Texas Progressives have last pre-election thoughts

Just five days left before Election day, and we face the following questions:

• Will Democrats regain the U.S. Senate? 

• Will Texas Dems flip the state House?

• Will Biden win Texas?

• Will M.J. Hegar beat John Cornyn?

• How well will third-party candidates Jo Jorgensen and Howie Hawkins do?

• If Hawkins is well behind Stein 2016, in part because lack of dues-paying membership put a crimp on state-by-state party ballot access, what will the Green Party do?

• Will the GP address rogue states Rhode Island (openly endorsing Biden and sending no presidential delegates to the GP 2020 convention) and Alaska (separately nominating Jesse Ventura) at its 2021 convention?

Maybe not all of America is facing these questions, but this person is. You may get tentative answers to the first three here; I'll tackle all, probably next Monday.

And with that, let's jump in!

Texas-elections

Yes, it started a week early, but comparing two weeks time with two weeks time, early voting was already equal to 2016, and the extra week means it should surge way past that. But? What will overall numbers be? Will total turnout be that much higher? OR, per Betomania, will they be that much higher for Dems than in 2018? Many experts say it will break 65 percent and threaten 70 percent, numbers not hit since 1992. Dan Solomon has more on the turnout and what it might hint at.

The battle over dropoff sites for absentee ballots continued, but Texas Supremes finally said "no" to plaintiffs and kept Abbott's rules in place. (It may be a form of vote suppression, but the legal ruling is correct.) Meanwhile, the battle over drive-through voting is firmly settled in favor of voters and against Steve Hotze. Well, change that. Hotze refuses to give up and yesterday was one of the plaintiffs in ANOTHER suit.

Justin Miller at the Observer ponders the latest on the battle to flip the Texas House. That said, Tom DeLay's mid-decade redistricting isn't totally unique. Michigan Republicans planned similar in the 1890s, but state House and state Senate disagreed within themselves on details. Read more here.

Off the Kuff (doing his best Beto impersonation?) tries to make sense of some recent polls that show Joe Biden with a slight lead in Texas.

However, the two newest of said polls, for various reasons, show The Donald with a 4-5 point lead. And, the NYT's poll, as discussed by yours truly in detail, shows that Texas is once again, among Hispanic voters .... wait for it, wait for it ... looking like a non-voting state. Shock me.

Reform Texas is amused by John Cornyn's delicate ears.

The Texas Signal notes that we're still a state that does its damnedest to make it hard to vote. 

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank look at how independent voters have shifted away from Republicans in recent Texas elections. 

Matt Mohn marvels at the extreme variance in polling preferences of Texas Latinos in this election. 

Sending the National Guard to Texas' largest cities on election day smacks of vote intimidation, Strangeabbott.

Texas-other politics

Kenny Boy Paxton is now supposed to get tried by a jury of his peers Collin County cronies, even as he seemingly violates state whistleblower laws by sacking AG employees.

Senfronia Thompson is officially in the ring for Texas Speaker. Could she pull off a nomination even if Dems don't flip the House side of the pink dome?

Texana

The Monthly has the first in a three-part series about how Texas  school history textbooks are teh suck. The first piece is good, but per not yet great. Per this hot take of mine, the review may be exchanging one form of privilege for another in one passage. If you asked around GOP Austin, Danny Goeb would say they're great, Strangeabbott would issue a Jesuitical hair-splitting statement while talking about his Mezzican wife, Kenny Boy would try to sell you stock in Pearson and Tim Dunn would pay $1 million to get the SBOE to approve a textbook even more wrong.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' refusal to officially exonerate Lydall Grant is its biggest black mark in many years on a ledger full of them.

Two Navajos have raised this year's death count at Fort Hood to 28, and suspicions surround both of them, with the usual Fort Hood lethargic and changing responses adding to that.

RIP Jerry Jeff Walker.

The Texas Living Waters Project tries to imagine what our state would be like without water.

National

Doing his Weird Al Yankovic schtick, SocraticGadfly taps his inner Blue Öyster Cult and offers up the lyrics for “Don’t Fear the Virus.” After all, “Donaldine and Melania ARE together in COVIDity.”

Reflecting Hume's younger thought on reason being the slave of the passions in the Treatise, rather than his (not totally warranted IMO) partial pullback in the Inquiry, wingnuts are burning $10 million to try to unseat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If one-third of those contributors haven't maxed out to Trump, I'm sure, given his "poor me" on campaign financing, and refusal to extend himself more (of COURSE not cash) via a loan that wouldn't be repaid this time and would be even more griftier than four years ago, I'm sure he'd love some of that for ad buys in neighboring Pennsylvania.

Garrett Hardin wrote about, and popularized, "the tragedy of the commons." He did so not as an enlightened environmentalist, though, but as someone more xenophobic and racist than Ed Abbey. And, because of his motivated reasoning, he actually got some things wrong.

Paradise in Hell sampled reactions to the last debate.