06.25.10
Posted in Elections, Good Stuff, Presidential Election at 7:27 pm by dembones
As a member of the temporary rules committee, I was present at the meeting R. G Ratliff describes in today’s Houston Chronicle.
The hybrid system of awarding some presidential convention delegates through a primary vote and others through a series of caucuses held on primary night became contentious in the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Clinton won the primary vote, but Obama outmaneuvered her in the caucuses and walked away with the most pledged Texas delegates to the national nominating convention: 99-94. The state fight over those delegates continued from the March primary until a week before the 2008 state convention when Clinton conceded the nomination to Obama.
In some ways, the fight reignited Thursday morning during a pre-convention meeting in Corpus Christi in a sometimes-heated discussion over whether to keep the system or start allocating presidential delegates based only on primary results.
The temporary rules committee voted unanimously to recommend the adoption of the West Commission report, which keeps the allocations of national delegates’ presidential preferences based up on the combined results of the primary and caucuses. In the interests of full disclosure, this reporter served on the Temporary Rules Committee and authored a supplement to our report on the issue.
Now the work passes to the permanent Rules committee in the morning, where I believe the committee will vote to allow the full convention an opportunity to vote on a simple question: “Should Presidential Delegates’ presidential preference be determined exclusively by Primary election results?” If the full convention agrees with me and the rest of the Temporary Rules Committee, then the answer to this question will be no.
The concerns of those who would prefer we changed to a conventional primary are currently being addressed by the Texas Democratic Party. With improved and secured record-keeping, participant credentialing, improved training and certification, the scenes of chaos that made the national news in 2008 won’t be repeated. We can retain the precinct conventions as a party-building exercise in the long Presidential nomination process, honoring the tradition of the Texas Democratic party, and keep our unique process. It is going to take work.
My hope is that the convention will commit to completing this task and saving this critical organizing tool for future presidential elections.
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01.19.09
Posted in Around The Nation, Around The State, Commentary, Election 2010, HD-52, Presidential Election, Uncategorized at 2:12 pm by wcnews
Evan Smith of Texas Monthly has started a discussion about the Democrats chances in Texas in the next several election cycles. He’s essentially surmising that we should expect no change from GOP rule in Texas for a while yet. Here’s his initial post, A 2012 Reality Check, and his Newsweek article, The Lone Star State Stays Red.
Not long after Election Day, soothsayers suggested that just as Colorado and Virginia (along with seven other states) flipped from red to blue this cycle, Texas was on the verge of political transformation, too. The reasoning went like this: as with those states (and, to a lesser degree, newly blue North Carolina), Texas has a growing Latino population that remains untapped; it’s got younger, more-progressive transplants from other states moving into urban areas, while older, more-conservative rurals are dying off; and it’s undergoing a migration of base Democratic types (civil servants, union workers, ethnic minorities) into the once blood-red suburbs, turning some purple or even light blue.
All true. The only thing wrong is the conclusion. Texas isn’t poised to flip—yet…
He has invited responses. It has been responded to so far by Glenn Smith, Charles Kuffner, and this anonymous contribution.
If Barack Obama, as President, can repair the people’s trust in their government and show that once again our government can help the people, the electoral outlook can change rapidly in Texas. As Glenn Smith lays out in his response the GOP record in Texas is less than stellar:
[Evan] Smith is right when he writes that demographics aren’t destiny. What has opened the future to Democrats in Texas is not the make-up of the population or party-based gamesmanship; it’s what’s happened to the Lone Star State under Republican rule.
College is no longer affordable for many. Texas has more citizens without health insurance than any other state. Mismanaged transportation planning has led to failing toll roads, poor maintenance, awful traffic, loss of productivity. Public education is headed backwards.
When the GOP rose in Texas, it based its “no tax” arguments on the premise that taxpayer money was spent on the other side of the tracks. But now critical state services are visibly crumbling everywhere. Phony social issue distractions are thin and growing thinner. People want their children to learn in public schools. They want them to go to college without having to start their lives staring up at a mountain of debt. They want them to be able to drive on safe roads, and they want them to have access to medical care should they have an accident on the way.
Republicans have taken these simple hopes away from us.
What will the Texas GOP’s solution be in this legislative session be to high college tuition, health care, public education, and transportation? More of the same, or a new approach? It’s hard to predict the future, and many scenarios are possible, but if things change for the better at the national level from Democratic leadership, that could make a Democratic resurgence much more likely in Texas.
It may still be hard to believe a change in Texas could come quickly but if the 2008 Presidential race taught us anything, Yes It Can. Two more years of failed leadership in Texas by the GOP, and more importance being put on ideology as opposed to what works, could easily help speed up a change.
The biggest question still answered is, how well would the Democrats do in Texas with a fully funded, fully organized, fully mobilized state wide election effort? Here’s another compelling point that Glenn Smith makes.
…where Texas Democrats have campaigned hard and invested resources, they won. Smart work by Democratic state House leaders and their allies closed the Republican margin in the state House from a dozen to only two seats in just two elections. Harris County, which is the largest county in Texas and has more people than the state of New Mexico, now favors Democrats. Prior to the 2008 elections, not a single Democrat held any countywide office in Harris County. After investing time and resources in Harris, Democrats won 85 percent of the countywide seats on the ballot. This follows a similar effort in Dallas County – Texas’ second largest county. A focused Democratic effort has moved the county from having only four countywide Democratic elected officials to now holding every single county-wide position.
We know how fast things can change right here in Williamson County. Who would have thought that HD-52 would have elected a female Hispanic Democrat over white male conservative Republican four years ago? Nobody knows how well Democrats would perform state wide, in the future, with a well-funded, well organized effort. Whether the Democrats can continue to make gains in Texas has more to do with the future than the past. Looking back will not provide proper perspective for Democrats chances in the future in Texas. If Obama is successful and the Democrats are able to raise the money needed to put together a first-rate organization, no one knows what kind of gains could be made.
Kuffner’s observations, among other things, show that there’s little chance for Obama in 2012 if the economy doesn’t turn around. And that likely wouldn’t bode well for Texas Democrats either.
Couple of things first. One, I actually think Smith is making the smart money bet, at least if we’re wagering on who will win Texas’ electoral votes in 2012. Being competitive is a more nebulous concept, but let’s not get bogged down in that. I think we’ll know it if and when we see it. I’m making two assumptions in my argument here. One is that the economy has substantially improved by 2012. If not – if things are as bad as they are now – the question won’t be whether Obama can win Texas but whether he can still win Illinois. And two, that Team Obama will make some kind of genuine effort to compete here. I agree with Glenn Smith that the result this year could have been better had the Obama campaign directed resources here instead of using the locals to help efforts in Ohio and New Mexico and wherever else.
While the anonymous response, from the GOP side, blames their lowered numbers in Texas in 2008 on the fact that McCain was unpopular and Obama was too popular. They also blame the GOP’s losses in the Texas House on running bad candidates, and on the GOP’s bad redistricting. And purports that the Texas GOP’s promise for the future lies in the next round of redistricting.
The fact is that the LRB will likely have more to do with redistricting than the legislature will. Look at Susan Combs, Greg Abbott and Jerry Patterson’s cash on hand advantages (along with David Dewhurst’s personal wealth); it is hard to see how Democrats could even hope to have one seat on the LRB in 2011, much less three.
Republicans have learned their mistakes from the past redistricting done by the LRB in 2001; there are easily six seats that would still be in GOP hands had the party not used more skilled personnel in drawing House seats. So even if Democrats managed to recapture the Texas House in 2010, their time in power could be very brief.
It may be hard to see Democrats gaining enough power to control redistricting in two years, just like it may be hard to see the Democrats in Texas winning a statewide office in 2010. With a legislative session to get through, there’s still a long way to go, until anyone knows what the political landscape will look like for 2010. An example of how quick things can change in politics. Who would have thought two years ago that Joe Straus would now be the Speaker? Things can change quickly.
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12.04.08
Posted in Commentary, Presidential Election, The Economy, Williamson County at 9:32 am by wcnews
Lawrence Lessig asks, Can Obama create a truly transformational presidency? He uses a great phrase, “economy of influence”, to frame the issue of lobby money in Washington. He also uses a great analogy to describe where our country stands right now.
Yet on the way to “transformation,” things have gotten impossibly hard for the president-elect. Imagine a cancer patient, on the way to the hospital to begin chemotherapy, involved in a drive-by shooting: This, sadly, is the state of our nation. However committed in principle the new administration is to fundamental change (that’s the chemo), a different focus must occupy the field just now (that’s the trauma), if only to stabilize the patient for the next stage. I count five major crises that Obama must tackle in the first hundred days. There’s not going to be a lot of time for fancy theorizing about transformation.
I first heard him use this argument on Charlie Rose, you can watch it here. He gave the keynote address at Netroots Nation over the summer, the famous 9 percent presentation.
Grits rips the recent “study” on the red light cameras in Texas, Scarce data makes new TXDoT study on red light cameras suspect.
These are surprising data that contradict many past studies on the topic. For example, in Lubbock red light cameras were discontinued after accidents overall increased 52% at intersections with cameras. Similarly, the state of Virginia eliminated their use after studies in every city using the devices found the number of accidents increased. In other jurisdictions, studies have found reductions in right-angle accidents but nearly equal increases in rear-end collisions, including in injury accidents.
So how did this study come up with such radically different results? The short answer may be that much of their data is incomplete and speculative. For camera operators who began before 2008:
there is no requirement for the local authority to provide a report to the Texas Department of Transportation concerning the 18 months of pre-installation crash data even if the system remains active in 2008. …
This presents a problem in reporting since some local authorities reported pre-installation crash data while others did not. This made the process of analyzing the effectiveness of the red light camera system difficult to perform since no base line data was present for some local authorities. In short, there was no metric to determine the rise, fall or static percent difference in crash rates at some of the reported treatment intersections.
Also some disturbing news for the state economy, Worries Over State Pension Funds.
With the losses in the stock market are the state’s pension funds in need of additional state money? Governor Perry is watching closely. At this point the Governor isn’t sure if state money will need to be used to make up for losses to the states various pension funds.
Once again I’m so happy the Bush/GOP privatization scheme for Social Security never happened.
And Williamson County isn’t immune to the bad economic news, Layoffs hit Leander
manufacturer.
More than one hundred Leander workers will be out of a job in January. Luxury bathtub manufacturer Aquatic Industries, Inc. will shut down its facility in Leander on January 26.
“We’re very proud of that company,” said Leander Economic Development Director Kirk Clennan. “They were, I guess I’ll speak in the past tense, they were a historically significant company in our community.”
Aquatic has been an economic staple in Leander for nearly 20 years. Two local entrepreneurs created the company in 1989 and sold it several years later to Lasco Bathware.
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11.12.08
Posted in Election 2008, Good Stuff, Presidential Election, Williamson County at 3:27 am by dembones
This map (click to enlarge) shows the margin of victory in votes for the Democratic Presidential candidate in the Nov. 4 general election. Red and purple precincts had more votes for the Republican Presidential candidate. Barack Obama won the blue precincts.
The Democratic strongholds in the county are in the area from Round Rock to Georgetown, Cedar Park and the Hutto-Taylor area. There’s also a very nice pocket of Democrats in the area surrounding Bartlett. Republicans still hold vast leads in the precincts containing Sun City, Liberty Hill, Forest Creek and Behrens Ranch.
UPDATE: Due to a spreadsheet snafu, El Paso and Ellis counties had been reversed. The error has been corrected and the map updated.
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11.11.08
Posted in Elections, Good Stuff, Precinct 2, Precinct 4, Presidential Election, Williamson County at 12:11 pm by dembones
There were 21,437 fewer votes for the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 than in 2004. Support for the Democratic presidential candidate grew by 6,485 votes. The margin of victory at the top of the ticket in Williamson county shrunk by 70 percent in four years.
Republicans who look at these results and see good news are continuing the same sort of denial of reality that led to George W. Bush’s legacy of failure. Democrats are now on trajectory to winning many offices, countywide and lower on the ballot, in 2010.
Although we missed taking a county commission seat by 285 votes, the writing on the wall is clear. Cynthia Long and Ron Morrison, the Democrats are coming after you in two years. You have been put on notice.
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11.04.08
Posted in Around The Nation, Around The State, County Attorney, Election 2008, HD-52, Precinct 1, Precinct 3, Presidential Election, US Senate Race, Williamson County at 1:06 am by wcnews
Print these out and take them to the polls with you.
Williamson County candidates:
National and statewide candidates:
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11.01.08
Posted in Commentary, Election 2008, Presidential Election, Williamson County at 11:12 am by wcnews
Received Friday evening:
We just returned from a day in Fredericksburg and as we drove down our street, we noticed every Obama sign was missing or torn apart. This happened sometime between 11 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. today in broad daylight. This is the third time this has happened and it is very frustrating and infuriating. All the McCain signs remain in place and untouched. But every Obama sign is gone! I thought this was a country that valued free speech. Evidently Republicans in Williamson County do not understand or value our rights and continue to break the law by coming onto citizen’s laws and stealing our property. We do not retaliate in any way and believe you have a right to place a sign in your yard even if we don’t agree with your choice of candidate. You may take my sign but you can never take away my vote for Obama!
-ER, Milwood
I like what this Austin women did, via KXAN (w/video), Woman paints lawn after
sign is stolen:
After the Barack Obama sign was stolen from her front yard, Shannon Bennett painted a more permanent one with 12 cans of spray-paint and her front lawn as the canvas. “I just wanted to be able to say who I support, without being censored, which is how I felt when my sign was taken,” said Bennett. She painted a large, red, white, and blue symbol in the front yard, using her old Obama sign as an inspiration.
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10.31.08
Posted in Commentary, Election 2008, Good Stuff, Had Enough Yet?, Presidential Election, Take Action, Williamson County at 2:27 pm by dembones
More voters voted early yesterday than ever in a single day in Williamson County. The 12,659 who voted in person at the 15 early voting locations in operation sets a new record, surpassing the 11,801 who voted on Friday, October 29, 2004.
Another surprising result is the early voting location where most voters cast their ballots. In the past, the Sun City Recreation Center has long been the most popular early voting location, but as of now it is in fourth place with 8,936 voters.
Cedar Park Public Library has processed 13,025 voters to lead all early voting locations, followed by Brushy Creek Community Center (10,864 voters) and McConico Building (9,803).
The implication is that the center of Williamson county’s political gravity is shifting. Does that portend a shift in the county’s traditional Republican partisanship? It is likely.
On first glance, KXAN’s recent poll showing Sen. John McCain with a 22-point lead over Sen. Barack Obama in the Presidential race appears to reinforce the conventional thinking that Democrats would have a difficult time in this campaign. However, when compared to the 31-point lead by George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential campaign, 22 points doesn’t look too bad.
The high margin of error in the KXAN/SUSA poll, 4.43%, indicates a smaller sample size. SUSA is a well-respected pollster, currently ranking second in fivethirtyeight.com‘s pollster ratings. We can assume that they have balanced their sample based on party identification and screened using likely voter turnout models.
However, the current turnout profile breaks down when overall turnout reaches the 80 percent mark, which record early voting turnout in Williamson county seems to point toward. At that level of turnout, there really is not a significant difference between the “Registered Voter” and “Likely Voter” models. However, KXAN did not indicate which model the poll was employing. Furthermore, there are no internals to see how the numbers break down by gender, ethnicity and age.
Given these limitations, there is a significant probability that the actual result will lie near the extreme end of the margin of error. That might reduce the McCain lead to as little as 13 points county wide. Realistic expectations of an Obama win in Williamson county are unfounded; however, some parts of the county are significantly more Democratic. Unpopularity of Republican incumbents in the local races could produce large numbers of split-ticket votes.
The Democrats are still the underdogs in this campaign, but they’re fired up and making their biggest assault in 14 years. Quite a few incumbents are going to be up late Tuesday night anxious over their job security. We can put a few out of work, but it is going to take every single vote and massive amounts of volunteer hours.
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10.23.08
Posted in Around The State, Commentary, Election 2008, Good Stuff, Presidential Election, US Senate Race, Uncategorized at 1:42 pm by wcnews
While it’s been interesting to watch the “usual suspects” at the national level jump off the sinking GOP/McCain/Palin ship the last few weeks or so, a similar thing may be happening in Texas too. Harvey Kronberg at Quorum Report had a recent item titled, If Current Trendlines Hold, Something Big Could Be Brewing In Texas. In it he shows how McCain and John Cornyn have both been polling well below what Bush got in ’04 and Hutchinson got in ’06, 63%. John McCain is polling at 53%, and Cornyn hasn’t been above 50% since June….2007! (Today’s poll notwithstanding).
To be clear none of this means Barack Obama is going to win Texas. What it does mean is this, from QR:
It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the ten point drop is moderate Republicans and independents that are at least up for grabs.
In other words the GOP can no longer take anything for granted anymore in Texas. Around Texas the GOP is suffering from two problems. The moderates, Independents, and even some Democrats that used to vote for them are recoiling from their radical, far right, and inept governing style. While the right-wing base of their party – as evidenced by this editorial in today’s AAS (Tom Craddick must step down as speaker of the Texas House) – sees them as not “conservative” enough. They’re boxed in, and that’s not where a party wants to be less than two weeks before an election. This is similar to the predicament the Democrats in Texas found themselves in decades ago when their hold on Texas began to ebb.
But it’s not just Kronberg, Paul Burka of Texas Monthly is seeing something similar:
I regard this race as a hard choice. I don’t think Noriega is ready for the Senate, but he has come a long way since he first announced his candidacy. At the same time, I find myself in agreement with the Chronicle’s view — unstated, but implicit — that Cornyn, once widely regarded as a voice of moderation (and who ran as a moderate in 2002), has been more loyal to the hard right Republican ideology and the GOP base than to his overall Texas constituency. The Chronicle correctly singled out immigration as an issue in which he is out of step with Texas tradition. The editorial also mentioned social issues (stem cell research matters in a major medical community); it also might have brought up Cornyn’s votes (six of them, according to Noriega) against the expansion of S-CHIP, the state children’s health insurance program, even though Texas leads the nation in uninsured children.
The Houston Chronicle endorsement of Democrat Rick Noriega is here, Houstonian Rick Noriega is an old-fashioned Texas Democrat with the right voice for these new times. The HChron in making their case use the argumnet that with a Democratic majority in the Senate, Texas would be better served having a Democrat in the Senate. Instead of reelecting Cornyn who they describe as a “too-loyal foot soldier for the Bush administration”.
Kronberg’s overriding argument is that Republicans are polling much lower than they were just 2 years ago, and that if Democrats can get into the mid-40′s in statewide polls “..it may be a [Democratic] wave”.
When you get past the consultants, it is obvious that the general mood among Republican incumbents facing challengers is glum. While not euphoric, Democrats are upbeat if not downright enthusiastic about their prospects.
A reliable pollster told us a month ago there was no evidence of a Democratic wave in Texas…but that was a month ago.
The bottom line? This election is a knife fight and, for the moment, Democrats have the power of the trends behind them.
While Kronberg and Burka are not right wing pundits they have previously been less than positive about the Democrat’s chances this cycle. But it is an encouraging sign to see these two Texas pundits giving Democrats a much better cahnce than they have in a long time. Not overconfidence, and Democrats haven’t won anything yet, but that is a more reasonable hypothesis.
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10.20.08
Posted in Election 2008, Good Stuff, HD-52, Presidential Election at 9:30 am by dembones
About 250 enjoyed the sunshine Sunday at Pepper Rock Park for a Democratic Rally. Candidates spoke as folks signed up for volunteer opportunities at early voting and election-day polling locations. KXAN reporter Stephanie Serna brought cameras, and the crowd put on a show. As KXAN cut to Serna live during their Sunday 5 o’clock news, sign-waving Democrats chanted “Di-a-na!”, referring to Democratic candidate for Texas House district 52 Diana Maldonado.
Now the real work begins. Volunteers are needed to work outside polling locations and make phone calls. Head over to the Williamson County Democratic Party web site and fill out the volunteer form if you’re fired up and ready to go.
To get an idea how great a turnout it was, here’s a photo of a rally four hundred times larger that took place in St. Louis Saturday.
Also this weekend, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has announced that the campaign raised more than $150 million in September. More than 3.1 million people have contributed to the Obama campaign, with each donation averaging $86.
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