Austin at Large: Easy to Be Hard, Easy to Vote No

This issue's election package touches on some of the news made Tuesday that politicos will be chewing, swallowing, and turning into Narrative and Discourse in the weeks ahead. Turnout sucked! The major gains made in 2018 and 2020 in voter engagement appear to have evaporated for both parties; we may be back at the 2016 status quo ante. Did votes get suppressed? Who knows? A lot of those few Texas voters, especially the Democrats, really have no clue who they're voting for in most races when they go to the polls; they were targeted for get-out-the-vote efforts by Beto O'Rourke or Greg Casar or whomever, and were flying blind elsewhere on the ballot.

People really did not get their votes counted because of the stupid "election integrity" rules put into place, largely at random, to thwart Harris County and appease former President Apesh*t. (Texas Secretary of State John Scott, one of the lawyers who tried to flip the 2020 election, put out a confusing release on election night, apparently intended to prepare the way for a GOP takeover of Harris County elections. Troubling if true!) Apesh*t's ravings and endorsements really do carry weight when deployed against very conservative yet reasonable Republicans like U.S. Rep. Van Taylor, R-Plano, who was forced into a run-off by former Collin County Judge Keith Self (reputed to be Ken Paxton's best friend in all the world) and then abruptly withdrew from said run-off Wednesday with a lurid confession of an affair with an "ISIS bride." Sucks to be him. What else did we learn?

Dead Pax Walking?

Inept, corrupt, and indicted Attorney General Paxton, who was in D.C. rallying the insurrectionists on 1-6-21, only eked out 43% of the vote in a high-dollar primary against inept but neither corrupt nor indicted Land Commissioner George P. Bush; non-inept etc. but lesser-known and more visibly Latinx former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman; and raving loony U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, who scratches the same partisan bug bites as Paxton but, again, not indicted. Does that mean Paxton is done for? Probably not! While Bush and Guzman's millionaire establishment backers are likely kicking themselves for splitting their money and votes between the two (an artifact of Texas' absurdly early primary, which this year both parties complained about; we'll see what happens next session), they only combined for less than 40%. While Gohmert did astoundingly well in his East Texas home turf, thus eating into the establishment's desired non-Paxton vote, those voters are not at all guaranteed to show up in a May run-off. My guess is that unless the current FBI investigations into Paxton's latter-day misdeeds turns into another bauble in his collection of indictments before then, he can pull it off.

East Austin: Full of Pinkos!

And especially pinkos who went to college and can afford to make political donations, which is the perfect breeding ground for a member of the Squad. Much is made of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., organizing working people in her Bronx-based district, which is true and good, but she's also a national fundraising machine whose imprimatur is as effective with her base as Apesh*t's is with his. The rest of the Squad in Congress represents districts very much like the ones that Greg Casar will now likely represent in January: central Boston, Minneapolis, the Arab neighborhoods in Detroit, the more down-to-earth suburbs north of New York and Atlanta, most of St. Louis, and much of Dallas if state Rep. Jasmine Crockett prevails as expected in her run-off.

Are they working-to-middle-class districts that are majority-minority? Yes, but their voters are not a random sample of their population, and their primary electorates even less so, and in all these races the primary is what matters; should Jessica Cisneros unseat corrupt Blue Dog Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, and then make it through November, she would be an exception to that rule. But can Casar's landslide win please now put paid to the notion that decriminalizing homelessness, reining in police spending, and blocking state infringements on workers' and reproductive rights are too far left for Texas voters to even contemplate?

Notes From Three Scandals

Those would be: fixing the damn grid, cleaning up Abbott's mess on the Mexican border, and navigating the assaults on human rights codified in last year's Senate Bill 8 outlawing most abortion care and made up by Abbott and Paxton this week to attack transgender youth and their families and score last-minute votes. Did any of them make a difference anywhere to voters? Nah. The grid has been most loudly talked about by lt. governor candidate (since 2018) Mike Collier, but he couldn't avoid a run-off with state Rep. Michelle Beckley, who barely mounted a statewide campaign. The border shenanigans were called out not only by O'Rourke but by Allen West, who despite his eccentricities and failings can at least claim legitimate expertise in matters military; it moved few if any voters. Supposedly, the SB 8 and anti-trans moves have turned off a great many GOP women voters, but the punishment has not yet materialized. We'll see if O'Rourke can cause Abbott some pain over the long hot summer to come.