The Texan Podcast - Weekly Roundup - November 8, 2024

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

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Howdy folks, this week's weekly roundup looks first live stream my name is mackenzie delulo i'm the senior editor at the texan and i'm joined by our illustrious team here we got rob lausches my assistant editor we have brad johnson senior reporter and cameron abrams reporter at the texan gentlemen thanks for joining folks. We are so grateful you decided to join us the day after Election Day to talk all things debrief. We have so much to discuss, and Texas is at the forefront of so much of that. So gentlemen, right off the bat, how are you?

Barely making it in one sense, but extremely excited on the other. It was crazy night and I was up in Dallas and it was really fun. Maybe not for the people I was surrounded by, but it was fun nonetheless. Yeah, let's start with that. So where was everybody on election night? Cameron was up in Dallas at the All Red Camp. Wild night for them as they were watching returns. Brad, where were you? I was at the cruise event in Houston, and it was quite packed. Obviously, they were quite happy with how it went, especially when news basically broke after, I'd say, about 8.30 that results came in from election day and it was clear

Cruz would win at that point the question was just by how much and it turned out to be quite a lot especially for Cruz not quite as much as Trump won the state by but obviously it was a jubilant event for the Cruz crew. And, you know, both sides ran a really hard fought race and we'll get more of the details of that. But yeah, he came out and he congratulated Allred on a hard fought campaign and declared victory. Yeah, Brad, you're jumping ahead. We have a lot of Senate stuff to talk about. I'm sorry. Oh, what's in that glass, Bradley? Scotch.

What kind of scotch? Macallan. That somebody gave to me. It may or may not be on this stream. Yeah. Yes, because you did them a pretty big favor, which we won't get into because accolades are not given on this. Rob, where were you last night? We, you know, the editing team in Austin, we pretty much just hunker down. We stick, we stick around. We're at the disposal of the rest of the reporting team who,

you know, takes the bullet for us and goes all over the state. But did you, did you end up doing anything exciting while you were watching everything? Where I was, Mackenzie, is right here in my apartment. Just hanging out and following everything. It was absolutely crazy. I was talking to some college friends of mine, talking to family on the phone. Everybody's all, you know, everybody's trying to talk to each other as the results start coming in. And I, I think like many was pretty surprised by what happened last night. And so the calls I think got more frequent as the results came pouring in. So I was right here. Some of us in our, in the office might not have as been a surprise as Rob was, but we can save all those bets.

I think this would be- Take your victory lap, Cameron. Yeah, Cameron, this is the time. We're going to let you take a victory lap. Folks, if you've listened to any of our Weekly Roundup podcasts, Cameron has been predicting a lot of what happened last night and the rest of us are like, I don't know. I don't know. Seems crazy. Needless to say, he was right and he's been pretty humble about it. I'll say, there has not been a ton of gloating on his part. So shout out Cameron on that end.

We haven't been back in the office yet. Well, and I've been saving it all for this moment because I did predict the Trump win. I did predict the, my long shot bet was the popular vote win. Got that right. And then the day of when we were chatting about, oh, what's going to be the thing people aren't talking about, or what's going to be the thing that shifts the election i said if latino men go for trump he will win and what happened latino men went for trump and yeah i don't feel like that's going out on much of a ledge there if a large demographic that is up for grabs goes to one candidate of course the odds are that

you're saying it was a lot of people didn't call it so yeah well true but the way he couched that was if they do this not i think they will do this okay well three for three let's just three for three he's doing pretty well he had it better than i did yeah i think a lot i think he had it better than a lot of us did for sure um well to give a quick overview of what we're going to talk through today the first 30 minutes or so will be this crew chatting through all things election the races they were following the watch parties they were at general takeaways and there's a lot to cover. We'll have extra guests throughout the next about hour and a half or so join us. So we'll have Holly Hansen, Kim Roberts, Mary Elise Cosgrave, Matt Stringer, all joining us at different points throughout this live stream. So stick around.

We'll be talking through all sorts of races all over the state. But gentlemen, why don't we go ahead and jump in? Because even though we have 90 minutes plus, there's so much to get into. And I kind of want to start us off here. So right off the bat, Brad, I want to talk the Texas Senate race. We're going to end with the presidential bit about the behind the scenes at the watch party later on when Mary Elise joins because she was there with you in person. But really, I want right now you to just break down your takeaways from the Senate race, walk through, and then I'll ping you for the Congressionals in a second. Yeah. If anybody's listened to us for this entire race, they've heard me talk about the different strategies of the two campaigns, particularly All Reds, which I thought was more unique than Cruises. The backdrop for this is the 2018 race and how close Cruz came to losing. Is Texas really that close to flipping blue in some regard? And if Democrats really believed that if they had a shot, it was here taking out Cruz.

You know, the current back then, there was one prevailing current, and that was against the sitting Republican president in the White House and a sitting Republican president who at the time, especially, had pretty high negatives. But then there was not the counter current of the Trump supporters coming out to vote. The question was, which weighs more? And I think we clearly saw this time that the Trump support weighs more, especially in context of just the GOP leaning of the state. It's just a fact. You can't avoid it.

You might have a one-off race that a Democrat could be competitive and was competitive in 18. So in 18, O'Rourke ran a campaign, very expensive, kind of like colin all reds um he focused o'rourke focused a lot more on um you know basically a glorified whistle stops tour touring all these small towns trying to drive out uh democrats in rural texas flip independence in rural texas for the democrats um and he got very close it almost worked but it didn't. And when the All Red campaign was developing their strategy here, they had a different kind of candidate. They had a candidate who was very disciplined. You could not get him off message. The Cruz team

was very frustrated about that. And he was very good in that regard obviously very good at raising money raised 80 million dollars right so um those were the two biggest advantages for all red along with the fact that you know he he's kind of in the middle of the Democratic caucus. He's definitely not one of the further left members. And, you know, we saw when O'Rourke ran for president, he went way to the left and that hurt him in the governor's race. So the Democrats thought they kind of had a blank slate candidate here who could raise a lot of money and rev up the base enough to drive them out. Instead of doing this, you know, whistle stop tour, going around, holding all these rallies, mini rallies everywhere, they did a lot more controlled events. And they kept things

within the realm of messaging, they could control what came out of his mouth. And he was very good at it. He got tripped up on almost nothing. And we might talk a little bit about what it was that got him there. But the strategy was, I think, sound. It was logically sound, especially given the candidate they had. It just didn't work. And the biggest reason why was the Trump effect that didn't exist in 18, the one drawing out at least the positive Trump effect, not the negative Trump effect. And it just pushed everybody down ballot, including Cruz, way over the line. And I mean, that's my biggest takeaway. This was a Trump wave more than anything else. And you see that in the Valley in South Texas. We'll talk about that later. But I think

both candidates did run a good campaign. There's a lot of talk about whether Allred went dark in the last couple of weeks, especially on media. I think O'Rourke ran out of money in 18 at the home stretch. I don't think Allred quite hit that, but, um, you know, he's, he was up on TV for since May, April, and that costs a lot of money. Um, he had to drive up his name ID. Nobody knew who he was and he did it worked for him um but overall rural texas came out for cruz south texas came out for trump and enough for cruz um and it you know pushed the senator over the line and now he's got another six years you know a lot of speculation if he's going to gear up for a presidential race in 2028. But he didn't just survive. He advanced the ball significantly, at least in terms of his own political persona and footprint.

And the margin there is really where the story is, right? If you look back at 2020 and you look now at Cruz's margin, Trump's margin, I mean, that is one of the big stories in Texas from last night. And this was- It was at 14 for Trump. Yeah. Go ahead. 14 for Trump and 8.7 for Cruz, at least right now. Yeah. Which is doubling in some ways from last cycle, right? So this really was a litmus test for Democrats to say, how much money do we need to spend in Texas to make inroads? I think the answer is, hey, this is not necessarily where we- Yeah. More. Yeah.

Always more. More than what we already spent, right? And's that's a huge story in and of itself right there let's talk south texas congressionals you covered a few races that were really specifically um hot this cycle walk us through 15 28 and 34. so you had as i described them in my pre-election writing you had the um the republican flip in tex 34, or at least this is what they were aiming for. In Texas 34, that was Vicente Gonzalez, the Democrat, against Mayra Flores, the Republican. Then you had the Democratic flip in Texas 15 with Republican incumbent Monica de la Cruz and Democratic challenger Michelle Vallejo.

Neither of them flipped, but Texas 15 went significantly more for de la Cruz than it did last time. She grew her margin. And then in 34, the margin shrunk. And this is a very tight district. This is something to watch next cycle. I don't know if Flores is going to take another stab at this. This was a rematch between them. She might.

And I think Gonzalez won by two to three points. It was not a lot. So if this trend of south texas moving republican continues that is something to watch uh for you know another flip down the road for republicans and when they did redistricting um they kind of banked on this republicans did banked on that as a potential uh to try and pick up a seat later on not immediately because it was redrawn to be pretty favorably Democratic. They tried to shore up 15 to make sure they got that seat immediately. But it seems to be paying off, not only there, but also in 28, the other one you mentioned.

Henry Coyier managed to, you know, he eked out a win. And going into this election, I was told that's a sneaky one to watch. This could be, you know, a potential, a close race where we didn't see it before. And turns out it was. Jay Furman, who didn't really have any footprint early on, he didn't raise any money. You know, however he did it, he managed't raise any money um you know he however he did it he managed to raise his profile enough and raise enough money to um get something get the ball moving somewhat but also it's probably not even him you know the trump effect that we talked about

and it's um he came up short maybe he takes another stab at it in two years. But the question going into this was, does the district really care about the indictment against Cuellar? Does that matter? Or do they value more the fact that he's high in seniority on good committees? And at least for now, they're keeping him. But he had to sweat it out. He really did on Tuesday. Yeah, absolutely. Rapid fire.

I want you to run through the house races you were watching. You have 34 as the first one that is listed here. That's one of my big takeaways from the night. So 34 was Denise Villalobos, Republican defeating Solomon Ortiz, Democrat. That was one of the flips, two flips in the House. HG 37 was incumbent Republican, Janie Lopez, defeating Jonathan Gracia, the Democrat. I think Democrats really missed an opportunity here to press Lopez even more than they did. And the race was close, but not what it could have been this was something republicans

were really worried about and they did not um grassy is a more moderate candidate and he did not get the support that say christian caranza did in bear county now that's different different district dead even district so you know that makes sense. But I think they'll, they might be kicking themselves over that. Then you have 70, Mihaela Playsa against Steve Kennard, places the Democratic incumbent. She won, but that was one going into this that nobody really expected to be close, but Kennard did make it close, ended up losing. 74, Eddie Morales staved off robert uh garza the republican 80 don mclaughlin kind of ran away with it the tracy king seat 118 john luhan uh won by 3 000 votes more than i thought he would uh the bear county district that was dead even and then 121 mark lahood the

republican defeated uh laurel. So there you go. Quite the slate. We'll come back, circle around for takeaways at the very end. So boys, keep in mind one takeaway that you guys want to hit at the very end of this segment before we bring on new folks. Cameron, you were covering so many races this cycle.

And I want to walk through the results from the races you were covering specifically. And I want you also, right up from the races you were covering specifically. And I want you also right up front to tell us a little bit about your time at Allred's watch party and how things changed throughout the night. Obviously, you start the night, hopeful candidate, hopeful campaign, supporters in tow thinking, hey, maybe we got a shot at this. Walk me through, you know, start to finish how that how it changed at the party, right? This is how it works in politics. It's tough. But walk us through um you know start to finish how that uh how it changed at the party right this

is how it works in in politics it's tough um but walk us through yeah well like actually being there yeah yeah so um showed up to the watch party a couple hundred people there was packed uh lots of supporters lots of call red signs uh lots of Harris Walls shirts and hats, and two giant projector screens playing MSNBC. So Rachel Maddow was front and center for everyone to watch as the results were coming in. And what was fun is I got to sit in the press box, national news outlets everywhere, lots of cameras. And every time the projections would come up and it would go the Democrats way, big cheers. And then once Republicans would win something, boos. But as the night went on and there was less blue on the screen and a lot more red, things got to be much quieter.

And what was interesting is as the Senate result became clear that Cruz was going to win, Cruz announced that he had won. They called it on DDHQ. But an interesting moment was MSNBC is blasting on the TV and they're going through all the Senate races and where they're at. They skipped Texas even after DDHQ had said Cruz had won. So that didn't get put on screen, but everyone was on their phones already and already knew that Cruz had won.

But yeah, we saw Wendy Davis come out. I tweeted about that saying, there's still a long ways to go. And it was like, Cruz has already given his acceptance speech. And so then we had people coming by the press box and, hey, you know, All Red's going to come out soon. I know you guys have been here a while.

They did that twice before he eventually came out. And yeah, he came out, he gave his speech and people just were already starting to filter out by then. And yeah, it was just interesting night. Diametrically opposed to the big cheers that I'm sure Brad was experiencing as he was at Cruz's party. But it was a fun experience. This is my first Senate race presidential election that I've experienced as a reporter. So that was really fun. Absolutely.

Yeah. It was awesome. So walk us through, Cameron, your takeaways from the races you were following specifically. If you're looking for a political podcast that goes beyond the headlines, check out the Beltway Briefing. I'm Howard Schweitzer, CEO of Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies. Every week on the Beltway Briefing, our team of former Republican and Democratic presidential appointees, Capitol Hill veterans, and political advocates, shares behind-the-scenes perspective that cuts through the noise. If you want the inside scoop, subscribe now to the Beltway Briefing here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, Brad hit a few of them already. We keep touching on this, the south texas shift uh that's really one of the big takeaways as it pertains to a lot of the races that i've been covering you know um brad touched on hd 74 um eddie morales defeating robert Garza. He touched on Don McLaughlin winning. There was a battle in HD 112. Angie Chen Button projected

to remain in her seat even though she was challenged. Angie Chen Button, if you want to read about the number of tough races she has been in, and she keeps winning. But, yeah, she's going to retain her seat after a progressive challenger,

Avery Bishop, picked up. How much did Avery Bishop pick up? At the time, 46%. So pretty close there. Morgan Meyer will hold on to a seat in hd those dallas county seats all eyes yeah um but those were the main races i was following um federal races was texas 23 tony gonzalez to a victory. That was pretty easy. Early one, that was called. And then obviously, I was following the presidential election. We're going to talk about this more. But if people are interested, put out Trump wins Texas piece.

Put out Trump wins president piece very quickly. Yeah, it was just crazy seeing, you know, because I'm sitting there at the all red party and I was paying attention to all red was doing. And I'm also paying attention to the Trump Harris race. And, you know, I'm chatting with people online, um, chatting with you guys on Slack and, you know, you're, I'm at this democratic party, you know, and most of the people I'm communicating with are not on the left. So it was interesting. Some of the looks people were looking over at my laptop, uh, some of the things that were being communicated, but it was, uh uh it was a fun

night overall um but yeah i know we're gonna talk about big takeaways later but that's that's what i got for now that fits right in there yeah dovetails so rob i'm gonna let you um come right in next and talk presidential and cameron this is where y'all jump in brad jump in but let's talk presidential for the last few minutes of this section here. We're already running out of time. I knew this would be the case. We have too much to talk about. But Rob, run us through your takeaways from last night, specifically in relation to the presidential in Texas and otherwise. Donald Trump won the popular vote. And I think which Cameron predicted Cameron called, so let him have his flowers here. No, he really did. And I think if you would have told me at the start of the day that Trump was

going to win the popular vote, I remember in 2020, when I was still in school, I was at a watch party and there was a guy taking bets with people that Trump was going to win the popular vote in 2020. He was taking $50 bets. He was so convinced that Trump was going to win the popular vote in 2020. He's taking $50 bets. He was so convinced that Trump was going to win. And I kept thinking about that yesterday. I kept thinking that it would be something like, well, it's possible he wins the electoral college, but there's no way. But he really did pull it out. It's incredible to see. When you look at the numbers, I just want to run through the numbers really, really quick of the number of votes so far. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got about

66 million votes and Trump got about 63 million. So Clinton had a margin of about 3 million, but of course Trump won thectoral College. In 2020, Biden had 81 million votes. It's a jump of about 15 million due to the massive, you know, the changing voting rules during COVID, Democratic, you know, get out the vote, ballot harvesting, all of their plans to do that. And Trump rose from 63 mil in 2016 to 74 million in 2020. So both of them had pretty dramatic rise. For Biden, for the Democrats, it was about a 23% jump. And for Trump, it was about a 19% jump. But in 2024, for Harris, it has fallen down to now it's about 68 million, which is less than Obama had in 2008.

Trump, on the other hand, is 73 million and still gaining votes. He has managed – that bump in 2020 has fallen for the Democrats, but for the Republicans, it appears to basically be almost the same number. And that is wild to see that the turnout for Republicans was that good, whereas for Democrats, it fell so dramatically. So Cameron, as you were watching this come in and you were seeing these popular vote numbers, were you just like, hmm, sounds about right? Were you chill about it? Or were you jumping off the couch? Yeah, I called this people. Well, of course, I have my stoic exterior on, but inside, I was just super excited. It was very interesting. You know, for people who have been reading my newsletter since we started, it seems like

every single one is about the reshaping of the two parties and what's driving that and what's going on with this political polarization. Is it due to this? Is it due to that? What's the media saying? You know, it's every single week there's something to write about. And I think just last night confirmed a lot of people's feelings about there is a true realignment that has occurred between the two parties. And yeah, it just showed up last night. The Republicans are definitely the working class party now. If you look at the voter breakdown, Trump overwhelmingly won people without college degrees, and he overwhelmingly won people who make under $100,000 and under $50,000 per year. So really a class divide between the two parties right now. And I think a lot of people sort of assume that in how, you know, things have been portrayed in the media and just sort of if you're just

doing a sort of a vibe check. I know we'd like to talk about that. But yeah, just that's my big takeaway. The political realignment showed itself last night. Absolutely. And I'll say, and add to that, that, you know, we see folks like Bernie Sanders come out and issue scathing rebukes of the Democrats' approach to this election, and specifically citing what you're talking about, Cameron, about the working class and Democrats' ability in previous cycles to harness them as a huge sector of the electorate that they can rely on, and not seeing that at all this cycle in theate that they can rely on and not seen that at all this cycle in the way that they have previously. So absolutely, you know, we're seeing that time and time again. Very interesting to watch, you know, a former Democratic presidential

candidate come forward saying those exact things. Brad, I want to run quickly and say, or give you the chance to talk through any Texas-based presidential takeaways. I mean, I think the big story is South Texas, but we saw increased margins in terms of wins for Trump in all sorts of counties throughout the state, pretty much anywhere in the state. So walk us through your takeaways in that regard. Yeah, I haven't mentioned SD27, which was a big race. Adam Hinhosa defeated Morgan LaMontia millions of dollars in that race. Obviously that was in South Texas. Um, I think a big takeaway is that this was kind of the red wave that didn't happen in 22 that a lot of Republicans thought would happen. And it just didn't materialize. And I think the reason is that Trump was not on the ballot.

Even though he was in the ether, he was campaigning or not campaigning when we hit the Georgia special election. When was that? In January. But yeah, it was this was a bloodbath for Democrats and going into this, the more than just a win or loss against Cruz, Democrats need to set themselves up for 2026 to have, um, to have justification to dump even more money than they have into the state. And I they're leaving empty handed in that regard. Maybe they come back. That's certainly possible. You know, hope springs eternal on this. And but they really needed a better showing from the top of their ticket within the state on this. And they didn't get it. And I think a lot of that's to do with just the red monsoon that was Donald Trump. And a big part of that is South Texas beginning to vote more and more. They're not there yet,

but they're beginning to vote more and more like rural Texas and the rest of the state. Some years before they get there, but yeah. Well, something I'll say is we were talking last night, how the common moniker was it's the economy, stupid. And it's it's somewhat is still.

But it seems like in Texas, it's it's immigration, stupid. Like, that's such a big issue. The left and the media has tried to focus Trump's rhetoric on immigration to frame it as being racist in some sense. But what last night proved is it doesn't matter what ethnicity, what race you are. They care about immigration in the state of Texas and they will vote accordingly. So I think it's kind of a check for how people are framing certain issues. Just look at what's important to people and how they're voting. We haven't talked about the polling at all. I got a lot of thoughts on the polling that came out beforehand, but maybe we'll get into that later. What were you going to say, Brad?

I don't think we can discount the effectiveness of the Republicans' main wedge issue, which was the biological males in female sports. Everyone ran that. Cruz, chief among them. Trump across the country. And it worked. It really did. And I don't think it was the biggest issue in this race. Immigration, the economy, inflation worked. It really did. And I don't think it was the biggest issue in this race, immigration, the economy, inflation I would put there, but this was effective and it really worked. And that's the criticism we're seeing in Cameron. I know you have this written,

right, where it's like policy versus vibes. That's the criticism of the Harris campaign at this point that we're seeing. And I think that resonated in Texas, specifically in South Texas, where we're seeing these communities be very directly impacted by illegal immigration. It's a very interesting dynamic. And we've seen, Cameron, to your point, certainly this cycle, we see a lot of the messaging surrounding the illegal immigration and border security resonate with folks in South Texas and Texas generally. But I'll say that it's only ramped up from previous cycles. It's just been continually becoming more and more of an issue for folks here. Yeah, last thing, last thing. Immigration is not just a Texas issue anymore. It's an issue across the country. And I think Abbott here in Texas and DeSantis in Florida. There was their busing of the illegal migrants to many of these

blue cities. It might've seemed like kind of hokey or whatever, like a publicity stunt, but it really brought light to this issue. It can be both. It can be both. But it brought the issue of illegal immigration into the mainstream and really into the blue cities to where they had to deal with that, how people are dealing with it in Texas. It really revealed a lot, and I think it worked. That's true. Okay. Well, folks, Brad, you're the Ice in Your McAllen. I told my husband that you have Ice in Your McCallan, and he called you a loser.

I'm getting crap on Twitter for this, too. Of all the things, I didn't think this would be it. You never know. Stay tuned for more news updates after this short message. Are you tired of missing critical updates in legislative hearings? Frustrated by the overwhelming flood of new bills and the challenge of staying informed as they change? Introducing USLedge, the revolutionary software solution designed to transform how you track and analyze government meetings and legislation. With USLedge, you can search, pause, rewind, and review transcripts of public meetings live.

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Folks, we're going to move on to the next section. We are going to invite Holly Hansen and Kim Roberts to join the live stream. Let's see how this goes. This is all anything that does not go right on this live stream. It's just a little extra seasoning, right? It's a little extra character. There are our ladies. Hello, you guys, you're all y'all's backgrounds are monumentally more impressive than any of ours. Kim's like, what do you have back there, Kim? Tell us about it. Those are my hard-earned diplomas right there and my bar certificate. Which universities might you want to shout out?

Went to Angelo State for undergrad, Baylor for law school, and then I got my State Ball in Texas certificate. Figured you might want to have an excuse to say Sikkim. Sikkim, that's right. They won against TCU last weekend. So anyway. That's a pretty sweet deal. Well, ladies, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. Oh, Kim, make sure you're unmuted too. We can hear you, but just in case. there we go we're good to go um okay ladies gosh you cover so much in texas outside of the regions that you live in you are not in austin with the rest of us thank goodness for your sanity um but i'll say that it is um fascinating to watch you

cover both local issues kim tarrant dallas county holly harris county and beyond which there's a lot beyond terrace county but then all sorts of different issues throughout the state y'all were Kim, Tarrant, Dallas County, Holly, Harris County, and beyond, which there's a lot beyond Harris County, but and then all sorts of different issues throughout the state. Y'all are covering a myriad of very important issues, both near y'all and across the state. So we have a lot to walk through. I want to kind of run through this at the very end. I'm going to ask y'all for a takeaway. So, you know, just keep that in mind. That will be the last thing we hit before we move on. But Kim, I want to hit Rockwall ISD. We're seeing school bonds, as always, are a hot topic for local voters, specifically those who are footing property tax bills. So walk us through what happened in Rockwall ISD and why it was important. Yeah, I love covering local issues

because, you know, to quote Tip O'Neill, all politics is local, has a lot of impact on people's lives. So Rockwall ISD had a not only a voter approval tax rate increase election on the ballot, but also three bonds that totaled $848 million. And the opposition just got organized a couple of weeks ago, and they managed to defeat all of them, all four, the voter approval tax rate and all three propositions by 10 point or larger margins. And so it was quite impressive. You know, these issues tend to be on May ballots, not November ballots. And so when it comes around to November ballot, there's a lot more people participating and it didn't do very well.

So one of the organizers of the opposition, Misty, I hope I say her name right. Yes, I think is how you say it. She she told me, you know, we just wanted accountability and transparency and we wanted to focus on what's truly needed. And so it was a big they were very happy with the outcome of the voters there in Rockwall, which is northeast of Dallas. For people who might not know, it's it's across, across the Lake Ray Roberts. Absolutely. And I'll throw this out to whoever's willing and able to answer this question. We've seen for so often bond proposals just pass, right? They're on the ballot, they pass. What trend are we seeing now? I mean, Rockwell ISD, and Holly, we'll get to this in a second here, because I want to talk about Houston ISD next to compare, even just from a dollar amount perspective, the difference, right? But whoever is willing to answer this question, walk me through

the difference we're seeing in terms of how bonds are received by folks on ballots, at least in the last two election cycles. Well, I can tell you for one thing that in Houston ISD, you had a completely different environment than what you see in a typical school district, because this is the largest school district in the state of Texas. It was taken over by a state-appointed board of managers due to years of chronically failing schools, neglected facilities, even corruption within the administration. But unfortunately, a lot of the local community that would normally be behind a school bond measure were against it precisely for those reasons. They don't like a state-appointed board of managers. They say it's anti-democratic. They don't like the appointed superintendent, Mike Miles, who admittedly is not very gentle in his communications. He's a lot harsher about the realities of the district. Miles, by some estimations, has done a pretty

good job. He's brought up the performance of some of these schools and student achievement. But there was just so much animosity towards him and County passing resolutions saying, we don't want this bond. You add on to that the huge price tag, it would have been the largest school bond issue in state history at $4.4 billion. Okay, Kim, how much was Rockwall? Rockwall was? $848 million. Which huge, huge bill, but $4.4 billion. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you had a different situation here in Houston, and it doesn't really compare to a lot of the other districts. But, you know, along with that, I do see across the state, you know, sometimes people being more apt to question whether or not the bond is appropriate,

looking at, you know, the way they're splitting out some of the bonds into various propositions where you'll have one that says, this is specifically for school facilities. This one, this part is for technology. This part's for a football stadium. And so people are able to say, okay, we're good with a new school with with getting the air conditioning fixed and the roof fixed. We're not so great about this Taj Mahal football stadium. So I think there has been a little bit of a ones on Rockwall. It's there. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with Holly. And I also think that, you know, the legislature a few years ago, I can't remember what year, passed legislation requiring that they list these things as facilitating tax increases. So the language on the ballot is really showing people like, okay, you know, your school district may tell you there's no tax increase, but when you incur this much more okay, you know, your school district may tell you there's no

tax increase, but when you incur this much more debt, you're going to be paying taxes a lot longer. That's effectively a tax increase. And the legislature requires them to put that on the ballot now. I think that's a great point. And in Houston ISD's case, they were making the argument from the administration side that, well, that INS part of the property tax rate isn't going to change. What they didn't say is that it extends the taxpayer's payment of that rate for about another 30 years. So, I mean, it is effectively a tax increase. Plus in Harris County, we have a ton of other tax increases we could talk about later. I hear Mr. Ice and his McAllen wants to chime in here.

I'm never going to live this down. Hey, you're looking to learn. We all make mistakes, right? Yeah, I haven't covered much bonds this year because I've been so busy with the main elections, but I have in the past. And previously, we've been able to at least get a mostly complete list of all the bonds across the state. That's not the case this year. They're not reporting it to the bond review board. These localities I saw Jeremy Kitchens on this.

He put a tweet out saying that the, what was it, the comptroller discontinued its bond report. And you just have no idea how much was on the ballot. I don't think it was nearly as much as we had in most local elections in May or past general elections, but that's just a guess. And there's no requirement in statute that I'm aware of that these localities are required to report these to the state. So we have at least some list of what is on the ballot across the state. So we have some accounting of how much money is being approved. And it's a real problem. I know it's just basic transparency. Talk about truth in taxation. Legislature

talks about this all the time. That's what Kim was referring to about the ballot language. Seems like that's pretty straightforward, right? Apparently not. So that's something to watch. Also, unless they adopt a no new revenue rate. Stop saying that. You're going to make me crack up. Continue. I'm just getting rosy. I'm trying to get him to speed up. And I said, okay, Iceman. Yeah. Iceman. That's a good nickname. Thanks.

Can I finish? Or is this just going to print it out? I'd have preferred if you did it quickly. I think we should shift to a Bash Brad session. I mean, we've all been gunning for that. That's what every podcast is anyway. And now I have a team. I have a team with me. I'm so much better. The last thing I'll say is that anytime they don't, they as in localities, don't adopt the no new revenue tax rate, it's a tax increase. You know, they might couch it in, oh, it's a, we're not raising the rate. But if it's not a no new revenue rate adoption, it's increasing taxes, property taxes.

And sometimes it's worth it, you know, like make that case. But, you know, I used to do the job. I used to run these kinds of campaigns and I know full well the sleight of hand they use with words that we used and it works. There's a reason why they do it. But, hey, you know, sometimes it's justified, sometimes it's not. I wish we just had a central accounting of what's on the ballot. Yeah, there you go. Thanks, Iceman. Okay, ladies, let's move on. Kim Roberts, let's go to GCISD. Well, speaking of one that passed, they made the case there and the Grapevine Collierville

residents passed there. It wasn't a bond, but it was a voter approval tax rate election for three golden pennies. So in the Robin Hood, as it's so-called Robin Hood system of school finance, school districts can keep a certain number of golden pennies that aren't subject to recapture. Grapevine Colleyville is a property wealthy school district. And so they said they could raise $6 million of maintenance and operations funds with these three golden pennies. And they persuaded the electorate and it won by 15 points. And Grapevine Colleyville is a pretty conservative district and they elected some pretty conservative school board members in the last few years, but they made the case and convinced, they also made an adjustment to the interest in sinking rate

so that the overall rate didn't go up. And so I think that was also persuasive to voters. Absolutely. Thank you, Kim. Holly, we could go into Harris County for so long. I want you to talk a little bit about Harris um, Harris County judicial races. And I know that's broad because there's a lot that went on last night, but why don't you just run us through what happened in Harris County relating specifically to the judiciary? Sure. Well, you know, this is really interesting because at the top of the ticket in Harris County, you had Harris County voters select Kamala Harris by about 52 percent. And then let me just check. They went for Colin Allred by about 54 percent.

And yet there were a number of voters who crossed party lines and voted for some of the Republicans judicial candidates. Now, the judicial appeals courts candidates didn't win in Harris County, but they did win because they were elected from a 10-county region that surrounds Houston. But the voters did put some Republicans on the bench in some of these countywide races. There will now be 10 Republicans that will join the criminal courts in Harris County beginning in January. And this was a big surprise. A lot of people had written off Harris County as a solidly blue county. And so there was, you know, some folks who were not really interested in putting, you know, financing or running for office in Harris County, which was unfortunate because there were several Democratic criminal court judges who've been very much in the news because of their behavior who were unopposed. county under some sort of secretive process, allegedly, and taking him to a medical facility

that was part of the public and in a waiting room with the public to have a brain MRI without authorization or without notifying the victims or the DA's office. So, you know, that's unfortunate. But I think the voters in Harris County were listening to this kind of constant drumbeat we've had on the news weekly, nightly, talking about crime, talking about judges who repeatedly release these repeat violent offenders who are sometimes out on seven, eight, or nine bonds for various things. They release people on PR bonds who are caught with an illegal weapon, namely a machine gun. And so we see that we saw a big push in financing from the likes of Elon Musk. So there was a group here in Houston, Harris County called Stop Houston Murders Now, PAC. They ran some advertising in addition to the ads for these appeals court candidates and really just hit that constant drumbeat about the crime problem. We did have some media here trying to tell us,

you know, crime is down. Of course, there's a lot of dispute over the crime statistics. And you even had the mayor of Houston, John Whitmire, former state senator and chair of the Senate committee on, oh gosh, I can't think of the name of the committee right now, criminal justice, I think. But even he talking about the fact that he didn't trust the crime stats. So there's a sense in the community that the crime is underreported or not reported correctly. That was only compounded by the big scandal in the Houston Police Department earlier this year, when we found out that some 264,000 incidents had been suspended for investigation due to a supposed lack of personnel. So they just got shuffled to the side.

So I think all of that, you know, just came together in this perfect storm that allowed these candidates to win in what is pretty much a Democratic county. Even the Republicans that lost in these judicial races only lost by a point or two. So I think the biggest spread was maybe two percentage points. But very good, very good performance in Harris County for Republicans, all things considered. And excuse me, I'm starting to lose my voice. It's not like you've been on tv and radio 24 hours yeah radio tv and everything uh but uh the polls were way wrong way wrong for harris county we did have one poll that made it look like uh democrats were going to win by some amazing margins and they just didn't. Yeah. Wild night. And certainly worth going and checking out all of our reporters reporting,

but certainly check out Harris County results. Holly dives deeper than just about anybody on that. Also, I really want to encourage folks. I've neglected to say this the entire time we've been live. Send questions. I see some of y'all already are in the live chat on Twitter slash X, whatever you choose to call it. We'll circle back at the end and answer as many as possible. So just keep that in mind if we are not answering a question or neglecting to cover something that you're interested in. Hopefully, we can get to that at the end. So keep that in mind. Put your questions there. Kim, let's go back to you here. Again, covering North Texas so thoroughly. Walk us through, okay, the city of Dallas had some very interesting charter amendments that you covered. Walk us

through what passed and what didn't. I was just thinking how ironic it is that I'm on Twitter, that I'm not on Twitter. Anyway, yeah, the Dallas talk about kind of under the radar, Dallas charter amendments are not the most well publicized of the election issues, but Dallas had 18 charter amendments this time. And the one that got all the attention was the Dallas Freedom Act, which was to decriminalize. It doesn't actually decriminalize marijuana possession, but it would be not enforced by the police. And that passed by a large margin. There were also Dallas Hero was an organization that had three amendments, citizen initiated amendments.

Two of those three passed, one by very slight margin giving pay increases to police officers and having a contribution to the pension system, which has been a subject of great debate at the Dallas City Council, and also allowing citizens to sue Dallas for violating its own ordinances or charter. They, Dallas, even though Dallas is a bright blue county, I think they voted for Harris over Trump by like 20 points, or it was a large margin. They voted for term limits for

their city council and mayor, which is kind of more of a conservative leaning issue. And they voted against a salary increase for their mayor and for the city council members. That would have been 90,000 to 110,000 for the mayor and 60,000 to 80,000 for the city council and that failed. And then the other Dallas Hero Amendment failed. That was to create a citizen survey that would, if the results were good, allow kind of a bonus for the city manager that did not pass. So yeah, Daly City Charter amendments was, there were 18. 18. No raises for folks for government employees in Dallas this time. My goodness. Not for the state council mayor. Yeah. Yeah. Those few at least. Kim, let's also, let's go to West Texas here. Amarillo,

we've been following this, you've been following this story for a long time and encourage folks to go read your reporting. Walk us also in the chat we have joe saying oh kim must have a life if she's not on twitter that's exactly right the rest of us are lousy time wasters on twitter and that's the truth um but walk us through what happened in amarillo last night kim yeah amarillo struck a blow for the pro-life movement um there was a sanctuary city for the unborn ordinance as a proposition on the ballot. It had been in the works. Citizens have been trying to get it passed since 2020. They've been working. The sanctuary cities for the unborn movement has

been passed in over 50 cities in the state. And Emeril has been, though, working on this specific proposal, I've been covering it for a year. And after the citizens couldn't get the city council to pass it, they did a citizen initiative to get it on, well, where the city council either had to vote for it or put it on the ballot. And it was on the ballot and it failed by 20 points. And Amarillo is a very reliably red city. The panhandle is a very reliably red area. This particular proposition did not just outlaw abortion. It also outlawed abortion trafficking, which, you know, there are not just pro-choice, but groups that call themselves pro-abortion that came and landed in Amarillo and put a lot of resources there

to fight this. It was a nationally known issue going on in Amarillo. So yeah, that was a big blow to the pro-lifers who worked for that over the last several years. Absolutely. Kim, thank you for your coverage. Holly, let's just run through. You've got so many different things you're watching in Harris County. Run us through anything that we missed there specifically that you want to cover before we head on to our next segment. Yeah, I do want to point out, it's not just Harris County that elected a lot of Republicans to these appeals courts, but several appeals courts districts across the state, the one anchored in Dallas, in San Antonio, and in the Corpus Christi area, also sent a lot more Republicans to these courts. And this is really important. Not only is there this whole debate about how

to handle criminal defendants, there's also a complaint in these appeals courts, sometimes with the length of time it takes for them to process cases and issue an opinion. There was an opinion that came out last year from the higher court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, lambasting the appeals court in the Houston area because it had taken them a full five years just to issue an opinion. So, you know, these courts handle all cases that are on appeal in the state of Texas. That would be criminal, civil, juvenile, and family courts. And so anyone who has any contact with the justice system in an appeal situation is going to have interaction and contact with these courts. They have been dominated by

Democrats since the beta wave of 2018. But for example, alone in the Houston-Harris County and that 10-county region area, there's now been 10 Republicans sent to that court, which I think altogether those two circuits have 18 justices there. So that's a really big win. I also wanted to just touch briefly on the situation in Fort Bend County, where you have the Democratic County Commissioner candidate who has been accused of posting fake racist messages about himself and County Judge KP George. And he was caught. And the search warrants are really fascinating. He has nine indictments. I think it's four misdemeanors and five felonies or either five misdemeanors and four felonies.

But he's he's in big trouble. He did not win. The Republican incumbent, Andy Myers, won the election. But Taral Patel, who's accused of faking this racist scheme here, he actually won 41% of the vote, which is sort of an interesting statement on what the floor is for Democrats in Fort Bend County, at least in that particular commissioner's precinct. Yeah, that's a wild story. And I gave you all the details because it is as spicy as it sounds. Go read the story. Holly, anything else on that? You know, not on that. We, you know, we did see some, some shifts in the Latino vote here in the state of Texas. Mark Jones was on earlier with one of my friends over on one of the local TV stations. And he was talking about how Latino support that Democrats received has just evaporated. Let's just make sure I have these numbers right. They went from providing Joe

Biden with a 17 point advantage in 2020 to giving Donald Trump a 10 point advantage in 2024. Pretty incredible shift there. Yeah. Absolutely. I think we'll be watching that. It's no longer a monolithic group. And that doesn't have just implications for elections, but also for redistricting. Well, Holly, thanks for sparing your voice or not sparing your voice, rather, to come join us. It's going. It's going. I'm sorry. I should have some of what Brad's having because I'm losing it here. Without the ice, though. Holly probably would do it. Yeah, no losing it here. Without the ice though, Holly, Holly. Yeah. No ice. Yeah.

That's a cardinal sin. Apparently. Blasphemy. Yeah. Iceman strikes again. Kim, I want to ask you a quick question from our chat that I think is really helpful in terms of the sanctuary city for the unborn ordinance.

Someone asks, isn't sanctuary city for the unborn moot now, obviously referring to all the federal moves we've seen in the pro-life space. Yes, I hopefully could rightly represent the argument for those who were in favor of the sanctuary city for the unborn ordinance. I think they would say there are some distinct differences from the law in Texas. The Heartbeat Act, of course, is state law, a private enforcement action at eight weeks. Amarillo's sanctuary city ordinance would have made it for conception. So that's a difference. It also would have made a private enforcement action against abortion trafficking, which is those who like offer to pay for their travel. I-40 runs right through Amarillo and goes straight to Albuquerque. And a large abortion clinic moved from San Antonio to Albuquerque, and they advertise that they'll

pay for transportation for Texas teens to go get abortions in New Mexico. And the Guttmacher Institute reported that 14,000 Texans went to New Mexico for abortions last year. So abortion trafficking is something that this ordinance addressed and it outlawed helping people go get abortions in New Mexico or other states. And then also there's a concern about the disposal of fetal remains in Amarillo. And so it would have addressed that as well. So those are some of the differences that this ordinance had compared with state law. Perfect. Thank you for that clarification. Tarrant County, quickly, is there anything we missed in Tarrant County talking through, Kim? Well, I just want to plug, I'm going to write an article

tomorrow, kind of a roundup of Tarrant County. But in 2020, Joe Biden won Tarrant County. And so there was concern that Tarrant County was no longer red, but Trump won Tarrant County. But in 2020, Joe Biden won Tarrant County. And so there was concern that Tarrant County was no longer red, but Trump won Tarrant County this time. But Ted Cruz did not. He lost by about 1,250 votes. And I just wanted to point out that the Libertarian in that race got almost 20,000 votes. So that was a note for development. But down the ballot, all red in Tarrant County. Absolutely. Brad, can you tell us one more time the margin difference between Trump and Cruz on the state level? It was roughly 14 points for Trump and 8.7 for Cruz. So whatever the math is there, I'm a writer, not a mathematician.

Oh, my gosh. Lord in heaven. Hear, hear. I think it's the Icy McAllen talking. Okay. Well, Holly. Can't do math when I'm sober. Come on.

Yeah. Likewise. Well, I'd just like to plug. I am a native South Texan. I grew up, I was born down in the lower Rio Grande Valley in Harlingen, right on the border. And I remember how everybody was a Democrat. My parents were Republicans. And I cut my teeth with my sixth grade teacher arguing about Ronald Reagan's election. So that's amazing. It's a big flip to see that area of our state turning red.

Yeah. And rapidly so. Kim, Holly, thank you both so much for your time. We appreciate it. I think we get one of y'all back at the end to answer some questions. Kim, I don't, yeah. Kim's saying goodbye. Ladies, thank you for joining us. I'll be back. Bill will be back. Okay. And we also have now joining us, we have Mary Elise Cosgrave and we have Matthew Stringer joining us um we're so excited to have you all make sure you're unmuted otherwise maslin who is pulling all the strings and making this all happen i'm sure i've given her multiple gray hairs tonight so shout out maslin uh will yell at us so let's make sure we're unmuted um uh matt and mary elise we're

so glad that y'all are here um we have so much to talk about matt you're um you've got a lot going on in your life so thanks make it for making time you're off doing amazing things at law school um yeah right off the bat give us like 30 seconds how is law school we have someone asking in the chat um it is like uh drinking from the fire hose of information that's a great succinct beautiful answer answer. Mary Elise, how was your first general election covered at the Texan? It's great. Definitely lacking a little bit of sleep and running on a whole lot of caffeine, but it's great. It's fun. It's exciting.

Lots of things happening all at once. I should have asked everyone up top how many hours of sleep every each person got because I don't know that we'd hit double digits between the six of us. Oh, maybe we would. Okay, hold on, everyone. Hold up. Okay, so we got six. Oh, gosh, this is my math.

Okay, everyone hold your feet up. Keep them up. Six, nine. Cameron. Okay, 12, 15. Okay, we got 19 hours of sleep between the six of us that's not too bad i'm clearly the only one two human beings worth hey i counted with ease and and grace so leave me alone um okay um matt i want to talk judicial let's piggyback off of the last conversation we had a little bit here with Holly about some of the local judicial races. Let's zoom out in the statewide

races. Walk through, hold on. He covers power grid stuff as well. I think there are numbers in that as well. Brad, you really got to get the math thing together. Okay. But Matthew, judicial results statewide. Let's talk through what we have going here. What are you seeing? Let's talk about the Supreme Court first and. What are you seeing? Let's talk about the Supreme Court first and foremost. And in a state like Texas, where we did see such significantly massive Republican margins, specifically in races like this, walk us through why folks are even watching these races in the first place. Well, that's a great question. To kind of set the stage on what happened last night, let's take a step back over the past year.

Ordinarily, these statewide judicial offices go unnoticed. It's not something that the general voter is very aware of, who the judges are, what the court does, the difference between the Court of Criminal Appeals or the Texas Supreme Court, et cetera, et cetera. And over the course of the year, it's been a real judicial civics lesson, both on the campaign side and from some notable court cases. With regard to the Texas Supreme Court, there's been kind of a couple of notable issues over the past year at play. One of the seats up was Justice John Devine. And you saw a pretty contentious primary election where Republican Brian Walker, I believe it was, made a concerted effort against Justice Devine,

where they tried to challenge the validity of his application for place on the ballot. Devine's colleagues on the court rejected that. Then you saw just contentious mudslinging election. Devine survived that. The other two candidates up for election, Justice Jimmy Blalock and Justice Jane Bland. One thing I'd like to point out is that these positions are elected to statewide six-year term offices. Blalock and Bland were both originally appointed to their seats by Governor Greg Abbott to fill unexpired terms. I believe Blalock filled Justice Jeff Brown's vacancy whenever former president, now president-elect Donald Trump appointed him to the federal judiciary.

So they were both up. And the nine members on each court are staggered for six-year terms, three of them for six-year terms every two years on partisan elections. The Texas Supreme Court, you usually see the most money in because it deals with civil matters, and those civil matters can be some very large dollar disputes. So the legal community, major business, et cetera, usually make sure that there's a lot of campaign cash flowing in behind those seats. So it's not uncommon to see a justice raise $500,000 or a million dollars. Still not a lot of money with regard to a statewide election, but definitely the biggest court between the two.

The other court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, just handles criminal matters. You see a lot of parties in there represented by criminal defense attorneys. It's not big money. People with not a lot of parties in there represented by criminal defense attorneys. It's not big money, people with not a lot of money. It's very difficult for the judges on that court to raise money, low profile again. So on the Supreme Court, you had some of the contentious primary with Devine. And as far as that translated over into November, though, at the end of the day, I think it was just Republican turnout, Republican judges. You saw the same 60-40 margin across the board for each one of the three Supreme Court seats. So I was looking to see whether or not there was any kind of difference. Also, on the Democrat side for Texas Supreme Court, you saw Judge Deshaun Jones, who was challenging Jimmy Blalock.

I was looking to see whether or not there'd be any kind of notable difference on that race because Judge Jones was part of a controversial election where he was elected to a state district court seat. His challenger contested the validity of the election. And two years later, they found out that he was actually illegally elected by invalid illegal votes cast in the election. So he kind of had that hanging over him. But I really didn't see any like notable distinctions on, oh, I'm going to, you know, vote more against this candidate or more for this one with those seats. It just, it just kind of came out into the same 60, 40 margins across the board. And we saw the same thing on the other side of the Supreme Court building with the Court of Criminal Appeals. Yeah. Walk us through that and explain quickly, 10-second overview of what the Court of Appeals

does compared to the Supreme Court and the difference. Yeah, so Texas is one of two states. The only other state is Oklahoma, where we divide our Supreme Courts between civil and criminal matters. So the Court of Criminal Appeals is the Supreme Court for criminal cases. And we've seen two kind of funny instances of Texas's judiciary this past year. You know, the battle over the man on death row where you had the legislature issue the legislative subpoena to stall the execution and the Texas Supreme Court issue a stay that kind of got in the way of where you got, had the civil court kind of get into the business of the criminal court while the criminal court was, you know, okaying the execution, et cetera. And it actually, I have a great newsletter on this where I found a case from 2011 where a former state Supreme

Court justice, Don Willett, talked about the quirks in the Texas judiciary and where they had this case. It was a normal civil lawsuit, but there was a man who was held in criminal contempt for lying under a deposition. And they hit a road bump because he had appealed his civil criminal contempt up to the Supreme Court, which didn't have criminal jurisdiction. And they tried to transfer it to the Court of Criminal Appeals. And they said, this is a Supreme Court case. We hand it back to you. And it was just this. And so he ended up calling it the Rube Goldberg Judiciary. It was a great case and a great write-up. I highly suggest go checking out that issue of the docket. Subscribe to the Texan and you can get access. Absolutely.

And of course, Justice Willett just had a way of writing those opinions in a way of words to bring it into perspective. So with the Court of Criminal Appeals, we had one interesting race. Well, we had a bunch of interesting races. All three of them, you had an unprecedented turnover in the primary. And that was because of the 2021 Supreme Court of Criminal Appeals case, State v. Stevens, where the court found that the Texas Attorney General's office had been unconstitutionally given the power to prosecute election crimes under the election code. That did not make Attorney General Ken Paxton happy, and he rallied an unprecedented campaign movement against the three incumbent justices, brought in endorsements from former President Trump, and managed to oust all three justices in the primary. One of those candidates that was backed that ended up winning,

Lee Flinley, we reported on some of his mortgage issues. But once again, going into the November general election, all three Republican nominees defeated their Democrat challengers, same 60-40 margins. And again, just didn't see any kind of notable discrepancies in the votes because of any particular issues with any of the candidates. Yeah, absolutely worth going and checking out. We have pieces up for Matt on both those courts, so go check them out at the Texan. I want to reiterate, folks, we still have a little bit of time here, quite a bit of time, actually,

a whole other segment to do, but reminder, we do have a little bit of time here, quite a bit of time, actually, a whole other segment to do. But reminder, we do have questions that we will take at the end. So if you've got general election questions, kind of thematic lookbacks of what's going on in Texas, about the presidential, the Senate, a certain district, let us know. We're happy to answer. We've got a few here for us, but can take a few more. So ping us in the chat here on the live stream and we will do our best to answer your questions. Matthew, thank you. Mary Elise, we are going to quickly come to you here, talk a congressional race that was spicy for many reasons. Let's talk about the 28th Congressional District. Yes, yes. I think Brad covered this initially,

but this was a really interesting one. I was not sure how it was going to end up. Originally, so it was Henry Cuellar versus Jay Furman. And I was interested particularly to see how Cuellar's indictments would affect this election. The FBI investigations, if this would affect him, if it would affect his constituents, his voter base, who have been voting for him since 2005. He's been in office for almost 20 years. And so he was indicted for bribery and money laundering. So I was just kind of went into this race thinking this is interesting. I wonder if this is going to affect his voter base. And it looked like for maybe the

first hour or two when results started coming in, it looked as though Furman was going to take the race. And I was pretty surprised by that. And I was watching it. And then as the other counties started sharing their data, Cuellar quickly took the lead. And just for a little background this congressional district 28 holds a d57% so it's a little bit over half right and when I spoke with Furman before the race he seemed relatively confident that he could take this he said that he knows the people he knows he said specifically he knows the heart of the people. They're focused on God, family, country values, which he felt as though Cuellar does not represent. But in the end,

Cuellar did take the race. He finished off with about 52% of the vote, which was about 112,000 out of the 217,000 that were cast. So this was, yeah, it was an interesting one. It didn't look as though Cuellar's legal situation affected the turnout. And then moving on real quick to a house district that I covered, which was Denise Villalobos versus, excuse me, Denise Villalobos. And she was, she's still, the race isn't determined entirely, but she is projected to defeat Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr. with, and they have 90% of the vote now. And she leads by 11% with 29,000 votes out of 21,000 total that have been cast. So I was watching this closely because it was a competitive one. This district is rated D54%, so pretty close, just teetering on the edge there. And she was endorsed by Governor Greg Abbott earlier in the race, in particular for her school choice stance, her positive stance

on school choice, which we know Governor Greg Abbott is a big advocate for. He actually funneled, Brad reported this earlier, he actually funneled about 55k into her campaign ads. There were text ads, TV, I believe some of them were TV, just days before the race, which kind of signaled the GOP's concern over her winning. They really wanted to focus on Denise's race. And it looks as though she was victorious. So definitely a battleground for Republicans in South Texas, one of those battleground races. All right. And then the other one that I covered was House District 52. And this was Caroline Harris Davila. And she ran against Jenny Burkholz. And we don't have the official results yet but she is projected to win the race caroline is

projected to win the race with about 13 of 111 000 votes that were cast and this wasn't a competitive race to watch because williamson county has been growing so much recently and so her race was really targeted by both sides of the aisle, the Democrats, Republicans, because it had this potential to go either way, although she did end up winning, although not officially. She is projected to win. And Governor Greg Abbott was really quick to call her race. He congratulated her on X for Twitter. And it's worth noting that her vote as a House Republican in Texas would be really important for getting Greg Abbott's school choice plans across the board. And I think y'all mentioned

this earlier, discussed it, but Governor Greg Abbott, after he endorsed her, it was maybe like an hour or two later, excuse me, not endorsed after he congratulated her. And he said that there's now more than enough votes to pass school choice in Texas. So he seems pretty confident about that. And then we'll see, of course, how this pans out in the upcoming legislative session. But her win, regardless, is definitely Caroline's win is definitely positive for the GOP. So, yeah, absolutely. I i mean session really is uh coming quickly brad do you have something to add to this conversation before we move on to the cruise event and y'all's takeaways there yeah um brought up school choice obviously that's gonna be a big issue next year

the governor's putting the full court press on that or he has been already right we saw what happened in the primary um based on my rough math, which, again, apparently I'm bad at. He has 80, 82 votes between there. Obviously depends on what what the bill looks like. Right. We don't know what it's going to be like. Is it going to be what Chairman Buckley put on the floor back in the fourth special session. Probably not, but there's going to be a back and forth on this. He's got a significant amount of votes, enough to pass something. The question is, what's it look like?

What are the parameters? How much money are we putting on this? And the fact that Republicans added two seats to the majority now 88 in the chamber, that is a, um, a good sign for Abbott to get something, but there's a lot left to go on this. Here. Now I'm the one having to unmute myself. Um, Brad, Mary Elise, y'all were at the cruise event in Houston together. Walk us through how Cameron told us about All Red, really just how the event changed throughout the night, right, as results start coming in.

What was it like in Cruises Camp? Well, Mary-Lise, this was your first event, so why don't you go first and I'll add after that. Yes, okay, sure. It was definitely really interesting to go to since it was my first time. We also had the news on. We had, I believe it was Fox, Brad. I think Fox was on both screens, Fox News.

And, you know, every time they were showing the races on the screen, like Cameron was saying earlier, when a race would come up that the Republicans had won or somewhere that Trump was declared victorious, the crowd would just start clapping and cheering. Although we'll say a lot of the event, our heads were kind of down, like looking at our laptops working and on our phones. But it was, it was definitely could sense energy there. And especially every time the screen switched. So that was, that was pretty cool to watch, to observe that happening in real time. Bradley, what you got? My reference point, at least the recent one,

is Governor Abbott's event in 2022 down in the Valley. This was, they were kind of similar. Obviously, they both candidly won by quite a bit. This was not a tight, neither were a tight race um it's pretty standard it they they called the race about 8 30 and um then you started to hear rumblings about Cruz coming taking the stage and giving a speech and it was packed it really was which not surprising um and it would be a shame if it wasn't for a sitting U.S. senator. But yeah, they were partying afterwards and watching the rest of the results come in from around the country. And every new state that went for Trump, a big roar. Obviously,

we're at a Republican event. So it was a lot of cheering last night and especially when the senator took the stage but um yeah i had a really nice view from behind the riser the meteorizer which was great yeah what was your press what was that cameron broad mary lee's the three of y'all at the senate races last night what was the press setup well we were set at tables behind behind the riser and you couldn't really see anything yeah our vision was pretty much blocked i got a good photo of the senator that was it i think um that mary lee's posted a photo of her view and it made me laugh or a video and it made me laugh where it quite literally was just a view of the riser and like wires and camera equipment yeah Cameron what was yours like uh the setup was there was a stage big like dance floor that

they turned into seating and then just like one step up like a walkway where dozens of cameras were set up. And behind that were booths facing the stage where they had us in the press set up. And it was very cramped. Not a whole lot of seating for us doing the writing and the digital stuff. Man, I'm really good at the unmute button as I'm typing in the chat here. Yeah, it was fun to watch, at least from afar, y'all's takeaways and get a little bit of insight into your nights at all these parties. Okay, Matt, Mary Elise, if y'all could have, if you could give one takeaway from last night, could be national,

could be state level. I'm curious to know. And Matt, I think I'm going to pivot to you here, hear from you first. So yeah, walk us through what a takeaway was for you from last night. Well, since I pretty much focused on the statewide court races all evening, my big takeaway there was that at the end of the day, if it was a Republican or a Democrat, that's what mattered to two voters. way down the ballots with those judicial races, I think Justice Jimmy Blalock got the most votes out of them all with 6,351,533 votes. And like I said, you know, they're just all within, you know, 50 or 100,000 of each other, but all along 60- 40 margins against the Democratic challengers. So it's, yeah, straight line party voting. Yeah, pretty spicy stuff. Marylise, what do you got for us? Take away from last night. Okay, I've been on this one a little bit. This would include both local and federal, but I saw how Democrats were really honing in on the topic of abortion as really their, what they seem to think would be their winning issue. And I especially noticed that

when I went to the Kamala Harris rally in Houston, and the entire rally was centered around abortion, right? Each speaker talked about abortion, abortion access, abortion rights. You know, we've seen lots of ads covering stories like Amber Thurman, Kate Cox, Colin Allred had a lot of abortion ads showing those women. So I was really curious if that would pan out to be really a determining issue for voters. And it looks like it wasn't, which I find interesting. So this is abortion is definitely Democrats' favorite wedge issue, I would say. But it didn't appear to be a winning one. So that was pretty interesting to observe, just the concentration on abortion and then seeing whether that would really pan out in their favor and didn't look like it did.

There you go. Exciting stuff. Well, Matt, Mary Elise, thank you all so much for your coverage of so many races and just keeping folks up to date on what's going on. We appreciate it. I think Matt is, okay, who's staying for the questions? I know I think we're losing Mary Elise. Yes. Mary Elise, thanks for joining us. Matt, are you sticking around or do you have law school to study for? I've got to study for civil procedure in the morning, but I'll stick around for a little longer. Okay, we'll take it. Mary-Lise, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. Folks, go follow her on Twitter. Go follow everybody on Twitter, except Kim Roberts, because she doesn't have a Twitter. Okay, let's move on to the Q&A section of our live stream.

Waka, let's see, we have Holly rejoining. There we go. I think that's it. Welcome back, Holly. Thank you. I got hot tea, so hopefully my voice will come back this time. Oh, I thought you literally have hot tea, not that you have some spicy gossip to tell us. No.

Dang it. Yeah, well. So just to confirm, there's no... But it's off the record, so I'll have to tell you afterwards. Yeah. Oh, dang. It's my favorite kind of tea. Okay. Well, I do have... There's no ice in that tea? There's no ice in this tea, honey. Keep a cool head, chill out chill out ice man okay well Holly I'm gonna ask you the first question of the evening um walk uh okay so this is where did it go I totally lost it um Harris County you're talking earlier about Republican inroads there this cycle um One listener asked, how close is Harris County to turning red?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think they're poised to turn red. I think that the results indicate that it's a much more purple county than people thought a couple of cycles ago. They did think it was solidly blue. But where we saw the inroads were on these judicial races. And there was a very close race for district attorney. The incumbent district attorney, Kim Ogg, was unseated in the primary earlier this year, and a more progressive candidate took her place on the Democratic ticket. The Republican candidate came within one percentage point of winning. So it was much closer than people anticipated. Plus, you have these 10 Republicans who won these countywide races for the judicial seat. So I think the public safety issue is one that's drawing voters who might normally vote Democratic to the Republican side. Republicans will have to do a lot

of work to capitalize on that momentum. But some of the factors that have played into that is some of the radical approaches to criminal justice, again, where you have these judges that took the bench in 2018 who tend to believe that we shouldn't hold anybody pre-trial. So they don't believe in pre-trial incarceration, and they release a lot of these folks back out on the streets. I think there was an interesting cross-current, too, with the immigration issue. Of course, Houston was the site of the horrific murder of the 12-year-old girl, Jocelyn Nungary. And that murder was committed by two Venezuelan nationals who crossed the border illegally in Texas just earlier this year.

They were equipped with GPS ankle monitors that weren't even monitored. And so you've had a lot of people in the community get very upset with the Biden administration and Democrats for their approach to border security and immigration. How that affects Harris County, I think that's still kind of pulling out. But it's interesting that Kamala Harris only won by about 52 percent. So she she didn't do as well as some might have hoped in Harris County. We had a lot of Harris County prominent Democrats make a trip to Washington in hopes that they would be part of, you know, a celebration of Kamala Harris taking the White House. But they were very disappointed when they were there this week. Well, on that note, another question is, which Texan does Trump take to Washington?

And will that floodgate of open statewide seats open during session? Now, I will plug immediately, Brad and I recorded, oh gosh, how many months ago, Brad? Like two or three months ago? A Smoke-Filled Room podcast episode where we basically held a state level draft saying, okay, if X official here in Texas gets taken to DC, who would run for that position, right? It was interesting kind of who's eyeing specific spots. So go listen to that if you want a little bit more detail on that, because we've gone into plenty of detail. But now that it's official,

Trump will be retaking the White House. I want any and everybody to chime in on this one. Which Texans do you think have a chance at migrating to D.C. for a potential Trump administration spot? Matt, you raised your hand. Well, the first thing that came to mind is election night. I saw a tweet or post or X or whatever you call it now that showed Attorney General Ken Paxton and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller down at Mar-a-Lago for the election night watch party. And, you know, in journalism and reporting and everything like that, you kind of watch for the subtle little signs and things like that. So not not saying anything, but I did take note that those were the two statewides down there. Yeah. Very notable for sure. Brad, Cameron, Rob, Holly, who wants to take a whack at it? Any predictions? I mean, the two that come up

constantly are Paxton and Sid Miller too, in that picture. Um, you know, Paxton and Sid Miller, too, in that picture. Paxton obviously wants to be U.S. Attorney General. Whether he can survive a confirmation hearing is a different question entirely. The same could be said for Sid Miller. Maybe they could, maybe they couldn't. I have no idea. It depends on what the makeup of the committee at hand, if it's a nominations committee, what that makeup is, also what,

you know, how willing Trump is to spend political capital on either of them and getting them through. And, you know, another angle is, let's say Senator John Cornyn is the majority leader. Does Paxton try and leverage a brisk walk through a confirmation hearing and a vote on the floor into not running against Cornyn in 26 next cycle? It is quite possible, and I'm sure it is on their minds whether they do that. I have no idea, but we shall see. Paxton has a lot of options at hand. And it will be another fascinating angle to this is how fast are the DOJ charges against him, or at least the investigation that I'm aware of, but the feds are circling. And how fast are those dropped when Donald Trump takes the White House, especially if he wants him as his attorney general? A lot at stake here. Yeah, certainly. Cameron, you've got your finger on the pulse of Trump world so often, keeping us surprised of anything that's going on.

Any predictions there? I really don't have any solid take here i i think i'm just going to echo what you guys are saying if it's anyone that's going to be paxton but um yeah i i'll just throw something out there maybe some chip roy possibly no way that would be interesting. That would be a massive olive branch. Holy cow. What should be noted is there is one other Texan who has made the jump to Congress from the state legislature in Craig Goldman, right? He's in the U.S. House house now if i recall correctly there's well there's also some former texas officials that made their way up into the trump administration and that um might you might see a

re-emergence um there was the one congressman i forget his name that became the dni ratcliffe yeah he was his name was just floated for cia director today oh wow i did not do that um y'all i don't know if you guys but i don't know if y'all saw but it looks like decision desk hq uh called arizona for trump while we've been recording so what is the margin 312 to 226. oh but in arizona do you have the margin in Arizona? Oh, in the margin in Arizona. Let's see here. It's 52.1 to 47.

So 5.1%. That's a lot more than I was expecting. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Now that's what 73% in it looks like. So that could change, but Decision Desk has, um, yeah, there we go.

Wow. Interesting. Um, Brad, I'm going to ask you a question here besides Hispanics or South Texas trending toward Republicans or what other possible emerging voting trends in Texas? Uh, do you see one shout out Maslin for this cool graphic to That guy in the bubble there looks awfully familiar. I can't place him. I'm going to steal, I was on a panel today, I'm going to steal one of my fellow panelists talking point on this, Ross Ramsey. Used to be at the Text Tribune. He had made a good point today about the difference in the two parties in college education or non-college education.

And Republicans are quite obviously growing in that. Cameron is nodding his head profusely over there. It's clear. It's clearly happening. And I'm going to parlay this into saying, again, the point I've been making for a while about the general direction of these parties you had for a long time the Republican Party was the ideological party and the Democratic Party was the coalitional party I think back to the FDR coalition you had this mishmash of different demographics with different priorities that

didn't necessarily agree with each other on much at all, but they fit in this one big tent party. I mean, while the Republicans were a lot more focused on ideology, policy, they're flipping. And that started with the Trump election in 2016. And it's just continued since then. Republicans are becoming more and more coalitional and Democrats are becoming more ideological and they're not totally flipped yet, but they are trending in that direction. Um, and that changes the math in all kinds of ways on voter demographics. And a big one is the educational attainment of voters. And that's a massive breakdown. The educational attainment of voters.

I like it. Well, thank you, Daniel Friend, whoever you are. Okay, let's, okay, what is next for the Democrats in Allred? And on the other side, what is expected for Republicans and Cruz? I'm curious y'all's thoughts on this. I mean, this is the tough thing about these kinds of races, right? We have, we got? We have got winners. We got losers.

What happens after the fact? So who should I direct this to? Brad covered the Senate race. So maybe hop in on this one first, Brad, and then chime in whoever else wants to hit this one. What's next for Democrats? Oh, there's an interesting tweet that just popped up. It's almost like I had this ready to go. Gilberto Hinojosa is the Texas Democratic Party chair, and he made comments today. I talked earlier about the wedge issue, the transport stuff and how that was effective. And he made comments to, I think, Laura McGaughy about Democrats need to realize that a lot of their voters, or at least people who used to

be their voters, do not agree with them on this issue. And they need to accept that and figure out a way to bring them back into the fold. Well, he received a lot of grief about that. And he just put out a tweet that said, I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today. I recognize the pain and frustration my words have caused in frustration over the GOP's lies to incite hate for trans communities. I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity. You can see the rest of it on Twitter. I won't read it all, but, um, you know, there's been a lot of heat on Hinojosa for a while now, and a lot of people calling for his head as chair. And this disaster of an election for the Democrats seems like as good a reason of any to change leadership in the Texas Democratic Party. And to this point, he's maintained control. He's secured the top spot each every two years at the convention.

But clearly he is feeling the heat that he needed to put this out there. And, you know, he was saying the quiet part out loud that a lot of Democrats or at least some are talking about behind the scenes. Now, others disagree entirely and they're going to have to fight this out. You know, Republicans have been slaughtering each other in Texas for well over a year now. Well, more than that, but like this cycle, it's been over a year that they've just been knifing each other in the back. Well, Democrats might have to contend with that now. And that's happened, but not near to the level Republicans have dealt with that. Which we're certainly seeing that Democrat friction in Harris County. We saw that in the primaries where you had Kim Ogg, the incumbent district attorney, lose mostly over the crime issue and her prosecution of fellow Democrats for crimes,

namely Lena Hidalgo's staff here in Harris County. But we also saw another primary loss with State Rep Shawn Theory over the transgender issue. Theory, of course, has become a national name now because of her very vocal stance on these transgender issues. And I can't help but wonder if that isn't swaying some of these voters here in this urban area because of that Democrat position on, you know, boys in biological males in girls sports and things along these lines. It just doesn't sit well with some of those communities that might traditionally vote Democrat. So that is something they're grappling with locally, I think. And the Texas Democratic Party is certainly

broken with the National Party on certain issues in the past. It's a very different party in a lot of ways. You can say that about any state level party, but I think in Texas, it's specifically interesting in that oil and gas is a huge point of contention. Second Amendment, South Texas, point of contention, and a lot of deeply religious communities in South Texas too, being very ardently pro-life. So it's just interesting kind of watching a party chair in Texas have to straddle all these different issues. And we're seeing that only compounded this election cycle on the national level, right? There has been a referendum on how these, how Democrats handled this party. And we'll see how that ends up in strategy in the next national cycle. It'll be very interesting to see what changes or what doesn't and what they

determine is worth losing in terms of strategy and what's worth keeping. So we'll keep an eye on that. But on that note, Holly, I mean, you mentioned this. Oh, did we get into what's expected of Republicans in Cruz? Did we talk through that? Oh, we haven't. The second part of the question. I'll add that. What's expected of them to fight it out in session, I guess,

over particularly the budget. I think that's going to happen. If we're talking next cycle, it's going to be less favorable to them than this year was. It just naturally will be. It's a midterm. You have a Republican in the White House.

The midterm always recoils against whoever is occupying the white house just question of how much right is it is it really bad is it just kind of bad is it meh but um you know you're at least right now you'll have john cornyn presumably at the top of the ticket he performs very well in a general election he won he out he outpaced Trump. I think he almost hit double the margin that Trump did in 2020. And so I think you could expect him to do better than that, at least as a baseline. But when you get into the environment, is this a 2018-like environment? After last night, you have to say say probably not, probably won't be

going into next cycle, but things can happen. You know, the one constant is things just continuously happening, events that change decision-making and voting trends. COVID's a big one. Stuff happens and you can't predict it. It's just you have to adjust. And Democrats are having to adjust right now. Maybe Republicans will have to adjust in two years, depending on how a Trump administration goes or a second Trump administration, I should say. Yeah, certainly. I want to ask this nerdy judicial question because we have folks who are more than equipped to answer nerdy judicial questions and we love them here.

What Texas judicial office holders or high profile office holders with accomplished legal backgrounds are potential federal court nominees? Matt, I'm going to have you start us off with this one and then pivot to Holly. Well, the Texas Supreme Court has seemed to be a pretty good supply ground for high-profile federal judicial nominations. We saw several come off the high court during the first Trump administration, including Justice Jeff Brown, who was appointed to a South Texas federal district court. And then you saw Justice Don Willett, who ended up on the short list for U.S. Supreme Court nominations, but ended up getting appointed to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The justices on that court are, of course, always very popular, conservative jurists. It's an easy area to pick from because Governor Greg Abbott can fill those nominations. So you're not really messing up any kind of process there. Outside of the Texas Supreme Court, you might see some of the top high profile attorneys in the Texas Attorney General's

office. I could see them getting on shortlist picks and then any, maybe some of the former OAG attorneys that are now in private practice. And of course, anybody who ends up on Federalist Society judicial pick lists. Classic. Holly, what you got? I, you know, I really couldn't answer that question. I think Brown, didn't he come from one of the appellate courts? Matt, he was sat on either the 1st or 14th Court of Appeals. So you could see any of these Republicans who are sitting on those appeals courts or

even the state's two top courts don't know. You know, of course, Don Willett being the superstar from Texas that all of us miss so much on Twitter. If you followed him years ago, he's witty and funny, but also an excellent jurist. It commands a lot of respect. But who's in the wings for that? Couldn't say at this point. And, you know, the Texas solicitor to general position has always been a position to leap up to high positions. That's where Ted Cruz came from. And that's kind of an unusual position to leap from U.S. Senate from, but it happened. So, but it's a high profile

position and that a lot of these major court cases that you hear argued at the Fifth Circuit or argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, I think the current Solicitor General is Aaron Nielsen. So, you know, that's definitely a position you could see, or that division itself you could see being looked at for potential judicial nominations. Okay, very good stuff, guys. Last question, and then we'll end with some takeaways. I thought this one was particularly spicy, so we can end with this fun one.

Who are candidates, and guys, you know, in the news business, we do our job best when we speculate wildly. So that's what I'm going to ask you to do here. Who are candidates feeling the party switching vibes? Holly, Kim Ogg obviously comes to mind. Folks in South Texas, who else? Yeah, I talked to Kim Ogg, by the way. I asked her that question directly, and she said very firmly she is a Democrat, although she did this year endorse Ted Cruz. You know, Sean Theory's already switched parties. I couldn't tell you in Harris County, Houston, if there's anyone, perhaps maybe some of those who are involved with more of the

public safety issues. No elected officials come to mind at this point um but uh yeah that's that's that's a spicy one don't know the answer to that anyone else want to speculate wildly on this one i had someone ask me today um about eddie morales which is an interesting ask um did you see his tweets today there's no way in hell that's happening yeah exactly yeah there's no way but that was somebody telling off the governor no way that was a that was a question that i got um after watching there was speculation of that for sure and he can certainly break with his party on some issues and you know border security being um one that he's willing to talk about super freely. But yeah, it's not on the cards, I'm thinking. Holly, I do have a Harris

County question for you. Sure. That's coming from a Twitter comment. What do you think the odds are some of the major Republican PACs getting involved in races like the Harris County DA's race in the future? Oh, I think this showing, yeah, that's a great question. I think this showing indicates that more donors are going to show interest, right? Or it's going to draw in that interest. In the back channels here in Harris County, I know that some Republicans were very frustrated that they did not get more support from outside of the county, from statewide officials and from big donors. The judicial candidates had the benefit of the Judicial Fairness Pack, which is kind of a TLR affiliated pack, and they got huge donations. They got the $2 million from Elon Musk.

I'm trying to remember, there was a couple of other big corporations, and I don't want to misquote on that. But they raised a sizable amount of money. I think, I don't know what the last report was, but the third period was like $8.3 million. It was an astounding amount of money, and that really helped boost those candidates. Some of the other candidates, like the DA's candidate, Dan Simons, and some of the others lamented the fact that they just weren't able to get much support for their races because so many people had written off Harris County as being solidly blue. I do think the showing here this week has shown those donors that there are races that can be won in the Houston-Harris County area. There's some openings there, especially when you're talking about the court system or anything that really

touches on public safety. It's a big issue locally. Yeah, great question, Matt. Well, folks, we have gone 20 minutes over the time that we had allotted. And we're so thankful for your questions. We're thankful for this time. This has been awesome. And certainly a great first try at this whole live stream thing. So thanks for joining. It makes it so much more fun when folks interact with us. It's way more interesting, especially when folks are giving certain people on this live stream grief it is way more fun so folks thank you so much um for joining us i'll plug quickly if you want more of a rundown on the presidential race certainly go and check out send me some stuff it'll be a long form podcast episode that's out this monday from rob and from cameron it'll

be great content to debrief all that went on last night we also have if you've not uh checked out all of the election coverage we have at the texan.news go check it out we have a tracker that has all the results county by county we have judicial races state house races the senate race all sorts of resources there for folks looking to debrief everything that's going on. And as always, subscribe. We are a subscription run company and that's how we are able to do what we do. We appreciate our subscribers. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll catch you next time we're live. Bye y'all. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you enjoy our show, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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