#battlegroundtexas

[theamandaelise]

2018 midterms are over & Texas is a battleground state thanks to these beautiful people here & countless others. (not pictured, almost all of team Houston lol) #teambgtx #midterms2018 #BattlegroundTexas (at Battleground Texas Office) https://www.instagram.com/p/BqAmXLKh5HC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=j76z21owkesl

[twobroadstalkingpoliticspodcast]

0037: The Politics of Texas (2/14/2018)

[sleepypasture]

This song is about dating, but also — it's about rights!

Try not to get choked up when it gets to the part where she says, "I don't tell you what to do." I'm a cheeseball, but I just think of the 50 years that ladies have been fighting for their rights, and I feel the feels. Press "Play" and join me.

Annie Clark! Carrie Brownstein! Sia! Warpaint! Lena Dunham! GET OUT AN VOTTTTE! 

[turntexasblue]

An in depth article on Davis, her background, and the filibuster that put her in the spotlight. 

“Democrats now thought she really had potential for statewide office, maybe even for a run at the governor’s office,” the journalist said. “But she really doesn’t give two shits about what anybody thinks of her. The reality of the situation is that her standing up against the education bill may be her last hurrah if the redistricting plan holds up in court.”

[turntexasblue]

Republicans were dead-set in 2012 on ousting force-to-be-reckoned-with Wendy Davis and winning back a traditionally red seat. Beating Davis would have let them bring any legislation to the Senate floor with just one Democratic vote. Besides the strategic importance of her seat, Davis was also personally irksome to Republicans. She defended reproductive rights, opposed the hike on wholesale energy prices, and staged the filibuster at the end of the last regular session that forced Gov. Perry to call a special session to pass the bill gutting public school funding.

Republicans thought their candidate, pediatrician and state Rep. Mark Shelton, could recapture the GOP-leaning district with the $2.3 million he raised, but Davis raised $3.5 million in the most expensive and closely watched race of the election. Davis won with just 51.11 percent.

Davis, a one-time teenage single mom who graduated from Harvard Law School, is a survivor. In the new session, her first priority is to restore the school funding her filibuster couldn’t protect. But Davis-watchers aren’t focused on the next five months; they’re thinking about 2016. Bill Miller, an Austin-based political consultant, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Davis should aim for the governorship. “She’s got momentum,” Miller said. “She’s got acclaim. It would be a mistake not to go for something great.”

[turntexasblue]

A source who has spoken with Republican donors says Attorney General Greg Abbott is saying he'll run for governor next year, challenging Rick Perry. With the 83rd Texas Legislative Session underway this week, Gov. Perry says he's focused on state business not re-election.

[turntexasblue]

Texas lawmakers determined in 2011 that taxpayers should not fund anything even tangentially related to abortion services, so they passed legislation designed to deny funds to the national reproductive health-services provider Planned Parenthood. As a result, the state said goodbye to federal funding that paid tens of millions of dollars for low-income women’s reproductive health services — none of which were abortion-related to begin with.

Lawmakers thought they were doing a good thing for the unborn as well as taxpayers. In practice, though, the result has been a waste of public money, enormous cuts in health care funding and creation of an informational black hole for low-income women seeking health services.

AsThe Dallas Morning News’ Claire Cardona reported Saturday, a state-run referral website for women’s health care services sends visitors to offices that offer no such services. One of the listed referrals is for a sports-medicine clinic; another is for a title company. A survey of providers listed on the website produced an appalling 18 percent accuracy rate for clinics that actually accept patients for the services the state says they provide.

Most of the listed providers surveyed in the Dallas area either are not accepting new patients, are not aware that they were listed as providers or are not participating in the state program. Some phone numbers on the state list were out of service.

...

Clearly, someone screwed up, and someone else failed to follow up. State administrators have had more than a year to get this right but have failed to perform even cursory spot checks to make sure the list is correct.

Lawmakers should ask themselves how their 2011 action has served taxpayers and made the administration of these government services more efficient. Was the previous referral method so broken that it couldn’t be fixed without risking the loss of such substantial federal funding?

[turntexasblue]

The organization, dubbed “Battleground Texas,” plans to engage the state’s rapidly growing Latino population, as well as African-American voters and other Democratic-leaning constituencies that have been underrepresented at the ballot box in recent cycles. Two sources said the contemplated budget would run into the tens of millions of dollars over several years - a project Democrats hope has enough heft to help turn what has long been an electoral pipe dream into reality.

...

Still, Democrats buoyed by the breadth of their 2012 victories are looking to Texas as a political holy grail: a prize so spectacular that it might just be worth a big, sustained investment of money and energy. If state and national party leaders committed the time and almost presidential-level resources required, the thinking goes, the most important cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral map could become competitive.

“I’m excited to see that at national levels, people are now looking at Texas and saying, ‘That’s where we need to make our next investment. That’s where the next opportunity lies.’ The enthusiasm that I’m hearing in that regard is growing every day,” said Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.

  The Fort Worth legislator, who won a difficult reelection campaign last year in a conservative district, is viewed in and outside of Texas as perhaps her party’s strongest statewide prospect for 2014. Both Davis and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro visited Washington during the Inauguration this week and addressed a fundraiser for the Lone Star Project, an influential outside group that drives Democratic messaging in Texas.

  ...

Davis — whom multiple Republicans privately described as “scary” to the GOP — agreed that there’s political opportunity for Democrats in Texas but said it remains to be seen how quickly the party can take advantage of it. “Our issues already are the issues that are reflective of the values of the people in Texas: building a strong public education, creating an opportunity for higher education and making sure that we keep our citizens healthy so that their families are strong and our economy is strong,” Davis told POLITICO. “I’m excited that people are talking about the opportunity for me to do something statewide one day. What I’m smart enough to know is that you can’t decide that’s a good idea for yourself. Instead, the support for that has to generate from under.”

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Democratic Houston Mayor Annise Parker said her party couldn’t afford to wait passively for population change to turn Texas blue. Instead, they should dig in for a longer, harder campaign to make it a swing state.

“We have been waiting in Texas for a very long time for the Latino vote to come into its own and turn the tide. But many of us have decided that we can’t wait for that. We have to do the old-fashioned work of going out and talking to Texans,” said Parker, who didn’t rule out a statewide campaign “when I am done [being] mayor.”

“Do I think we’re going to turn Texas in two years? Probably not. Do I think we can turn Texas in four years? Absolutely, because I think the Republican Party in Texas is going to drive itself off a cliff,” Parker said. “You hear Republicans with rhetoric, literally talking about the jack-booted thugs coming and taking guns out of people’s homes, going door to door. You have legislators who will file, once again, virulently anti-immigrant legislation in the state House.”

  ...

Any new national group aimed at building up Texas Democrats would join a small but significant array of in-state organizations developing progressive infrastructure. In addition to the Lone Star Project and the germinal Battleground Texas effort, strategists pointed to the group Be One Texas as a significant player in their comeback effort.

That organization plans to spend heavily across several elections to coordinate action among Democratic interest groups, said Texas strategist Robert Jones, who’s taking over as the group’s CEO next week. Be One Texas will follow the “roundtable” model adopted successfully by Democrats in states such as Colorado and Minnesota, where collaboration between big donors, labor groups, women’s groups and other core Democratic constituencies have powered major gains.

“I think there’s a lot of conversations about Texas right now, looking at the electoral map and how you change the nature of politics in the country,” said Jones. “The state is on track to have 42 electoral votes in the 2020 census, so it has the potential to be a huge player in national politics.”

Ideally, Democrats said, the existing progressive groups there and a new entity would end up “embracing and reinforcing one another.”

  ...