Hegar isn't the reason to invest in Texas. The Republican gerrymander of the state house of representatives is on the verge of blowing up because it was built around the idea that Republicans would always carry the suburbs. Beto won an outright majority of state house districts in 2018 despite losing the popular vote. Biden doesn't necessarily have to win to pull this off. But you need an anchor at the top of the ticket to make a victory possible. On top of the state house, there are several federal house districts in play that all would benefit from the same effect. The potential downballot gains in Texas dwarfs any other potentially competitive state in the US right now. And with winning the state house of representatives in a redistricting year, Democrats gain a veto on federal redistricting (but not state maps unfortunately). Plus, it creates sustaining momentum to make Democrats relevant. 2018 was a nice moral victory but to create real sustainable momentum going forward, Democrats have to actually start winning in Texas. But Biden will end up spending in both states as long as the polls are close. Obama invested in all kinds of places in 2008 before limiting what the campaign focused on. But it started with a wide net. At one point, the Obama campaign had actual targeted efforts in North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska (although they stuck around in Omaha for CD2), and Alaska. You have to spend in multiple places and as long as the polls continue to look good, you keep investing and if things don't improve you stop. But Texas and Georgia continue to look good, so you have to invest. And in Texas's case, the down ballot implications are huge because the Republican gerrymander was never built for this sort of situation. The worst case scenario for Republicans is that Democrats win the state house of representatives and win 7 House seats (which also gives Dems a majority of the US Congressional delegation).
I strongly agree with this and why I’ve been saying win at all levels. Part of why the Republicans have been hanging on even though numerically they haven’t won the total vote since 2010 is that they’ve won at all levels and have been able to control things like redistricting.
...oh enough of this already.... ...WHY doesn't the Donald hold a press conference for one of these things... ...so he can look into the camera at the American people and say what he really wants to say: "You're Fired." ...we all know by now that if this was a reality show, he would do this every week... ...he's already let enough people go to put this whole fiasco into syndication in perpetuity...
I'm wondering how well prepared DNC servers will be against hackers this time around. They literally stole both parties info and more notably handed the DNC playbook full of state and national demo data into the hands of the Trump campaign. Ofc they didn't directly ask for it and found it on the porch like an orphan baby...
In all fairness to Trump he was talking to base. Most of them probably didn’t know about Lincoln’s party. I want to clarify I am not making disparaging any voting group (Trump supporters).
George Will... one of America's greatest conservative writers... "The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime." The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come Opinion by George F. Will Columnist July 15, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT Because of his incontinent use of it, the rhetorical mustard that the president slathers on every subject has lost its tang. The entertainer has become a bore, and foretelling his defeat no longer involves peering into a distant future: Early voting begins in two states (South Dakota and Minnesota) 61 days from Sunday, which is 107 days before Election Day. Never has a U.S. election come at such a moment of national mortification. In April 1970, President Richard M. Nixon told a national television audience that futility in Vietnam would make the United States appear to the world as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Half a century later, America, for the first time in its history, is pitied. Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300. Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected. The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump. By commuting Stone’s sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying. Because the pandemic prevents both presidential candidates from bouncing around the continent like popcorn in a skillet, the electorate can concentrate on other things, including Trump’s selection of friends such as Stone and Paul Manafort, dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel. “Longing on a large scale is what makes history,” Don DeLillo wrote in his sprawling 1997 novel “Underworld” about the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Today, there is a vast longing for respite from the 21st century, which — before the pandemic, two inconclusive wars and the Great Recession — began with a presidential election that turned on 537 Florida votes and was not decided until a Dec. 12, 2000, Supreme Court decision. Given Trump’s reckless lying and the supine nature of most Republican officeholders, it is imperative that the Nov. 3 result be obvious that evening. This year, the pandemic will be an accelerant of preexisting trends: There will be a surge of early and mail voting. So, an unambiguous decision by midnight Eastern time Nov. 3 will require (in addition to state requirements that mailed ballots be postmarked, say, no later than Oct. 31) a popular-vote tsunami so large against the president that there will be a continentwide guffaw when he makes charges, as surely he will, akin to those he made in 2016. Then, he said he lost the popular vote by 2.9 million because “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted against him. Making a preemptive strike against civic confidence, Trump has announced that the 2020 election will be the “most corrupt” in U.S. history. The 2020 presidential selection process began with Iowa’s shambolic Democratic caucuses, a result not of corruption but incompetence, an abundant commodity nowadays. It is scandalous that in many places casting a ballot requires hours of standing in line. Larry Diamond of the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford discerns another scandal: “The hard truth is that there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections. These actions — such as overeager purging of electoral registers and reducing early voting — have the appearance of enforcing abstract principles of electoral integrity but the clear effect (and apparent intent) of disproportionately disenfranchising racial minorities. One example was the decision of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State (now Governor) Brian Kemp to suspend 53,000 predominantly African-American voter registration applications in 2018 because the names did not produce an ‘exact match’ with other records.” This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...499fd4-c5f0-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html
So...Trump hired the guy that was one of the primary people behind the New Jersey politically-motivated lane closures?
Good point (you too @jiggyfly). If Biden has the money...and it certainly seems like he's starting to rake it in...he definitely should try to branch out and try to take every state he can. Dems definitely do need help in Texas...and if Biden gain on Beto's push, then that should help out in the future, even if they aren't able to pull it off this year.
Upcoming trump COVID-19 superspreader event planning... with all the top minds involved (the other idiot son's wife, white nationalist stephen miller, and trump's homewrecker squeeze hope hicks)... RNC restricts convention attendance as Florida coronavirus cases climb https://www.politico.com/news/2020/...n-attendance-florida-coronavirus-cases-365559
I might not always agree with George Will but I love his writing style. This is one where I agree with the content and the style.
