Hinojosa Ads

Count me as most impressed with the State Rep. Gina Hinojosa campaign. The Hinojosa ads are the best. She had another one roll out this morning. See the featured photo. Heck, I have lost count of how many ads she has run. She is in control of her message and isn’t being thrown off her game plan. You can’t say that about MAGA Gov. Greg Abbott. I can’t figure out what Abbott’s message is these days other than beware Sharia law or some other crap like that.

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There are 3 days of early voting in person remaining. Christopher Hooks of Texas Monthly just dropped a piece on those that are trying to make sense and nonsense of who is voting. Here is a part of the Hooks take:

In October, Texans may raise their eyes toward the sky to see Swainson’s hawks passing through, ruby-throated hummingbirds headed south, and yellow-rumped warblers moving in for the winter. In even-numbered years, they will also hear relentless chittering, in the last two weeks of the month, from partisans trying to make sense of the state’s early-voting numbers. They’re good for Republicans, some will say with perfect conviction, or they’re good for Democrats. A third group, the Election Knowers, smugly chides anyone trying to divine meaning from early-voting patterns. Lingo is fired back and forth—red shifting, backloading, three of three.

They do this because there’s a huge audience for it. By this time in the election cycle, most of us hate democracy and hate Cleisthenes for inventing it, or whatever it was he did, and are desperate for clues that will allow us to skip forward to the result. The top-line number right now is that, as of Sunday night, voters who have previously voted in Democratic primaries slightly outnumber voters who have cast ballots in Republican primaries.

But the frustrating thing about early-voting totals is that they tell you a little—just enough to argue about—and not enough to actually say anything definitive. It’s sort of like ripping a paper in half from top to bottom and giving one side to another person. They’ll be able to draw some educated guesses about what’s on the other half, but they could be totally wrong. Texas has a bad reputation for ballot access, but it has a healthy, long early-voting period, which we should be proud of. This year it runs from Monday, October 19, through Friday, October 30—two business weeks and a weekend. So, when will we actually know something? The best time to check in is at the end of this week, after the last day. But if you’re anxious, maybe a little earlier: One GOP strategist suggests paying attention starting Tuesday night, when his party will know “if we’re on hurricane watch or hurricane warning.” Because many people will be refreshing the vote counts every day, looking for meaning like prehistoric man under the stars, here are a few things to know.

First, listen to actual experts, or, at the least, people who don’t seem like grifters. A universal principle when it comes to large datasets like this, which most of us don’t have the smarts to interpret, is that you should look for the supposed experts who are using the data to give you a range of possibilities and ignore the ones who are giving you strong takes about what they mean.

The gold standard for this kind of stuff is the newsletter put out by Derek Ryan of Ryan Data & Research, which you can sign up for here. Ryan has the frustrating habit of being careful about saying what he knows and doesn’t know (he’s a little more fun on X). 

I must agree with Hooks for the most part.

Vote, vote, vote! Early, early, early!