Tag: texas senate

Worse yet, the top 0.1 percent has cornered about 20 percent of it, up from 7 percent in the mid-1970s. In fact, applicants from families in the top 1 percent are now 77 times more likely than in the bottom 20 percent to land in an elite college, and 38 of those schools admit more kids from families in that top percentage than from the bottom 60 percent. Individuals, companies, and organizations can, for instance, give money to political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs. PACs face no monetary limits on their independent efforts to shape elections, though they can’t accept corporate or union money or take more than $5,000 from individuals. They raised $1.6 billion and spent nearly $809 million. Nearly 78 percent of the money they received came from 100 donors. They, in turn, belonged to the wealthiest 1 percent, who provided 95 percent of what those Super PACs took in. It devoted $15 million to lobbying in 2018—and that’s not counting its campaign contributions, using various channels. Compared to other democracies, the United States appears to be in a league of its own when it comes to money’s prominence in politics. (Super PACs spent another $350 million to help Romney and $100 million to back Obama.)

Cruz had just made the argument that the Senate should give Trump $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall so the government shutdown could be lifted and Coast Guard employees could get paid. And then he laid into Cruz on the matter of eminent domain. And, as the Bennet v. Cruz bout reminded us as well, the fight over Trump’s border wall bears a strong similarity to another recent attempt by the federal government to seize private land in Texas—one that played out a lot differently. A mundane turning of the federal bureaucracy, one might think, except that the BLM and Texas landowners south of the river happened to disagree pretty vigorously on where the south bank of the river actually was, and the difference between the two put the ownership of a lot of privately owned land in doubt. Texas politicians may well have been right to come to the defense of the Red River ranchers. In order to build Trump’s border wall, or fence, or whatever, the federal government will have to seize a substantial amount of land on the Rio Grande’s north bank. It would be one thing if Congress agreed to fund and build the wall, signifying it as a national priority—that’s how things are supposed to work. Because the fight over the wall is understood by the national media to be a D.C. story—about whether Trump or his foes will prevail in a political game—the impact that the wall would have on people who live next to it has received very little play in the national media. Ted Cruz was another one of the people who made hay out of the fight on the Red River, pressuring the agency and then, when declaring victory in 2017, writing that “Texans along the Red River should not be subject to the seizure of property they rightfully own.” On Thursday, on the Senate floor, when he rose to urge Democrats to capitulate and pass funding for the wall, Senator Bennet noted how odd it was that Cruz was going to the mat in support of a project that would seize his constituents’ property. And why has no one who supports the wall made the honest case that the wall would be worth more to the nation than it would cost south Texans?

Former Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke faced across-the-board criticism on Tuesday after an unflattering interview in The Washington Post portrayed him as equivocal and unsure on a variety of substantive policy issues. O'Rourke, 46, is widely considered a possible 2020 presidential contender, after falling only a few percentage points shy of dethroning incumbent Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm elections. At one point in the two-hour chat with The Post's Jenna Johnson, O'Rourke openly wondered whether the U.S. can "still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago" in the Constitution. Asked what could be done about illegal immigrants who overstayed their visas, O'Rourke told Johnson simply, “I don’t know." Asked about the planned Syria pullout, he responded that there should be "a debate, a discussion, a national conversation about why we’re there, why we fight, why we sacrifice the lives of American service members, why we’re willing to take the lives of others. ... We haven’t had a meaningful discussion about these wars since 2003.” Asked whether the U.S. is capable of change, O'Rourke was again equivocal: "I’m hesitant to answer it," he said, "because I really feel like it deserves its due, and I don’t want to give you a — actually, just selfishly, I don’t want a sound bite of it reported, but, yeah, I think that’s the question of the moment: Does this still work? "When it comes to immigration policy and changing the way things are, he has few solutions — and would rather debate and discuss the topic," Johnson wrote on Twitter. Just knows one thing: He's against a wall," Washington Examiner chief political correspondent and Fox News contributor Byron York wrote on Twitter. "Beto might have to figure out what he thinks about Syria before the first debate," commented CNN political reporter Rebecca Buck. In a move that channeled O'Rourke and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Warren broadcast herself in her kitchen on New Year's Eve using Instagram Live, drinking a beer and thanking her husband for his presence.

Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn weigh in on the immigration crisis on the southern border and how it's affecting their home state on 'Hannity.' #Hannity #FoxNews FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to…

Beto O’Rourke and the predictive power of the presidential vote O’Rourke lost the Texas Senate race by less than 3 points to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Two years ago, Hillary Clinton lost Texas by less than 9 points, better than any Democratic presidential candidate since the 1990s. For example, four opposition party senators lost this year in states that the Trump carried in 2016. It’s easy to overlearn the lessons of one primary, but Ocasio-Cortez’s victory points to a lesson that I learned the hard way in 2016: primaries are weird things. Turnout is far less predictable in primaries. In the 2020 presidential primaries, we could very well see candidates come from the polling nether regions at the last minute to win caucuses or primaries. DeSantis ended up winning by less than a point. Trump trailed in a lot of polls by a relative small margin in some pivotal swing states that he ended up winning. Next electoral cycle, it will be key to realize that just because a candidate holds a small lead in lots of polls it doesn’t mean she or he will win. What I got right: Electoral politics are still normal The good news was that I didn’t screw up anything massively in 2018.

On Roll Call’s Political Theater Podcast, you won’t always get what you want. But you’ll never be bored. We hope. With that in mind, here are a few of our favorite podcasts from the year that was, which just happened to be our first. Houstonian and political reporter Alex Roarty and Inside Elections’ Leah Askarinam on the Texas Senate race, Lone Star demographics and whether being a Whataburger partisan helped Beto O’Rourke against his White Castle-loving-opponent Ted Cruz. If you worked on Capitol Hill for any length of time, you probably have a John McCain story. “RBG” filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen discussing their documentary and its subject, the Supreme Court justice who became an unlikely pop culture icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When is it funny and when does it bomb? We did 49 episodes of Political Theater this year, and there was no way to capture them all in a year-end wrap-up. You can find all of our podcasts on our Political Theater page on RollCall.com and by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.

[Get On Politics delivered to your inbox.] But ActBlue has changed the game for Democrats. Founded in 2004, the nonprofit has developed into a trusted platform, turning the once-cumbersome process of donating to a campaign into something that can be done with just one click of a cellphone. The technology encourages small, recurring donations that go directly to candidates, giving campaigns more control over how the money was spent. “Technology can help democratize this process in a way that wasn’t possible 20 years ago.” Of course, money doesn’t guarantee success. Four of the five House candidates who received the most in small donations lost their elections, according to a New York Times analysis conducted in mid-October. “ActBlue wasn’t ActBlue in year one, two or three,” said Mr. Bliss. updates We’re 10 days out from Election Day and votes are still (!) The state is now waiting for the results of a state-mandated manual recount. Mr. Gillum said he would continue to push to have all votes counted before any election results were certified.

In books like Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics and Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, he has traced the way “investors” in political parties have shaped US politics from the American Revolution to the present. While not dismissing the role of racism in Trump’s election, Ferguson and his colleague’s new work shows the way an economy for the 1 percent paved the way for Trump’s victory. You and your colleagues trace the “populist” upsurges of 2016 in both major parties to the runaway growth of a “dual economy” in America and the failure of our money-driven political system to do anything about this but talk. But the big studies of individual voters do not show this pattern. We also concur that the political discussion and reception of the Affordable Care Act was heavily racialized — that really stands out when you study the survey data. But we also find compelling evidence of the importance of economic issues. That likely reflects some economic considerations, though economics alone hardly exhausts its content. When we analyze voting by congressional districts, especially changes in the presidential vote from 2012 to 2016, the importance of economic issues also stands out. We find that economic considerations played a major role in the decisions of “switchers” — people who voted for Obama in 2012 but then voted for Trump; 2012 non-voters who came in from the cold to vote for the real-estate mogul; and last, 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016. And the survey evidence confirms this.

In books like Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics and Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, he has traced the way “investors” in political parties have shaped US politics from the American Revolution to the present. While not dismissing the role of racism in Trump’s election, Ferguson and his colleague’s new work shows the way an economy for the 1 percent paved the way for Trump’s victory. You and your colleagues trace the “populist” upsurges of 2016 in both major parties to the runaway growth of a “dual economy” in America and the failure of our money-driven political system to do anything about this but talk. But the big studies of individual voters do not show this pattern. We also concur that the political discussion and reception of the Affordable Care Act was heavily racialized — that really stands out when you study the survey data. But we also find compelling evidence of the importance of economic issues. That likely reflects some economic considerations, though economics alone hardly exhausts its content. When we analyze voting by congressional districts, especially changes in the presidential vote from 2012 to 2016, the importance of economic issues also stands out. We find that economic considerations played a major role in the decisions of “switchers” — people who voted for Obama in 2012 but then voted for Trump; 2012 non-voters who came in from the cold to vote for the real-estate mogul; and last, 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016. And the survey evidence confirms this.

Candidates are in the final hours of the campaign in Texas; Casey Stegall reports from El Paso on the high voter interest.