Posts Tagged ‘2018 Election’

Texas Gains 2 Congressional Seats, California, New York Lose 1 Each (With Some Thoughts On Texas Redistricting)

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

The 2020 Census results are out:

Florida and Texas gained House seats while California and New York lost one seat each as a result of population shifts, according to the 2020 census results announced on Monday.

Texas gained two House seats in the census apportionment for a new total of 38 congressional districts, while Florida gained one House seat, bringing its total number of districts to 28. California lost one House seat and will decline to 52 congressional districts, while New York also lost one House seat and will now have 26 congressional districts. Those four states are the nation’s most populous and together provide one-third of the House’s total seats.

A census official noted that if New York had counted 89 more people, the state would not have lost a House seat.

Too bad Andrew Cuomo killed off all those old people before they could be counted.

The population of California stopped growing several years before the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2020 the state lost more residents to outmigration than it gained. Residents have migrated to Texas as well as to neighboring states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.

Once again, blue states lost population and red states gained population. People flee Democratic governance and its symptomatic poverty, high taxes, crime and disorder. It’s also the first time California has lost a congressional seat ever.

With two new congressional seats to play with, how will Texas Republicans approach redistricting? I am very far indeed from a redistricting guru, but I have a few educated guesses about how they’ll approach things:

  • Obviously, they’ll try to carve out two more Republican districts, but that may prove difficult. Expect a new Metroplex-area suburban/exurban Republican majority district, but don’t be surprised if they have to create another Hispanic majority district for Democrats somewhere.
  • The next-highest priority has to be taking back the two seats lost in 2018, AKA The Year of Beto. Both the 7th (John Culberson losing to Lizzie Fletcher) and the 32nd (Pete Sessions losing to Collin Allred) were typical sleepwalking incumbents caught by end of election cycle demographic shifts, but there’s no reason those districts can’t be redrawn to make them Republican majority districts again. Republican challenger Wesley Hunt only lost by 3% in the 7th in 2020. (Sessions carpetbagged his way into the Waco-based 17th.)
  • Next up would be protecting Republican incumbents whose current districts are starting to get purple. To that end, I would guess that the 2nd District, with Dan Crenshaw, a rising national star regarded as a solid team player (as newly minted congressmen Beth Van Duyne and August Pfluger can attest) in a district that’s only R+5, would be the top candidate for shoring up. Van Duyne’s 24th (R+2) and Chip Roy’s 21st (R+5) would be next. John Carter’s 31st (R+6) is starting to get purple as well, but since he’s 79, he may not get as much consideration as other incumbents. Michael McCaul’s 10th (R+5) would be another candidate, but as one of the richest incumbents, there might be sentiment that he can stand fast without much additional help. Van Taylor’s 3rd (R+6) looks like a candidate on paper, but neither he nor previous Republican incumbent Sam Johnson ever won by less than 10 points.
  • A separate issue than the above, due to different dynamics, is what to do about the 23rd. The only true swing district in Texas over the last decade is currently held by Republican Tony Gonzalez, who defeated Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones by 4% in 2020. Despite having a giant target on his back every time, Republican Will Hurd held the seat for three cycles before retiring despite never breaking 50%. The fate of the 23rd is highly dependent on whether they decide to carve out another majority Hispanic Democratic district for San Antonio, or whether they want to…
  • Make a play for the Rio Grande Valley? One of the more surprising results of 2020 was that Republicans made significant inroads into the Valley, including President Donald Trump winning Democrat Henry Cueller’s 28th outright. Part of this is due to Trump’s increasing popularity among Hispanics, but the Texas Republican Party has been pouring significant resources into the Valley. Combined with Biden’s border crisis, all this adds up to an opportunity to pick up one or more seats through redistricting. Michael Cloud’s adjacent 27th is looking pretty safe, so the temptation will be to turn one or more of the 28th, Vicente Gonzalez’s 15th (D+3) and/or Filemon Vela Jr.’s 34th (D+5) into competitive swing districts.
  • Another issue will be what the hell to do with Austin, the blue tumor in the heart of red Texas. One driving rationale for the shape of the 35th district (running from Austin down I-35 to San Antonio) was trying to knock off Democratic incumbent Lloyd Doggett by forcing him to face off against a San Antonio-based Hispanic Democrat. That failed, and Doggett won handily. It’s going to be mighty tempting for Republicans to throw in the towel and fashion a liberal urban core district for Austin to free up redder suburban areas to shore up Republican incumbents.
  • I can see one approach solution that solves a lot of those problems: an urban Austin district, a new majority Hispanic district near San Antonio, and a new majority Hispanic district huddling the Rio Grande Valley, reinforcing the 23rd and turning two of the 15th, 28th and 34th into majority Republican districts. But the fact it is obvious means that it probably won’t come to pass, with the likely result a more sophisticated (i.e., gerrymandered) solution.

    LinkSwarm for September 25, 2020

    Friday, September 25th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to the first LinkSwarm of fall! Strangely enough, we’re already getting some fall in our fall in Texas, as opposed to our usual Ever So Slightly Less Hot Late Summer. This week: Still more riots, Supreme Court pick news, more ugly truths about Crossfire Hurricane, and Lebanon goes boom again. Plus a bit of news that goes to eleven.

  • Yet another rash of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, this one ostensibly over the return of a single non-murder charge in the Breonna Taylor killing case.
  • Speaking of those idiots:

  • “Why Amy Coney Barrett is hands-down best pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

    Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.

    Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

    Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman — a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of ­impeaching the president — hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.

    “She was one of the two best lawyers” of the 40 clerks “and arguably the single best.” Feldman concluded: “She was legally prepared enough to go on the court 20 years ago.”

    When Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, every single one of those 40 fellow clerks endorsed her as a “first-rate” thinker, ­including such vehemently anti-Trump figures as Neal Katyal, solicitor general under Team Obama. The entire Notre Dame law faculty likewise endorsed her, “and that includes people who identify as liberal,” as Snead was quick to note.

    She is recognized as an expert on how judges are supposed to interpret statutes — a crucial role, as demonstrated by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s bizarre recent reading of “gender identity” into a civil rights statute enacted in the 1960s. She has also thought deeply about the relationship among the branches of government, a gnarly and seriously important area of law.

    To these achievements Barrett marries a vibrant Christian faith. For the evangelicals and Catholics the president needs to turn out in November, her pro-life bona fides are on display not just in her activities and statements, but also in her own family: She is a mother of seven, including one biological child with intellectual disabilities and two adopted from Haiti.

    Yes, Democrats and their ­media allies will attack and demonize her — viciously. But that’s no reason to nominate other candidates who have no record on life issues. As one conservative activist told me, “the left is going to burn everything down no matter whom we pick, so we might as well get the right person on the court.”

  • And why she’s the odds-on favorite.
  • Democrats worry that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is too old and senile to handle a Supreme Court nomination fight. Of course, they put it in slightly more delicate terms:

    Feinstein sometimes gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked. Her appearance is frail. And Feinstein’s genteel demeanor, which seems like it belongs to a bygone Senate era, can lead to trouble with an increasingly hard-line Democratic base uninterested in collegiality or bipartisan platitudes.

    Just this week, Feinstein infuriated progressives after declaring her opposition to ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster — a top goal of party activists if Democrats win full control of the Congress and White House in November. Some on the left called on her to resign over the comments, although other Democratic moderates have expressed similar views.

    It’s hard to pick which is the more interesting angle here: The hard-left planning to push for their suicidal court-packing/filibuster ending agenda, or the old guard of elderly Democrats hanging on to power ghastly Ringwraiths. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Democrats: “We have the following list of demands for this Suprem-” Republicans: “Sorry, we remember your outrageous smear job on Kavanaugh. Suck it!” Also, remember this:

    There were electoral consequences, with every “incumbent Senate Democrat in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination” losing his or her re-election bid. Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Bill Nelson of Florida were all replaced by their Republican opponents, while Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia saved his seat by backing Kavanaugh. That fall-out handed Republicans the votes they now need to push through a new nominee to the Supreme Court before Nov. 3, 2020.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Trump wants the Supreme Court at full strength to thwart any Democratic attempts to steal the election. Foresight. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “The ‘primary sub-source’ for the Steele dossier was suspected of being a possible Russian agent and a ‘threat to national security,’ according to newly declassified FBI documents.”
  • The goal of the Michael Flynn investigation wasn’t enhancing national security, but to get Flynn fired. “The explosive new documents support Flynn’s latest claims that Obama-era Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials had conspired to set him up from the beginning and that they never had any legitimate basis for investigating him.”
  • “Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the agency’s potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI text messages show.”
  • More on the same subject. I get the impression that there’s so much information coming out about malfeasance during Crossfire Hurricane/FISAgate that I can’t keep up with it all…
  • “Gov. Abbott proposes increased penalty, mandatory jail time for 6 riot-related offenses.”
  • It’s not just Texas: Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis just proposed similar anti-riot legislation. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • For construction workers, not just a V-shaped recovery, but a Super-V.

  • Hezbollah arms depot in Lebanese town of Ayn Qana blows up real good.
  • Follow-up: Wirecard’s business was “almost entirely fraudulent.”
  • Arkansas Kroger’s fires Christian employees for refusing to wear a gay rights pin.
  • Ratings for NBA conference finals way down.
  • “‘This Is Spinal Tap’ Creators Reach Settlement On Long-Running Court Battle Over Rights And Income.” Good. Studios shouldn’t screw creators out of rightfully owed money, even if it is Meathead.
  • Today’s market to be hit by crazy high valuations is…(spins wheel)…rare plants? Now if only it would hit science fiction first editions I would be set!

  • Microsoft buys Bethesda.
  • Boom:

  • Child brought down by wild pack! Oh the humanity!

  • LinkSwarm for Friday, June 7, 2019

    Friday, June 7th, 2019

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Good economic news, Democrats behaving badly, and dispatches from the #NeverTrump wars.

  • “Unemployment for workers without bachelor’s degrees fell to the lowest rate on record in May, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday.”
  • “How The Media Covered Up The Real Collusion, Between Russians And The Hillary Campaign.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • President Donald Trump gets a big court win over House Democrats in the fight over the border wall, the judge ruling they have a lack of standing to sue over statutorily discretionary spending.
  • Seattle’s Minimum Wage Has Been a Disaster, as the City’s Own Study Confirms.”

    These findings, examining another year of data and including the increase to $13/hr, are unequivocal: the policy is an unmitigated disaster. The main findings:

    – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by *3.5 million hours per quarter*. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.

    – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.” On average, low-wage workers *lost* $125 per month. The minimum wage has always been a lousy income transfer program, but at this level you’d come out ahead just setting a hundred million dollars a year on fire.

  • I’ve not been following the Sohrab Ahmari/David French contretemps, but Liel Leibovitz at Tablet has:

    We live, thundered Ahmari, in perilous times, with a progressive vanguard on the rise, dedicated to maximizing individual liberties at the expense of communal and traditional values.

    Even worse, today’s social justice warriors, Ahmari continued, see any dissent from their dogmas as an inherent assault. “They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human,” Ahmari wrote, “lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.” This means that no real discussion is possible—the only thing a true conservative can do is, in Ahmari’s pithy phrase, “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

    Needless to say, big battles like this one have little use for niceties. “Progressives,” Ahmari went on, “understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values.” Which is not to say they should be jettisoned; instead, Ahmari concluded, “we should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral.”

    Almost immediately, French delivered his riposte. Ahmari’s call to arms, he wrote in his response, betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both our national moment and our national character. “America,” French wrote, “will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.”

    Which means that civility is not a secondary value but the main event, the measure of most, if not all, things. Bret Stephens agreed: In his column in The New York Times, he called Ahmari—who was born Muslim in Tehran and had found his path to Catholicism—“an ardent convert” and a “would-be theocrat” who, inflamed with dreams of the divine will, had failed to understand that it was precisely the becalmed civilities of “value-neutral liberalism” that has made his brave journey from Tehran to the New York Post possible.

    What to make of this argument? Stephens and others clearly imply that behind Ahmari’s call to arms lurked a shadowy figure, draped in Catholic robes, who would force Americans to recite the catechism while banning abortions and forcing gays back into the closet. Scary, if true; ugly bigotry, if not.

    You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

    The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

    To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

    Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump.

    There are problems with Ahmari’s view, not least that outside the realm of sex, almost nothing about today’s left is dedicated to “maximizing individual liberties” as opposed to enforcing in-group collectivism in the form of victimhood identity politics as a means of keeping a vast array of groups tied to the Democratic Party. But Leibovitz is dead-right in casting #NeverTrump’s vainglorious “Orange Man Bad” puffery as deeply unserious for advancing a conservative agenda.

  • “Progressive activists are planning to debate a resolution at this weekend’s California Democratic Party convention that accuses the Israeli government of fueling the rise of anti-Semitic hate crimes in the United States.” (Evidently the resolutions were defeated.)
  • “In 2018, Justice Democrats recruited 12 Democratic primary challengers and endorsed 66 other candidates. The only Justice Democrats-recruited candidate to win election to Congress that year was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” Of those 66 endorsed, only 7 won the general election.
  • Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw explains what a dog’s breakfast the Democrats “immigration reform” proposal is:

  • “The Mexican government is reportedly offering a slate of immigration-related concessions to appease the Trump administration as it seeks to prevent the imposition of tariffs on exports to the U.S.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Texas Teacher To Trump: Please Help Me Fight Illegal Aliens In My School.”
  • Union members are getting tired of all the extreme environmentalist bullshit:

    Brian D’Arcy, business manager of the powerhouse International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Los Angeles, says that Garcetti’s move is just the latest on the environmental front that’s pushing his members toward the GOP — and into the arms of Trump, who effectively wooed blue-collar Rust Belt workers on his way to a 2016 presidential win.

    “I’m getting hate mail and blowback from our workers, saying the Democratic Party is doing nothing for us,’’ D’Arcy says, sitting surrounded by his union members in a hall in Los Angeles as they prepared to protest on the streets. Asked if members might gravitate toward Trump, D’Arcy sighed and said, “It’s already happening.”

  • A not-so-short history of hate crime hoaxes in the Trump era.
  • I missed this from last week: Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to form a government and Israel will be going to the polls again in September.
  • The EU, not Brexit, killed British Steel
  • Which gives me an excuse to post this:

  • You may not have noticed, but there’s a violent crackdown going on in Sudan, where somewhere between 46 (government figures) and 100 (everyone else) protestors have been killed. Sudan’s military regime want sharia law to be the basis of the country and protestors are having none of it.
  • Stephen Green proclaims that actually, a $999 monitor stand is everything right with Apple today:

    The last truly professional Mac desktop was the Westmere-powered beast from 2012. The 2013 Mac Pro, as much as I liked mine, was really a prosumer device. Those actual professional users rightly bristled at its lack of expandability, and Apple’s hopes for its all-new design were quickly crushed. The self-inflicted wound was so deep that two years ago Apple did something I can’t recall ever happening before: It issued a mea culpa to its pro user base, and promised an all-new Mac Pro years in advance, which they also promised would be a truly professional, modular, expandable machine. The company went so far as to bring some pro customers on as employees to help with the new Pro’s design.

    And, boy, did they deliver. As tech analyst Ben Thompson wrote on Tuesday, “It was fun seeing what Apple came up with in its attempt to build the most powerful Mac ever, in the same way it is fun to read about supercars.”

    Full pricing won’t be revealed until this Autumn, but you can bet that it’s going to priced like the supercar of workstations. I’ve seen estimates bandied about the tech-o-sphere that the starting price of $5,999 will balloon up to $25,000 or even $40,000 for a fully specced-out rig. “Would you like to buy a smaller Mercedes sedan, or a computer?” Before you gasp again, that top-end machine will be pretty much a Pixar animation studio in a box.

    In a Slashdot thread on the new MacPros, several commenters concluded that specing out a similarly loaded Windows or Linux workstation (1.5TB of RAM, 28-core/56-thread Xeon CPU, four high end GPUs, etc.) is going to cost you as much as Apple’s solution.

  • Baltimore got hit with a ransomware attack that crippled city government, then blamed the NSA, even though the specific vulnerability used was patched by Microsoft in 2017. They should blame their own horrible data security management.

    Baltimore’s ongoing ransomware dilemma is in many ways a product of more than a decade of neglect of the city’s information technology infrastructure. Since 2012, four Baltimore City chief information officers have been fired or have resigned; two left while under investigation.

    CIO Christopher Tonjes, who left in June of 2014, was forced to resign in the face of a Maryland attorney general’s investigation into claims his office had paid contractors for work they didn’t do. In 2017, CIO Jerome Mullen was fired in the midst of an investigation into alleged misconduct, including “inappropriate contact” with women in the mayor’s Office of Information Technology. He denied the accusations and cited “historic issues” with the city’s IT that had led to problems with the city’s 911 system (which was ceded back to the Police and Fire departments’ control in 2015) and a host of other IT missteps.

    In fact, the IT department languished following the departure of Mayor Martin O’Malley, who became Maryland’s governor in 2007. O’ Malley had instituted CitiStat, a data dashboard for monitoring things like police and city worker overtime pay, employee absenteeism, and (as it expanded) a host of service delivery and infrastructure issues. The system was immortalized in fictional form in the television series The Wire, and it relied on aggregated reports from city agencies, usually presented in PowerPoint format to the mayor in regular meetings. Little about the infrastructure used to create the data has changed in the last dozen years. An audit of the Baltimore Police Department last year found that precincts were still using IBM’s (Lotus) Notes databases developed by a consultant during the O’Malley administration to track data, and no standard reporting format was used. The versions of Notes used by the police department reached end-of-support in 2015.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • This is unacceptable:

  • Speaking of unacceptable Fourth Amendment violations: a look at civil asset forfeiture in Texas. There should be ZERO cases where assets are seized without a criminal conviction.
  • Vice is laying off people left and right. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ, which says “because Vice is trash and that trash is on fire and that fire is burning money.”)
  • The fund that bought UK book dealer Waterstone’s is buying Barnes & Noble.
  • The Empower Texans 2019 Fiscal Index. Find out how your state congresscritter did.
  • How Hobart’s “funnies” helped clear obstacles off the beach on D-Day.
  • Oops!
  • Trump Derangement Syndrome, stabby Florida woman edition. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Tales From Toby’s Graphic Go-Kart, or how playing for Yes was like playing with Spinal Tap, and how Rick Wakeman was a carnivore while the rest of the band were vegetarians. Well, except that one time…
  • Modern D-Day Warriors Storm Washington To Demand Free Stuff From Government.”
  • Werewolf mouse.
  • LinkSwarm for November 16, 2018

    Friday, November 16th, 2018

    Welcome to the Friday before Thanksgiving! I hope you have your family gathering, gluttony and/or shopping plans all laid out. I tend to avoid Black Friday sales unless I happen to be near a used bookstore. (And speaking of booksales, I’ll be putting out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog after Thanksgiving, so drop me a line if you’re interested.)

  • Florida: DeSantis wins, Scott leads Nelson in senate race, where it goes to a hand recount. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Meanwhile, both Broward and Palm Beach counties, where most of the Democrat shenanigans occurred, missed the machine recount deadlines, so the initial tallies stood.
  • In all the bad recount news, here’s one bit of good news: Utah incumbent Republican congresswoman Mia Love is now expected to win reelection after recounts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • A bit more analysis of the midterms:

  • Democratic presidential preferences for 2020: 1. Joe Biden, 2. Bernie Sanders, 3. Beto O’Rourke, with senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker trailing.
  • Speaking of longshot Presidential contenders, Michael Avenatti Arrested for Alleged Domestic Violence. Remember: Believe all women, except when they accuse Democratic political operatives.
  • Heh: “Hillary Clinton Receives Large Cash Advance For ‘What Happened 2’ Ahead Of 2020 Presidential Run.”
  • Pentagon fails first audit, as expected. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Joy: “Beijing is sharply speeding up a large-scale buildup of military forces in preparation for a future conflict with the United States, according to the congressional commission report made public Wednesday.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Over 50 million Chinese apartments are empty. (Caveat: Some sort of malware on ZeroHedge is trying to do a drive-by DMS install on that page. They should look into that…)
  • Austin’s sick leave ordinance was just struck down by the 3rd Court of Appeals. “The requirement violates the Texas Constitution because it is pre-empted by the Texas Minimum Wage Act.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Another week, another fake college hate crime.
  • Any time Israel tries to defend itself: “Shame! Shame!” Any time Hamas fires missiles at Israeli civilians from Gaza: “Oh look! It’s my lunchbreak!”
  • The Ammo.com folks wrote in with this piece on an armed American populace and asymmetrical warfare, making some of the same points I’ve made before. But keep in mind that no one actually wants a second American Civil War save parts of the Twitter echo chamber and some of the more delusional Antifa types.
  • Who frontman Roger Daltry “detests Jeremy Corbyn (whom he, not without cause, calls a “communist”), supports Brexit, and says of the Labour party, ‘It pains me to say it, but in my life a Labour government comes in with incredible optimism and leaves the country in the sh*t.'”
  • Stan Lee, RIP.
  • Roy Clark, RIP. To TV viewers, he was that guy on Hee-Haw. To fellow guitarists he was a legend. Here’s a nice rendition of his signature piece:

  • William Goldman, RIP. The Princess Bride is a swell novel, and he penned more than his share of great Hollywood movies.
  • If you’re going illegally carry a concealed gun without a permit, maybe you shouldn’t make yourself look like The Joker. And yes, it’s exactly the state you think it is. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Nothing says “I hate Trump” quite like shouting “Heil Hitler!” at a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.
  • “It’s a nice day to…START AGAIN!”
  • Texas Election Results Analysis: The Warning Shot

    Thursday, November 15th, 2018

    This is going to be a “glass half empty” kind of post, so let’s start out enumerating all the positives for Texas Republicans from the 2018 midterms:

  • Ted Cruz, arguably the face of conservatism in Texas, won his race despite a zillion fawning national profiles of an opponent that not only outspent him 2-1, but actually raised more money for a Senate race than any candidate in the history of the United States. All that, and Cruz still won.
  • Every statewide Republican, both executive and judicial, won their races.
  • Despite long being a target in a swing seat, Congressmen Will Hurd won reelection.
  • Republicans still hold majorities in the their U.S. congressional delegation, the Texas House and the Texas Senate.
  • By objective standards, this was a good election for Republicans. But by subjective standards, this was a serious warning shot across the bow of the party. After years of false starts and dead ends, Democrats finally succeeded in turning Texas slightly purple.

    Next let’s list the objectively bad news:

  • Ted Cruz defeated Beto O’Rourke by less than three points, the worst showing of any topline Republican candidate since Republican Clayton Williams lost the Governor’s race to Democratic incumbent Ann Richards in 1990, and the worst senate result for a Texas Republican since Democratic incumbent Lloyd Bentsen beat Republican challenger Beau Boulter in 1988.
  • O’Rourke’s 4,024,777 votes was not only more than Hillary Clinton received in Texas in 2016, but was more than any Democrat has ever received in any statewide Texas race, ever. That’s also more than any Texas statewide candidate has received in a midterm election ever until this year. It’s also almost 2.5 times what 2014 Democratic senatorial candidate David Alameel picked up in 2014.
  • The O’Rourke campaign managed to crack long-held Republican strongholds in Tarrant (Ft. Worth), Williamson, and Hays counties, which had real down-ballot effects, and continue their recent success in Ft. Bend (Sugar Land) and Jefferson (Beaumont) counties.
  • Two Republican congressmen, Pete Sessions and John Culberson, lost to Democratic challengers. Part of that can be put down to sleepwalking incumbents toward the end of a redistricting cycle, but part is due to Betomania having raised the floor for Democrats across the state.
  • Two Republican incumbent state senators, Konni Burton of District 10 and Don Huffines of District 16, lost to Democratic challengers. Both were solid conservatives, and losing them is going to hurt.
  • Democrats picked up 12 seats in the Texas house, including two in Williamson County: John Bucy III beating Tony Dale (my representative) in a rematch of 2016’s race in House District 136, and James Talarico beating Cynthia Flores for Texas House District 52, the one being vacated by the retiring Larry Gonzalez.
  • Democratic State representative Ron Reynolds was reelected despite being in prison, because Republicans didn’t bother to run someone against him. This suggests the state Republican Party has really fallen down on the job when it comes to recruiting candidates.
  • In fact, by my count, that was 1 of 32 state house districts where Democrats faced no Republican challenger.
  • Down-ballot Republican judges were slaughtered in places like Harris and Dallas counties.
  • All of this happened with both the national and Texas economies humming along at the highest levels in recent memory.
  • There are multiple reasons for this, some that other commentators covered, and others they haven’t.

  • For years Republicans have feasted on the incompetence of the Texas Democratic Party and their failure to entice a topline candidate to enter any race since Bob Bullock retired. Instead they’ve run a long string of Victor Moraleses and Tony Sanchezes and seemed content to lose, shrug their shoulders and go “Oh well, it’s Texas!” Even candidates that should have been competative on paper, like Ron Kirk, weren’t. (And even those Democrats who haven’t forgotten about Bob Kreuger, who Ann Richards tapped to replace Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen when the latter resigned to become Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, getting creamed 2-1 by Kay Baily Hutchison in the 1993 special election, would sure like to.) Fortunately for Texas Republicans, none of the non-Beto names bandied about (like the Castro brother) seem capable of putting them over the top (but see the “celebrity” caveat below).
  • Likewise, Republicans have benefited greatly from a fundraising advantage that comes from their lock on incumbency. Democrats couldn’t raise money because they weren’t competitive, and weren’t competitive in part because they couldn’t raise money. All that money the likes of Battleground Texas threw in may finally be having an effect.
  • More on how Democrats have built out their organization:

    Under the hood, the damage was significant. There are no urban counties left in the state that support Republicans, thanks to O’Rourke winning there. The down-ballot situation in neighboring Dallas County was an electoral massacre, as was the situation in Harris County.

    “This election was clearly about work and not the wave,” [Democratic donor Amber] Mostyn said. “We have been doing intense work in Harris County for five cycles and you can see the results. Texas is headed in the right direction and Beto outperformed and proved that we are on the right trajectory to flip the state.”

  • “Last night we saw the culmination of several years of concentrated effort by the left — and the impact of over $100 million spent — in their dream to turn Texas blue again. Thankfully, they failed to win a single statewide elected office,” Texas Republican Party chair James Dickey said in a statement. “While we recognize our victories, we know we have much work to do — particularly in the urban and suburban areas of the state.”
  • The idea that Trump has weakened Republican support in the suburbs seems to have some currency, based on the Sessions and Culberson losses.
  • That effect is especially magnified in Williamson and Hayes counties, given that they host bedroom communities for the ever-more-liberal Austin.
  • Rick Perry vs. The World ended a year-long hibernation to pin the closeness of the race on Cruz’s presidential race. He overstates the case, but he has a point. Other observations:

    3. What if Beto had spent his money more wisely? All that money on yard signs and on poorly targeted online ads (Beto spent lots of money on impressions that I saw and it wasn’t all remnant ads) wasn’t cheap. If I recall correctly, Cruz actually spent more on TV in the final weeks, despite Beto raising multiples of Cruz’s money. Odd.

    4. Getting crazy amounts of money from people who dislike Ted Cruz was never going to be the hard part. Getting crazy good coverage from the media who all dislike Ted Cruz was never going to be hard part.

    Getting those things and then not believing your own hype…well if you are effing Beto O’Rourke, then that is the hard part.

    5. Beto is probably the reason that some Dems won their elections. But let’s not forget that this is late in the redistricting cycle where districts are not demographically what they were when they were drawn nearly a decade ago.

  • For all the fawning profiles of O’Rourke, he was nothing special. He was younger than average, theoretically handsomer than average (not a high bar in American politics), and willing to do the hard work of statewide campaigning. He was not a bonafide superstar, the sort of personality like Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Donald Trump that can come in from the outside and completely reorder the political system. If one of those ran as a Democrat statewide in Texas, with the backing and resources O’Rourke had, they probably win.
  • A lack of Green Party candidates, due to them failing to meet the 5% vote threshold in 2016, may have also had a small positive effect on Democrat vote totals in the .5% to 1% range.
  • None of the controversies surrounding three statewide Republican candidates (Ken Paxton’s lingering securities indictment, Sid Miller’s BBQ controversy, or George P. Bush’s Alamo controversy) seemed to hurt them much. Paxton’s may have weighed him down the most, since he only won by 3.6%, while George P. Bush won with the second highest margin of victory behind Abbott. Hopefully this doesn’t set up a nightmare O’Rourke vs. Bush Senate race in 2020.
  • Texas Republicans just went through a near-death experience, but managed to survive. Is this level of voting the new norm for Democrats, or an aberration born of Beto-mania? My guess is probably somewhere in-between. It remains to be seen how it all shakes out during the sound and fury of a Presidential year. And the biggest factor is out of the Texas Republican Party’s control: a cyclical recession is inevitable at some point, the only question is when and how deep.

    More 2018 Post Election Analysis

    Thursday, November 8th, 2018

    Busy as hell today. Here’s some more election analysis of note:

  • Jim Geraghty:

    Dear God, did the Senate Democrats’ strategy on Brett Kavanaugh backfire on them on an epic scale. I do think that before the Kavanaugh fight, the Democrats were on the path to that “Blue Tsunami.” And then they decided that rerunning the Neil Gorsuch fight wasn’t going to be enough; they had to fully embrace a bunch of accusations that had no supporting witnesses.

    Claire McCaskill, gone. Finally. I laid out her devilish luck in yesterday’s Jolt; for at least twelve years, Missouri Republicans yearned for a chance to take her on in a relatively normal political environment with a candidate who wasn’t a walking Superfund site of toxicity. Lo and behold, with no political wind at her back, no good GOP rivals being knocked out by the political equivalent of anvils falling from buildings or alien abductions, Josh Hawley won . . . by about 144,000 votes. The old “Vote liberal for four or five years, veer back to the center in election years” strategy of red-state Democrats finally stopped working.

    Taylor Swift could not deliver Tennessee for Phil Bredesen. In retrospect, the hype around the former governor looks like wishful thinking on the part of Democrats. He last won a statewide race in 2006, and as soon as Marsha Blackburn nationalized this race, it was over. Blackburn won by about 245,000 votes last night. You figure that Democrats will have a hard time recruiting a top-tier candidate anytime soon.

    Rick Scott won in Florida! Never underestimate this man again. If aliens invade Florida in 2022, Scott will lead the forces of humanity to a narrow upset victory, because that’s what he does every four years — win something that nobody thinks he has a chance to win, by about one percent. Florida Democrats will console themselves that it was so close, but with the high turnout, four-tenths of a percentage point comes out to . . . about 34,000 votes. After the 2000 presidential election, that’s a Florida landslide.

    As of this writing, Mike Braun is on pace to win Indiana’s Senate by 10 points, or about 189,000 votes. A lot of people are pointing to this result as a polling failure, but remember that because of Indiana’s strict anti-robocall laws, pollsters survey this state less frequently because they have to use live interviewers. The lesson here is, trust your instincts! A GOP candidate in a longtime Republican-leaning state, the home state of the current vice president, up against a Democrat who won with 50 percent in a presidential year and who votes against Kavanaugh a month before Election Day . . . has a really good chance to win and win comfortably.

    Face it, we’re not even that upset that Joe Manchin won in West Virginia. His victory offers the lesson that any red-state Democrat could have improved their chances for reelection by voting for Brett Kavanaugh.

    We should give Beto O’Rourke a bit of credit; coming within three points is better than any Democrat running statewide in Texas since . . . Ann Richards, I think? But that’s . . . not a victory, which is a fair expectation when you raise $70 million and spend $60 million. And because of the scale of the turnout, those three points amount to 213,750 votes. Turnout was more than 8.3 million votes, and I recall seeing O’Rourke fans insisting that if turnout surpassed 8 million votes, then their man was certain to win. Guys, there are a lot of Republicans in Texas.

    Bad: Nancy Pelosi as Speaker again. Good: Getting to run against Nancy Pelosi again, since she’s now the highest ranking elected Democrat in the country.

  • Kevin D. Williamson:

    I am happy to see the admirable Senator Ted Cruz reelected in Texas, where you can almost buy a Senate race but not quite. I like Senator Cruz a great deal (and I like him even more when he’s not campaigning) but I’d have enjoyed watching a reasonably well-qualified ham sandwich defeat Robert Francis O’Rourke, one of the most insipid and puffed-up figures on the American political scene.

    Snip.

    The Democrats have gone well and truly ’round the bend. I spent a fair part of last night with Democrats in Portland, Ore. — admittedly, a pretty special bunch of Democrats, Portland being Portland and all. The professional political operators are what they always are — by turns cynical and sanctimonious — but the rank and file seem to actually believe the horsepucky they’ve been fed, i.e., that these United States are about two tweets away from cattle cars and concentration camps. The level of paranoia among the people I spoke to was remarkable.

    Fourth, and related: The Democrats don’t seem to understand what it is they are really fighting, which, in no small part, is not the Republicans but the constitutional architecture of the United States. The United States is, as the name suggests, a union of states, which have interests, powers, and characters of their own. They are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government. All that talk about winning x percent of the “national House vote” or the “national Senate vote” — neither of which, you know, exists — is a backhanded way of getting at the fact that they do not like how our governments are organized, and that they would prefer a more unitary national government under which the states are so subordinated as to be effectively inconsequential. They complain that, under President Trump, “the Constitution is hanging by a thread” — but they don’t really much care for the actual order established by that Constitution, and certainly not for the limitations it puts on government power through the Bill of Rights and other impediments to étatism.

    Noun. etatism (usually uncountable, plural etatisms) Total control of the state over individual citizens.”

  • Sean Trende:

    Overall, Republicans had a tough night Tuesday. When all is said and done, Democrats look to have gained around 35 seats in the House, seven governorships and over 330 state legislators. Yet as rough as it was, it could have been much worse for Republicans. In Barack Obama’s first mid-term in 2010, Republicans picked up 63 House seats and 700 state legislative seats — numbers that were not out of the question for Democrats for a large portion of this cycle. In the Senate, Republicans actually expanded their majority — as it appears they will pick up 3 seats — whereas Democrats lost 6 seats in the 2010 midterms.

    In many ways, it was a strange election. If you had told me in August that Democrats were going to win more than 30 House seats, I would have bet a large amount of money that the Senate would also be in play. I would have a difficult time accepting that Florida would elect Ron DeSantis governor and (as it now appears) Rick Scott as senator. The notion that Ohio’s Senate race would fall into the mid-single digits, that Mike DeWine would win the Ohio governor’s race handily, or that Michigan’s Senate race would be decided by fewer than seven points all would have seemed ludicrous. Martha McSally keeping Arizona close (and possibly winning) would not seem possible.

    Snip.

    1. The GOP got killed in the suburbs. We can place Republican losses into three broad buckets: “perennial swing seats” (Colorado’s 6th, Arizona’s 2nd), “sleeping/problematic candidates” (Oklahoma’s 5th, South Carolina’s 1st), and suburban districts. This last category is by far the broadest, and it accounts for around two-thirds of the Republicans’ losses. This is a significant long-term problem for the party if it continues.
    2. This probably doesn’t count as a wave. If you look at the Index I referenced on Monday, our preliminary results suggest that things have moved about 23 points toward Democrats. That’s a substantial shift, but it falls short of even “semi-wave elections” such as 2014 (a shift of 26 points toward Republicans) and 2006 (a movement of 30 points toward Democrats). Obviously, as results trickle in this might shift further, but probably not by much.
    2. Money. One of the ways to resolve the tension between what we saw in the House versus the Senate (and to a lesser extent, governorships) is that Democrats had a massive fundraising advantage in the lower chamber. This allowed them to catch a number of incumbent Republicans napping, and to spread the playing field out such that the GOP just had too many brush fires to put out. Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, for example, flipped in part because Michael Bloomberg’s team spent $400,000 on the air in the final week of the election. To the extent we wish to deduce anything about 2020 from these midterms, we should bear in mind that the next election will probably be fought on a more even financial playing field.

    Snip.

    This all takes place against the backdrop of a booming economy. Finally, it is important to note that Republicans should not have found themselves in this position amid a vibrant economy. It is quite unusual to have a result this bad in a time of peace and prosperity. Some of this is the suburban realignment, but some is driven by Donald Trump’s more extreme actions, which alienate suburban moderates.

    On the other hand, if Trump can smooth out the rougher edges that turn suburbanites off, he could prove to be a formidable candidate in 2020. Most of his states from 2016 continued to support Republicans this cycle. But, on the other hand, he hasn’t shown much interest in smoothing out those edges. And if the economy slides into recession, all bets are off.

  • Ed Rodgers:

    While Tuesday night was not a complete win for Republicans, there was no blue wave, either. By most measures, Republicans beat the odds of history and nearly everyone’s expectations, while Democrats were left disappointed as the fantasy of Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams and others winning fizzled. Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene. It will take a few days to process the meaning of this year’s election returns, but the instant analysis is clear: Democrats may have won the House, but Trump won the election.

  • Jazz Shaw on what won’t be happening:

    Let’s look at what won’t be happening, despite the fever dreams of the Democrats. First, there will be no big ticket legislative packages going through. No major immigration reform supporting the highest priorities of either party. No new tax cuts, but also no tax increases. No new gun control legislation. The fact is, these folks will be lucky if they can name a new Post Office.

    The President isn’t going to be impeached. The Democrats would need to round up every one of their members in the House to get the ball rolling and too many of them are on record saying that would be too extreme. And even if they managed it in the House there is zero chance of a conviction in the Senate. Donald Trump will finish his first term at a minimum.

    The wall isn’t going to be finished. That’s somehow become a badge of honor among Democrats, despite being one of the most doable solutions to immigration problems imaginable. If we’re going to get any money at all for additional wall construction, the new House majority will want a massive pound of flesh in return.

  • Kurt Schlicter: “Look For Democrats To Blow Their Meager Success By Being Jerks”:

    No, they want all #resistance, all of the time, and they are going to do everything they can to appease their looney base by launching investigations and screaming and yelling. That’s not going to help the newbies keep those new House seats in 2020. It’s going to be especially funny when all these rookies who promised the suckers back home they would never vote for that San Francisco liberal monster get strong-armed into casting their very first vote for Mistress Nancy.

    And if they decide to obstruct and agitate, then Trump can be in opposition to them and run against the do-nothing House in 2020. Nobody is better than Trump when he has an enemy. I’m kind of hoping the Democrats choose the path of jerkiness just for the nicknames he’ll bestow in his tweets.

    Oh, and please, impeach him over Russia Treason Traitor stuff. Please. Toss the Trump in that briar patch and he’ll be president forever.

  • George Neumayr thinks Trump helped in Florida:

    The national media portrayed Trump as a weight on Republicans. In fact, he was their source of energy. Had the Florida GOP been ambivalent about Trump and kept him out of the state, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott would have lost. Journalists mocked DeSantis for “tying himself to Trump,” but they now fall silent as it becomes clear that that was perhaps his only winning strategy.

    The press propagandized relentlessly for Gillum, who was flush with money from George Soros and Tom Steyer, while kneecapping the scrappier DeSantis over minor lapses, and Gillum still couldn’t win. Notice also the media’s silence about Obama. Yet again the darling of journalists shows himself to be a crappy campaigner for others. In his narcissistic shade nothing grows.

    The media’s excited talk of a “blue wave” in Florida never struck me as very convincing as I walked around various cities in Florida. The media’s giddy keenness for Gillum was never reflected in any of the conversations I ever heard. In mid-October, I walked around the Volusia County mall in a MAGA hat as an experiment to test the media’s claims of a spreading anti-Trump backlash. Nobody seemed to care in the slightest. In fact, a self-described independent who said that he “had voted for Jimmy Carter” made a point of walking over to me as I sat in the mall’s food court to express his support for Trump’s policies. “I didn’t vote for him,” he said, “but he is delivering results.”

  • Dems are currently up 30 seats in the House, which puts them up to 225.

    Morning After 2018 Election Update

    Wednesday, November 7th, 2018

    A few quick updates:

  • Republicans are on-track to pickup five senate seats, including Arizona and Montana, but Republican Dean Heller lost in Nevada. (Update: Democrat Jon Tester back in the Montana Senate race lead narrowly.)
  • Democrats pick up 27 House seats (with some races still outstanding), enough to take control of the chamber and put Nancy Pelosi back in the speaker’s chair.
  • Democrats picked up seven Governor’s mansions, including booting Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
  • No blue wave. A bit of a blue ripple, but Democrats underperformed midterm averages, as the party in the White House usually loses senate seats.

    Republicans both taking a senate seat and holding the governor’s mansion in Florida without recounts in such a mixed midterm is a big of a surprise.

    Twitter really thinks Democrats are dumb:

    More later. Maybe tomorrow.

    Liveblogging the 2018 Election

    Tuesday, November 6th, 2018

    AZ, NV and MT Senate races all too close to call, but Republicans are leading in all three right now.

    I’m out of gas and heading to bed. Analysis tomorrow.



    Wisconsin Gov still too close to call.


    Takeaways seems to be:

  • Republicans tighten grip on senate
  • Democrats take the House.
  • Dumptrucks full of outside money and a good candidate can almost make Texas competitive.
  • Claire McCaskill concedes.


    Dems pick up Iowa 1.
    John Carter still up.


    Democrats pick up OK5.

    PBS praising Bloomberg for airdropping outside money into races.


    Scott Walker’s Gov race too close to call.

    Culberson looking like he’s going to lose.


    Never mind the election, Vincent Price is on the Carol Burnet Show on MeTV!


    Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick wins by six points, AG Ken Paxton by 4 points.


    McCaskill goes down, Heitkamp went down. “Just like the old Gypsy woman said!”



    Ted Cruz victory speech. He sounds really horse. Compliments O’Rourke on a hard-run race.

    “All the money in Hollywood couldn’t beat the good people of Texas!”


    Charlie Baker (R) reelected Governor of Massachusetts.




    Culberson behind in TX07.


    Nate Silver’s algorithm has evidently gone rogue. He’s now having to pull glowing memory sticks out of HAL.




    My state Rep. Tony Dale, currently behind John Bucy. Williamson County has gotten a lot more purple, alas.


    All republicans winning Texas statewide races, but more narrowly than expected. That Bobby Francis money is having a real effect.


    McMaster (R) wins SC Gov.


    Dems have picked up most of the PA redistricted competitive seats, but Republicans just got one.


    ABC projects Ted Cruz to win Texas!


    Texas Governor Greg Abbott speaking. Victory speech.


    NBC thinks Dems take the House.


    McSally up over MethLab in AZ.


    My congressmen, John Carter (R) up, but only by 2 points.


    Incumbent Democrats Sherrod Brown (OH) and Bob Casey (PA) projected as winners.


    Bob Sleazoid (D) declared winner in NJ Sen.


    Cruz now up 10,000 votes.


    Cruz 6,000 votes behind O’Rourke, 73% in.


    Cruz/O’Rourke virtually tied with 72% of vote in, with Midland/Odessa still out.


    O’Rourke up with 70% of the vote in. It would obviously be a huge upset if it holds. But I’m not sure 70% of thevote is actully in.


    Lindsey Graham (R-Like A Boss) on NBC.



    CBS calling WV for Manchin.


    Bob Schiffer says “The Senate is moving not only in Republican’s direction, but Trump’s direction.”


    Marsha Blackburn (R) called the winner in Tennessee.


    Cruz up by only 3% over O’Rourke. Hmmm.
    Braun declared winner over Donnelly. The last Stupak Bloc Flipper goes DOWN.


    They thawed out Tom Brokow.



    Election watching Rich: “I haven’t been this excited since Hillary Clinton won the White House.”


    Manchin (D) holding on in WV.


    “For the first time in Georgia, we have a progressive Democrat running in Georgia.” And she’s getting WHOMPED.


    They called KY for Barr (R) over McGarth (D), the candidate the MSM kept lauding. Suggests Dems won’t take house.

    Dave Brat still up by 1 pioint, 86% in.


    Stacey Abrams still getting walloped in Georgia,


    Hugin up by 4 point over Sleazeball (NJ). 6% in.


    DeSantis (R) up narrowly in Florida.


    Hugin (R) winning narrowly over Sleazebag (D) in New Jersey, 1% in.
    Hawley walloping Planetoid Claire, but only 1% in there as well.

    PBS: “No blue wave.”


    Frum Brooks has arms crossed on PBS. Not looking happy.


    Wow:

    Stacey Abrams (D) losing big early, but only 2% in.

    Braun still up 16 points with 27% in.


    Nancy Pelosi on PBS. Looks like she’s had another round of Botox.


    Republican Greg Pence, older brother of VP Mike pence, has reportedly been elected to Indiana’s 6th congressional district. (via Twitter)


    Florida Sen: Scott (R) 50.5%, Nelson (D) 49.5%, 4% in, via RCP.


    Indiana: Braun 58% to Donnelly’s 38% with 10% in (via PBS)
    No, delusional PBS host, O’Rourke did NOT run a negative-free campaign.


    5:50 PM: First results from Indiana via Real Clear Politics: “Donnelly 34.7, Braun 61.3, Brenton 4.0” with 2% reporting (presumably some early voting results).


    Just a placeholder for now, but I expect to start liveblogging/livetweeting the 2018 election starting at 7 PM CST.

    2018 Election Day Post

    Tuesday, November 6th, 2018

    Happy election day, everyone!

    1. Go vote, if you haven’t already.
    2. A list of Williamson County voting locations can be found here.
    3. A PDF of Travis County voting locations is here.
    4. A list of my endorsements for Round Rock ISD and other down-ballot Williamson races can be found here.
    5. I will be live-blogging/live-tweeting the election results tonight around 7 PM.

    Now some links:

  • “Early Voter Turnout Surges As Republicans Hold Lead In Battleground States.”
  • Last week: “Voters were told that DeSoto is a Democratic voting location only and if voting for any Republicans or write-ins they need to go north to Dallas.”
  • Borepatch covers the 2018 midterms as an exercise in game theory:

    The Middle Class has been playing cooperatively for decades, as the Progressives have been pushing and taking advantage of that cooperation. It’s worked very well for Progressives, and very badly for the Middle Class. As I said in that post (almost a year before the 2016 election) it led to the rise of Donald Trump.

    The last two years has been a series of Trump victories where he has shown the Middle Class that you can push back against the Progressives and win. I believe that this is a fundamental shift in American politics, as the “deplorables” have not only had enough, but have seen that they can win.

    Sure, the hard core Democrats hate Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns and will turn out heavily to vote against Republicans. But the rest of their party doesn’t seem to feel that way: Blue Collar/Union Democrats are making more money now, Blacks and Hispanics are making more money now, everyone has better employment prospects, Trump’s favorability numbers are up.

    There’s a split between the core of the party and the rest of the party.

    At the same time the Republican base has been energized and united – the Kavanaugh hearings in particular seem to have been a huge blunder for the Democrats. Sure, it energized the Democratic base, but it seems to have united the GOP base against them.

    And so we’re seeing big turnouts in early voting, and Republicans out voting Democrats pretty much everywhere. I don’t think that any of the election models predicted or planned for this, and so none of the polls or predictions carry any weight. Like I said, we’ll see tomorrow but I think it will be a glum evening for the Democrats.

    But I said earlier that this gives me hope for the Republic. The reason is that tit-for-tat results in a game theory stable outcome. If Republicans stick to push back, but also keep the Middle Class “we’re all in this together” spirit from the last few decades, game theory suggests that the Democrats may have to adjust to a less confrontational style of politics (if for nothing other than preventing the evaporation of the non-rabid part of their party). We’ll have to see how that plays out. As I said in my post 3 years ago:

    Tit For Tat is essentially a reputational game – get a bad reputation by screwing your opponent and you pay the price. The mathematics is unmistakeable on that.

    The Middle Class finally has an option to play against their opponent. An opponent who has a deservedly poor reputation.

    No wonder Trump’s support seems rock solid. The mathematics is unshakeable.

    If the Blue Wave disappears in the face of an enraged GOP base, then the Democrats will have to change their tactics – or keep losing elections.

  • “A reporter for a Michigan newspaper called Michigan Senate Republican candidate John James’s campaign looking for an interview and thought she hung up the phone before leaving a voicemail saying ‘fucking John James…that would suck.'” Note that polls show James within two points of Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow. (Update: The reporter has been fired. Good for the Huron Daily Tribune upholding basic journalistic standards. Meanwhile, racist Sarah Jeong is still employed by the New York Times…)
  • Heh:

  • Your Obligatory “Day Before the Election” Horserace Post

    Monday, November 5th, 2018

    Election day is tomorrow! So here’s a brief roundup of the state of play:

  • Here’s the way Real Clear Politics breaks down Senate races:

    They show North Dakota Democrat incumbent Heidi Heitkamp as gone, which already brings Republicans up to 50 seats with victories in Tennessee (likely) and Texas (even more likely).

    The races they have as tossups are:

    • Arizona: The late John McCain’s seat. I expect former fighter pilot and Republican Martha McSally to beat Kyrsten “Meth Lab of Democracy” Sinema based on the latter’s baggage and blunders, and the importance of border control to Arizona residents.
    • Florida: Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson is in a very tough fight with Republican Governor Rick Scott, but Republican turnout seems to be surging. Keep in mind that in 2014, Scott beat the odious Charlie Crist by only 64,000 votes. It being Florida, it may not be decided until the recount.
    • Indiana: Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly (D), the last of the Stupak Block Flipper still in office, has been in a virtual tie with Republican challenger Mike Braun. Trump walloped Hillary by 19 points in 2016, while Donnelly managed to eek out 50.04% of the vote in the very Democrat-friendly year of 2012. I think he’s toast and Braun wins.
    • Missouri: Republican challenger Josh Hawley has lead polls against incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ever since the Kavanaugh vote in a state Trump won by 18 points in 2016. Stick a fork in her.
    • Montana: Incumbent Democrat Jon Tester should be in deep trouble in a state Trump won by 21 points, but polls show him with a small but sustained lead over challenger Matt Rosendale. Chalk this up as the toss-up Senate race Republicans are most likely to see slip away.
    • Nevada: Polls show Republican incumbent Dean Heller slightly behind challenger Jacky Rosen. See the mention of big crowds at Trump rallies further down in a state Hillary won by just over two points. Heller eked out a two point win in face of Obama’s big 2012, and I think he survives by the skin of his teeth this year as well.
    • West Virginia: You would think that Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin would be in deep trouble in a state where Trump walloped Hillary by 42 points, but he’s maintained a small but persistent lead over challenger Patrick Morrisey. The Last Blue Dog may survive 2018, but I suspect this one will go down to the wire.

    Any “Likely Democrat” races Republicans can pull an upset off in? Maybe New Jersey where, despite substantial leads, Democrats have been pouring last minute funds in to save indicted sleazebag Robert Menendez. But that’s a pretty high mountain for Republican challenger Bob Hugin to climb.

  • Vegas oddsmaker Wayne Allyn Root, who correctly predicted Trump’s upset win two years ago, similarly sees another GOP win in the offing:

    Don’t look now, but it’s all happening again. Nate Silver says Democrats have a 80%+ chance of winning the House. Cook Report says Democrats will win the House by 40 seats. All the experts say it’s over- Democrats will win. I’ll go out on a limb and disagree again.

    I see Florida Democrat Governor candidate Andrew Gillum holding a rally with Bernie Sanders and the whole place is empty.

    Barack Obama could not fill a high school gym in Milwaukee.

    I witnessed firsthand Joe Biden and Obama at separate events here in Las Vegas playing to small crowds.

    Meanwhile I was opening speaker for President Trump’s event in Las Vegas last month- with 10,000 waiting in line for hours in a place where no one cares much about politics. This is a phenomenon.

    Does that sound like the GOP is losing 40 seats? Dream on delusional Democrats.

  • National Review‘s Jim Geraghty sees Democrats pulling off an extremely narrow win to take the House.
  • One of the seats he see’s flipping is the Texas 32nd Congressional District, currently held by Republican Pete Sessions. The district went very narrowly (1.9%) for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but went for Romney by over 15 points in 2012. I tend to think Sessions barely wins reelection, based on a strong economy, the long-time Republican nature of the district, and incumbency.
  • My prediction: Republicans keep the Senate, and we won’t actually know if they keep the House until most of the recounts are done.