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The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now.
(newrepublic.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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politics
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I reject the premise that any state can be permanently lost. In 2020 Biden received more votes in Texas than he did in New York, and lost the state by only ~620k votes (under 6%), with 66 % voter turnout. Criminal Ken Paxton was going around saying that if he hadn't been able to shut down Harris County sending out mail-in ballots to everybody like they had intended, Trump would have lost Texas. If we can get voter turnout up into the 70s in the big 4 metro areas (Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio), we really could see the state go blue for state-wide and Federal offices. Unfortunately our Governor, Lt Governor, and Attorney General are all elected on mid-term years, and we have even shittier turnout in those years (dropped under 50% in 2022). But if we can get turnout up enough in a Presedential or US Senate year (both in 2024) then we can expect some serious national support in the next midterm to flip our state-wide offices.
You are assuming the Texas Secretary of State, who is under complete control of the Governor's office, would allow a blue victory in Texas.
The Governor's appointed Secretary of State operates elections in Texas, including the tally and review of ballots, which is handled electronically by the SoS and their private helpers. There is simply no world where a conservative/fascist should be trusted to operate and tally their own elections. They even audit their own work when accused of inaccuracy or inpropriety. Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. They lack veracity and are absolutely to never be trusted. Never.
I appreciate your optimism and I agree that we need greater voter turnout, but I guarantee you voter turnout will not save us if Texas conservatives are counting the votes. Trusting a conservative to be honest is a deadly mistake.
Oh I don't trust them at all. But we at least recently switched from the completely black box eSlate voting machines that store your vote on local internal memory, and were notoriously easier to alter the results in, to ones that print out a human-readable ballot that we can verify before scanning it into the ballot box. So that's a huge step in the right direction. I believe if we can just get turnout high enough, there will be so much national funding for law suits to enforce bipartisan monitoring and media scrutiny and all that that I think it'd be hard for them to wash it all away.
I hope you are right. I was on the purple hope train for years until fascism won in 2016. Watching it grow stronger has really changed my outlook. I know not to trust my neighbors now. I understand what normal people will have to do to our neighbors if we are still living in conservative strongholds when fascism takes power again. I prefer your outcome to the one I see on the horizon.
Yeah 2024 is pretty damn crucial. Have several emmigration strategies if it goes poorly.