I personally am most optimistic about the Texas Senate race, pitting Congressman Beto O'Rourke of El Paso against Ted Cruz, the incumbent. Beto is doing it all 95% perfectly and brilliantly, through Facebook video feeds sometimes twice a day of his visits to small towns and his powerful town hall meetings; truly, I hope 95% is perfect enough to win back that US Senate seat, against all odds, and I don't just mean who is raising the most money (for four consecutive quarters, that has been Beto, by far!) or who is coming to or not coming to the town hall meetings that he is having.
Cruz entirely misses the point by dismissing these 250 town hall meetings that have been held all over Texas in obscure places and county seats you have never heard of, when he says that they are just "drive by photo ops."
Perhaps in Ted Cruz's elitist experience, his political lexicon and his otherwise enormous Princeton and Harvard Law School vocabulary that is all they are, since Cruz hardly ever has any populist meetings of his own, and thus is not capable of recognizing any of the efficacy of this kind of political strategy.
>>>>> Just in:
Ted Cruz just said he supports ending DACA, the federal program that protects hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who arrived in this country as children from deportation. An estimated 200,000 of these Dreamers call Texas home. These are young Americans who contribute to our communities every day and make our country better, safer and stronger. But instead of working to find a solution to keep them here, Ted Cruz has turned his back.Dreamers deserve to be able to live without fear. Dreamers go to school, lead productive and successful careers, serve in our military and are critical members of our communities.
Beto is working in Congress to pass the Dream Act, legislation that would create a permanent home for the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who already see themselves as Americans and contribute so much to our nation.
There's bipartisan support in Congress for the Dream Act, but Washington politicians like Ted Cruz continue to choose divisiveness over solutions. It's time for Congress to pass bipartisan immigration laws that reflect our values and our strengths. And stop using fear to drive us apart.
>>>>>>
I do think Beto is partially missing the boat in not following through on what I call the Battle of the Editorial Pages, in which supporters register their support in writing in as many newspapers across Texas as will publish their letters.
The editors who read their letters are the same editors who will write the endorsements in October, 2018, and in the most populous East Texas, he still from suffers lack of name recognition.
One important benefit from letters to the editor is that they are objective and personally motivated. They also manifest whatever kind of growing power there is behind a candidate, a coalescing of support that has a ripple effect, even stronger if the letter writer is a well-known significant figure in the community served by that particular newspaper.
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