Since this is a mid-term the voter pool is big enough it is a matter of percentages relative to the 2016 election. 20% swings happen when 70% of one party vote and 50% of the other vote relative to the presidential year. That is what happened in Alabama.
A 5% swing though could happen solely due to conservatives and independents turning away from Cruz.
Again, using the 2016 election as a starting point 52.23% of Texas voters voted for Trump and 47.67% voted against Trump. That is only a 4.56% difference.
The breakdown of those against Trump was 43.24% Clinton, 3.16% Johnson, 0.80% Stein, and 0.57% writeins. Note that there will always be a small number of people who will not vote for either party candidate, but it should be less than 1% in the Senate race. One can argue these anti-Trump voters will be anti-Cruz voters.
I will also argue that Cruz is less popular than Trump was at the time of that election.
There is also a lack of enthusiasm among a significant percentage of Republicans while Democrats are enthusiastic. Independents are leaning strongly democratic.
I think it will be more than enough to swing the election to O'Rourke.
Tahoe also said if junior was lying. It is already well established that junior lied to the Senate. The question is only how may lies are prosecutable as purgery.
I do not buy the automatic Pence pardon argument. Pence wants to win a presidential election and pardoning Trump would make him unelectable in much the same way it was with Ford.
With Cambridge Analytica under serious investigation I wonder when Cruz will be implicated and how badly. At a minimum he employed foreign workers in key decision making rolls in his presidential campaign in violation of law.
NK said that two tunnels had not collapsed. But there is no way to know how much equipment survived the collapse and those tunnels could be highly contaminated, which is what I suspect, along with surviving equipment.
If so the best thing they can do is bury everything in place as they are doing. Still we may never know for sure.
We cannot prevent having Fentanyl available. What we can do is have consistent purity and dosage to help prevent accidental overdoses. We can also lower the cost so that we eliminate the illegal drug trade and the associated violence. At the same time by making recreational drugs more affordable, we can minimize secondary criminal activity related to getting money for drugs. It would no longer by on the streets but in licensed pharmacies. We can also offer counseling and drug treatment options to users to improve treatment and lower the number of addicts. And, like in Portugal we can identify problem drug users in critical jobs where recreational drug use is not appropriate.
As for guns, this would minimize the drug related gun violence which is a substantial component to the topic of this thread.
The savings already outlined plus the improved standard of living for people currently caught up in drug use, drug trade or legal problems associated with them, will make legalization even more worthwhile.
Once you strip away the religious, racist, and power grabbing aspects behind the development of laws prohibiting recreational drugs I find it hard to understand why those laws continue to exist.
Fines and incarceration don't prevent the human desire to digest or inhale mood altering substances. It is the worse possible way, short of murder that was suggested earlier, to deal with the problems that arise from it.