton (480K) were the two low scorers among Republicans. Mike Collier and Rochelle Garza both had leads against them of just over 100K votes, right in line with Beto’s lead against Abbott. That’s not as robust as what Dems did in 2018 as we know, but I can’t blame Collier and Garza for that. They were still top scorers, it was mostly that the environment wasn’t as good for them.

Overall, it looks like Collier and Garza did about as well percentage-wise as Beto did. Collier actually did a tiny bit better in HD133, and both did better in HD134. In some cases, like HD132 and HD138, Collier and Garza were about equal with Beto but Patrick and Paxton were a point or two behind Abbott. That looks to me to be the effect of the larger Libertarian vote in those races – there were about 29K Lib votes in these two races, while there were about 16K third party and write-in votes for Governor. At least in those cases, you can make the claim that the Libertarian received votes that might have otherwise gone to the Republican.

In the Ag Commissioner race, Sid Miller got 507K votes to top Abbott’s total, but he was aided by not having any third party candidates. Susan Hays did pretty well compared to the other Dems in that straight up two-way race:

Ag Commissioner


Dist   Miller     Hays
======================
HD126  36,872   22,678
HD127  40,060   25,992
HD128  32,447   13,641
HD129  38,091   26,236
HD130  46,273   19,792
HD131   6,091   25,170
HD132  36,189   24,576
HD133  34,548   25,581
HD134  31,793   48,687
HD135  17,174   23,491
HD137   8,207   13,090
HD138  32,276   24,389
HD139  12,291   31,372
HD140   5,904   13,079
HD141   4,667   20,779
HD142   9,047   25,391
HD143   8,631   15,710
HD144  11,849   14,344
HD145  13,871   31,301
HD146   8,922   33,114
HD147   9,761   36,482
HD148  16,238   20,657
HD149  12,270   19,513
HD150  34,895   22,408
						
CC1    71,746  202,649
CC2    97,753  106,167
CC3   224,670  141,583
CC4   114,198  127,074
						
JP1    64,850  122,675
JP2    22,256   29,898
JP3    35,923   42,332
JP4   173,381  126,119
JP5   145,619  143,496
JP6     5,243   17,412
JP7    12,266   66,242
JP8    48,829   29,299

Dist  Miller%    Hays% 
=======================
HD126  61.92%   38.08%
HD127  60.65%   39.35%
HD128  70.40%   29.60%
HD129  59.21%   40.79%
HD130  70.04%   29.96%
HD131  19.48%   80.52%
HD132  59.56%   40.44%
HD133  57.46%   42.54%
HD134  39.50%   60.50%
HD135  42.23%   57.77%
HD137  38.54%   61.46%
HD138  56.96%   43.04%
HD139  28.15%   71.85%
HD140  31.10%   68.90%
HD141  18.34%   81.66%
HD142  26.27%   73.73%
HD143  35.46%   64.54%
HD144  45.24%   54.76%
HD145  30.71%   69.29%
HD146  21.22%   78.78%
HD147  21.11%   78.89%
HD148  44.01%   55.99%
HD149  38.61%   61.39%
HD150  60.90%   39.10%
		
CC1    26.15%   73.85%
CC2    47.94%   52.06%
CC3    61.34%   38.66%
CC4    47.33%   52.67%
		
JP1    34.58%   65.42%
JP2    42.67%   57.33%
JP3    45.91%   54.09%
JP4    57.89%   42.11%
JP5    50.37%   49.63%
JP6    23.14%   76.86%
JP7    15.62%   84.38%
JP8    62.50%   37.50%

Miller was definitely a slight notch up from the first three. How much of that is the lack of a third choice versus some other consideration I couldn’t say, but you can see it in the numbers.

I’ll get into it a bit more in the next post when we look at the higher-scoring Republicans, but my sense is that these three Dems, plus Beto, received some crossovers. Beto and Collier and Garza had enough money to at least run some ads, while Hays was still running against perhaps the highest-profile (read: got the most negative news for his ridiculous actions) incumbent after those three. We have definitely seen races like this, certainly in elections going back to 2016 – Hillary versus Trump, Biden versus Trump, Beto and the Lite Guv/AG/Ag Commish triumvirate this year and 2018. We saw it with Bill White in 2010, too – as I’ve observed in the past, White received something like 300K votes from people who otherwise voted Republican. That’s a lot! Democrats can persuade at least some Republicans to vote for their statewide candidates, but only under some conditions. If we can get the baseline vote to be closer, that could be enough to push some people over the top. We’re still working on the first part of that equation.

Like I said, I’ll get into that a bit more in the next post. Looking at what I’ve written here, I need to do a post about third party votes, too. Let me know what you think.

Ike Dike authorization officially passed

Dec 27th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Took a roundabout route to get there, but here we are.

With the stroke of a pen, President Joe Biden authorized a $34 billion proposal to build a massive storm surge protection system on the Texas coast and around Galveston Bay.

Biden on Friday signed the National Defense Authorization Act, a $858 billion spending package that includes raises for troops and aid to Ukraine.

Buried deep in the bill was a single line that opens the door for one of the largest public infrastructure projects in U.S. history to be built in Texas. The defense act authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Texas Coastal Protection and Restoration project, which has locally become better known as the Ike Dike.

The $34 billion plan is a proposal to build a system of seagate, levees and dunes in an around Galveston Bay to block storm surge from rushing in from the Gulf of Mexico and into the bay and Houston Ship Channel.

[…]

Once fully constructed, the Army Corps estimates the project will save $2.2 billion in storm damages every year, though how useful the gates will be when they are complete — or over the half-century or more that the structure is expected to operate — remains to be seen. Like any other levees or dams, the barrier could fall short or fail to hold back the biggest storm surges. The project doesn’t address the kind of the rain-caused flooding that happened during Hurricane Harvey.

The defense bill doesn’t authorize funding of the project. Congress will need to separately authorize $21.4 billion for the project sometime in the future, while a new state-created taxing entity, the Gulf Coast Protection District, will have to contribute about $13 billion to the project, according to estimates published in the defense act.

“Federal authorization of the Coastal Texas Program represents a momentous step forward for this critical effort, over a decade in the making, to protect the communities, economy, and vital ecosystems of the Texas coast from the devastating effects of coastal storm surge,” said Michel Bechtel, president of the protection district’s board of directors.

As noted in an earlier story, a standalone version of the Ike Dike bill had passed both the House and the Senate earlier in the year, but there were differences between the two that were not reconciled in time for that bill to pass. So this is what we get, basically the same thing just done in a weird way. I feel confident that funding will follow – the state has already created one funding mechanism, but federal dollars will be needed – and from there it’s just a matter of how long it takes to actually build something. Which, to be clear, is probably on a 20-year timeline even if everything goes more or less as planned. So while one door is finally closed, there’s still a long way to go.

Electoral Count Act included in must-pass budget bill

Dec 21st, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s not nearly enough to shore up voting rights, but it’s still vitally necessary and clearly the best we could do.

After months of negotiations, it now appears to be official: The Electoral Count Reform Act has hitched a ride on the much-anticipated 2023 omnibus funding package that was released Monday night, setting up a path for the legislation to pass the Senate.

“My two-word reaction is thank God,” said Matthew Seligman, a lawyer and fellow at Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center who has tracked the reform effort closely. “I think this means that it’s virtually certain that it will be included in the final bill and the Electoral Count Reform Act will become law.”

Democrats and a handful of Republicans have been negotiating over how to reform the outdated 1887 law — which lays out how presidential electors are counted in Congress — for the past year. The effort to do so was prompted by vagaries in the text that former President Donald Trump and lawyer John Eastman sought to exploit to subvert the 2020 election.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced they’d come to an agreement this summer, but it has been unclear for some time whether the legislation would garner the 60 Republican votes needed to clear a filibuster, and whether it would pass before Republicans take over control of the House next year.

But the end game is coming into focus: The Friday government funding deadline is coming up, lawmakers are aiming to pass the massive $1.66 trillion spending bill — and the ECA reform included in it — before then.

“We must finish passing this omnibus before the deadline on Friday when government funding runs out, but we hope to do it much sooner than that,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on Tuesday morning. He added the first procedural votes in the Senate could happen as soon as today.

The ECA reform bill would clarify that the vice president’s role in certifying a presidential election is purely ceremonial and make it clear that they do not have the sole power to address disputes over electors. It would also raise the threshold for Congress to invalidate legitimate electors and for state legislatures to override the popular vote in their states.

This reform is “​​a critical step to strengthen the guardrails for our democracy and ensure that the will of the voters is upheld following a presidential election,” said Holly Idelson, a counsel with Protect Democracy.

It really is a shame that a much more robust reform package that included a renewed Voting Rights Act, redistricting restrictions, requirements for early voting, voting by mail, same-day voter registration, and more was not able to pass. I’ve ranted about that before, and all I can do at this point is hope that another opportunity comes up in the foreseeable future. At least this will make it harder for a bad actor to try to steal the next Presidential election. You take the wins where you can.

Precinct analysis: Beto versus the spread

Dec 19th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott

So last time we saw the numbers for the 2022 Governor’s race. But what numbers need in order to be meaningful is context, and that means other numbers to compare them to. We’re going to do that in a few different ways, and we’ll start with the numbers from the Texas Redistricting Council for these new districts. Specifically, the numbers from 2018 and 2020.


Dist    Abbott    Beto     Cruz    Beto
=======================================
HD126   35,835  23,627   38,851  26,028
HD127   39,102  26,791   40,573  28,326
HD128   31,983  13,915   32,586  15,892
HD129   37,118  27,144   38,281  29,112
HD130   44,983  20,891   42,747  20,968
HD131    5,963  25,387    5,628  33,440
HD132   35,079  25,603   32,220  23,431
HD133   33,195  26,971   34,930  30,329
HD134   29,592  51,010   32,114  54,514
HD135   16,443  24,121   16,162  27,762
HD137    7,860  13,421    8,713  19,309
HD138   31,077  25,464   32,754  28,778
HD139   11,643  32,115   11,599  38,842
HD140    5,717  13,400    5,393  19,532
HD141    4,549  20,922    4,459  28,096
HD142    8,666  25,793    8,265  29,705
HD143    8,420  16,047    8,751  23,602
HD144   11,566  14,683   12,511  21,278
HD145   12,631  32,765   12,101  37,672
HD146    8,511  33,610    9,227  40,111
HD147    8,952  37,366    9,575  45,020
HD148   15,451  21,460   16,281  26,815
HD149   12,068  19,844   12,097  27,142
HD150   33,857  23,303   33,084  23,466


Dist   Abbott%   Beto%    Cruz%   Beto%
=======================================
HD126   59.37%  39.14%   59.40%  39.80%
HD127   58.50%  40.08%   59.30%  40.00%
HD128   68.66%  29.87%   66.80%  32.60%
HD129   56.80%  41.53%   56.30%  42.80%
HD130   67.29%  31.25%   66.60%  32.70%
HD131   18.78%  79.96%   14.30%  85.20%
HD132   57.06%  41.64%   57.50%  41.80%
HD133   54.41%  44.21%   53.10%  46.10%
HD134   36.16%  62.34%   36.80%  62.40%
HD135   39.97%  58.63%   35.00%  64.40%
HD137   36.32%  62.01%   30.90%  68.40%
HD138   54.09%  44.32%   52.80%  46.40%
HD139   26.25%  72.41%   22.90%  76.50%
HD140   29.36%  68.82%   21.50%  78.00%
HD141   17.61%  80.98%   13.60%  85.80%
HD142   24.79%  73.80%   21.60%  77.80%
HD143   33.86%  64.53%   26.90%  72.50%
HD144   43.34%  55.02%   36.80%  62.50%
HD145   27.31%  70.85%   24.10%  75.00%
HD146   19.95%  78.80%   18.60%  80.70%
HD147   19.04%  79.49%   17.40%  81.90%
HD148   41.18%  57.19%   37.50%  61.70%
HD149   37.31%  61.36%   30.60%  68.70%
HD150   58.34%  40.15%   58.10%  41.20%

Greg Abbott got 490K votes in 2022, whereas Ted Cruz got 498K in 2018. It’s therefore not a surprise that Abbott generally matched Cruz’s vote totals in the districts, with a bit of variation here and there. Beto, meanwhile, got 595K votes in 2022 after getting 700K in 2018, a significant drop. You can clearly see that in the district data. What’s interesting to me is that Beto was pretty close to his 2018 performance for the most part in Republican districts. His dropoff was almost entirely in strong Democratic districts, which accounts for the decrease in vote percentage he got. This is consistent with reports that Republicans had the turnout advantage nationally, due in part to weaker Democratic turnout among Black voters.

You can shrug your shoulders about this or freak out for What It All Means for 2024 as you see fit. I tend to lean towards the former, but I will readily acknowledge that the job of working to get turnout back to where we want it for 2024 starts today. I’ll have more to say about this in future posts as well, but let me open the bidding by saying that the target for Democratic turnout in Harris County in 2024, if we want to make a serious run at winning the state for the Democratic Presidential nominee, is one million Democratic votes; it may actually need to be a little higher than that, but that’s the minimum. It’s doable – Biden got 918K in 2020, after all. Ed Gonzalez got 903K in his re-election for Sheriff. Really, we may need to aim for 1.1 million, in order to win the county by at least 300K votes, which is what I think will be needed to close the statewide gap. Whether we can do that or not I don’t know, but it’s where we need to aim.

I also want to emphasize the “Abbott got more or less the same number of votes in each district as Cruz did” item to push back as needed on any claims about Abbott’s performance among Latino voters. His improvement in percentage is entirely due to Beto getting fewer votes, not him getting more. That’s cold comfort from a big picture perspective for Democrats, and as we saw in 2020 a greater-than-expected share of the lower-propensity Latino voters picked Trump, so we’re hardly in the clear for 2024. All I’m saying is that claims about Abbott improving his standing with Latino voters need to be examined skeptically. Remember that if we compared Abbott to Abbott instead of Beto to Beto, he got 559K votes in 2018, so he dropped off quite a bit as well. He got fewer votes in each of the Latino districts in 2022 than he did in 2018:

HD140 – Abbott 6,466 in 2018, 5,717 in 2022
HD143 – Abbott 10,180 in 2018, 8,420 in 2022
HD144 – Abbott 13,996 in 2018, 11,566 in 2022
HD145 – Abbott 15,227 in 2018, 12,631 in 2022
HD148 – Abbott 18,438 in 2018, 15,541 in 2022

So yeah, perspective. I suppose I could have done the Governor-to-Governor comparison instead, but I was more interested in Beto’s performance, so that’s the route I took. Beto would look better from a percentage viewpoint if I had done it that way. There’s always more than one way to do it.

One last thing on turnout: In 2014, Wendy Davis led the Democratic ticket with 320K votes in Harris County. Beto was at over 401K even before Election Day. His total is almost twice what Davis got. We can certainly talk about 2022 being “low turnout”, but we’re in a completely different context now. 


Dist    Abbott    Beto    Trump   Biden
=======================================
HD126   35,835  23,627   50,023  35,306
HD127   39,102  26,791   53,148  38,332
HD128   31,983  13,915   46,237  21,742
HD129   37,118  27,144   51,219  38,399
HD130   44,983  20,891   58,867  29,693
HD131    5,963  25,387   10,413  42,460
HD132   35,079  25,603   46,484  35,876
HD133   33,195  26,971   42,076  40,475
HD134   29,592  51,010   38,704  66,968
HD135   16,443  24,121   26,190  40,587
HD137    7,860  13,421   12,652  24,885
HD138   31,077  25,464   42,002  37,617
HD139   11,643  32,115   17,014  49,888
HD140    5,717  13,400   10,760  24,045
HD141    4,549  20,922    8,070  38,440
HD142    8,666  25,793   13,837  41,332
HD143    8,420  16,047   15,472  28,364
HD144   11,566  14,683   20,141  25,928
HD145   12,631  32,765   18,390  45,610
HD146    8,511  33,610   12,408  51,984
HD147    8,952  37,366   14,971  55,602
HD148   15,451  21,460   24,087  34,605
HD149   12,068  19,844   21,676  35,904
HD150   33,857  23,303   45,789  34,151

Dist   Abbott%   Beto%   Trump%  Biden%
=======================================
HD126   59.37%  39.14%   57.80%  40.80%
HD127   58.50%  40.08%   57.30%  41.30%
HD128   68.66%  29.87%   67.10%  31.60%
HD129   56.80%  41.53%   56.20%  42.20%
HD130   67.29%  31.25%   65.50%  33.00%
HD131   18.78%  79.96%   19.50%  79.60%
HD132   57.06%  41.64%   55.60%  42.90%
HD133   54.41%  44.21%   50.30%  48.40%
HD134   36.16%  62.34%   36.10%  62.50%
HD135   39.97%  58.63%   38.70%  59.90%
HD137   36.32%  62.01%   33.20%  65.40%
HD138   54.09%  44.32%   52.00%  46.60%
HD139   26.25%  72.41%   25.10%  73.70%
HD140   29.36%  68.82%   30.60%  68.30%
HD141   17.61%  80.98%   17.20%  81.80%
HD142   24.79%  73.80%   24.80%  74.10%
HD143   33.86%  64.53%   34.90%  64.00%
HD144   43.34%  55.02%   43.20%  55.60%
HD145   27.31%  70.85%   28.30%  70.10%
HD146   19.95%  78.80%   19.00%  79.80%
HD147   19.04%  79.49%   20.90%  77.60%
HD148   41.18%  57.19%   40.50%  58.10%
HD149   37.31%  61.36%   37.20%  61.70%
HD150   58.34%  40.15%   56.50%  42.10%

Obviously, the vote totals don’t compare – over 1.6 million people voted in 2020, a half million more than this year. But for the most part, Beto was within about a point of Biden’s percentage, and even did better in a couple of districts. Abbott did best in the Republican districts compared to Trump. As we’ll see when we look at the other statewide races, Abbott (and Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton) was one of the lower performers overall among Republicans, as was the case for Trump in 2020, but maybe there were slightly fewer Republican defectors this year.

It will take an improvement on the 2020 Biden and 2018 Beto numbers for Dems to put any State Rep districts into play, with HD138 being the first in line; remember that HD133 was a bit of an outlier, with a lot of Republican crossovers for Biden. Incumbency has its advantages, and as we have seen Dem performance can be a lot more variable downballot than at the top, especially when the top has the most divisive Republicans, so it will take more than just (say) Biden getting 50.1% in HD138 for Rep. Lacy Hull to really be in danger. It’s more that this will be another incentive to really work on boosting overall turnout. Having a good candidate in place, which I think Stephanie Morales was this year, and making sure that person has the financial and logistical support they need (which she didn’t have) will be key.

I’ll have more to say as we go along. Please let me know what you think and ask any questions you may have.

Ken Paxton’s hatred of LGBTQ+ people continues unabated

Dec 15th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Item #1: Texas attorney general’s office sought state data on transgender Texans.

The only criminal involved

Employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office: to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their Texas driver’s licenses and other department records during the past two years.

“Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month,” the chief of the DPS driver license division emailed colleagues in the department on June 30, according to a copy of a message obtained by The Washington Post through a public records request. “We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.”

After more than 16,000 such instances were identified, DPS officials determined that a manual search would be needed to determine the reason for the changes, DPS spokesperson Travis Considine told The Post in response to questions.

“A verbal request was received,” he wrote in an email. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”

Asked who in Paxton’s office had requested the records, he replied: “I cannot say.”

[…]

Public records obtained by The Post do not indicate why the attorney general’s office sought the driver’s license information. But advocates for transgender Texans say Paxton could use the data to further restrict their right to transition, calling it a chilling effort to secretly harness personal information to persecute already vulnerable people.

“This is another brick building toward targeting these individuals,” said Ian Pittman, an Austin attorney who represents Texas parents of transgender children investigated by the state. “They’ve already targeted children and parents. The next step would be targeting adults. And what better way than seeing what adults had had their sex changed on their driver’s licenses?”

[…]

The records obtained by The Post, which document communications among DPS employees, are titled “AG Request Sex Change Data” and “AG data request.” They indicate that Paxton’s office sought the records a month after the state Supreme Court ruled that Paxton and Abbott had overreached in their efforts to investigate families with transgender children for child abuse.

Paxton’s office bypassed the normal channels — DPS’ government relations and general counsel’s offices — and went straight to the driver license division staff in making the request, according to a state employee familiar with it, who said the staff was told that Paxton’s office wanted “numbers” and later would want “a list” of names, as well as “the number of people who had had a legal sex change.”

During the following two months, the employee said, the DPS staff searched its records for changes in the “sex” category of not only driver’s licenses but also state ID cards available from birth, learner’s permits issued to those age 15 and up, commercial licenses, state election certificates, and occupational licenses. The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation for describing internal state discussions.

DPS staff members compiled a list of 16,466 gender changes between June 1, 2020, and June 30, 2022, public records show. In the emails, DPS staff members repeatedly referred to the request as coming from the attorney general’s office as they discussed attempting to narrow the data to include only licenses that had been altered to reflect a court-ordered change in someone’s gender.

DPS staff members did spot checks on the data, examining records that included names of specific individuals, according to records and the state employee familiar with the inquiry. But it was hard to weed out driver’s licenses that had been changed in error, or multiple times, or for reasons other than gender changes.

“It will be very difficult to determine which records had a valid update without a manual review of all supporting documents,” an assistant manager in the DPS driver’s license division wrote in an email to colleagues on July 22.

On Aug. 4, the division chief emailed staff members, “We have expended enough effort on this attempt to provide data. After this run, have them package the data that they have with the high level explanations and close it out.” On Aug. 18, a senior manager emailed to say a data engineer had “provided the data request by the AG’s office (attached).”

Last month, The Post made a request to Paxton’s office for all records the attorney general’s office had directed other state offices to compile related to driver’s licenses in which the sex of the driver was changed, as well as related emails between Paxton’s office and other state agencies.

Officials indicated that no such records existed.

“Why would the Office of the Attorney General have gathered this information?” Assistant Attorney General June Harden wrote in an email to The Post, later adding, “Why do you believe this is the case?”

If it did, Harden said, any records were probably exempt from release because of either attorney-client privilege or confidentiality.

Marisol Bernal-Leon, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, later emailed that the office “has reviewed its files and has no information responsive to your request” for either records it had requested from DPS or emails between the attorney general’s office and DPS.

Separately, DPS provided The Post with a half-dozen documents spanning three months that referenced the request by Paxton’s office.

When The Post shared copies of the records that had been provided by DPS, Assistant Attorney General Lauren Downey noted that “none of the records provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety are communications with the Office of the Attorney General. Our response to your request was accurate.”

Downey did not reply to questions about why the DPS emails refer to the request as originating from the attorney general. Paxton’s office has yet to respond to another public records request for any records of its contact with DPS concerning driver’s license changes via means other than email, including phone calls, video meetings and in-person exchanges.

It’s the brazen lying about it that really kicks this up a notch. I can’t think of a good reason for a public official to need this data, or to bypass the normal channels for requesting it, but there are plenty of bad reasons for it. Because data tends to be messy, you can see how potentially thousands of people who were not Paxton’s intended targets could have been caught up in whatever malevolent scheme he cooked up for them. In a way it’s too bad this came to light before that could have happened, because the harassment of such a large number of people might have been an actual scandal that could damage him. Now it’s just another unfair MSM hit piece that Paxton’s enablers can ignore.

And in case that wasn’t enough, we also got news item #2: Texas fights federal rule that would outlaw LGBTQ discrimination in state adoptions and foster care.

Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the federal government to preserve Texas’ ability to include religious groups that won’t place kids with same-sex couples in the state’s adoption process without losing federal funding.

With his lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Galveston, Paxton continued a yearslong, cross-country legal fight over anti-discrimination rules for adoption and foster programs drafted under the Obama administration that languished under former President Donald Trump and have never been enforced.

The rule on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination, known as the SOGI rule, prohibits recipients of federal funds for adoption and foster programs from discriminating on the basis of age, disability, sex, race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or same-sex marriage status.

A Texas law passed in 2017 allows religious organizations that contract with the state to refuse to work with LGBTQ couples who are seeking to foster or adopt. The law requires the state to ensure there are other providers to work with LBGTQ children or families who are refused help by a religious provider, although there is no specific process for ensuring that happens.

Losing federal funding would be a major blow for Texas’ foster care budget. Federal money accounts for nearly a quarter of the $550 million the state spends on residential care each year, and another $58 million supports case work for foster children who qualify for the funds, according to the attorney general’s complaint.

[…]

The anti-discrimination rule has been the subject of court battles. In 2019, Texas joined the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to sue the federal government over the rule, arguing it would prevent the religious group from becoming a provider of child welfare services. Shortly after the suit was filed, the Trump administration announced a rollback of the rule.

But Paxton is now seeking to have the rule thrown out preemptively as other groups are suing to compel its enforcement.

[…]

Bryan Mares, the government relations director at the National Association of Social Workers Texas, said the state law allowing religious providers to refuse services to LGBTQ couples creates a supply issue for the LGBTQ children in the foster system who need affirming homes.

“It makes it much more difficult to find families who might already identify as part of the LGBTQ community to bring children that are in the system into their home,” Mares said of the law. “It really just impedes our ability to prioritize LGBTQ youth placements into homes where they are being supported in a way that they need.”

A 2018 analysis of Texas licensed child-placing agencies by the Center for American Progress found that nearly half of them had statements of faith listed on their websites, but only 10% had expressed specific willingness to work with LGBTQ foster and adoptive parents. “Given this landscape, and the religious exemptions and lack of legal protections … prospective parents may understandably become discouraged about finding a welcoming agency and choose to abandon their efforts,” the report concluded.

Pretty sure that’s the intent. I’ve run out of accurate descriptors for Paxton and his shameless hate. At this point, I don’t know what can be done to stop him. He certainly acts as though there is nothing in his way and no possible consequences for anything he does.

State and county election result relationships: Tarrant County

Dec 12th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

In years past, Tarrant County was a pretty close bellwether for election results in the state of Texas. From 2004 through 2016, the closeness of their Presidential numbers with the statewide numbers was eerie. But since 2018 the talk has been about how Tarrant is on the verge of turning blue, which puts it at least a little to the left of the state as a whole. As I did before with Harris County, I thought I’d take a closer look at how statewide candidates have done in Tarrant County compared to the state overall, to see what it might tell me. We start as we did with Harris in the distant past of 2002:


2002                 2004                   2006
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
43.33   41.27 -2.06   38.22   37.01 -1.21   36.04   34.80 -1.24
39.96   38.53 -1.43   40.94   37.36 -3.58   29.79   31.07  1.28
46.03   42.63 -3.40   40.77   38.06 -2.71   37.45   37.06 -0.39
41.08   37.76 -3.32   42.14   39.15 -2.99   37.23   36.99 -0.24
32.92   30.86 -2.06                         37.01   36.41 -0.60
41.48   37.94 -3.54                         40.96   40.67 -0.29
37.82   34.85 -2.97                         41.79   40.86 -0.93
41.49   39.02 -2.47                         41.73   40.52 -1.21
40.51   37.55 -2.96                         44.89   42.79 -2.10
41.54   38.73 -2.81                         43.35   41.56 -1.79
41.89   38.49 -3.40								
43.24   39.74 -3.50								
45.90   42.26 -3.64								
39.15   35.90 -3.25								
42.61   39.20 -3.41								
40.01   36.92 -3.09								
										
Min   -3.64           Min   -3.58           Min   -2.10
Max   -1.43           Max   -1.21           Max    1.28
Avg   -2.96           Avg   -2.62           Avg   -0.75

You can read the earlier posts for the explanation of the numbers. The bottom line is that in early to mid Aughts, Tarrant was more Republican overall than the rest of the state. As was the case with Harris, there was a step in the Democratic direction in 2006, with the chaotic multi-candidate Governor’s race providing the first Democrat to do better in Tarrant than in the state, but it was still about a point more Republican than overall.


2008                  2010                  2012
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
43.68   43.73  0.05   42.30   40.98 -1.32   41.38   41.43  0.05
42.84   42.52 -0.32   34.83   34.97  0.14   40.62   40.41 -0.21
44.35   43.39 -0.96   33.66   33.90  0.24   39.60   39.20 -0.40
43.79   43.47 -0.32   35.29   35.24 -0.05   41.91   41.40 -0.51
45.88   44.16 -1.72   35.80   35.83  0.03   41.24   40.31 -0.93
44.63   43.51 -1.12   36.24   35.64 -0.60				
45.53   43.81 -1.72   37.26   35.39 -1.87				
43.75   42.49 -1.26   37.00   35.97 -1.03				
                      35.62   35.17 -0.45				
                      36.62   36.05 -0.57				
										
Min   -1.72           Min   -1.87            Min   -0.93
Max    0.05           Max    0.24            Max    0.05
Avg   -0.92           Avg   -0.55            Avg   -0.40

Still slightly on the Republican side as we move into elections that feel more familiar to us – as I’ve said before, looking at those elections from 2002 through 2006 is like visiting a foreign country – and you can see how dead on the Tarrant Presidential numbers were. Tarrant was a bit more Republican in the judicial races than in the executive office and Senate races, but otherwise not much else to say.


2014                  2016
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================
34.36   36.13  1.77   43.24   43.14 -0.10
38.90   41.08  2.18   38.38   38.62  0.24
38.71   39.53  0.82   38.53   38.43 -0.10
38.02   38.91  0.89   41.18   40.49 -0.69
37.69   38.67  0.98   39.36   39.58  0.22
35.32   36.49  1.17   40.05   39.75 -0.30
36.84   38.14  1.30   40.20   40.91  0.71
37.25   38.43  1.18   40.89   40.59 -0.30
36.49   38.02  1.53				
37.60   38.41  0.81				
36.54   38.00  1.46				
						
Min    0.81           Min   -0.69
Max    2.18           Max    0.71
Avg    1.28           Avg   -0.04

I wouldn’t have guessed that 2014 would be the year that Tarrant County officially became (slightly) more Democratic than the state as a whole, but here we are. Maybe because 2014 was such a miserable year, maybe because Wendy Davis was the Dem nominee for Governor, maybe it was just time. It wasn’t quite the start of a trend, as things snapped back a bit in 2016, but a threshold had been crossed.


2018                  2020                  2022
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
48.33   49.93  1.60   46.48	49.31  2.83   43.81   47.24  3.43
42.51   43.75  1.24   43.87	46.18  2.31   43.44   47.36  3.92
46.49   47.25  0.76   43.56	45.25  1.69   43.62   46.80  3.18
47.01   48.11  1.10   44.49	46.71  2.22   40.91   44.33  3.42
43.39   44.70  1.31   44.08	46.14  2.06   42.10   44.90  2.80
43.19   43.99  0.80   44.76	47.23  2.47   43.63   46.72  3.09
46.41   47.37  0.96   44.35	46.50  2.15   40.51   43.83  3.32
43.91   44.85  0.94   45.18	47.38  2.20   41.81   45.14  3.33
46.83   47.86  1.03   44.70	47.03  2.33   42.87   46.36  3.49
46.29   47.44  1.15   45.47	47.91  2.44   43.55   46.75  3.20
46.29   47.68  1.39                           43.02   46.48  3.46
45.48   46.24  0.76                           42.74   46.22  3.48
45.85   47.14  1.29								
										
Min    0.76           Min    1.69            Min    2.80
Max    1.60           Max    2.83            Max    3.92
Avg    1.10           Avg    2.27            Avg    3.34

And thus, despite the small hiccup of 2016, the ball moved ever forward. It would be easy to look at the Tarrant County results in 2022, especially at the top, compare them to 2018 and 2020, and declare that Tarrant had backslid, but as you can see that would be a misreading of the data. I’m going to step a little out on a limb here and say that Tarrant will be Democratic at a Presidential level again in 2024, and there’s a good chance that will be true elsewhere on the statewide ballot as well. Going by the average gap in 2022, two other Dems would have carried Tarrant County in 2018. If the trend we see here continues, getting to about 45% statewide would probably be enough to win Tarrant in 2024. Please feel free to point at this and laugh at me if this turns out to be wildly off base. Until then, I’ll do this same exercise for a couple more counties, just for the fun of it.

HISD to get funding for electric school buses

Dec 5th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Some good news.

Houston Independent School District is hopping on the city’s net-zero carbon emissions bus, so to speak, thanks to more than $6.2 million in funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The funds are part of the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program Fiscal Year 2022 rebate competition, which will award nearly $51 million in funds from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to Texas school districts, and $965 million in total to districts around the country.

Houston’s $6.2 million will go toward 25 new school buses, according to a statement from the EPA. Fifteen of the vehicles will be brand-new electric buses.

[…]

HISD must now submit Payment Request Forms with purchase orders that shows the district has ordered the new buses and eligible infrastructure.

The district is among 13 Texas school districts to receive funding. Dallas ISD, the second largest school district in the state behind HISD, was awarded roughly $7.6 million. Killeen ISD and Socorro ISD received the largest sums among the districts, totaling nearly $9.9 million in funding each.

The first – and last – time I blogged about electric school buses was a decade ago. It’s fair to say this has been a long time coming. There will be another billion dollars in federal funds available for applicants next year as well, so hopefully HISD can bump up that number. Metro has used a different pot of money to get their own electric buses. The more, the better.

Precinct analysis: How the 2022 Harris County State Rep candidates did versus the 2020 and 2018 results

Nov 28th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

I still don’t have a full canvass of Harris County, so I’m looking around to see what kind of analyses I can do in the meantime. For this post, I’m comparing how the candidates in the contested State Rep contests did against the 2020 and 2018 numbers that we saw in the redistricting reports. This isn’t my preferred kind of comparison – there are too many uncontested races, some “contested” races really aren’t because of poor candidate quality, incumbents tend to have a bit of an edge – but it’s what we’ve got for now. My impressions of the numbers for the new State Rep districts are here, and the Texas Legislative Council reports can be found here for 2020 and here for 2018. First up is 2020:


Dist   Biden   Trump   Hegar  Cornyn     Dem     Rep
====================================================
128    31.6%   67.1%   30.6%   67.2%   29.5%   70.5%
129    42.2%   56.2%   39.4%   58.0%   39.2%   60.8%
131    79.6%   19.5%   77.3%   19.9%   80.5%   19.5%
132    42.9%   55.6%   40.0%   57.6%   40.3%   59.7%
133    48.4%   50.3%   43.2%   54.9%   36.4%   61.4%
134    62.5%   36.1%   56.6%   41.7%   61.6%   37.1%
135    59.9%   38.7%   57.5%   39.4%   57.6%   42.4%
138    46.6%   52.0%   42.8%   55.0%   42.9%   57.1%
145    70.1%   28.3%   66.2%   30.8%   71.3%   28.7%
148    58.1%   40.5%   55.3%   41.7%   55.5%   42.6%
149    61.7%   37.2%   59.7%   37.5%   59.8%   37.7%
150    42.1%   56.5%   39.5%   57.9%   39.3%   60.7%

Biden generally outperformed the rest of the ticket by two or three points, more in some places like HDs 133 and 134. It’s clear he drew some crossover votes, so matching his performance is a sign of great strength. MJ Hegar was more of a typical Dem performer, and ideally a Dem in 2022 would do at least as well as she did. Note that most of the individual State Rep races were straight up D versus R, but in the cases where the percentages don’t add up to 100, assume there was a third party candidate as well. Most Dems met the Hegar standard, with incumbent Reps. Alma Allen (HD131) and Christina Morales (HD145) outdoing even the Biden number. On the other side, HD133 GOP candidate Mano DeAyala easily stomped a Democrat whose existence even I didn’t know about.

On to 2018:


Dist    Beto    Cruz  Valdez  Abbott     Dem     Rep
====================================================
128    32.6%   66.8%   29.1%   69.7%   29.5%   70.5%
129    42.8%   56.3%   36.8%   61.5%   39.2%   60.8%
131    85.2%   14.3%   80.4%   18.5%   80.5%   19.5%
132    41.8%   57.5%   36.2%   62.3%   40.3%   59.7%
133    46.1%   53.1%   37.9%   60.3%   36.4%   61.4%
134    62.4%   36.8%   52.5%   45.3%   61.6%   37.1%
135    64.4%   35.0%   59.4%   39.2%   57.6%   42.4%
138    46.4%   52.8%   39.6%   58.7%   42.9%   57.1%
145    75.0%   24.1%   67.5%   30.4%   71.3%   28.7%
148    62.7%   37.5%   56.1%   42.4%   55.5%   42.6%
149    68.7%   30.6%   64.0%   34.8%   59.8%   37.7%
150    41.2%   58.1%   36.3%   62.4%   39.3%   60.7%

Beto and Valdez represented the top and bottom of the scale for Dems this year. It’s clear that Dems fell short of the 2018 standard this year, with the 2022 version of Beto being somewhat above the Valdez line. In general, Biden did about as well in most districts as Beto had done two years before, though there are exceptions, of which HDs 135 and 149 are the most interesting. I don’t want to read too much into any single number here – this was a year I’d classify as an underperforming one for Dems overall, though at a much higher baseline than we were used to for off years, and I’d expect better numbers in 2024. Dems have the same targets as before in HDs 132 and 138, while if I were the Republicans I’d take a closer look at what’s going on in 135 and 148. The actual me really wants to see the full canvass data to see how the broader ticket did in these districts. Let me know what you think.

We do need to find someone to run against Ted Cruz

Nov 27th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

I don’t know who that ought to be yet, but surely someone is out there.

Not Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz said on Saturday that he would seek a third term in the U.S. Senate in 2024, though he also did not rule out running for president.

“I’m running for reelection in the Senate, I’m focused on the battles in the United States Senate,” Cruz told reporters after addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas. He said he was also focused on the Senate runoff in Georgia on Dec. 6, according to a video of his discussion with reporters posted by Fox News.

The Texas Republican reiterated his disappointment that his party failed to take control of the Senate in this month’s midterm elections, a setback he blamed on a lack of determination within the party.

Cruz was one of 10 Republican senators who voted against the reelection of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, as minority leader on Wednesday. McConnell easily fended off a challenge from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, by a vote of 37-10.

I know I just said that I don’t want to engage in wischcasting for this, and I still don’t. But we do need to be prepared to think about who we want to see run for this nomination, and the sooner the better. It’s still the case that no Texas Republican has come as close to losing statewide this century as Cruz did in 2018, and it’s still the case that all decent people loathe Ted Cruz. I’m sure there are some people who will relish the opportunity.

I know we just came off a mediocre at best election, but the optimistic view is that Dems have been steadily gaining ground overall, and we’ve done better in Presidential years. The lunatic fringe of the Republican-majority House will make a very easy foil for President Biden, and Donald Trump will either be the Republican nominee – and nobody has done more for Democratic turnout efforts over the past three cycles than he has – or will be enraged and embittered over not being the nominee – and nobody has done more to sow division and turmoil in the Republican Party over the past six years than he has. There are any number of ways that things could be bad, and that’s before we consider whether Biden should be running for a second term, but there is a very plausible optimistic case to be made. Of course, I said the same thing about 2022 not long after Biden was inaugurated, so take all that into account. The point still is, at least at this time, there’s no need to fear running in 2024.

As to who, we can debate that as we see fit. Maybe Julian Castro, if he hasn’t reached his sell-by date. Maybe a current (Ron Nirenberg, Eric Johnson) or recent (Annise Parker) Mayor might want to take a step up. Maybe a State Senator who wins the draw to not be otherwise on the ballot in 2024. Who knows? My argument is simply that this is an opportunity that someone should want to take. We know we can raise enough money for whoever it is. Just think about it, that’s all I’m asking.

Forced birther lawsuit targets abortion pills

Nov 23rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Did you think you were going to have a nice, peaceful Thanksgiving week? Sorry, no can do.

Abortion opponents who helped challenge Roe v. Wade filed a lawsuit Friday that takes aim at medication abortions, asking a federal judge in Texas to undo decades-old approval of the drugs that have become the preferred method of ending pregnancy in the U.S.

Even before the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion earlier this year, the use of abortion pills had been increasing in the U.S. and demand is expected to grow as more states seek abortion limits.

The lawsuit was filed by the Alliance for Defending Freedom, which was also involved in the Mississippi case that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. The lawsuit argues the U.S. Food and Drug Administration erred in approving the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol and overstepped its authority in doing so.

Reached for comment, the FDA said it does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Amarillo, Texas. The state banned abortion after the Roe decision and is among the states where GOP lawmakers have banned mail delivery of the pills.

The number of medication abortions has increased since regulators started allowing them and now account for roughly 40% of U.S. abortions. The medication can cost as little as $110 to get by mail, compared with at least $300 for a surgical abortion. Research has shown the pills are safe.

However, people seeking abortion pills often must navigate differing state laws, including bans on delivery of the drugs and on telemedicine consultations to discuss the medication with a health care provider. And until Democrat Joe Biden became president, U.S. government policy banned mail delivery nationwide.

Axios has a copy of the lawsuit. And before you ask the answer is yes, of course this is about sheer opportunism, not anything resembling facts.

Medication abortion accounts for more than half of abortions in the U.S. In response to the pandemic, the FDA allowed abortion pills to be mailed, which contributed to a significant jump in its use. For decades now, it has been used safely and effectively up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. It has been extensively researched for decades, and has proven safe, effective, and convenient for doctors and patients alike.

There is absolutely no scientific or medical basis for the assertions in this case. It is “an incredibly safe medication,” Loren Colson, a family medicine physician in Idaho and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told The Washington Post. “It’s been well-studied and much safer than a lot of things you can find over the counter,” Colson said. “If they are trying to argue the safety, they have very little ground to stand on. It’s just a clear and blatant attack on abortion.”

One legal expert who has written extensively about the pill calls the safety claims in the suit “ridiculous.” Greer Donley, associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said, “Mifepristone is one of the safest drugs on the market, safer than Viagra and penicillin,” citing the decades of research: “We have a lot of studies and a lot of data on it.” This case, she said, is “really weak.”

Which is why the group chose Texas, where they could find a friendly federal district judge. They did. The case is going to Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, one of the young extremists the Federalist Society handpicked. He is vehemently anti-LGBTQ and misogynistic, and so extreme in his anti-LGBTQ writings that Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, voted against him.

His hostility to abortion is no secret. He has described Roe v. Wade as wrongly decided. “On January 22, 1973, seven justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to abortion hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the shadowy ‘penumbras’ of the Bill of Rights, a celestial phenomenon invisible to the non-lawyer eye.”

It’s a junk case with no basis in science or medical research. But we’ve been here before with junk cases, this federal court district, and the 5th Circuit in which it operates. Kacsmaryk will rule for the plaintiffs and possibly even try to put a national injunction on the use of medication abortion. The administration will appeal and it will go to the abortion-hostile 5th Circuit, from where it will be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court.

So yeah, this is bad, not because of the law or anything like that but because of numbers and court-shopping. I don’t know how long it will take to get to a hearing and then to a preliminary ruling, but it’s out there. Be prepared for it. Bloomberg Law and Kaiser Health News have more.

Christopher Busby: The Case for Texas Democratic Optimism

Nov 17th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

(Note: The following is a guest post that was submitted to me. I occasionally solicit guest posts, and also occasionally accept them from people I trust.)

The election came and went with a similar story. Texas Democrats just started to get their hopes up about the idea of finally breaking through for their first statewide win since their fall from voters’ graces in the early 90s. Then falling flat yet again in their efforts. 30 years in the wilderness can do a lot to sting the hopes of Democrats parched for any sign of success. In 2014 Wendy Davis sent shock waves among Texas Democrats in her voracious defense of abortion rights yet lost by 20 points. In 2018 Beto O’Rouke came within a three point margin of knocking off the firebrand Junior Senator from Texas Ted Cruz. In 2020 President Joe Biden lost by just 6 pts, the best Democratic Presidential performance since 1996.

Yet despite all the clear movement in Democrats favor, incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott decisively defeated Beto O’Rouke to win by approximately 11 points. My guess is that across the state Texas Democrats feel much like Charlie Brown lying on his back on the football field. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me for three decades?

The message I want Texas Democrats to take away from this however is counter intuitive. My message is: Y’all are still headed in the right direction.

Before you think I’m just Lucy with her football again, hear me out.

In political statistics it is often most useful to compare the final performance of a candidate’s party relative to the national environment. In 2000 then Texas Governor George Bush lost the national popular vote in his race for president yet won Texas by 21 points in the same year. In parlance of political statistics that would make Texas an R+21 state. 8 years later when President Obama was carrying the country by 8 points he lost Texas by 12 points, meaning that despite a facially 8 point improvement, Texas was still R+20 compared to the nation as a whole. Little relative movement.

Taking this in mind we shouldn’t be too surprised by political consultants who got excited about Hillary Clinton’s Texas performance where she lost the state by only 9 points despite winning the popular vote by 2 points. Suddenly Texas moves from an R+20 state to an R+11 state. Suddenly Texas moves from a pipe dream to just… a dream.

In the years after Clintons narrow loss Texas Democrats have started taking themselves seriously again. What have the numbers since then told us? Looking at the presidential race President Biden lost the state by 6 points while winning nationally by 4 points. Now R+10 Texas inches ever closer to being competitive. BUT we just got done with a midterm year. Midterm numbers are where data nerds’ minds will pour over for the next few months.

2018 was the Texas Democrats banner year. Beto O’Rouke was cast as a political rockstar for almost upsetting Texas Senator Ted Cruz. His 3 point loss during a year when Democrats were winning by 8 points was very much in line with the R+11 numbers that Clinton and Biden would achieve in the elections before and after. Yet let’s look at Governor Greg Abbott who also was on that same ballot. He defeated Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez by approximately 13 points, an R+21 performance. Many will want to argue that Beto’s performance at the top of the ticket was indicative of Democratic performance that year however looking at the data it’s clear that most statewide officials fell closer to Abbott’s performance. Abbott was one of the top performing officials on the ticket year of either party.

2022 tells a story for state Democrats that they should take some optimism in. Taking the 2018 top performer from each party would seem like a recipe for a competitive race. Easy math would have expected an Abbott victory of 6-8 points if the year was the same. However the midterm years were very different. Numbers are still slowly trickling in so the data here will be less precise than the historical numbers, yet the initial measure of national vote seems like it will likely land somewhere between an R+1-2 year, much different from the D+8 year of the previous midterm. Moving almost 10 points redder Abbott lost 2 points off his victory margin and his performance fell from a solid R+21 to an R+9-10. The message should be clear: When Texas Democrats put up strong candidates with a real performance they can draw down the Republican ceiling more than Republicans can push Democrats to their floor.

Let’s take a more detailed look at the national picture. Governors across the country went up for re-election. Republicans had been hoping to score a host of upsets in swing states. Instead Democrats held on and in fact gained 3 governor’s mansions in open races. The story however was different for Republican incumbents. In every single state where a Republican governor ran for re-election they gained more support as compared to 2018. Except one: Texas. I’ll say it again for effect Texas was the ONLY governor’s race in the nation where the Republican incumbent lost support in re-election compared to 2018. In fact only Nevada and Georgia had governors races where the winning Republican candidate did worse than Greg Abbott and both those states were states which President Biden won in 2020. And looking briefly at President Biden’s performance you would see that of all states won by former President Trump, the only state to vote to the left of Texas was Florida. Florida, for the record, completely fell off the map for Democrats this year with Senator Marco Rubio winning by 17 points and Governor Ron DeSantis winning by 19 points.

So if I haven’t lost you in all the numbers, what does this mean for Texas Democrats in 2024? It means that Texas may be on the precipice of a major shift. Or may not. It depends on whether national Democrats want to fight for it or not. Ted Cruz is no Greg Abbott. While partisan Democrats might find equal distaste in the two I think you would be hard pressed to find the same polarization around Governor Abbott that you do Senator Cruz. Ted Cruz simply falls flat with the same independent voters who have proved crucial Republicans past successes. On a ticket with the equally, if not more, polarizing former President Trump Texas Democrats have a real opportunity. If Texas Democrats put up a real candidate who can draw investment and has a proven track record of campaigning they might just create an opening. Most importantly President Biden’s campaign team needs to take a hard look at the hundreds of millions dumped in Florida cycle after cycle even as it drifts more and more red. 2022 saw Texas and Florida cross each other’s paths in terms of state partisanship. Texas sits to the left of every major red state at this point and only the population sparse Alaska might argue an opportunity for an easier flip. If national Democrats are looking to expand the map beyond the states won by President Biden in 2020 they have their best opportunity in the lone star state.

Christopher Busby is a lifelong Houstonian and independent political campaign consultant and policy advisor. He is a currently pursing a medical doctorate, is former K-12 educator, and has worked extensively on local campaigns. All views and opinions expressed are his own and not representative of any affiliated entities.

Trump judge blocks student loan forgiveness order

Nov 12th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Same crap, different day.

A federal judge in North Texas ruled on Thursday that President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is “unlawful,” the latest challenge to the policy that has seen several attacks from conservative groups.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman said in court files that he declared the loan forgiveness plan unlawful because Biden did not follow federal procedures to allow for public comment prior to the policy’s announcement.

In October, the Job Creators Network Foundation filed the lawsuit in the North Texas court on behalf of two borrowers who don’t qualify for all of the program’s benefits. Those borrowers disagreed with the program’s eligibility criteria and the lawsuit alleged that they could not voice their disagreement.

The latest attack on Biden’s loan forgiveness programs comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit temporarily halted the program last month in response to a lawsuit from six GOP-led states. The Texas lawsuit joins a growing number of legal challenges to the loan forgiveness plan that Biden announced in August. Borrowers started applying for the program in October.

[…]

The Texas lawsuit alleges that Biden’s program violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not providing a public comment period. The lawsuit also argues the Secretary of Education does not have the authority to implement the program.

Alexander Taylor, one of the plaintiffs, is not eligible for $20,000 in forgiveness because he did not receive a Pell Grant, which is only available to low-income students, and therefore will only be entitled to $10,000 off his student loans.

The other plaintiff, Myra Brown, has privately held loans that are no longer covered by Biden’s plan. Earlier in the program’s existence, commercially held loans like Brown’s could be consolidated into Direct Loans, which meet the eligibility requirements of Biden’s program, but the Education Department changed this policy after fielding multiple lawsuits from conservative states.

In response to the lawsuit, the Justice Department argued last month that Biden’s plan doesn’t require notice and comment.

I guess we should be thankful that this is based on a colorable legal claim, one that at least theoretically could be addressed in a subsequent order if it came to that, and not on some bullshit Constitutional theory invented last week by a drone in a Federalist Society lab. It’s still the case that every two-bit Trump-appointed or adjacent district judge thinks they have a national veto on anything the President does, and that’s not how this is supposed to work. It really would be nice if we could restore a little balance here.

Some opening thoughts on the 2022 election

Nov 10th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
10 comments

Done in the traditional bullet-point style. There may or may not be a part 2 to this, depending on the usual factors.

– Obviously the overall result was disappointing. It was harder to see a Beto victory this year from the polling data than it was in 2018, but that doesn’t lessen the sting. There were polls that had the race at about five or six points and there were polls that had it at about 11 to 13. One of those groups was going to be more right than the other, and unfortunately it was the latter.

– I’m not prepared to say that turnout was disappointing. I mean sure, Beto didn’t get the margins he had gotten four years ago in the big urban counties, and that was partly due to lower turnout. But look, turnout was over 8 million, which up until the 2020 election would have been considered Presidential level. Indeed, more votes were cast in this year’s Governor’s race than in the 2012 Presidential race. We didn’t build on 2018, certainly not as we wanted to, and turnout as a percentage of registered voters is down from 2018, but this was still by far the second highest vote total in an off year election, not too far from being the first highest. There’s still plenty to build on. And for what it’s worth, election losers of all stripes often complain about turnout.

– That said, I think any objective look at the data will suggest that more Dems than we’d have liked stayed home. I don’t know why, but I sure hope someone with access to better data than I have spends some time trying to figure it out. How is it that in a year where Dems nationally outperformed expectations the same didn’t happen here? I wish I knew.

– Turnout in Harris County was 1,100,979, according to the very latest report, for 43.21% of registered voters. A total of 349,025 votes were cast on Election Day, or 31.7% of the total. That made the pattern for 2022 more like 2018 than 2014, and the final tally came in at the lower end of the spectrum as well.

– For what it’s worth, predictions of a redder Election Day than Early Voting turned out to be false, at least when compared to in person early voting; Dems did indeed dominate the mail ballots, with statewide and countywide candidates generally topping 60%. Those five judicial candidates who lost only got about 55-56% of the mail vote, and did worse with early in person voting than their winning peers. On Election Day, most Dems did about as well or a little better than early in person voting. The Dems who fell a bit short of that on Election Day were generally the statewides, and it was because the third party candidates did their best on Election Day; this had the effect of lowering the Republican E-Day percentages as well. Go figure.

– In answer to this question, no I don’t think we’ll see Beto O’Rourke run for anything statewide again. If he wants to run for, like Mayor of El Paso, I doubt anyone would stake their own campaign on calling him a loser. But his statewide days are almost surely over, which means we better start looking around for someone to run against Ted Cruz in 2024. We know he’s beatable.

– Before I let this go, and before the narratives get all hardened in place, one could argue that Beto O’Rourke was the most successful Democratic candidate for Governor since Ann Richards. Consider:


Year  Candidate       Votes    Deficit    Pct   Diff
====================================================
2002    Sanchez   1,819,798    812,793  39.96  17.85
2006       Bell   1,310,337    406,455  29.79   9.24
2010      White   2,106,395    631,086  42.30  12.67
2014      Davis   1,835,596    960,951  38.90  20.37
2018     Valdez   3,546,615  1,109,581  42.51  13.30
2022   O'Rourke   3,535,621    889,155  43.80  11.01

He got more votes than anyone except (just barely) Lupe Valdez, but he came closer to winning than she did. He got a better percentage of the vote than anyone else, and trailed by less than everyone except for Chris Bell in that bizarre four-way race. Like Joe Biden in 2020, the topline result fell short of expectations, but compared to his peers he generally outperformed them and you can see some progress. It will take someone else to move to the next steps.

– I’ll take a closer look at the State House data when it’s more fully available, but overall I’d say Republicans did pretty well compared to the 2020 baseline. That said, there are some seats that they will have a hard time holding onto. Getting to 75 will probably take continued demographic change and the continuation of the 2016-2020 suburban trends, and a lot of work keeping up with population growth. All that will take money and wise investment. That’s above my pay grade.

– In Harris County, I was swinging back and forth between confidence and panic before Tuesday. In the end, I’m pretty happy. Getting to that 4-1 margin on Commissioners Court is huge, and that’s before savoring the end of Jack Cagle’s time in power and the enormous piles of money that were set on fire to oust Judge Hidalgo. I may have made a few rude hand gestures at some houses with Mealer signs in my neighborhood as I walked the dog on Wednesday. One of the pollsters that was close to the target statewide was the UH Hobby Center poll, but they botched their read on the Harris County Judge race, finding Mealer in the lead and underestimating Hidalgo by six points. Hope y’all figure that one out.

– In the end there were 59,186 mail ballots counted, after 57,871 mail ballots were returned at the end of early voting. These took awhile to be fully counted – as of the 5 AM tally, only 55,393 mail ballots had been tabulated in the Governor’s race, with fewer in the others. In the past, we have seen the mail ballot total go up by quite a bit more in the days between the end of early voting and the Tuesday results – for example, in 2018 there were 89,098 ballots returned as of the end of the EV period and 97,509 mail ballots tabulated. I have to assume this is about the rejection rate, which if so I’ll see it in the post-canvass election report. If not, I’ll try to ask about it.

– By the way, since there were more mail ballots counted at the end, they had the effect of giving a small boost to Democratic performance. There was a slight chance that could have tipped one or more of the closest judicial races where a Republican had been leading, but that did not happen. It almost did in the 180th Criminal District Court, where incumbent Dasean Jones trails by 465 votes – 0.04 percentage points – out of over a million votes cast. If there are any recounts, I’d expect that to be one. Unless there are a ton of provisional ballots and they go very strongly Democratic it won’t change anything, so just consider this your annual reminder that every vote does indeed matter.

I do have some further thoughts about Harris County, but I’ll save them for another post. What are your initial impressions of the election?

UPDATE: There were still votes being counted when I wrote this. I think they’re done now. Turnout is just over 1.1 million as of this update.

Taking seriously the threat of election violence

Nov 2nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

This is the reality we face.

U.S. security agencies have issued a heightened threat advisory, warning of a potential attacks on political candidates, election officials and others. The alert came Friday, the same day that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their San Francisco home.

NPR has obtained the bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the U.S. Capitol Police.

Attacks conducted by lone actors pose the most plausible threat to potential targets, the bulletin warned. The risk of violence is fueled by an increase in domestic violent extremism, and those carrying out the attacks would likely do so for ideological reasons.

Most individuals are likely to cite the 2020 presidential election, repeating the false narrative that the results were skewed, and that former-President Donald Trump was the rightful winner, according to the warning.

Since 2021, perceptions of a fraudulent election have contributed to several attacks or violent plots, and the bulletin added that new theories of fraud undermining the midterm elections have been emerging.

The advisory said that last month, domestic violent extremists were identified as claiming the electoral system of being “under attack” and threatened violence against politicians.

With less than two weeks before Election Day, President Biden on Friday called on political figures to “clearly and unambiguously” reject political violence, calling the attack on the Pelosi “despicable.”

The president, citing news reports, drew ties between what Friday’s attacker allegedly said — chanting, “Where’s Nancy?” — and what rioters said while storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“What makes us think that one party can talk about stolen elections, COVID being a hoax, it’s all a bunch of lies — and it not affect people who may not be so well-balanced? What makes us think that it’s not going to corrode the political climate?” he said.

In the bulletin, law enforcement officials warned that the threat of violence extends beyond just politicians, with religious minorities also listed as a potential target.

We have been living under this threat for awhile now, and though I appreciate the heightened attention to it, we could have gotten this months ago. That said, we also could have gotten the clear and unambiguous rejection of violence from a whole swath of Republican elected officials, and I find their failure to take a stand – indeed, in many cases, their deflections and whataboutisms and sometimes-coy sometimes-explicit approval of the violence – to be cowardly and reprehensible. There are plenty of things our Republican elected officials in Texas could be doing right now to actually enhance election security, but instead they’re making the problem worse. And as we know, nothing is going to change as long as they remain in office. This is the reality we face.

What will Tarrant County do this year?

Oct 30th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Hoping for a blue result at the top and at least closer races below it, but we’ll see.

Eight years after voting for Gov. Greg Abbott, Angela Martinez found herself waiting in line Tuesday to snap a photo with Beto O’Rourke, his challenger in this year’s nail-biting gubernatorial contest.

Martinez, a 33-year-old marketer for a pediatric home health agency, has never identified as strictly liberal or conservative, she said, and sometimes feels like “a walking contradiction.” If there’s a spot for her on the traditional political spectrum, she hasn’t found it. When she voted for Abbott in 2014, Martinez identified with what she saw as the then-attorney general’s Christian family values.

But since then, Martinez has soured on Abbott. She feels Abbott didn’t do enough in the wake of the deadly winter freeze in February 2021 to prevent the state’s electrical grid from collapsing should a similarly catastrophic weather event hit Texas in the future. As someone who values “the sanctity of life,” Martinez is uneasy about the state’s blanket ban on abortions that took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

“My mother had the freedom (to seek an abortion), my aunts had the freedom,” Martinez said while waiting to meet O’Rourke at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. “Why shouldn’t we?”

Voters in Tarrant County, the state’s last major urban county dominated by Republicans, just barely broke for Democrats at the top of the ticket in the last two elections — O’Rourke won there during his 2018 Senate bid and so did President Joe Biden two years ago — stoking Democrats’ hopes that the path to the governor’s mansion, and the end of their decadeslong exile from statewide office, goes through Tarrant. Boosting those hopes is infighting this year among Tarrant County Republicans — who insist the party is united.

The year that O’Rourke carried Tarrant during his near-miss bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Abbott won the county by more than 66,000 votes and nearly 11 percentage points — outperforming every other statewide Republican on the ticket.

Four years later, Abbott’s team is “confident” the governor will win Tarrant County once more, Abbott’s chief strategist Dave Carney told reporters last week while acknowledging the county is competitive. “It’s going to be a battle,” Carney said.

At his campaign stop at the UNT Health Science Center, O’Rourke expressed optimism that 125,000 people who have been added to the county’s voter rolls since he ran in 2018, combined with discontent over the power grid failure during last year’s winter storm, the state’s abortion ban and Abbott’s response to school shootings would help deliver him the county.

“Abbott has given us a huge, huge opening” in Tarrant County, O’Rourke said. “So many people are looking for the common ground and the common sense that’s been missing from our state government.”

But as Democrats express optimism because of O’Rourke and Biden’s victories, Republicans continue to dominate down-ballot races in Tarrant County — a sign of the GOP’s enduring dominance here.

“They have now a little bit of history that suggests that Democrats might be able to win in Tarrant County,” said James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University. “On the other hand, there has not been a countywide Democrat elected for county office in Tarrant County in this century.”

Statewide Democratic candidates in 2018 and 2020 slightly outperformed their cumulative margins in Tarrant County. In 2018, the small number of local countywide candidates did a tad better than the statewide slate as a whole, scoring in the 47-48% range. In 2020, the same slight improvement was still there among a larger collection of local countywide candidates, but they finished in the 46-47% range for the most part.

Tarrant, as noted before, had been a reliable bellwether of the state as a whole through the 2016 election, but as with the other large urban counties, and several of the large suburban counties, it became more Democratic than the state. It’s just that Tarrant started in a redder place than the others, so they still lag behind by a bit. I suspect they will again be slightly bluer than the state as a whole, but if there’s a step back from 2018 or 2020, that will be reflected in Tarrant’s numbers as well. I believe the larger trends will continue, whether this year is in line with that or not. I hope that means a blue Tarrant sooner rather than later – as we know, there are a plethora of State House districts that were drawn to be modestly red, and CD24 looms as the best future pickup opportunity – but whether that’s this year or not I couldn’t say.

Univision: Abbott 46, Beto 42

Oct 27th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Another registered voters poll, with a supersample of Latino respondents.

Republican Governor Greg Abbott leads Beto O’Rourke in the Texas governors’ race by more than four points, even though the Democrat has more support among Latinos and Blacks.

The increase in the cost of living dominates the concerns of registered voters in Texas for the November 8 elections and is emerging as a decisive factor, according to a survey by Univision News and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas.

Half of the 1,400 respondents – including Hispanics, Whites and African-Americans – considered inflation to be the biggest problem facing the administration and the new Congress that will emerge from the elections to be held in two weeks time.

[…]

Overall, Latinos in Texas represent about 25% of the state’s registered voters and lean towards the Democratic Party candidates. White voters remain the majority and are more likely to be Republican.

This is clearly seen in the gubernatorial race. Some 58% of Latinos and 70% of African-Americans say they will vote, or are inclined to vote, for O’Rourke. Meanwhile, Abbott, the current governor, has the support of 63% of White voters, giving him a four-point overall lead (46% – 42%).

The same goes for polling in the congressional election in November which could redraw the balance of power at the federal level. Although the preference of Latinos and African-Americans on the performance of the current Congress largely favors Democratic Party candidates, Republicans have the overall advantage.

While 55% of Latinos and 75% of African Americans say they will vote for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives, only 25% of Whites say they will do the same, and 63% will vote for Republican candidates. That gives Republicans a seven-point advantage (47% vs. 40%) in overall voter intention in the state.

President Joe Biden’s popularity isn’t helping Democratic Party candidates. The weakness in the economy is due to many factors – the hangover from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, among others – but historically voters always blame the incumbents.

Overall, 55% of registered Texas voters have a poor image of Biden, while 40% view him favorably. Among Latinos the numbers are reversed (40% – 55%), but the percentage who view him “very favorably” (26%) is nearly equal to those who view him “very unfavorably” (24%).

This is a trend that Univision News polling has observed since the beginning of the year.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has a 49% favorability rating among registered voters in Texas. It is much lower among Latinos, at 34%.

Crosstabs are available here. They also did a poll of Nevada, which I didn’t look at. The last Univision poll I blogged about was from late October 2020, in which they had Trump up by a 49-46 margin. Trump actually won by five and a half points, 52.0 to 46.5, so while they were a bit off it’s pretty close.

There are two main takeaways from this poll for me. One is that it is further evidence of a significant split between “likely voter” (and “Extra Supersized Likely Voter”) polls and simple “Registered Voter” polls, following on the heels of the Beacon poll, the Marist poll, and the LV-screened UT/TPP poll. Maybe we will find that the LV screens were off, maybe we will find that a lot of voters who said they preferred Dems didn’t vote, maybe we won’t know what difference it made. The point here is that whatever we think, we should acknowledge that these differences in approach are yielding differences in result. We don’t know yet if one is superior to the other. Maybe the final totals will end up in the middle. This is a weird year with a lot of uncertainty. It’s foolish to put all your chips on one particular outcome.

The other is that as was the case in 2020, we are getting very different signals about how Latinos will vote across the polls. This poll, which has Beto carrying Latinos by a 58-28 margin, is the best result for him we have seen. Like the Telemundo poll, this one has an actual survey-sized sample of Latinos, with a standard-sized margin of error, which ought to make it more accurate. That said, they were too rosy on Democratic prospects for Latinos in 2020, and their story makes it clear that Republicans have an edge on at least the economy right now, so who knows what could happen. I am trying to stay hopeful without being a chump.

One last point is that both Abbott and The Former Guy are in positive approval territory, while Beto and Biden are negative. Given that, the closeness of this poll is remarkable. That also may be an indicator of a difference in voter enthusiasm, which would be in Republicans’ favor. Just noting it for the record.

UT/Texas Politics Project: Abbott 54, Beto 43

Oct 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Not great.

With in-person early voting set to begin in Texas on October 24, the latest University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll finds Gov. Greg Abbott leading Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke in the gubernatorial race, 54%-43%, among Texans likely to vote in the 2022 election. While more than half of Republican voters say immigration and border security is the most important issue area informing their vote, Democratic voters’ attention is divided among a list of several issues, topped by abortion.

The poll surveyed 1,200 self-declared registered voters using the internet from October 7-17 and has a margin of error of +/- 2.83 for the full sample. From among this overall sample, likely voters were defined as those respondents who indicated that they have voted in every election in the past 2-3 years; or those respondents who rated their likelihood to vote in the November elections on a 10-point scale as a 9 or a 10. This likely voter screen yielded a pool of 883 likely voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3.3% for the full likely voter sample.

Beyond the two major party candidates, Green Party Candidate Delilah Barrios and the Libertarian Party’s Mark Tippets each earned 1% support while 2% preferred an unspecified “someone else.”

[…]

The results among likely voters found Republican candidates maintaining wide leads in the five other major races for statewide office. In all of the trial ballots, including for governor, undecided, but likely, voters were asked whom they would choose if forced to make a decision. All results for the trial ballots report the results of the initial question combined with this “forced” response. (The poll summary reports the share of voters who expressed no preference in the initial question in each race.)

Lt. Governor. Incumbent Dan Patrick led Democratic challenger Mike Collier, 51%-36%, in their rematch of the 2018 race.

Attorney General. Incumbent Republican Ken Paxton leads Democrat Rochelle Garza 51%-37%.

Comptroller of Public Accounts. Two-term incumbent Republican Glenn Hegar leads Democrat Janet Dudding 47%-35%.

Agriculture Commissioner. Incumbent Sid Miller leads Democrat Susan Hayes 51%-39%.

Land Commissioner. Republican State Senator Dawn Buckingham leads Democrat Jay Kleberg 47%-36%.

The generic ballots for the U.S. House of Representatives and the Texas legislature also revealed continuing advantages for Republican candidates: Republicans lead 53%-44% in the generic ballot for the U.S. House of Representatives, and 53%-42% for the Texas legislature.

This is upsetting mostly because the August poll had Abbott up by only five and had shown a slight but steady drift towards Beto over time. The one caveat here is that the previous polls were of the full registered voters sample, and this is of “likely voters”, which is about three-fourths of the original. It’s not a direct comparison as a result, though of course the pollsters will have done what they think is best to reflect the electorate accurately. If they provided numbers for the full sample in October, I didn’t see them.

The October poll data is here and the August data is here. The underlying atmosphere has not changed in any significant way. Biden’s approval was 40-52 in August and it’s 39-52 in October (the approval numbers are still based on the full sample in each case). Abbott went from 46-44 to 47-44. Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton were actually slightly worse in October, going from 38-37 to 37-39 for Patrick and from 37-38 to 36-39 for Paxton. Either a lot of people changed their minds or that likely voter screen is a big difference maker.

I’ve put my faith in the “the screen is too tight” beliefs before without much success, so I don’t want to go overboard here. If these numbers are accurate, they don’t bode well for Harris County either, suggesting Beto might end up with 52 to 54 percent. At the high end, as I’ve said before, I’d still feel pretty confident about Harris County Dems. Less than that, and I would expect Republicans to win at least some races. Maybe this year is another inflection point, and maybe the dip in the gap between Harris and the state that we saw in 2020 following years of games will not be a one off. No way to know until we start to see some real numbers.

The poll also includes this demographic breakdown in the vote:

White/Anglo: Abbott 64%, O’Rourke 32%
Hispanic: O’Rourke 48%, Abbott 48%
Black: O’Rourke 86%, Abbott 11%

Those are the strongest numbers Beto has had for Black voters in awhile. They’re not great for white voters – compare to the Marist poll, for example, which had Abbott leading Beto by a much smaller 57-37 margin among those voters – and this is another poll that has Beto with no advantage among Hispanic voters; note that was also true in the Marist poll. We saw a great disparity in Hispanic preferences in the 2020 polls, and in the end the ones that showed a smaller lead for Dems were more accurate. I don’t know what else to say here.

I will add that we saw one more poll result released yesterday, from the Democratic AG’s Association (DAGA), which claimed Rochelle Garza was trailing Ken Paxton by two points, 48-46. That linked poll memo is the entire thing – no Beto/Abbott numbers, no Biden approval numbers, no crosstabs, nothing – and it’s basically an internal poll, so maintain a higher level of skepticism for this one. I will note the following from the memo:

The survey was conducted between October 12th-16th using live calls to landlines, SMS text-to-web and live calls to cell phones, and an online panel. The sample includes 879 registered voters and is weighted to reflect a likely 2022 Texas general electorate. The margin of error is +/- 3.24% at a 95% confidence interval.

The results of the survey show that when asked who they’ll vote for as Attorney General and Texas undecided voters are allocated to a candidate, Paxton is only ahead by 2 points, within the margin of error for the survey, landing at 48% Paxton, 46% Garza, with 6% of voters say they’re voting for Libertarian Mark Ash in the AG race.

Another “likely voter” result, though with less detail. They also seemingly pushed the initial non-respondents into picking a side, which I had initially frowned at but I guess if the UT/TPP folks can do it, they can too.

You can be gay, you just can’t act gay

Oct 9th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

So rules a notoriously anti-gay Trump judge, narrowing a SCOTUS ruling from just two years ago at the behest of the usual suspect.

A federal judge has ruled that Biden administration guidelines requiring employers to provide protections for LGBTQ employees go too far, in a win for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who brought suit against the rules last fall.

The rules were first issued after the landmark ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex or religion, includes protection for gay and transgender people.

In 2021, the Biden administration released guidance around the ruling, noting that disallowing transgender employees to dress and use pronouns and bathrooms consistent with their gender identity constituted sex discrimination.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump-appointed U.S. district court judge for the Northern District of Texas, found that Title VII prohibits employment discrimination against an individual for being gay or transgender, “but not necessarily all correlated conduct,” including use of pronouns, dress and bathrooms.

Earlier this year, after Paxton issued a nonbinding legal opinion that gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors could be considered child abuse, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra released additional guidance that federally funded agencies can’t restrict people from accessing “medically necessary care, including gender-affirming care, from their health care provider solely on the basis of their sex assigned at birth or gender identity.” Kacsmaryk also ruled to vacate that guidance.

[…]

Kacsmaryk is himself known for his opposition to expanding or protecting LGBTQ rights. Before being nominated to the bench, Kacsmaryk was the deputy general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal organization focused on religious liberty cases. In a 2015 article arguing against the Equality Act, Kacsmaryk wrote that the proposed legislation that would prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation or gender identity would “punish dissenters, giving no quarter to Americans who continue to believe that marriage and sexual relations are reserved to the union of one man and one woman.”

In a 2015 article for the National Catholic Register titled “The Abolition of Man … and Woman,” Kacsmaryk called the term gender identity “problematic” and wrote that, “The campaigns for same-sex ‘marriage’ and ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ (SOGI) legislation share a common legal theory: Rules predicated on the sexual difference and complementarity of man and woman are relics of a benighted legal regime designed to harm ‘LGBT’ persons, or at least deny them ‘full equality.’”

I wonder sometimes how Ken Paxton would do if instead of being able to pick his judges he always had to argue his cases in front of a judge that, you know, ruled on the law and the merits of the case rather than on what they felt like. Probably would have a lower batting average, I’m thinking. Anyway, that ruling was 6-3, with Gorsuch the author and Roberts joining him and the (at the time) four liberals. That means that five judges who ruled for the plaintiffs are still there. It’s certainly possible, maybe even likely, that the Biden administration read that ruling in as expansive a manner as they thought they could, and as such they could have overstepped what SCOTUS had in mind. I suppose we’ll get to find out, once the Fifth Circuit does its duty of upholding the ruling. We know that in general this SCOTUS doesn’t give a crap about precedent, but maybe they’ll feel differently when it’s their own precedent.

The Biden marijuana pardons

Oct 7th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

A pretty big deal.

Calling the criminalization of marijuana a “failed approach,” President Joe Biden announced a pardon of all federal marijuana possession charges Thursday — and urged governors to follow suit with state-level convictions for marijuana possession.

The federal pardon will affect about 6,500 people, The New York Times reported, but the vast majority of marijuana possession crimes are charged on the state level, not in a federal case.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday about Biden’s announcement.

Abbott’s gubernatorial opponent, Democrat Beto O’Rourke, was quick to announce his support for the president’s action.

“When I’m governor, we will finally legalize marijuana in Texas and expunge the records of those arrested for marijuana possession,” O’Rourke said in a statement.

According to the Texas law, the governor can issue pardons only if a majority of Board of Pardons and Paroles members make such a recommendation in writing.

[…]

This year through August, Texas prosecutors filed more than 14,000 misdemeanor pot possession charges, so far leading to more than 5,000 convictions, according to statewide court data. Pot possession is a misdemeanor for up to 4 ounces, and a felony for quantities beyond that.

Marijuana prosecutions dropped dramatically after 2019, when Texas lawmakers legalized hemp and as a result complicated how law enforcement can determine if something is illegal cannabis. In 2018, for example, nearly 50,000 misdemeanor marijuana charges were filed.

I assume that a relatively large portion of the 6,500 people who will receive the federal pardon are in Texas; we’re a big state with a significant non-white population, so just on the numbers we’ll be home to a lot of the beneficiaries of this. I haven’t seen what that number might be, nor do I know how many people could be pardoned for state offenses, if Greg Abbott were so moved. We know that loosening marijuana laws polls well in Texas, though it’s not clear to me if these pardons would be as popular; my guess is they’d have significant support but maybe not as much as expanding medical marijuana access or decriminalizing pot for recreational use. This announcement may help charge up the youth vote, but again it’s hard to say by how much or what the net effect might be. We’re unlikely to get any insight from polling at this point.

The President’s actions were right on the merits and I daresay good on the politics. They were sufficiently long-awaited that I’d say some people had expected them to never happen. As is usually the case with federal action, Texas will get the smallest possible benefit from it because our state leaders won’t allow for any more than that. I assume I don’t need to tell you what we could do to affect that.

Spectrum News/Siena College: Abbott 50, Beto 43

Sep 23rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

A new pollster enters the chat.

Less than two months from Election Day, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has a seven-point, 50-43%, lead over Democratic challenger, former Congressman, Beto O’Rourke. In the race for Lieutenant Governor, incumbent Republican Dan Patrick is up by nine points, 49-40%, over Democratic challenger Mike Collier. In the race for state Attorney General, incumbent Republican Ken Paxton has a five-point advantage, 47-42%, over Democratic challenger Rochelle Garza according to a new Spectrum News/Siena College (SCRI) poll of likely Texas voters released today.

Abbott has a 47-46% favorability rating, while O’Rourke has a negative 39-52% favorability rating. Patrick has a negative 33-36% favorability rating, compared to Collier’s 13-12% favorability rating. Paxton has a negative 29-41% favorability rating while Garza, like Collier is unknown to about threequarters of Texas likely voters, and has a 13-12% favorability rating.

“Governor Abbott, who won a landslide thirteen-point race against Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez four years ago, has a seven-point lead with over six weeks until Election Day. Abbott has the support of 95% of Republicans and O’Rourke has the support of 93% of Democrats, while independents tilt toward Abbott by one point,” said Don Levy, SCRI’s Director. “White voters favor Abbott by over two-to-one, 64-31%, while Black voters prefer O’Rourke 79-10% and a majority of Latinos, 58-36%, plan to vote for O’Rourke.”

The crosstabs are here. The headline on the Chron story for this refers to Abbott’s lead “widening”, which I object to on the grounds that there’s no earlier Spectrum/Siena poll to compare this one to. I don’t like comparing one pollster’s poll to another’s because they all do slightly different things. Nobody asks me these about these things, so here we are.

Now, if we want to do comparisons to other polls, I will note that this one actually has solid numbers for Beto in terms of support from Dems, as well as from Black and Latino voters. Compare to the DMN/UT-Tyler poll from earlier this week that had Beto only winning Dems by a 77-12 margin, and multiple polls saying that Abbott is getting upward of 15% of Black voters. Why is the overall result not so great if these subsamples are so good? My guess would be that this sample’s partisan distribution is a bit weird – 27% Dem, 34% GOP, 32% Indie/Other (the remaining 8% are a mystery). The DMN/UT-Tyler poll had those distributed as 33-40-27, and in general I expect the Dem share to be higher than the Indie share.

Having written that, I decided I had to go back through earlier poll results to do a comparison. With one exception, my expectation matched the data:

UT-TPP: Dem 42, GOP 48, Indie 10

Echelon: Dem 35, GOP 43, Indie 20

UH/Hobby Center: Dem 41, GOP 46, Indie/unsure 13

Quinnipiac: Dem 24, GOP 30, Indie 36, Other 10

I went back as far as June. Not all of the recent results I’ve blogged about included partisan breakdown data that I could find. Color me surprised at some of the ranges here. You can make of all this what you will, it’s what I noticed.

The Biden student loan forgiveness plan will help a lot of Texans

Sep 23rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Hope they’re all voters, because it’s very clear who is on their side and who is against them.

More Texans would benefit from President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt than residents of nearly any other state — and 1.6 million would have their balances completely cleared — according to new White House estimates released as Republicans call it an unconstitutional giveaway to the elite and seek to derail it.

More than 3.3 million Texans would be eligible to have at least $10,000 forgiven and most people in that group, 2.3 million, would have $20,000 forgiven. Texas is second only to California in the number of residents that would benefit from the debt forgiveness plan, according to the estimates, which were compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.

[…]

Officials have said they plan to have applications available early next month, but the plan is likely to face a long legal battle.

Texas is among the red states looking for ways to stop it from becoming a reality. Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a recent interview on Fox News that Texas is “definitely looking at a strategy.”

It is the first time a president has sought to unilaterally cancel swaths of student debt and whether the administration has the authority to do so has been the point of heated debate. The administration says it can, citing a 2003 law that grants the secretary of education authority to offer loan relief during times of war or national emergencies.

But Republicans say Biden is going too far.

“The reality is, I don’t actually think Joe Biden thinks he can do this,” Paxton said. “We are absolutely looking at something we can do to protect the American people from a president that is just making up his own rules as he goes along.”

Republicans argue the plan is unfair to those who have already paid off their debt, as well as the vast majority of American adults who do not have student loans. They say the plan will cost too much — with some estimates as high as $600 billion — and will help those who need it the least.

“College may not be the right decision for every American, but for the students who took out loans, it was their decision: able adults and willing borrowers who knowingly agreed to the terms of the loan and consented to taking on debt in exchange for taking classes,” Gov. Greg Abbott wrote in a letter to Biden with other Republican governors last week. “For many borrowers, they worked hard, made sacrifices, and paid off their debt. For many others, they chose hard work and a paycheck rather than more school and a loan. Americans who did not choose to take out student loans themselves should certainly not be forced to pay for the student loans of others.”

Paxton and Abbott are gonna do what they’re gonna do, and we’ll have to deal with it as we always do. There are absolutely root-cause issues here that are not addressed, but one of the big ones is the underfunding of state universities, which is why they’re so much more expensive now than they were even 20 years ago. Remember tuition deregulation, which the Lege did under Tom Craddick back in 2003 as an exercise in budget-cutting? Not much the President can do about that, and I don’t see Greg Abbott lining up to offer solutions. Anyway, policies that offer a lot of people a tangible benefit are usually good, and certainly attractive from a vote-getting perspective. I hope everyone involved in this remembers that.

DMN/UT-Tyler: Abbott 47, Beto 38

Sep 20th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Insert shrug emoji here, and insert link to the unreadable DMN story here. I’ll give you the main results of interest and then a few comments after that.

Abbott 47, Beto 38
Patrick 39, Collier 28
Paxton 37, Garza 30
State House GOP 50, Dem 48

The August poll had Abbott up 46-39. As I said in other posts while resisting the urge to attribute “momentum” to Beto, I find the claim that a one point shift for each candidate represents a “gain” for Abbott to be a bit tendentious. Like with other polls, the subsample that I tend to look at when considering these results is the partisan subsamples. Here, Beto wins Democrats by a lethargic 77-12, with Abbott at 85-8 among Republicans. It was 81-12 for Beto in August, with Abbott at the same level among Rs. I find the claim that more than ten percent of people who would credibly self-ID as Democrats support Greg Abbott to be implausible. I’ll just leave it at that.

I know that the Lite Guv and AG races are lower profile, but as I’ve said before, poll results this late in the cycle that can’t give me a better idea of how many people will vote for “the Republican” versus “the Democrat” are not ones I put much weight in. It is possible to do better than that. It’s especially humorous to me given the near-100% response rate for the Texas House race. The conjunction of these things doesn’t make much sense to me.

One last thing, in their suite of issues questions, this poll finds slightly less support overall for abortion rights, as approval for overturning Roe v Wade went from 42-49 in August to 46-46 in September, while the question on abortion being mostly or completely illegal versus mostly or completely legal went from 44-55 in August to 49-50 in September. This stands at odds with other recent polling. Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that I will cast a skeptical eye at it. The claim I saw in the snippet of the story I could read that this had to do with Abbott doing a lot of advertising strikes me as not very likely. Polls can be weird, which is why we try to look at them in bunches where possible.

UPDATE: I missed on first reading that this was a poll of registered voters, not “likely” voters, which is what all of the other recent polls have been. That explains the lower response numbers in the Lt. Governor and AG races. With their likely voter screen, this poll has Abbott up 50-39. My stated concerns about the likelihood of so many self-described Democrats saying they will vote for Greg Abbott remain.

UT/Texas Politics Project poll: Abbott 45, Beto 40

Sep 15th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Feels kind of familiar.

Gov. Greg Abbott leads his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke by 5 percentage points, according to a new poll from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

The survey found that Abbott received 45% of support among registered voters, while 40% supported O’Rourke and 4% supported third-party candidates. Three percent of respondents named “Someone else” as their choice, and 8% said they have not thought about the race enough to have an opinion.

The result is almost identical to the margin from when the pollsters last surveyed the race in June, finding Abbott ahead of O’Rourke 45% to 39%.

The latest survey also gave Republican incumbents single-digit leads in two other statewide races. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick led Democrat Mike Collier by 7 points, and Attorney General Ken Paxton registered a 5-point advantage over Democrat Rochelle Garza. More voters remain undecided in those contests than in the gubernatorial election — 20% in the lieutenant governor’s race and 21% in the attorney general one.

See here for the previous UT/TPP poll, and here for the pollsters’ report. The Lite Guv and AG numbers are 39-32 for Patrick and 38-33 for Paxton, and I just don’t give much weight to results that have such high numbers of non-responses. Joe Biden clocks in with a 40-52 approval rating, up from 35-55 in June. Abbott was at 46-44, up from 43-46 in June.

You may look at this and conclude that there’s been no noticeable boost in Democratic fortunes since the Dobbs ruling. Based just on post-Dobbs polls (minus that Echelon poll) that may be correct. I will note, however, that Abbott has slowly been losing ground to Beto in this particular poll over time:

February: Abbott 47-37
April: Abbott 48-37
June: Abbott 45-39
August: Abbott 45-40

I will also note that this poll, like previous ones, has generic US House/Texas House questions. If you look in the crosstabs for this poll (questions 21 and 22), those numbers are 47-43 and 46-43 in favor of Republicans, respectively. It was 46-41 GOP for both in June, and 48-39 (Congress) and 47-39 (The Lege) for the GOP in April. So while maybe not a sharp turn, there has been a gradual bend all along.

Echelon Insights: Abbott 48, Beto 46

Sep 14th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Make of this what you will. It’s a national poll plus samples of likely voters in a variety of states, some red and some blue and some purple, including Texas. The numbers of interest for us:

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of Joe Biden?

Very favorable = 20%
Somewhat favorable = 21%
Somewhat unfavorable = 13%
Very unfavorable = 44%
Other/Unsure = 0%

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of Donald Trump?

Very favorable = 26%
Somewhat favorable = 20%
Somewhat unfavorable = 9%
Very unfavorable = 44%
Other/Unsure = 2%

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of Greg Abbott?

Very favorable = 27%
Somewhat favorable = 22%
Somewhat unfavorable = 10%
Very unfavorable = 36%
Other/Unsure = 5%

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of Beto O’Rourke?

Very favorable = 28%
Somewhat favorable = 18%
Somewhat unfavorable = 10%
Very unfavorable = 38%
Other/Unsure = 6%

If the election for Governor were held today, would you vote for

Abbott = 48%
Beto = 46%

If the 2024 presidential election were being held today, would you vote for

Trump = 48%
Biden = 43%

If the election for U.S. House of Representatives in your district were held today, would you vote for

The Republican = 50%
The Democrat = 43%

I’m not familiar with this pollster. In the states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, they have pretty enthusiastic leads for Democratic candidates, but in the states where you’d expect Republicans to win they have them up by expectedly large margins. The Abbott/Beto race is the closest we’ve seen in any poll so far, but it’s not really an outlier. Abbott’s level of support is pretty consistently around 47-49 – he rarely if ever tops 50% in the polls – while Beto is usually around 42 or 43. It’s plausible to get this result just by the “don’t know” respondents leaning towards Beto. Note that this poll did not name either of the third party candidates, as some other polls have, so that could have a boosting effect for both Abbott and Beto as well. This is an optimistic result, and I’d like to see more like it before I fully bought in, but it’s not a bolt out of the blue. The Trump approval and 2024 numbers, the generic Congressional numbers, the Biden approval numbers, they’re all in line with other polls or in the case of the Congressional one leaning a bit Republican. Like I said, make of this what you will. See Lakshya Jain’s Twitter thread for more.

What do we expect from CD23?

Aug 30th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It was the perennial razor-close high-dollar swing district all last decade. Will Hurd won it three times, but never reached 50% in any of the three elections. It moved a few points towards the GOP in 2020 when Tony Gonzales won it, and redistricting made it a bit redder still, but it remains the closest Republican-held seat and may never fade as a perennial battleground. But that may depend on this year, when Gonzalez will have an easier time of it at least financially. I don’t know yet what I expect from that race.

Gonzales remains the favorite for a second term — given the new political makeup of the district and his stark financial advantage — but he said he is taking the race “extremely seriously” and treating it like he was still running under the famously competitive boundaries that were in effect before redistricting.

“The [elected officials] that don’t have to fight, that are just there as long as they want it — they’re like declawed indoor cats that get fancy meals when the bell rings out,” Gonzales said in an interview. “I think Texas [District] 23 — you’re like an alleycat that has to scrape and claw and fight for everything, and I think that just makes you just different. Like, you’re fighting for your life.”

This cycle, Gonzales said, he wants to “run up the score” and “take this seat off the table completely.”

A former Navy cryptologist, Gonzales won the seat in 2020 by 4 percentage points, a wide margin by the razor-thin standards of the 23rd District. He was the successor backed by U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, a moderate who had built his own reputation for breaking with his party, perhaps most notably opposing former President Donald Trump’s push for a border wall.

Trump carried the 23rd District by 2 points in 2020. But redistricting morphed it into a district that Trump would have won by 7 points, and in March, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee officially removed the seat from its list of targeted races.

[Democratic candidate John] Lira argued redistricting “didn’t do Gonzales that many favors,” noting the Cook Political Report, an election forecaster, only increased the Republican advantage of the district by 3 percentage points. And he said he is encouraged by the cracks in Gonzales’ Republican support, the political fallout from the Uvalde shooting and the strength of Beto O’Rourke’s gubernatorial campaign at the top of the ticket.

As for the case against Gonzales, Lira said, “he’s got Will Hurd’s playbook in his back pocket and he’s trying to see how he can play both sides.”

While national attention has faded from the race, Lira recently got the backing of O’Rourke, who rarely issues formal down-ballot endorsements. Lira also has the support of the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which endorsed him after the district was redrawn.

[…]

“I do think the district is going to be a little more competitive than most people anticipated — now how competitive, I don’t know,” said Jeff McManus, chair of the Bexar County GOP. “We sort of have a three-way race going,” with the independent challenger from the right.

McManus said he wishes Gonzales “were a stronger conservative.” The two were on opposite sides of the county party chair election in May, when Gonzales backed the incumbent, John Austin, that McManus defeated.

The independent candidate is Frank Lopez Jr., a former U.S. Border Patrol agent who had to give up his position as chair of the Val Verde County GOP to run. He and Gonzales are very familiar with one another: Lopez was the campaign manager for Raul Reyes, Gonzales’ bitter rival in the 2020 Republican primary runoff for the 23rd District.

Lopez said he ran as an independent, not in the GOP primary, after seeing “the way Raul lost” at the hands of the party’s establishment, which had coalesced behind Gonzales.

“Texans are tired of these dangerous Democrat policies,” Lopez said in an interview, “but they’re also tired of the pandering and games from the RINOs, establishment and globalists in the Republican Party. I had to give Texans a true choice.”

Lopez added that he sees a “perfect storm” for his candidacy, citing the recent intraparty blowback Gonzales has faced and Democrats he meets who say they are looking for a new political home.

Gonzales jokingly asked “Who?” when asked about Lopez in an interview. More seriously, he said the 23rd District has always had a third candidate in November who gets 3% to 5% of the vote and that he expected Lopez would be no different. Still, he said he is not taking Lopez for granted and that it “helps me stay sharp.”

Most of the rest of the story is about Gonzales’ votes in favor of the Cornyn gun control bill and the House bill to protect same-sex marriage, both of which has drawn him some criticism and two censure votes from aggrieved county GOPs (a third, in Bexar County, failed to pass). Good for him and all, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here for the numbers.

For what it’s worth, Trump carried CD23 by seven points in 2020. The next two closest districts are both Dem-held (CD15, Trump +3; CD28, Biden +7), and after that it’s all double digits, with CDs 24 (Trump +12), 03 (Trump +14), 22 (Trump +16), 26 (Trump +18), and 38 (Trump +18) next in line. The main difference between CD23 and these other districts is that the latter all moved strongly towards Dems since 2012, with Mitt Romney carrying them by 38 to 44 points. It would not shock me if Beto does about as well in CDs 03 and 24 as he does in CD23. I don’t think Gonzales is going to achieve his goal of taking CD23 off the table, but I could easily see him winning by 10-12 points and discouraging any serious competition in the near term future. I could also see him winning by about the seven points that Trump won it by and remaining in the same position. He has some big advantages, but this is officially a Very Weird Year, and I’m not making any predictions about it. Long term I think this district remains on the radar, but maybe not at the front of the pack. We’ll see.

A different EMTALA ruling in Idaho

Aug 26th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

As expected. You know where this goes from here.

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked Idaho from enforcing a ban on abortions when pregnant women require emergency care, a day after a judge in Texas ruled against President Joe Biden’s administration on the same issue.

The conflicting rulings came in two of the first lawsuits over Biden’s attempts to keep abortion legal after the conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the procedure nationwide.

Legal experts said the dueling rulings in Idaho and Texas could, if upheld on appeal, force the Supreme Court to wade back into the debate.

[…]

In Idaho, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice that the abortion ban taking effect Thursday conflicts with a federal law that ensures patients can receive emergency “stabilizing care.”

Winmill, who was appointed to the court by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, issued a preliminary injunction blocking Idaho from enforcing its ban to the extent it conflicts with federal law, citing the threat to patients.

“One cannot imagine the anxiety and fear (a pregnant woman) will experience if her doctors feel hobbled by an Idaho law that does not allow them to provide the medical care necessary to preserve her health and life,” Winmill wrote.

The Justice Department has said the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires abortion care in emergency situations.

“Today’s decision by the District Court for the District of Idaho ensures that women in the State of Idaho can obtain the emergency medical treatment to which they are entitled under federal law,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a written statement.

“The Department of Justice will continue to use every tool at its disposal to defend the reproductive rights protected by federal law,” Garland said. The DOJ has said that it disagrees with the Texas ruling and is considering next legal steps.

See here for the background. TPM goes deeper into the two rulings and also provides copies of them, but the bottom line is that the Texas judge said that the federal guidance went too far, didn’t go through the formal rule-change process (even though it was guidance on an existing rule and not a change), didn’t take the rights of the fetus into account, and could only apply when the mother’s life was in danger, not just when her health was threatened. The Idaho judge didn’t do any of that.

Both rulings will be appealed, and as Idaho is in the more liberal Ninth Circuit, there’s a very good chance that this ruling will be upheld. The same is true for Texas, where the radical and lawless Fifth Circuit will get its paws on it. While it is usually the case that a split in the appellate courts means that SCOTUS will weigh in, it seems possible to me that they will duck the issue, perhaps on the grounds that this is really a dispute over state laws, and since the Texas case applies only to Texas, there’s no need for them to step in. I’m just guessing, I could easily be wrong. We’ll know soon enough. DAily Kos has more.

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