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But that's rather my point: if you're living just in the larger metro areas, you're choosing to insulate yourself from the rampant discrimination and bigotry that, numerically, forms the bulk of the electorate and shape the cultural mindset. To be clear, that's not a bad thing that people make that choice; I would, were in that position.

If Texas voters will finally vote in someone who is more like Ann Richards than Greg Abbott, I will believe the mindset is changing. Statewide votes for Governor, Lite Gov, Comptroller, and so on are not gerrymandered so a vote in San Antonio counts just as much as a vote in Midland.

(To your first question, I have not lived in Texas for over a decade, but I am the only member of my family who does not so I have pretty close connections to this day.)

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Is that really any different from any other state, including California? Rural vs urban culture are completely different in every state in America. As Californians we still insulate ourselves from rural culture. The only difference in California those counties don't form the bulk of the electorate while in Texas they do. We still have the same problem: a cultural divide between rural and urban.

Yeas it's different. I'r invite you to drive through the rural west America, through arizona, nevada, wyoming and colorado. Even the rural areas of california have so many people. You will also noticr that the californians are almost all wearing masks even in the rural areas.

Rural California north of Sacramento is similar to those places and a lot of no mask wearing also. It is a large portion of the state. Check out a map to get a good feel. Texas is big, but California is not far behind.

Where the hell are you driving 1 hour out the bay and you're in no mask land?

I live in TX. I am very, very careful when I'm out in the sticks since the shitkickers are dangerous. I also lived in CA and even in the sticks out in central CA there's just nothing like the scale of xenophobic belligerence in rural TX (or the rest of the Bible Belt).

Careful how? Do you typically "stand out" as in being overtly gay, or wearing anti-relgious clothing?

I'm a white man and I suppose I would be a bit wary if I had a huge Bernie sticker on my car, I otherwise don't feel unsafe in the middle of nowhere TX. I just don't like that they're all rah rah GOP.

Careful how? Do you typically "stand out" as in being overtly gay, or wearing anti-relgious clothing?

My own (black) experience in West Texas (Ft. Bliss), "Careful" meant driving across state to see family in Houston and absolutely not stopping in certain counties, not even to piss or stretch my legs.

After getting stopped, pulled over and ordered out of my vehicle while an officer stood back at his car several times and interrogated about "where are you going" "where are you supposed to be" "who do you know in this town" and "where did you steal the car from" (all separate experiences) while doing nothing but trying to take holiday leave.

So... that kind of careful for some of us.

edit, before anyone even makes the attempt:

- I was not driving erratically

- I had no bumper stickers on my car signaling political viewpoints

- I was not wearing any 'curious' clothing other than a shirt and jeans

- I had functioning turn signals and brake lights

- I was driving a legally purchased, registered and insured vehicle at the speed limit (or +5mph) consistent with how I drive literally every day

I would have thought East Texas would have been the place to be wary.

Shrug.

I've had ... interesting interactions with police and even some ornery locals as far south as Austin (yes, that "blue dot surrounded by red" as people like to call it) and as far north as Milwaukee, which isn't that far from where I live now, comparatively.

Kinda stopped believing in that whole "social avarice is relegated to certain parts of the country" stuff before I even hit 23.

(but don't get me started about certain parts of Missouri)

That's terrible. I'm not completely shocked, but it is always jarring to hear that things like that happen.

I remember my truck breaking down in Menard, TX and my black friend and I walked into a restaurant in the morning... everyone stopped and turned around and stared at us for a moment and went back to their business.

I apologize for taking this less than seriously all things considered, it's a coping mechanism these days but I immediately thought of Blazing Saddles reading this

That is fucking lame. I hate that you had/have to endure this shit.

Sometimes I don't think humanity deserves to continue existing. It was a wacky experiment, but it is not working out.

A man was lynched in east Texas by dragging him behind a truck, that was in the news in our lifetime (in 1998.) I was surprised they prosecuted the killers because prior to this, no white person even went to prison in Texas for killing a black person post reconstruction.

>> no white person even went to prison in Texas for killing a black person post reconstruction

That's astounding. Do you have a source for this?

You can choose your own news sources but here's the wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Byrd_Jr. It was pretty sickening to read the headlines in the newspapers at the time.

It can be surprising. Hell I'm from Louisiana and find it funny that people are just discovering how much White Supremacy took off in some places like the North West US. They somehow think we kept it all contained here for the last 120 years.

The Pacific Northwest has had a problem with right wing extremism (skinheads, neo-Nazis) for decades, and the polarization between left-wing cities and right-wing rural areas is particularly extreme in Oregon.

Oregon was founded as a "white utopia", so I guess it makes sense.

I think we need to admit that we are all racist. Every ethnic majority thinks they are the greatest, it seems. If we can't even admit it, I don't see how it will change.

It goes both ways. Try walking around Town Lake in Austin (where I live) wearing a MAGA hat and the tell me how much more diverse and tolerant folks are in the big city.

try that with a Vote Republican hat instead of a symbol of the man trying to pull a political slow coupe currently. MAGA is about Trump and his inhumanity and not necessarily party affiliation.

>I live in TX. I am very, very careful when I'm out in the sticks since the shitkickers are dangerous.

Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, Pensacola, or anywhere in "the sticks" of Texas or Oklahoma or Utah or Alabama before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?

Yeah, if you're running around in a rainbow-colored, "I Love Sucking Cock" t-shirt, or wearing a, "Communism is the Bestism" shirt or some stupid shit like that, then yeah, you're not going to like rural Texas.

Newsflash, you're not going to like upstate New York, either.

It is. I've spent time in most of the U.S., minus Alaska and a few north eastern states, and some states have very distinct boundaries between city and rural atmosphere. In some states, I found places I was not supposed to be and it was made abundantly clear to me. There are some places that saying the wrong words or having the wrong beliefs can be incredibly dangerous. The degree of difference varies from state to state and also seems to change based more heavily on latitude. Not sure I understand why it works out that way.

Turnout says far less about political views than you might think. Voter suppression is a common and effective tool used to keep a political party in power even as they loose popular support.

All it takes is realizing changing X rule like a deadline will help or hurt your party and then voting based on that rule. Eventually this can fail, which oddly enough tends to flip states so they can quickly go from solidly party A to solidly party B.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/12/08/texas-ken-paxton-ele...

Having satisfactorily worked hard to make voting as difficult as possible in Texas, he wants to use the state's limited funds to sue other states that dared to improve their democracy. This is the government of Texas.

I would find it much more interesting if you were to engage on the legal argument being made rather than this sort of perfunctory dismissal.

Are you stating that as long as public officials are "daring to improve their democracy" that they are free to ignore Constitutional requirements that the legislature has plenary authority to proscribe the manor of selecting electors?

Note: Setting aside the likelihood that any of the alleged unconstitutional actions resulted in a different electoral outcome, isn't it important that election law is established through the Constitutionally proscribed legislative process and not via executive and/or bureaucratic actions independent of the legislature?

What legal argument? Texas has no standing to sue Pennsylvania over what is an internal matter to Pennsylvania.

Let's not pretend that this absurd lawsuit has any merit -- it's one in a long line of losing lawsuits (what are they up to, 50 out of 51 lost now?) by the current president to overturn an election result he didn't like.

Standing might certainly a reason why Texas can't sue Pennsylvania in this case, but you've neatly avoided addressing the underlying argument that they are making that the election rules were not changed by the legislature in these states and those actions are unconstitutional.

I'm interested in poking holes in that argument not avoiding it.

I'm not "avoiding" it -- it doesn't matter. What you're asking for is analogous to how to handle NTFS performance issues on a MacOS application.

Setting aside standing and even setting aside any effect on this election, does it not matter for future elections that it be clear that the legislature can't be bypassed in these matters?

The legislature can clearly be bypassed by the courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_State_Board...

So, it’s a much more specific question you’re asking. It also had zero impact on this election, but that’s largely irrelevant to the question.

I don't think that case is an example of the legislature being bypassed. That is an example of the legislature taking an unconstitutional action.

The question in the Texas lawsuit doesn't challenge the actions of the legislature, it challenges the actions of the other officials.

That’s a slightly different argument, if you accept that the courts are final arbiters then clearly they get to determine what’s allowed not the legislature.

It’s often argued by public officials that exceptions are allowed in extreme situations, though what those are is of course up to the courts. Perhaps best summed up as "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic... Which of course isn’t a blank check to do anything for any reason, but it is considered by the court system in various cases. There are many examples of this argument being considered acceptable, and perhaps more frequent examples of it being rejected.

As such simply saying the legislature was bypassed on it’s own is not considered a sufficient legal argument.

> As such simply saying the legislature was bypassed on it’s own is not considered a sufficient legal argument.

Well, the interesting point of law here is that the Constitution specifically delegates the authority to the legislature. So in this particular case it may indeed be as straightforward as saying that the legislature was bypassed and didn't authorize the changes. At least that is my understanding of the case so far.

That’s a common thread across other instances of this legal argument and again on it’s own is considered insufficient.

It all rolls back to article III section 2 The Judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution

The legislature is often assumed to have a great deal of power, but it was intended to be relatively weak just like the other two branches of government.

> Setting aside standing and even setting aside any effect on this election, does it not matter for future elections that it be clear that the legislature can’t be bypassed in these matters?

No, it would actually be terribly disruptive if the legislature could not subject its regulation of federal elections to the judicial and executive power in the same way as other state laws (and, particularly, laws governing the administration of simultaneously and on-the-same-ballot state elections) are.

The concern here was entirely feigned, hypocritical by the states involved in complaints, and substanceless and purely based on partisan advantage.

> Standing might certainly a reason why Texas can’t sue Pennsylvania in this case,

It is.

> but you’ve neatly avoided addressing the underlying argument that they are making that the election rules were not changed by the legislature in these states and those actions are unconstitutional.

The reason why that is false is well-argued in some of the briefs for the defendant states in Texas just-failed lawsuit, but, in summary: State legislatures are constitutionally free to, as part of the rules they set for elections of Presidential electors, submit those same rules to the same judicial and executive constraints otherwise applicable to state law including those applicable to state elections, the defendant states (and most other states, including those suing) routinely do so and specifically have done so for the rules applicable in this case, and the rules for the elections were all handled according to state law (including the role that state law affords judicial and executive officers in its application).

Cases with original jurisdiction to SCOTUS are so rare that I don't think anyone can reasonably speculate to it being tossed (or heard) based on standing.

It's a relatively clean slate in state vs state case precedent. Clean enough that a majority will easily find a way to justify a desired ruling one way or the other.

It really is weird. Normally the supreme court only hears appeals, so it only rules on matters of law. It wouldn't normally rule on matters of fact, wouldn't normally call witnesses, and wouldn't normally have a jury.

If you knew anything about Ken Paxton you wouldn't doubt the person before yours comment. He is very likely guilty of several crimes and generally unliked in Texas. It is not unlikely that he is doing this in exchange for a pardon from Trump on the last day (week?) of Trump's tenure as Prez along with 100s more no doubt. This suit will go no where because no one has presented any evidence of widespread fraud or that states were outside their rights as to how they conduct their elections. It's a joke like Paxton.

You are right that I don't know the motivations of Ken Paxton, but aren't there 18 other states joining in the lawsuit?

In any case you can't dismiss a lawsuit "because no one has presented any evidence". That is part of a lawsuit itself. Perhaps the evidence will be determined to be insufficient but that will be determined within the proceeding itself.

Now if you want to say that the claims presented in this particular motion is unconvincing, that would make logical sense. But any rationale for dismissing the motion has to be based on what is in the motion, not on what is floating around in social media.

> but aren’t there 18 other states joining in the lawsuit?

No, six attempted to do so (since the suit was never permitted to be filed, no one actually joined it.)

18 states (including the six that shortly after that filed to join the suit as party intervenors) filed a request to file a pro-plaintiff amicus brief, which is different than joining the suit.

The US SC agrees with you: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/us/politics/supreme-court... .

Voter supression is certainly an important point, but it seems like people have completely stopped feeling responsible for elections too. Even in Texas we had nearly 3 weeks of early voting. If you can't find a way in 3 weeks to go put in a vote I don't know how much more you can help someone. Texas democrats could have beaten Trump here if everyone would have shown up and voted rather than complaining and staying home.

We just had a massive natural experiment in loosening voting laws that showed that “voter suppression” is less extensive than many people assume. Take Georgia for example. Turnout was up 20% compared to 2016. But the Black share of the electorate went down again, to the lowest levels since 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/17/upshot/georgi.... What flipped Georgia was white voters in the Atlanta collar suburbs—and 100,000 people who voted for Biden but a Republican (or not at all).

And that’s exactly what you would expect from the data. Georgia is one of the few states in the country where Black voter registration rates are equal to registration rates for whites: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/voting-and-voter-r.... (California, by contrast, has a 12 point difference in Black-white registration rates.) In 2018, the Black voter turnout rate was actually 2 points higher than the white voter turnout rate in Georgia. It makes total sense that as you increase turnout, you’re going to see roughly the same demographics.

Same thing in Texas. 87% of votes were cast by mail in ballot. Turn out was up almost 7 points compared to 2016. But Trump earned basically the same percentage of the vote as in 2016, with Biden gaining a few points from winning people who voted third party last time: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/04/texas-voter-turnout-...

Democrats have this idea that voter suppression is preventing more minorities from coming out (and voting Democrat). But what the data seems to suggest in Georgia and Texas is that people who want to vote are already voting. Making it easier to vote or having a high states election will increase turnout, but by dipping into a pool of lower propensity voters who don’t look all that different demographically than the people who were already voting.

Voter suppression isn’t specifically targeted at minorities. That’s a common misconception, it’s tailored to individual states voting patterns. Overall turnout consistently favors Democrats which doesn’t win every state, but control doesn’t require every state.

As to the extra voting in Texas. 2020 had an additional + 1205300 Republican votes and + 1381258 Democratic votes in a solid red state which just hit 1/2 of voting age population. That’s 46.6% Republican and 53.4% Democrat and means those extra votes very much favored Democrats. Project a 20% increase in turnout with that kind of margin and Texas is in dead even recount territory.

Of course any election where Texas is that close Democrats have already won by such a margin as to make possibility flipping Texas largely irrelevant. Further, looking at these numbers it’s clear why targeted voter suppression becomes so significant.

> As to the extra voting in Texas. 2020 had an additional + 1205300 Republican votes and + 1381258 Democratic votes in a solid red state which just hit 1/2 of voting age population. That’s 46.6% Republican and 53.4% Democrat and means those extra votes very much favored Democrats.

You can’t conclude that because it overlooks third parties (who performed very well in 2016) and people who changed their votes from 2016 to 2020. That happened in suburbs all over the country. My traditionally red county (where voting was always super easy) went for Clinton by less than a point, but for Biden by 14 points. Voter turnout was up only 4 points, so Biden’s gain came mainly from flipping votes.

In Texas, Trump won basically the same share of the much larger turnout compared to 2016 (dropping just 0.1 points). Biden’s gain came almost entirely at the expense of third party candidates.

Indeed, nationwide, turnout went up 11 points. But Trump’s vote share also went up, from 46.1% to 46.8%. Again, Biden’s increased margin came entirely at the expense of third parties.

In our system third party votes for a presidential candidate are equivalent to people staying home. They are signaling a dissatisfaction with both candidates, and a willingness to vote.

Donations to the Green Party for example are a clever and accepted means of reducing Democrats’s turnout. Libertarians draw surprisingly evenly from both sides, but Republicans have had their own spoilers.

I don’t see how that’s responsive to my argument. My point is that, despite much higher turnout, Trump maintained his vote share in Texas.

Biden increasing his vote share at the expense of third parties doesn’t indicate any structural benefit to Democrats from higher turnout. It seems quite specific to Trump/Biden as candidates versus Trump/Clinton. Clinton and Trump had very high disapproval ratings, which pushed people to a surprisingly strong third party vote. Biden had much lower disapproval ratings than Clinton, which led those third party voters to vote for him in 2020. That doesn’t show a structure benefit to Democrats from higher turnout.

I’ve done a little numeric modeling, and it produces some surprising implications about who new 2020 voters selected. Pre-election polling showed that 9% of Trump 2016 voters planned to vote for Biden, while only half as many Clinton 2016 voters planned to vote for Trump. Moreover, they showed people who voted third party in 2016 strongly favoring Biden.

Trump won about 11 million more votes than in 2016, and Biden won about 15 million more votes than Clinton. But there was an over 3 million vote drop in the third party vote. If you assume that Biden pulled in a significant number of Trump 2016 votes, say 6-8%, while losing only 3-4% of Clinton 2016 voters, and won the majority of people who voted third party in 2016 but not in 2020, then its quite likely Trump actually won a majority of the 22 million new votes in 2020.

For Trump to nearly maintain his vote share in Texas while dramatically lower percentage of people voted 3rd party would have taken ~100% of third party defectors voting Biden. That’s simply unrealistic.

Your nationwide numbers are also off for several reasons. For example many people voting in 2016 skipped the 2020 elections for various reasons like death. Further pooling including exit polls doesn’t match up with actual voting very well suggesting a significant portion of Trump voters are unwilling to say they voted or plan to vote for Trump. That or a truly massive pro Republican voter fraud which seems unlikely.

Anyway looking at hard data. In 2016 Clinton got 65,853,514 votes Trump got 62,984,828 votes. A Democratic margin of 2,868,686 million votes. In 2020 Biden got 81,282,896 votes vs Trumps 74,222,484 a Democratic margin of 7,060,412.

Using the middle of your range 62,984,828 * 0.075 - 65,853,514 * 0.035 that’s a net gain of 2,418,989 votes which far less than the actual net gain of (7,060,412 - 2,868,686) = 4,191,726 votes that Biden over Trump.

To gain the (4,191,726 - 2,418,989) = 1,772,737 votes from a 3 million 3rd party voter drop would have taken a truly extreme margin of ~80% even assuming your other assumptions where correct. That might be reasonable if they where mostly green voters, but it’s largely from the Libertarian party.

I think you’ll find that that is true of all southern metros. Atlanta is different from Calhoun, Birmingham from Anniston, Huntsville from Madison, etc.

It’s not that people are choosing to insulate - the metros are where the jobs are. Those metros have been changed by the influx of people, and if there were jobs the suburbs you would see the electorate change there as well.

That's true for California, Washington, Oregon, New York, and Illinois as well. The big cities in every state are going to be culturally and economically different from the countryside. The only exceptions are affluent tourism-oriented rural areas like Napa.

"If Texas voters will finally vote in someone who is more like Ann Richards than Greg Abbott, I will believe the mindset is changing."

I think the problem with this is that it rests on a fundamental assumption that someone's primary motivation for voting Republican is bigotry. Polls by the Pew Foundation do not bear this out. Non-college educated Democrats and Republicans have equally wrong knowledge about what people on the other side of the spectrum believe. College educated Republicans match their numbers. The outliers are college educated Democrats. They, by far, have the most distorted view of what right wing people ACTUALLY believe. It goes both ways of course, with conservatives dramatically underestimating the patriotism of liberals, etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/democr...

When I lived in Arkansas, the voters simultaneously voted for a Republican governor and state house, AND a ballot initiative to significantly raise the state minimum wage, as well as a ballot initiative for medical marijuana.

The GOP politicians were all against these measures, but the voters approved them by large majorities.

The point I'm making is that the politicians on both sides aren't in step with the electorate, even if they are chosen by the electorate. People are voting for the lesser of two evils a lot more than we give them credit for.

Politicians are not in step with the general electorate, they are instep with party elites and primary votes. The primaries tend to select most "ideologically" aligned candidates and by the time you're in the general election the politicians on both sides are far away from the median voter.

I think you might be dismissing that even in suburban California, things are much closer to suburban Texas.

California may seem like it's 100% different, but that's mostly because people only know San Francisco, LA, and the other coastal cities. CA has its other parts, too.

San Diego, Newport Beach and other "Beach" cities had trump boat rallies throughout this year. Just saying

>But that's rather my point: if you're living just in the larger metro areas, you're choosing to insulate yourself from the rampant discrimination and bigotry that, numerically, forms the bulk of the electorate and shape the cultural mindset.

Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?

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