Will Biden win in Texas?
Probably not. But the fact that it's even this close is good news for Democrats.
Democrats have dreamed about flipping the deeply Republican Lone Star State for several election cycles (remember Beto O’Rourke? No? Well, he was a big deal in 2018, I swear) and some recent polls suggest that 2020 might be their year. A Dallas Morning News survey has Biden three points ahead of Trump:
Former Vice President Joe Biden has regained a narrow lead over President Donald Trump in Texas, after wooing more independents and Hispanics, according to a poll released Sunday by The Dallas Morning News and University of Texas at Tyler.
Biden’s lead among likely voters is 48%-45%, within the poll’s margin of error.
[…]
No Democrat running for president has carried Texas since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Biden is knocking on the door, the poll suggests, though Trump has posted gains among white suburban voters lately.
In the September poll, Biden was ahead among independents, 46-37. But in the latest survey, completed Tuesday, Biden’s edge among independents grew to 51-29. They make up 27% of likely voters.
“Biden wouldn’t be my first choice to get to cast a vote for, to be honest,” said Hayley Dyer, 32, an independent voter. “But I would rather vote for anyone than to vote for Donald Trump.”
Dyer, a marketing professional for a tech company who moved from Dallas to Tarrant County to ride out the pandemic at her parents' place, cited Trump’s handling of COVID-19.
'He knew about the virus before it got here," she said. “We could’ve been ahead of it. I don’t understand why we weren’t.”
Among Hispanics, who make up 22% of likely voters, Biden has also gained. His 30-point lead among Latinos in September — 58-28 — blossomed to 48 points, or 69-21, in this month’s poll.
Though Trump is wooing African Americans, Biden slightly improved his standing with Black voters, to 89-5, while avoiding significant slippage among whites.
Still, as in September, Trump enjoys commanding leads over Biden among white evangelicals (currently 76-24), white men (65-27), whites with no college degree (65-30), gun owners (58-35) and seniors of all races and ethnicities (56-40).
The president, who has warned that under Biden, suburbs would become unsafe and overrun with housing for low-income people, saw his lead among white suburban residents increase to 83-15, from September’s 74-16.
Overall, though, Trump is running behind his performance in Texas from four years ago, when he carried it over Hillary Clinton, 52-43.
Nate Silver gives Biden a 38% chance of winning Texas of this writing. Better than the odds he gave Trump of winning the Presidency in 2016.
But I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Not in 2020, anyway. Not when the Republican Governor seems to be going out of his way to make it really, really hard for people to vote:
The Texas Supreme Court has temporarily reinstated the governor’s ban on multiple drop-off sites for mail-in ballots, giving United States President Donald Trump a short-term victory ahead of the November 3 presidential election.
The ban will remain in effect while the state Supreme Court reviews an appeal court’s ruling that overturned Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s October 1 order limiting Texas counties to one drop-off site each, regardless of population size.
Abbott said his decision to limit drop-off locations was aimed at preventing voter fraud, but the move, which closed more than a dozen satellite locations, drew condemnation from Democrats and voting rights advocates.
Trump has repeatedly criticised mail-in ballots, claiming without evidence that they would lead to widespread fraud.
Forbes notes that “Abbott’s order limited drop-off locations to one per county—even Harris County, which has 4.7 million people—which CNN notes could result in Texans having to travel an hour in some locations to drop off their ballot.” As the old quote (perhaps wrongly) attributed to Stalin goes, “It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes.”
That’s why I’m not betting on Georgia going for Biden this year, either, despite polls showing a dead heat. But the mere fact that these traditionally Republican states are so close is a really good sign for the Democratic Party. At the very least, they should pick up some seats at the state level and bolster their majority in the House of Representatives. More importantly, every dollar Trump spends to hang on in the red states is a dollar not available to him in the real battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Florida.
Biden can win without Texas, Georgia, and even Florida. Trump desperately needs them all.
I am skeptical that the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop means very much, assuming it’s accurate at all. And even if it is completely accurate and shows that Hunter and his father are unrepentantly corrupt, it doesn’t even begin to approach what the Trumps have gotten away with for four years. I think it was Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark who pointed out that every serious criticism of Joe Biden only makes sense if you assume Donald Trump is not the President.
It is kind of creepy to see social media platforms trying to memory-hole the story this close to an election, though. 9/11 conspiracy theories, vaccine conspiracy theories, and even Holocaust denial are prevalent on Facebook and Twitter, but a story about the family of the man who may soon be President - to be clear, the man I strongly support in this election - is being taken down.
Of course, maybe that’s the point.
Matt Taibbi says this sets a very dangerous precedent:
The flow of information in the United States has become so politicized – bottlenecked by an increasingly brazen union of corporate press and tech platforms – that it’s become impossible for American audiences to see news about certain topics absent thickets of propagandistic contextualizing. Try to look up anything about Burisma, Joe Biden, or Hunter Biden in English, however, and you’re likely to be shown a pile of “fact-checks” and explainers ahead of the raw information…
[…]
Other true information has been scrubbed or de-ranked, either by platforms or by a confederation of press outlets whose loyalty to the Democratic Party far now overshadows its obligations to inform.
Obviously, Fox is not much better, in terms of its willingness to report negative information about Trump and Republicans, but Fox doesn’t have the reach that this emerging partnership between mass media, law enforcement, and tech platforms does. That group’s reaction to the New York Post story is formalizing a decision to abandon the media’s old true/untrue standard for a different test that involves other, more politicized questions, like provenance and editorial intent.
Ironically, all of this may have drawn even more attention to the Post’s story. The Streisand Effect strikes again.
Jen Gerson of The Line (the Canadian Substack newsletter which to which you should be subscribing) interviews George Roche, executive director of The Line (a COVID-19 conspiracy group at which you should be pointing and laughing). It’s…something.
JG: I actually do know how to corroborate information. And I know how to verify what's not accurate and what is. And what you said, and the way that you're talking, the way that you're throwing facts, and the way that you're making conclusions from those facts, to me, sounds like a pretty classic example of conspiracy theory minded thinking. You're taking isolated data points and forming an all encompassing ideology of cosmology out of the data points without putting any of those data points in context.
GF: I'm a conspiracy analyst. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, we question the statements of known liars. ... If you know anything about conspiracy theories, that was set forth by the C.I.A. back in the John Kennedy days when he was murdered for exposing the One World Government and the different resources that would be relied upon to execute the plan that has been even written in the Rockefellers’ playbook, which is online as well.
(Fact check: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
With days to go, I don’t know why Biden isn’t advertising more in Texas. He has the money to do it.
On the other hand, so many voters shifting to the Democrats is already very good, even though a certain share of those are not voting Democratic out of conviction, but because they don’t want Trump.
An hour’s travel to vote is patently ridiculous though. It’s another example of Republicans crossing the lines of basic reason and decency, especially since it would mostly or exclusively affect people with low income who don’t have the means and can’t take that much time. Between travel and lines, that’s a day off work to go vote. No one can excuse that as reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.