I get your point, but the result was closer than that:
Joe Biden 5,259,126 votes (46.5%)
Donald Trump 5,890,347 votes (52.1%)
It was a difference of 630 thousand votes in a state of 29 million people.
Abbott’s re-election purely comes down to the fight over voter turnout/suppression
Again, Texas has had a centrist Democratic Governor in the not-too-distant past. In fact, the vast majority of Texas governors have been Democrats (granted, most of those were before the party realignment following the Civil Rights movement).
We gain nothing by starting from the assumption that Texas is incapable of changing for the better. If the far-right folks really thought they had the state in the bag they wouldn’t bother with all the voter suppression stuff.
If not for older conservatives dying off from age and/or COVID. /s
Yeah, there were plenty of folks saying pretty much the same thing about Georgia for years. Thankfully folks like Stacey Abrams didn’t pay those folks much mind.
The only folks who ever changed the world for the better were the ones who had the audacity to see the possibility of a better future and worked to make it happen. If you can’t muster the optimism and energy to be one of those people, fine. But there’s no need to dump all over the people who can.
Once more: even the incumbent Republicans can envision a future where Democrats are running the place or they wouldn’t be spending so much energy to keep Democrats away from the polls.
O’Rouke lost his senate run against Cruz by less than 3 points.
That approval rating is lower than both O’Rouke’s share in 2018 and Biden’s in 2020. Also behind Ted Cruz’s current approval, and people fucking hate that guy.
Polls is polls. But that’s not happy news for Abbot.
His approval rating is very steady until the last week in July. The timing seems to line up really well.
It also looks like it might already be swinging back up, but it’ll be a couple weeks till you can tell.
Hate to break it, but native Texans are more progressive than California transplants. O’Rourke significantly won natives. We get to be the dumping ground of reactionaries from other states. (Though I’ll be the first to admit that our Democrats are more business centrists).
Dan Patrick? Maryland. Allen West? Just retired from head of GOP, but background’s Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas, etc.
It’d be amazing to see what the state could be if it wasn’t just default GOP control.
This would be a major misstep for Biden if the French military-industrial complex voted in U.S. elections … oh but wait, it does not
Approval voting is only asking people what party they’re in nowadays when you only have two parties. If you have three parties (o horribile dictu!) then you can have a red, blue, and a green party, and can vote for the blues and greens if you can tolerate either and not split your vote.
Many of us do not have a single ideology that we must have, but there are one or two ideologies that we would not have at any price. Approval voting replaces tactical voting, where you try and throw your single vote’s weight on the other side of the see-saw.
One would hope Democrats and their voters would be above such petty nationalism and Anglosphere chauvinism. But yeah, from a European perspective this has really disillusioned me with Biden. It was a very Trumpian move: either stunningly diplomatically incompetent or mystifyingly calculated to offend the French (and us with them) and to undercut their Pacific strategy*. Either way, not great.
* Remember: there are several million French citizens that live in the Pacific and need French naval protection. Those are parts of France in the same way Hawaii is a full part of the US.
I’m not saying that it’s actually a net good for the world that it happened, but in the context of Biden’s domestic approval rating, which is what we were discussing, I just really doubt he’s going to lose many swing voters over the issue. Most Americans pay little to no attention to international politics. But if you were to find some swing voters and tell them “hey, did you know that France is mad at the US right now because Australia decided to buy billions of dollars worth of submarines from us instead of them?!?” I just don’t see that as being a decisive factor for many of them voting against Biden.
FFS, people, can we stop acting like GA did not flip this past election?
There are pockets of progressive political activism ALL ACROSS THE SOUTH. The whole thing is NOT solidly red, just like blue states are not solidly red blue [ETA: fixed to correct a derp].
As an Australian who hoped Biden would pressure our Murdoch-owned government towards at least some semblance of action on climate change, this is a serious blow. The best I can hope for now is that this moronic insult from the US and Aus will mean the EU will put a real tariff on carbon and force our fuckwitted government to act.
Sorry, this is way OT and if it sounds like I’m looking for a Mars bar in a bucket of shit, I am.
Oh, I know, I was just saying that I would have hoped Democrats would not fall for the lazy France bashing and weapon sales based nationalism. But of course I know that that doesn’t influence their votes. It should, though.
Accurate.
What I see in Austin more and more, as time goes by and the influx of tech bros, money, hipsters, money, venture- and vulture-capital funded housing crises, more money and money flood Our Fair City.
Nailed it.
Talked with my state rep some years ago, she pointed out that Texas is already blue, if one looks at raw voting data, but since our state’s been notoriously, spectacularly gerrymandered, it’s just really hard work getting Dems into office.
I am sure @navarro could chime in with direct experience re parts of the Texas political landscape here.
As a human swimming in an unending tide of explosive residential growth
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2021/05/04/census-data-austin-metro-population.html
I can definitely tell you most people I’ve talked to say they fled California because it was too liberal and too expensive. And yes, I’ve probably got a dose of confirmation bias.
Plenty of native Texans–some of them sixth- and seventh-generation Texans–I talk with just can’t abide by this explosive, environmentally catastrophic unplanned growth, as more asphalt, fewer trees, staggeringly huge pressures on water resources
and the beleaguered Texas Freedom Grid (thank you, @StatusQuo for posting that Houston Public Media report) endanger and adulterate the very things people moving here claim to love about Texas.
The irony of Texas getting colonized yet again by right wing west coasters… it’s bitter.
In my experience your average Texan is more progressive than Californians from anywhere but the coastal cities.
Texas is a lot of red land mass wise, but the population is real concentrated. And an awful lot of it is not white. Cali gave us the gift of Peter Thiel.
It would probably shock you to learn that through trump’s presidency his popularity was pretty consistently in the 40-45% range.
I just don’t get it. Our country is so fucked.
Maybe as an average. Anecdotally, I’ve been out there in rural Texas talking to folks, and it’s fuckin’ scary.
Based on my experiences I’d say it’s close. I think it’s because of these divides that we seem to be quickly becoming the testing ground for the new fad in civil wars.
