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Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?

by Myron83Nao Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oops. Last year, fresh from a presidential reelection campaign in which it was hailed for its 21st-century tactics and organizing prowess, a group of Obama for America veterans descended on Texas with the goal of turning the state purple. They launched a new group, Battleground Texas, raised millions from wealthy donors, and teamed up with a rising Democratic star running for statewide office. What happened next will…probably not shock you.

In the first test-drive for Battleground Texas, Democrats got trounced, losing every statewide race for the 16th consecutive election. In the much-hyped governor’s race, state Sen. Wendy Davis lost to Attorney General Greg Abbott by 21 points. She fared only two points better than the sacrificial lamb running for agriculture commissioner, who didn’t campaign at all. But Republicans didn’t just fend off Davis, or rile up their base against a Democrat whom activists mocked as “abortion Barbie”—they ran up the score, and did so in all the places where Democrats were supposed to take baby steps.

When Battleground Texas first launched, 2014 was considered too much, too soon. But when Davis entered the race, fresh off of an 11-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill, the calculus changed. The group merged its offices with Davis’ gubernatorial campaign, set about building an army of 34,000 canvassers, lawyers, and voter-registration volunteers, and looked to pick off low-hanging fruit wherever it could.

The idea was that an Obama-style organizing operation could make a real impact in down-ballot races, which are traditionally less sophisticated. It didn’t.

Battleground invested in a dozen state-legislature races, targeting House and Senate districts that will have to turn purple for anyone at the top of the ticket to have a chance—East Dallas, the Houston suburbs, and a South Texas seat held by a party-switching state represenative. Democrats didn’t win a single one, and most of the races weren’t even close. In Harris County (Houston), where Democrats talked of tapping into the roughly 800,000 nonregistered potential voters, Davis lost by four points. (The Dem’s 2010 nominee, Bill White, won it by two.) In the final indignity, Democrats even lost Davis’ state Senate seat to a pro-life tea party Republican.

“Tonight’s decisive victory proves they picked the wrong battleground,” boasted GOP state Sen. Dan Patrick, who won the race for lieutenant governor by 19 points, despite an almost concerted effort to alienate Hispanic voters. (He warned, at one point, that child migrants might bring Ebola with them across the border.)

Soon-to-be-Senator Abbott had a low bar to clear, and he did so easily. Davis hammered him for comparing law enforcement corruption in heavily Hispanic South Texas to that of a “Third-world country,” and for refusing to say whether, as attorney general, he would hypothetically defend a hypothetical Texas law banning interracial marriage. (Abbott’s wife, Cecilia, is Mexican-American.) His simple response was to show up in South Texas and campaign seriously. It paid off: Abott won 44 percent of Latino voters, according to exit polling—including a plurality of Latino men.

And, in a sprawling, heavily Hispanic district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, Republicans unseated Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego. His replacement: Will Hurd, a former CIA agent who will be Texas’ first black Republican congressman since Reconstruction.

One silver lining for Battleground Texas is that no one was even running in some of these races two years ago. On Wednesday, the organization released a detailed memo from Senior Adviser Jeremy Bird and Executive Director Jenn Brown outlining their accomplishments and vowing to fight on: “We said from the beginning that turning Texas into a battleground will take time and commitment—and we’re just getting started.” Among their wins: a more potent fundraising operation, a growing voter database, and a nugget from the exit polls: higher percentages of young voters, women voters, and minority voters than in 2010.

But the voters just weren’t going for Davis. Even though Battleground boasted of having trained 8,700 new voter-registration volunteers, the overall voter turnout dropped by 300,000 from 2010. Absent any sort of marquee victory to call its own, the fate of Battleground is now outside its control. Texas Democrats won’t have another big election for four years—plenty of time to lose interest—and, well, something else might come up in the interim.

When I dropped by the group’s Fort Worth headquarters in September, I asked director Brown if she’d consider leaving her post to work for Hillary Clinton’s almost certain presidential campaign. She laughed and looked down at the mostly blank paper in front of her.

“The most important thing about Battleground Texas is that it is a Texas-run organization,” she said. “It’s not about me—I just am lucky to be a part of it, so I actually think no matter who runs it, whether it’s me or something else, ultimately, we don’t actually run the organization.”

So, Battleground took a shellacking in its first test run. Now comes the hard part.

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Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?

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Charts: How Minority Voters Get Blocked at the Ballot Box

by Ebony72Mlar Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Read more: Why do precincts with more minority voters often have longer lines and fewer voting machines?

The recent wave of Republican-backed photo ID laws and restrictions on early and same-day voting have made it harder for people to head to the polls. But that’s not the only obstacle to casting a ballot in many precincts. On Election Day two years ago, some voters waited as long as five hours at their polling places. Long lines can depress voter turnout since many voters undoubtedly give up and leave without voting. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, in 2012 minority voters, on average, waited longer to vote than white voters did. Nationwide, black voters waited about twice as long as whites.

The waits were especially long in areas with a high proportion of minority voters, according to a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice. In Florida, Maryland, and South Carolina, which experienced some of the longest voting delays in 2012, precincts with greater populations of black and Latino voters tended to have significantly fewer voting machines and poll workers than whiter precincts. While unexpected voter turnout may have contributed to bottlenecks at polling places, the report’s authors conclude that local officials’ neglect and failure to prepare played a key, yet overlooked, role.

Take Florida, which experienced the longest voting delays in the country in 2012. In the 10 Florida precincts with the longest delays (which the Brennan Center measured using poll closing times) almost 70 percent of voters were Latino or black. (Most were in Miami-Dade County, home to some of the nation’s largest Latino communities.) Statewide, Latino and black voters make up about 30 percent of the population.

Additionally, the 10 Florida precincts with the worst delays also faced serious shortages of voting machines and poll workers. Florida, which has no requirements for the amount of voting resources allotted to each precinct, had an exceptionally high ratio of voters to machines and voters to poll workers compared with other states.

Similarly, in South Carolina, the 10 precincts that saw the longest wait times in 2012 were all in Richland County, where African Americans make up nearly half of the population. Out of the more than 30,000 registered voters in those precincts, 63 percent were African American, more than double the statewide rate.

Those precincts also had significantly fewer voting machines and poll workers, with almost double the number of registered voters per machine or poll worker than the statewide average. By law, the state requires of no more than one voting machine for every 250 voters, a limit which was introduced as part of the Voting Rights Act.

The authors of the Brennan Center report note that Maryland does not provide data on poll workers or demographic data on its registered voters. But there are still notable racial gaps in the available data. All of the 10 precincts which had the highest number of registered voters per machine in 2012 were located in affluent, predominantly African American Prince George’s County. The researchers found that P.G. County had the highest number of precincts which violated the state’s standard for machine allocation, with an average of 230 registered voters per machine.

As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer points out, the findings in Prince George’s County indicate that the uneven distribution of voting resources on Election Day is not necessarily about poor versus rich precincts, but rather an indication of a racial gap in how easy it is for Americans to exercise their right to vote.

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Charts: How Minority Voters Get Blocked at the Ballot Box

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60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

by SFGJrg Posted on May 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The changes required by Brown v. Board of Education decision were not immediate, but they were profound and lasting. Today, schools in the South are the least segregated for black students in the nation.

Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. In honor of the Brown anniversary, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a report that analyzes the progress of desegregation since 1954. According to the report, starting in the 1980s, schools began to ditch integration efforts and shift focus to universal education standards as a way to level the playing field for students in unequal schools. In 1991, when the Supreme Court ruled that school districts could end their desegregation plans, it put the nail in integration’s coffin.

Black students integrating a Clinton, Tennessee, school in 1956 Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress

Today, the picture of American schools is far different than what the 1954 ruling seemed to portend. The UCLA report notes that Latino students are the most segregated in the country. In major and mid-sized cities, where housing discrimination historically separated neighborhoods along racial lines, black and Latino students are often almost entirely isolated from white and Asian students—about 12 percent of black and Latino students in major cities have any exposure to white students. Half of the students who attend 91-100 percent black and Latino schools (which make up 13 percent of all US public schools) are also in schools that are 90 percent low-income—a phenomenon known as “double segregation.” And the Northeast holds the special distinction of having more black children in intensely segregated schools (where school populations are 90-100 percent minority) in 2011 than it did in 1968. In New York state, for instance, 65 percent of black students attend schools that are intensely segregated, as do 57 percent of Latinos students.

Bused to a white school, New York City children face parent protests in 1965. Dick DeMarsico/Library of Congress

Even in the South, where Brown made such a profound difference, school integration is being rolled back. The chart below shows the percentage of black students attending majority white schools in the South over the last 60 years. You can see the progress made after Brown—and how rapidly it’s dissolving.

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60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

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Biden drops by the Green Inaugural Ball to say thanks

by Myrna Posted on January 21, 2013

Biden drops by the Green Inaugural Ball to say thanks

By Philip Bump

kcpetersonBiden at a 2010 green jobs eventLast night’s Green Inaugural Ball had an unannounced speaker: Vice President Joe Biden.

He had a brief message for the activists and environmentalists in the room: “I came to say thank you.” Politico has more:

“I’ll tell you what my green dream is: that we finally face up to climate change,” Biden said during a surprise appearance at the “Green Ball,” an inaugural weekend event for environmental groups. …

Biden offered no details about what the administration’s approach will be but said, “I don’t intend on ending this four years without getting an awful lot more done.”

He added: “Keep the faith.”

And, in an apparent knock to Republicans who question climate science, he said, “There is science in the White House.”

Response online was positive.

The Green Ball wasn’t Biden’s only stop. He also dropped by the Latino Inaugural. From The Hill:

Biden, accompanied by his wife, Jill, and other family members, told the crowd during brief remarks, “I think you underestimate your power.” He continued, “I think you underestimate what you’ve done for America and what you’re about to do.”

He said to applause, “The fact that the Latino Hispanic community in this country was such a decisive voice in turning out in this election was noticed by the whole hemisphere.”

In other words, he came to say thank you.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Biden drops by the Green Inaugural Ball to say thanks

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