Note: Tarrant County is Fort Worth; Collin County is just north of Dallas.
Now lets hope they can translate these good results into gains in the legislature and state-wide races.
Huge, huge shout out to the Tarrant County Young Democrats. They didn’t just show up, they organized, knocked on doors, made calls, and fought for every single school board seat they were targeting. And guess what? They swept them all. That’s the kind of ground game that wins elections. That’s the kind of energy we need to keep building.
I’ve been yelling for years that’s what low-level Democrats need to do. Ship some of them to every state.
And they’ve been doing it since forever. They are just more energized now and MAGA is feeling the pain so are less energized. Get out the vote efforts is politics-101. Second semester is suppressing the other side’s voters.
It is looking like the mid-terms will not go well for republicans. I can hardly wait!
Given that Texas is sometimes considered electorally a bellwether state, yeah, I could be looking forward to the mid-terms as well.
Doing it and doing it in large numbers, concentrating the efforts properly, and finding the right elections are very different things. The right has been outdoing the left in local elections for decades because the left keeps putting most of its time and money into state and national races. Wrong. Start with school boards and councils and let the public see the difference that makes with issues they care most about.
I’m hoping for a 435 seats D/0 seats R outcome. Because it is a sin to cast a vote for a Republican to assume elected office. And everybody knows it.
I see. And how often do people commit sins?
Far too often, I’m afraid. I can only forbid the election of Republicans; I can’t physically prevent it.
Yet.
I’m not 100% convinced this isn’t a bit of a rosy article.
From what I can tell, a lot of people are really fed up with the MAGA types’ attempts to get on school boards and do shady stuff like ban textbooks, mandate certain things to be taught, etc… The MAGA school board types have consistently looked wild-eyed and unhinged and that doesn’t go over well when people are considering who’s going to run their kids’ school districts.
But that doesn’t translate into wanting progressive or even Democrat candidates in statewide or national elections.
Okay, and I’d like the Texas Rangers to go 162-0 every season.
I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.
Really? I thought I was rather explicit about the fact that any other outcome would involve an unacceptable amount of sinning.
Huh.
I’m pretty sure Paxton, Patrick and Abbot will find a way to invalidate all of those elections.
“All politics is local.” ~Tip O’Neill (maybe)
A lesson Dems need to learn (and will take decades to fix…I probably will not live long enough to see results (old age) but still…they should start now).
Yeah, I’m not agreeing that this is a sign of a Dem takeover so much as a rebuke of MAGA and Trump. Regular people are tired of the nonsense. They are seeing their schools closed and consolidated because of Abbott’s voucher agenda. They are seeing all “extra-curricular” programs face the chopping block over a funding shortage of epic proportions.
The Rep school budget bill in Texas cut the amount per student for public schools from about $600 each to about $60 each. Meanwhile they are pouring money into the for-profit private schools. And we have yet to see just who is going to get all those vouchers. Are low- income families going to get access to those fancy schools by having vouchers? Or are the schools going to maintain their tight admission standards “elite” reputations?
I do see this as a potential bellwether for the coming midterms. If Texans are doing this, it signals a strong backlash to the current federal government is afoot.
Or it is just what happens when there is low turnout:
Just about 8.12% of registered North Texas voters showed up to vote
Yeah. The wackos are fully in the majority. If their fuhrer tells them to show up and vote RWT, they will. En masse.
They’re also seeing politically motivated jerks wading into library book choice and all other aspects of public schools and upsetting the apple cart in the name of protecting children, but in reality they’re advancing their own fairly extreme political agenda.
And people don’t like that when it’s so close to home. I think there’s a fairly widespread view that politics and schools is something that should stay in Austin, and on the local level it’s more about good governance of schools and school districts, not about political agendas from on high.
Well, I hope so, but Texas is on its own rabid book agenda. Right now the Texas legislature is pushing legislation that would make it illegal for public libraries to have “sexually explicit” material available to minors, where sexually explicit is some nebulous term the bill’s author didn’t even define in the bill and didn’t want to discuss in the legislature. If it passes, libraries will be under some really tough rules on books available for minors to check out. Like, they aren’t sure if a book for teens discussing kissing is allowed.
So while this is encouraging, Texas still has a lot of shit we are doing to ourselves that local control can’t undo.
The party that is out of power has voters who feel angry and helpless, which makes them more motivated to vote in special elections. I don’t think this amounts to much sadly. I don’t know if this momentum will carry over to 2026 when we have primaries and general elections of nationwide democrats. I hope it does.
That might be true if these were normal times, but they aint.
This was an early election of little that was way under Trumps radar. Trump won’t be so passive in the midterms. He’ll be all about flexing his new found power and sicing his Justice department and the regulatory state against any Dem. organization, candidate or media that appears to be a threat. We may take back the house but its not going to be easy.