Last night in Texas was disappointing, but not surprising.  All statewide races were lost by Dems.  100%.  And the spreads were predictable, all double digit losses but for the race for Ag Commissioner.  Susan Hays lost to the worst Ag Commissioner in Texas history by a mere 7 points.

Who to blame?  Leaving out for now the radical gerrymandering in state and US districts, the statewide blame for this kind of loss lay with the Texas Democratic Party and the candidates it produced, period.  Sure, Republican voter suppression, intimidation, and misinformation shaved 2 or 3 points from turnout, but it didn’t shave over 10.  The TDP did in 2022 what the TDP always does, just expected a different result.  In the governor’s race, the polls here were pretty clear and surprisingly close to actual results.  Real Clear Politics averaged Abbott + 10.4, and he won by 11.  A lot of the blame, too, needs to be laid at Beto’s feet.  He had a promising future when he came within 2 points of Cruz for Senate in 2018, but starting to believe his own bullshit, throwing it all away with his disastrous run for president in 2020.  That was stupid.

The lessons here are clear and need to be learned.  First, the TDP needs a serious housecleaning and fumigation.  Old assumptions need to be thrown out the window, especially the longstanding myth that Texas is getting more blue just because demographics are changing.  GOP messaging and ideology plays well with some groups like the Latino community, especially since the Dems have taken them, and African Americans, for granted for decades.  The party always plays to these demographic groups in voting years and then underserves them until the next election.  That’s got to stop.

I know this is hard to hear, but the GOP in Texas has outplayed, outworked, and out strategized Dems for years, and the asymmetric performance at the polls is the result.  Starting in the 1960s, Repubs went after school boards, precincts, city councils, and county offices.  Over this time they’ve built a huge base with a bench a mile deep.  The Dems have done the opposite; the Dems are every person for themselves until election season, and then try to build a strategy around a standard bearer who elbows their way in, be that for president or governor. (See Barack Obama, 2004 to 2008.)  They then vehemently resist change, leaving petrified party leadership in place for decades, stiff arming all new comers and those with opposing opinions.  Doing this discourages younger leaders because there’s no opportunity for leadership roles and stultifies policy.  What you get then are losers like Beto and Mike Collier.  In Beto’s case, you can’t build a statewide strategy on a standard bearer who acts like a teenager and says stupid shit in public.  Lastly, and this is not just a Texas problem, is that the Democratic party needs to stop counting noses.  I’ve been to meetings where the majority of the time is spent doing math to make sure every possible demographic is in the room before the meeting can start.  I’m not saying the party needs to be less inclusive; I’m saying the time for inclusivity is at the beginning, not at the end. There needs to be an obsessive focus on inclusion of demographic groups at the micro local level, not only at state conventions and statewide campaigns.  Being inclusive at the start would negate the necessity of nose counting at the end.

The textbook example of party failure in 2022 is not Beto, it’s Rochelle Garza.  Dems overwhelmingly chose Garza and rejected a very experienced and well known attorney, Joe Jaworski.  Let’s be frank – Ken Paxton is a deeply flawed, dishonest, embarrassing, and weak AG.  He was ripe to be picked off.  The Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by overwhelmingly nominating a less experienced, less well known candidate who didn’t have a prayer of beating Paxton; her nomination was a vote for diversity, not for a win.  Another example was Lupe Valdez in 2018.  Dems overwhelmingly chose her as the standard bearer over Andrew White, son of former governor Mark White.  Valdez ran a terrible campaign, had low name recognition, and then lost to Abbott by over 13 points.

Before you say it, I am actually all about diversity and inclusion.  But diversity and inclusion doesn’t get you a goddam thing unless you WIN.  Not winning has a lot worse negative consequences than winning every time.  The TDP (and all Dems) can actually do more than one thing at a time.  They need to be strategic, not just inclusive, because what the Dems are doing, and have been doing for decades, is a loser.  I know this opinion, just like the one I hold about Hillary, will piss a lot of you off, and I accept that.  But until the Texas Democratic Party and Dems in general start operating strategically they’ll keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.  And we all know what that’s called.  Until they start working strategically, there will be no joy in Mudville.

Oh, and Beto?  I love ‘ya, bro, but please go back to El Paso. Run for mayor or even the House again. Do some maturing.  You’ll have another chance at some point, but you need some years of growing up.

As was widely reported this morning, Texas Democrats have decided to take their big blue butts to Washington, D.C. today. This will deny Texas Republicans the quorum they need to pass restrictive voting legislation that they were unable to pass in the regular legislative session, earlier this year. Whether they can be arrested outside of the state is unclear, but the House rules about the arrests are as follows:

“All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested, wherever they may be found, by the sergeant-at-arms or an officer appointed by the sergeant-at-arms for that purpose, and their attendance shall be secured and retained. The house shall determine on what conditions they shall be discharged.”

It’s a ballsy move by the Democrats and I am glad they are doing it. In terms of whether their reason is “sufficient” or not, the sergeant-at-arms will have to travel quite a long way to find them. They’ll have to stay gone for a while, as Abbott can continue to call a special session at least through the end of the summer.

Now, if the special session addressed the power grid or some other substantive legislation instead of Abbott’s campaign materials, I’d feel differently. This entire special session is a waste of the state’s time and money. There’s no reason to restrict the distribution of mail-in ballots. My granddaddy’s been voting by mail since he retired from the postal service in 1986 and he always gets an application mailed to him.

During the pandemic, my shero and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo successfully implemented drive-thru voting and 24 hour voting. Hidalgo allowed both Democrats and Republicans to vote using both of these options so I don’t know what the Republicans are so pissy about. Instead of trying to block Democratic counties to vote, they should be working on turning out their own voters. Instead, they call a special session to try and eliminate any voting technology or innovation faster than you can say “Varmint.”

Of course, for the last twenty years, the Republicans have made their tent so small that Greg Abbott might be seen as too liberal to govern in the upcoming gubernatorial primary, so it seems that winning more voters isn’t going to happen. All they’ve got left is meanness and trickery. If we don’t vote these schmucks out we get the legislature we deserve.

The DNC is now considering what to do about Iowa in terms of where it sits in the order of presidential primaries, since it is traditionally first to go in the presidential race every 4 years.  My opinion?  Dump it.  The unmitigated shitshow of 2020’s caucuses should be the nail in the coffin of Number One Primary, but it goes beyond that.  Iowa voters are not predictive of a winner; its population is older, more rural, and generally less informed than many other states. As an aside, I even question the importance of New Hampshire, but whatever, let’s dump on Iowa tonight.  I’ve got an idea, how about we start out with Super Tuesday and just go from there?

There’s also other upsides to dumping Iowa; no more stupid steak fries, corn on the cob roasts, butter cow sculpture contests, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on bus rentals going from VFW hall to VFW hall to press the flesh of octogenarians.  On top of that, the Iowa Dems can’t even manage implementing a Goddam iPad app, hence 2020’s disaster.  In short, fuck those hayseeds.  Go to the back of the line; sit down, shut up. Eat your corn.

Not that I’m opinionated.  Or worn out.  Or just sick of hearing about Iowa.  Rant over, good night.

I think everyone is aware that Bernie’s campaign essentially ended with his heart attack last week and he’s admitted that he’s “scaling back”.  Worse, it’s now being reported that his daughter in law, Rainè Riggs, died suddenly a few weeks ago from a rare disease.  Riggs was married to Levi Sanders, Bernie’s son.  I believe Bernie is done.

I personally thought it was a terrible idea for Bernie to run again this year when the stage was set  perfectly for him to be a major player in guiding the Democratic Party into the post Trump era.  I didn’t want it to end this way, though.

Until 1968, Democratic Party bosses picked its candidates.  In 1968, Eugene McCarthy, who had won the most primaries, was pushed aside when party bosses picked Humphrey.  As we all know, Nixon beat Humphrey, which began our long national nightmare which ended in scandal and Nixon’s resignation in 1974.  In 1970, the party became democratic by giving the votes to the rank and file, but in 1972, the party nominated McGovern, who was slaughtered in 49 states by Nixon.  That’s when party bosses seized power again by inventing superdelegates, who had an outsized role in selecting candidates.  That outsized role was used to the extreme in 2016, which resulted in the second long national nightmare, the Trump era.  That happened when Hillary erected a huge wall of money and used that money to vacuum up almost all super delegates before the primaries even started in 2016, she abused Democratic Party rules to destroy the fundamental principle of our country – democracy.

Since the 2016 electoral disaster, the left side of the party has been at war with party leaders to get rid of superdelegates.  This weekend, they won a major battle when the DNC voted to reform the superdelegate system.  That reform took away the vote of superdelegates in the first vote in a contested convention. What that means is that if a candidate has enough votes to win the nomination without the superdelegates, they can vote.  If it hasn’t been decided yet, they have to wait on the sidelines on the first ballot.  This change, while not pure reform, is huge.  No longer can another candidate, like Hillary, use the party structure to suppress the vote of the rank and file before the primaries even start.  Because of this reform, party bosses like Donna Brazile, who had opposed the change are not happy.  Leaders like Karen Carter Peterson of Louisiana were outraged that their power to destroy democracy was being taken away.  Addressing the rules committee she said, “Are you telling me that I’m going to go to a convention, after my 30 years of blood sweat and tears for this party, that you’re going to take away my right?”  Well, Karen, if you mean your right to force your will over the voters, the answer is that you’re goddam right we’re taking away your right.  You abused that right, so now the people have taken that privilege away from you.  Welcome to democracy.

How do you like ‘dem apples?

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

Friday, the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee proposed a rules change for the 2020 campaign.  The new rule is directed straight at Bernie Sanders:

The new rule specifically requires that someone running for president must declare in writing his or herself as a member of the Democratic party and that they will run and serve as a Democrat.  Easy, right?  Not so fast.  The two party system in the US is cemented in place by statute, creating an almost impenetrable wall to outsiders.  Party primaries are paid for by the taxpayers, and getting on the ballot in all the states as an independent presidential candidate is virtually impossible.  Because of this, the only realistic path to the presidency is as insurgency in one of the two entrenched  political parties.  You saw that in spades in 2016 where Trump used his television persona to hijack the GOP and Sanders’ grass roots campaign almost uprooted Hillary’s coronation.

This rule seeks to stifle competition for the nomination, all while DNC political operatives are loudly denying that fact, which is as obvious to normal people as a hillbilly at a Newport garden party.  Even while these operatives are all sniffy that outsiders understand their actual intent, Sanders supporters aren’t happy.  Mark Lonabaugh, a senior Sanders advisor, call the new resolution “stunning”.

Someday, establishment Dems will have to face the fact that they are way out of step with their constituents.  The Sanders phenomenon should have shaken these pillars of the party to the core, but it didn’t.  They are ignoring, at their own peril, the 13 million voters, many first time voters, who went for the tottering old candidate from Vermont instead of the tottering old candidate from New York, Chicago, Arkansas (pick your accent).  He brought a message of social justice, equity, and fairness that the Dems abandoned in the 1990s.  And it appears that, rather than learning from that experience, the DNC is trying to keep it from happening again by further rigging the rules in favor of the establishment.

Oh, and one last thing – While the DNC specifically designed a rule to keep out insurgents, there are no adopted rule changes to eliminate or significantly reduce the influence of superdelegates, and no rule that prevents a presidential candidate from controlling the national party until AFTER they are nominated.  It appears the Democratic party is the LEAST democratic organization in US politics, and that should piss you off.