fuck off with this maybe could be shit.
I’m convinced this kind of coverage is engineered for no purpose than to make people go “Well, it looks like a shoe in, so I dont have to go deal with the crowds” and next thing you know republican has won by 30%
Ive been hearing this since Bush and it hasn’t once been close. So much like my football team, I’ll believe when I actually see some results
A lot of shitting on the possibility here. People have a right to be skeptical, but it’s also hard to overstate how many moderate Republicans Ken Paxton has already alienated in Texas. Paxton has impeached by the Republican-led Texas House for his criminal activity. There are large swathes of suburban voters who may typically vote Republican but who would skip right over Paxton on that ballot.
At the same time, Talarico’s ability to speak confidently and comfortably about religion and in churches is giving him a huge leg-up in making inroads with those same disaffected suburbanites.
The calculus is not the same as it was with Cruz vs O’Rourke in 2018. Talarico’s prospects today are solidly better than O’Rourke’s were at any point during his campaign.
A lot of shitting on the possibility here.
For good reason, this claim is made constantly.
I wrote more beyond those first 8 words
Don’t underestimate how stupid Republican voters are either.
I always felt like O’Rourke was mostly propped up by the party. I never really thought he had a serious shot at winning a statewide election.
Talarico is a genuine Christian. Try as they might, the Christian-ist Christians of Christian-By-God-Texas can’t make a dent in his actual real Christian love, and members of their flocks are noticing that. I see countless posts saying Jesus was a progressive, but precious few politicians that embody that. I hope he does well. That said, this is Texas. They may hate Paxton, but to they hate him enough to vote for gulp A DEMOCRAT!?
It was over when he said hell yah he would take their ARs.
Beto was doing great, right up until he went on a big Texas radio show and announced intended to take away their guns. You could almost hear the air hissing out of the balloon.
He lost by a tiny margin. I strongly believe that dumb statement cost him the seat. If he had taken Cruz’s seat, and Talarico took Cornyn’s seat, we’d have two Dem senators from Texas.
But Beto couldn’t keep his mouth shut about guns in Texas.
I didn’t hear about the radio show, but I recall him saying it during, I think, the Democratic Presidential Debate in 2016?
There was one particular radio appearance that he was particular enthusiastic and confrontational, like he could get. That kind of attitude was taking him far, until he applied it to guns. In Texas.
Previous Dems had lost by double digits, but Beto got within a couple of percentage points. It seems onvious that gun statement made the difference.
In true democrat fashion, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Believe it when i see it.
All the people in here commenting, like “oh no, there’s a hope! Step on it!”
Wouldn’t want people to actually get fired up and vote, now would we?
Repeated false hope doesn’t fire up anybody. It demoralizes people.
This is Lemmy. It’s terminally online doomers and pompous Linux dweebs.
They don’t want to be traumatized by marketing campaigns, yet again, that give them hope, only to have reality crush it mercilessly. It’s defensive, and protective, and makes complete sense, living in a hellscape where politic and corporate lying is ever present and hazardous. They don’t want others to be hurt.
So you’re really just shitting on victims for trying to protect others.
You’re making a huge amount of assumptions about the people expressing doomerism. They could just be assholes, or bots, or workers pushing messaging for the political opposition, or non-citizens who are treating US politics like a soap opera.
All you’ve done is created a strawman, claimed it has been traumatized by politics and asserted that this strawman is every person that’s making cynical doomer comments.
The person that you’re responding too is engaging with the reality of the thread, you’re manufacturing a justification to feel self-righteous and outraged.
Sure I am. I’m not writing a peer reviewed paper here.
I have friends that have or currently do live in Austin.
They have told me the cities are very left leaning.
In Illinois, it’s mostly Chicago that keeps this state blue and keeps the red plague from taking over.
It’s surprising how much of a foothold the reds have over Texas with Houston , Dallas, and Austin.
3 big cities.
City people are generally more democratic and left leaning. How are these 3 cities not having more of an impact on political seats in Texas?
the gerrymandering is bad in Texas
The population of the Chicago metro area (excluding the 2 WI and 2 IN counties that get lumped in) accounts for 66% of the population of the state.
The combined population of the Houston, Dallas, and Austin metro areas only account for 58% of the population of the state.
Not only that, most of Chicagoland is blue, but you cannot say the same for Texas cities where most of the outlying suburbs of the metro area are red.
The population of Houston proper, Dallas proper, and Austin proper combined only make up 15% of the population of Texas. But Chicago proper alone makes up over 21% of the population of Illinois. Throw in Aurora and Naperville to make the 3 city comparison a little more fair, and you get almost 26% of the population of IL.
San Antonio is the 7th largest city in the country, (soon to be the sixth) we have surpassed Philadelphia.
But it has only 1/3rd the density of LA. Famously car centric hellscape LA is 3(?!) times as dense as San Antonio.
I think physical proximity is part of what drives people in cities to vote more democratic. Texas Metro areas so so spread out they don’t generate the same voting trends.
The winds of change are blowing. The cities continue to grow and the rural counties populations in West Texas are shrinking, but it will take a very long time for the weight of urbanization to take hold in Texas politics the way it has in Georgia and Virginia.
People in Texas cities wayyyy less likely to vote. The people in the country side voting red show up every single time.
Don’t give me hope… Just, don’t. 😕
Seen this headline with slightly different details about 100 times since the early 2000s.
News media in a country with a two-party system: dangling a carrot in the right spot to constantly keep the people in charge in the butter zone.
I’m at least semi-optimistic because they’ve known he was the nominee for over a month yet their best insults are calling him “Talifreako” and a “Vaygun”. 🤔
The only thing Texas has ever turned blue:
This feels like a fetish.
c/ballbusting
I want to believe eapecially since Paxton may be the worst fucking candidate ever.
However i think even assuming Talarico wins Hot Wheels will find a way to claim the election is rife with fraud and appoint Paxton anyway.
Considering that Abbott is in charge of the fix, he would know
That is a nice thought/expectation/wishful thinking… but seeing L.A. on track to chose a deeply shitty reality tv scumbag as Mayor, I am doubting Texans will do anything to help themselves
Wouldn’t it be purple, at best? Flipping one Senate seat in a red state isn’t going to make the whole place blue.
For sure, but even making Texas remotely competitive would be a huge blow—it’s a large state that takes a lot of money to reach with political advertising, and if republicans have to start campaigning hard to keep their bedrock state then that time and money drain can start dragging other races.
I’ll believe it when I see it. You can serve filet mignon and Texans will still vote for feces on a platter. Example: Ted Cruz.
Doubt it, I’m not convinced Texas has three brain cells to share amongst themselves. They’ve had stronger candidates than Talarico in the past and still re-elected Cancun Cruz.
Beto had a decent chance until he said he was coming for the AR-15s. I mean at least let your opponents say that, don’t feed them the sound byte.
The gun comment was during the 2020 presidential primaries, didn’t affect his 2018 Senate run. Definitely affected the 2022 Governor race, but I honestly don’t think he actually wanted to run and just did so for the state party to save face when there were literally zero serious candidates announced for the primaries before he announced (like seriously nobody with any political experience, and one candidate without even a web site).
That loss was mostly due to bad turnout. If the Democrats had their usual Presidential turnout he would’ve won.
“I’d rather vote for a guy who skips a tenth of his votes, hikes the electric bill, and tried to overthrow a presidential election before I’d give up weapons used (repeatedly) to slaughter school children”
Mhmm yep. Very normal society.
Timing also matters. When things are shitty people want change.
Things being shitty is not a new phenomenon. This state is a petri dish example of 30+ years of gop policies and mistakes. All that time, and the state literally re-elected the pos that went for vacation while their neighbors froze to death. I hope to see change but texas is entirely “wish I knew how to quit you” with them.
Texas is like ground zero for voter disenfranchisement though. They do it better than anyone.
…Working as intended.
Straight party voting was eliminated in Texas in 2020, at least
The point was 99% the vote counting fraud though.
Yes, though I’d really like to see some evidence besides this single image
I’ve seen maybe two other images of the “Party = D, Senator = Cruz” ballot “error”, but that’s the only one I saved (also because I know who took it).
When I went back to see what had come from the “investigation”, my heart just sank when I saw that the press had simply swallowed the line given to them by the Abbott-appointed Texas Secretary of State: “oops, no big deal”.
As a Californian who’s only ever used paper ballots this confuses and disgusts me. I wish to do a march to the sea.
I first started complaining about this back in 2000, when it was said that all you needed to shift an election was 5 minutes alone with one of these machines and a USB drive. Of course everybody was calling me paranoid. You don’t even need a USB drive now.
Like even that aside technology is inherently malfunction prone, even if they were unhackable there’s always the chance something goes wrong. With a piece of paper the worst that can happen is that it gets destroyed and reduced to null.
