TX-SEN: True to Form

[Anna Komnene]

He doesn't strike me as the kind of Democrat that usually wins in a red state, but still might be able to at least give Cruz a run for his money.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

While you are right that every single Republican politician who talks about term limits breaks their promise, how is moving up to a higher office whose term is as long as his entire Congressional career to this point keeping a promise?
[/quote]

If term limits actually existed for the House, they wouldn't prevent a Rep from running for Senate or any other office afterward.

[Anna Komnene]

[Anna Komnene]

If I were running O'Rourke's campaign, I'd hit Cruz hard about being so slavishly loyal to Trump after Trump humiliated him and insulted his wife during the campaign. That's not Family Values and it's not Texas Values.

If I were running O'Rourke's campaign, I would just give up. Don't believe any out of state commies. I was born and raised in Texas, and have lived here my entire life. And I am here to say that Texas will start to become competitive around ten years from now, and maybe would tilt D twenty years from now. But now is too early. Cruz will win most probably with a margin in the lower to mid 10s. This race is not competitive, look elsewhere for now.

If you want Texas to become competitive sometime down the road, giving up isn't the way to do it.  Opposition parties don't just magically start winning elections.  Those kinds of things need to be built up over time, and part of that building is by getting people more excited about voting in elections even if they lose in the end.  It's also about getting people to consider your party.  If get a voter to even consider your party when they wouldn't have in the past, that's a win.  They might make a different decision next time.  If you can make the election closer, that gives other people a reason to jump in for the next election too and so on and so on.  Yeah, there are states and districts where it's incredibly hard for the opposition to win, but it's not just because of demographics and gerrymandering.  It's also because, a lot of times, the opposition doesn't really try that hard.

[Anna Komnene]

The only Texas Democrats that can win are Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich (yes, he can win) or Bill White, the son of former Texas Gov. Bill White.

Boldly asserting that some dude could totally win with no evidence or explanation to back it up is like a time honored Atlas tradition.

[Anna Komnene]

MJ covers O'Rourke in this long cheer article:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/beto-orourke-democrats-texas-ted-cruz/

A left wing media outlet fan girling  over a left wing candidate is not news

Who says the only thing worth posting on a congressional politics forum is "news?" You may not like Beto or MJ, but telling the story of a Senate candidate, his background, his views, the challenges he'll have to face if he's to have any chance of winning over voters in Texas - that's all very relevant to understanding the dynamics of a race. Sure, it's written with a bias toward him, but that's what a profile should be. Focusing on who he is and how he presents himself. That's what he'll be doing as he's on the campaign trail in Texas. It's stuff worth knowing if you want to analyze him as a candidate and not just look at this race through the narrow view of "It's Texas LOL." Personally, I thought it was an interesting read, and actually I thought they were pretty good about acknowledging how serious the challenges are for Democrats in Texas and for Beto O'Rourke in particular. Just because those challenges exist doesn't mean that he doesn't also have positive attributes that might help him win over voters.

If I have to decide between reading an article like that or reading a deluge of posts that say "SAFE R!" "JUNK POLL!" "THIS RACE IS UNWILLABLE" "DREAM ON DEMOCRATS", I'll take the profile article any day. Those comments might be accurate, but they don't tell me anything that I couldn't have figured out myself while nomming cinnamon toast and pondering the nature of Texas elections. At least I actually learned a few things from the article.