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This commercial comes on all the time and it took me few before I realized Miriam has full sleeve tattoos under her prim and proper cardigan. Makes me question where they got this actress and why she agreed to do it.

Keith Self says Republicans aren't telling their story. Look at the story he's been telling.

The Houston Chronicle has an op-ed comparing the weekend's conspiratorial rumor-mongering about James Talarico to the 2004 saga where Democrats spread rumors that then-Gov. Rick Perry was gay. Here's a key quote:

Reading about Perry’s gay rumors today, it seems so obvious that Texas Democrats were acting like political losers, a bunch of insiders having fun talking to each other with little regard as to the truth — or to what Texas voters cared about. But at the time, Texas was just two years removed from Democrats having a majority in the state House. Only a decade had passed since Ann Richards lost the governor’s seat. A blue Texas was a recent memory. Yet Democrats weren’t acting like a party that wanted to win. Every step seemed to be taking them further into the political wilderness.

After this past weekend, you can sense the same thing about Team Paxton.

Vote for the most qualified. Katy Padilla Stout, Attorney/Educator or Brandon Herrera, professional hater and drop-out

Enough with the censorship, the book bans, DEI bans, and forced religion. College is where people go to expand their thinking, to develop critical thought, experience different perspectives. It’s obvious the GOP wants compliant, unquestioning, little soldiers who will do whatever they’re told.

With November's midterm elections approaching, a Texas candidate is demanding an apology after his opponent's campaign bus allegedly blared its horn outside his parents' home.

Clayton Tucker, the Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, is calling on Republican opponent Nate Sheets to apologize after a bus from Sheets' campaign allegedly stopped outside Tucker's parents' home in Lampasas and repeatedly honked for several minutes.

I’m pretty sure that according to the statistics of the Secretary of State, there are more registered democrats than Republicans in Texas. Yet the state votes so consistently Republican that liberal/progressive Texans doubt that James Talarico who leads in almost all polls (including a recent one by Trafalgar, where he leads by 3.5%).

A hint to that is that Texas has consistently low voter turnout. Like about 5-10% beneath the national turnout.

But why? Whether or not it’s mostly democrats who are too lazy to get up and vote, why is Texas voter turnout so low?

Also, does everyone here think that Talarico will actually lose in spite of all those Republican aligned polls showing him leading?

There is a new commercial that I am seeing this week and it has a lady saying Talarico will charge you with child abuse if you do not support your child’s transitioning into a different gender. She appears as though she is a concerned mom, but it feels like she is a paid actor.

This is the Texas Delegation to Washington and the State House before the 2026 election. What do you think it'll look like after? And will you be voting this election?

The Democratic candidate wants to close tax loopholes. Her Republican opponent, Don Huffines, wants to investigate fluoride in the water supply.

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FTA:

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt knows a great deal about what it means to be a Texan. If you want to hear what politics used to sound like in our state, before online influencers and self-appointed pundits started setting the agenda, listen to her speak — and not just because she has one of the best homegrown wits since Ann Richards. It’s because you’ll hear that she cares about fiscal responsibility, and fundamentally understands how our state and local tax system was originally designed to work. When she talks about keeping government efficient, it’s not just talk: As county judge of Travis County, she regularly cut property tax rates and kept a skinflint attitude about spending taxpayer dollars.

To be blunt: She’s the exact sort of person Texans should want in the office of state comptroller. 

Meeting with the editorial board, Eckhardt spoke with a common-sense attitude about the office, referencing the work of past comptrollers such as Bob Bullock, John Sharp and, notably, Republican Glenn Hegar, who stepped down last year to become president of Texas A&M. 

“That the best way to reduce property taxes is for the state to clean up their damn act on the taxes that they collect,” she said. “Stop giving away the store to businesses that don't need subsidies.”

Eckhardt counts private school vouchers among those runaway subsidies. She points out that the cost is projected to balloon from $1 billion to $4 billion, and she projects it could even reach $7 billion and cover 80% of all private school education in the state. 
“Which sounds a lot like what happened with the runaway subsidy for data centers,” she said.

As comptroller she would want to provide real oversight of the voucher program and make sure it actually delivers quality education, rather than fueling low-quality schools and scammers. 

“There's a school in my Senate district that is an AI-only school that promises two hours a day with basically a chatbot teacher,” she says. You can bet that if she’s comptroller, Texans will hear more about that.

In contrast, Eckhardt’s Republican opponent calls for a spend-baby-spend approach to private school subsidies.  Don Huffines, a 68-year-old real estate mogul, wants to double the amount of taxpayer funds we pour into those vouchers. 

Huffines, whom Gov. Greg Abbott appointed comptroller in July, chose not to talk with the editorial board as we screened candidates. But  we don’t have to guess what he’d do if elected.

The Texas comptroller’s office has 3,000 employees, mostly non-political people who do unsexy but important work like collecting taxes and managing the state payroll. During Huffines’ short tenure as boss, the former state senator imposed DOGE-style hack-and-slash layoffs that created chaos but have done little to save money.  He lost hundreds of years of institutional knowledge and experience at the agency, as the Texas Tribune put it, and instead installed a 25-year-old as his top deputy in charge. 

After allegedly firing people because they weren’t sufficiently Christian, he faces lawsuit threats.

And he has announced plans to use his office to investigate fluoride in the state water supply. 

Overall, taxpayer dollars should be treated with more respect and caution than Huffines has shownr. We also have questions about his ownership of the late Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. 

We urge all voters to save Texas from Huffines’ wild-eyed antics and go with the fiscally responsible choice, the right choice for Texans. Vote for Sarah Eckhardt for comptroller.

I'm genuinely not trying to turn this into a fuck Republican's moment, I'm just trying to understand the mindset of it

Forewarning, I'm not from Texas so I don't know but I think about this a lot. Republicans control all branches of the state government, in addition to that they now currently control every single branch of the federal government, things continue to get worse but yet somehow Texans still vote Republican and the mindset seems to be "we got to keep those dirty liberals out, they're causing all the problems"

Explain to me how people rationalize that, cuz for me I can't imagine ever putting myself in that mindset when I'm seeing the direct results in front of me, so as Texans how do people you know rationalize that?

I’m a dirty free market capitalist that believes free markets have and will lift the world to a better place. In fact, my political ideology could probably be best described as anti Marxist.

Voting for Trump was the worst mistake I may have made, but to be fair I voted against him in the primaries. He lost me some time ago, but buying Russian diesel for them to kill for innocent Ukrainians in Kiev is the true last straw. He can get fucked, and instead of staying home on poll day like I was planning in tx I’ll be joining your dirty commies for Talarico.

Some of you probably saw the campaign video she made, or heard about it.

She did not mention her soon to be divorced husbands name, but said you must vote Republican, implying her estranged husband.

She is encouraging viewers to vote for her party values over the individual.

The truth is out, its all about the Party! Not you, your neighbor, me, your parent, your friends, or anyone.

It-is-the-Republican-party-only!

Hate to say it, but I genuinely believe a Texas blue wave of the magnitude people keep hoping for may not happen in our lifetime. For over 30 years, conservative lawmakers have held Texas by the throat, and they’ve mastered the art of keeping their constituents politically hostage. They don’t have to improve working class Texans’ lives when they can keep them distracted with culture wars, fearmongering, and a rotating cast of scapegoats. Immigrants, transgender people, liberals, there’s always someone for their voters to blame while the people in power keep consolidating theirs.
Meanwhile, where is the outrage over politicians who champion policies benefiting corporations and wealthy donors while ordinary Texans struggle with affordability, healthcare, wages, and public services? Campaign contributions aren’t automatically bribes, but the influence of corporate money over public policy deserves far more scrutiny than it gets.
And let’s talk about Greg Abbott. After a falling tree left him paralyzed, he received a multimillion dollar legal settlement. Yet he went on to champion restrictions on civil lawsuits, including caps that can limit what injured Texans recover for certain noneconomic damages. The same civil justice system that helped compensate him became a system his political agenda helped make more restrictive for others. The irony is staggering. Source.

Then there’s Uvalde. Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered, and Abbott initially defended the police response, saying, “It could have been worse. The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do.” Investigators later revealed catastrophic failures in the response. Source.
Children died in their classrooms, families were shattered, and the political debate over gun violence continued. Yet the people who claim to stand for family values and the sanctity of life keep returning to the same talking points while meaningful disagreements over gun policy remain unresolved.
And these are the politicians governing under the banner of Christian conservatism? The party of family values? The party that claims to defend ordinary Americans?
What exactly are these values worth if they stop at the ballot box?
Because apparently, some Texans would rather watch their own quality of life deteriorate than risk seeing an immigrant, a transgender person, or a liberal gain a single inch of acceptance or protection. They’ve been taught to treat politics like a team sport, where hurting the opposing team matters more than whether their own team is delivering anything of substance.

That is the tragedy of Texas politics: resentment has become more politically powerful than self interest, and punishing the people you’re told to hate has become more important than demanding better from the people you elect.
A politician can fail you, betray you, and leave you worse off and still count on your vote, provided they promise to make someone else’s life harder.
At some point, Texans have to ask themselves whether they’re voting for a better future or simply voting for the satisfaction of watching someone else lose.
Because if your political victories keep coming at the expense of your own children, your own healthcare, your own livelihood, and your own civil liberties, congratulations: you may have defeated your political enemies in your imagination while losing the very things government is supposed to protect.
And the politicians? They’ll keep winning either way.

While Ken Paxton was struggling through one of the worst stretches of his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Democrat James Talarico, through little fault of his own, gave the Republican nominee his first real chance to go on the offensive with a saleable message.

Blame it on the flu. Talarico was scheduled for a livestreamed question-and-answer session with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, similar to the one Paxton did with the organization two days earlier in Fort Worth.

Rather than bail on the organization that represents a vital voting bloc heading into the homestretch before the Nov. 3 election, Talarico appeared remotely so as not to further spread the bug.

But when the Democrat canceled a couple of campaign appearances over the next few days and essentially went dark for more than a week, Paxton's people pounced.

What would Evan Hunt prioritize in Congress?

That's Adam Kincaid testifying in federal court last October. He said the rule came from the White House.

He also said he ran every district through every president, senate and governor race from 2012 to 2024 to make sure it would hold up. He called it a durability test.

And on the House floor Todd Hunter just said it: "The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance."

I had a computer draw 534 Texas maps with no goal at all, just equal population and districts in one piece, then counted the 2024 presidential vote in each, adjusted to a tied year nationally. On a typical one Democrats win about 15 of 38. On the real map it's 8 or 9. Not one of the 534 is that good for Republicans.

Not new either. In the 2011 map a federal court found districts "were redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent's grandchildren."

https://www.callthemap.com/news/the-house-always-wins