How wide of national coverage is the Botham Jean case getting? The short version is that it appears a cop at the end of a 15 hour shift went to the wrong apartment thinking it was hers, entered, and shot the young accountant living there, presumably in the dark (because if the lights were on, she would have noticed it wasn’t her apartment.) Young accountant happened to be black. It’s a holy mess and some key facts are disputed (like if the door was unlocked).
Beto said he didn’t know all the facts but that at the very least, it was clear that the cop needed to be fired. Cruz characterized that as knee-jerk blame-the-cop thinking. I have no idea who votes for this guy.
It’s all fine - they executed a search warrant on the victim’s apartment and found (or “found”) a bag of marijuana, so the home invasion and shooting was fully justified.
Lawyer needed: What’s the legal status of black people in Texas these days? Can they sit on furniture inside their home with the reasonable expectation of not getting shot by an off-duty police officer who enters for no reason?
Ted Cruz, who presumably knows stuff, seems to think this is grey area.
I am not an advocate of “unskewing” polls, but if Beto does pull off an unlikely win then it will be because he gets a bunch of unlikely voters out. Anyway I’m glad I’m not the one having to put together likely voter screens in this environment. My gut feeling is that Cruz wins by a not especially close 4-7% at the end of the day. But considering that Abbott looks to be crushing Lupe Valdez by 20 points or more, that’s a pretty poor showing by Cruz.
Of course he can’t count on it. But he has to hope for it. And it is as they stated in that article (oddly place comma and all)-
And there have been polls that have not picked up the turnout of change voters. Capuano was polling 9 ahead of Pessley on an RV poll just before and 13 on an LV one for example, but Pressley won by something like 20 points. It’s not just D v R enthusiasm that is the factor. Incumbency is minimally not the big advantage it often has been.
That said, the broad environment with a generic House ballot now at D+9 and Trump under water by 13.4 also helps Beto some.
We shall be pleasantly surprised if Beto pulls the upset but it appears less likely. It’s all about turnout, if this is indeed a wave election then it could happen. Still a chance for Dem control, which would mean we’d no longer have to listen to Susan Collins pretend to waver before toeing the Republican line when the vote is called.