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Posted (edited)

It's at the very top of reddit popularity this morning. I'd love for it to have great implication but not living in Mansfield or knowing how this election went, I'm hesitant to do so. 

 

Edited by Chopper
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Posted (edited)

I'd say that's a good sign.  Mansfield is one of those semi- or recently rural places that is filled with non-natives, some of which may be Texan-types finding affordable housing and some out-of-staters. So, like a lot of Texas suburbs.

I'm guessing that it has some pretty hardcore Magat types as well as some "convinceable" lean-right types.  And I would take this that once the convinceables saw the Magats in full effect, they flinched.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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Posted

It’s crazy what’s happened to that town since I was a yute there in the 80s. It was one 3a high school and most of the land was a handful of farms/ranch land around the golf course and golf course adjacent neighborhoods.  There was the Walmart and a Skaggs and a grandy’snand that was about it. I remember when the McDonald’s was built just across 157. 

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Also it’s not DeSoto or Duncanville but it has a solid and growing black middle and upper middle class demographic 

they didn’t move there to have shitty schools

Of course, these days, what constitutes "shitty schools" varies pretty widely.  It's nice that they fell on the not-banning-books side of that equation.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Of course, these days, what constitutes "shitty schools" varies pretty widely.  It's nice that they fell on the not-banning-books side of that equation.

I don’t think so tbh. A small very vocal and active minority has been capitalizing on apathy. I think that is changing in some areas, and a new suburb that isn’t mostly white flight and California MAGAts is one of the places you will see it first

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Posted
34 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

I don’t think so tbh. A small very vocal and active minority has been capitalizing on apathy. I think that is changing in some areas, and a new suburb that isn’t mostly white flight and California MAGAts is one of the places you will see it first

Yeah, I think apathy and general disengagement has been a major factor and once those (the convinceable middle to me) see things up close and personal, they realize what a traveshamockery it all is.

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Posted (edited)
43 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

Democrats won all over DFW last night. Two Prosper ISD board members who originally ran because of sexually explicit books were unseated. Every Collin County Democrats endorsed Plano city/ISD candidate won too.

These are good signs.

It will piss me off if the Democrats don’t seize on all of these opportunities everywhere.

I am not holding my breath.

Edited by Steamboat1874
Posted
45 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

Democrats won all over DFW last night. Two Prosper ISD board members who originally ran because of sexually explicit books were unseated. Every Collin County Democrats endorsed Plano city/ISD candidate won too.

Dallas proper is a safe space.  That the burbs are turning I think is seriously positive.

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Posted

Texas will go as the burbs go. Cities are blue, rural is red, burbs swing the state. Especially true for inner ring burbs. The trends were looking good for Dems until the last presidential election. Will be interesting to see if that was a blip on the radar or something more significant. 

Posted

I follow Williamson county pretty closely and it had been trending more blue over the last 15 years. I personally think it will continue to trend that way despite Trump winning here in 2024.

Whatever Trump tapped into at a national level applied here, but didn’t trickle down to Cruz. 

  • Donald J. Trump  (50.21%)
  • Kamala D. Harris  (47.71%)

  • Ted Cruz  (47.85%)
  • Colin Allred (49.32%)
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Posted
1 hour ago, Larry T. Spider said:

I follow Williamson county pretty closely and it had been trending more blue over the last 15 years. I personally think it will continue to trend that way despite Trump winning here in 2024.

Whatever Trump tapped into at a national level applied here, but didn’t trickle down to Cruz. 

 

  • Donald J. Trump  (50.21%)
  • Kamala D. Harris  (47.71%)

 

  • Ted Cruz  (47.85%)
  • Colin Allred (49.32%)

I am a staunch Blue voter in Williamson county and have been for about thirty years and there is definitely a change in the residents here, especially in fast growing Georgetown where I live.

I have hope.

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Posted (edited)

"When we fight, we win" is true. The trick is to actually fight instead of only talking the talk. The national party is led by weak people such as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and dozens of people behind the scenes that are equally committed to the fantasy that this nightmare will end if we just hit snooze a few more times. Committed mostly because their careers depend on politics as usual remaining politics as usual.

"When we fight, we win" means recruiting strategists and candidates who are untainted by the facile "popularist" school of thought championed by Matty Yglesias. As we've begun to see with the pendulum swing on immigration, the vast majority of voters and poll respondents are fish naturally drawn to shiny objects. They follow us, not the other way around, so any political compass that's based on the fallacy of the fish attracting the shiny objects is guaranteed to fail.

The political faction with the shinier objects, the side with the more compelling and more viral narrative, is the faction who decides where the center mass of the public sentiment will be. Be the metronome, not the hapless musician trying to keep up.

Since at least the Obama administration, the Democrats conspicuously negotiated against themselves on immigration. At first, when the opponents were John McCain and Mitt Romney (by today's standards, way to the left of the GOP on immigration) the debate was never about the humanity of noncitizens or their entitlement to the basics of due process. The problem was defined in terms of whether to grant amnesty and how best to streamline legal immigration. On DREAMers, Romney said they should have a path to become legal permanent residents. He distanced himself from Arizona's "papers please" laws.

Obama of course supported granting DREAMers a pathway to citizenship but since the bad faith GOP didn't want to give him another accomplishment on top of the ACA, the DREAM Act never would happen. Dems' hands have since allocated to all of their fingers the task of checking where the wind is blowing, while at the same time the GOP's hands dexterously operated the industrial-grade propaganda machinery responsible for controlling the weather. Before long nobody was thinking of illegal immigration in terms of streamlining the legal process or passing the DREAM Act, instead it was wall to wall 24/7 coverage of a made-up "border crisis." No lie too outlandish, ranging from apartment complexes under siege to dogs being abducted and eaten.

Where was the counternarrative? In Chicago, where one would expect to have heard it, we instead were regaled with the tragic tale of Jim Lankford's border bill getting blocked for......... *gasp*............ optics? Partisan strategy?

No Way Wow GIF

Look at how far we've fallen, the delta between the DREAM Act that was blocked as a means toward cynical partisan ends during the Obama administration and the Lankford Border Bill that was blocked as a means toward cynical partisan ends during the Biden administration. If the Lankford Bill counted as a "win" then we'd already lost before the game even started.

What a difference eight years can make, sure, but the rightward shift on this issue is as unmistakable as it was avoidable. Worse yet, this is one of many issues where the Democrats' idiotic silence followed by flatfooted "popularism" has led to a catastrophic betrayal of a previously reliable voter bloc. The failure to lead is how we got here.

I have a faint sliver of hope from these local races that at least at the state level (now that there's a new party chair) we will see fewer of these hopeless, wasted efforts to win over conservatives by parroting whatever the latest opinion poll says is popular. Leftists have better ideas than Liberals, and Liberals have better ideas than Conservatives. The left may not have as many propaganda outlets and social media platforms as the right, but you can be the richest man on the planet aligned with the biggest social media and legacy cable "news" outlets in the world and still fail to win a Wisconsin supreme court seat--even if you make promises of a chance to win a million bucks!

Book bans should be unpopular. We never should have allowed the debate to regress to a point where even the suggestion of a book ban would allow its proponent to continue being taken seriously. That it was possible for a candidate who run on, win, and use their position to ban books in school districts is unforgivable. The failure to prevent the zeitgeist from getting to that point, the failure to fill the silence with an effective counternarrative, can't even be called political malpractice. It's something worse than malpractice, somewhere between murder and what Jeffrey Epstein did with his island.

Looking ahead I'm thinking about how to maintain these specific seats because if Joe Biden taught us anything it's that stability and prosperity are boring and it has a way of shining a spotlight on losers when they're the only ones losing. They become more vocal, and the propaganda machine cranks it to 11 looking for fake problems to pretend are real. How can we make good ideas and prosperity less boring? That's the big problem that the next generation of leaders has to solve. If you're boring, you're less of a shiny object, and if you're less shiny, you lose elections.

We need to be able to tell compelling counternarratives even when we're in power. One thing that the left has done very effectively in Mexico is maintain direct communication with its base. Sheinbaum won by even bigger margins than AMLO. There needs to be a competent, coordinated message when Dems are in charge that look at all I'm doing for you and we are delivering good things for you regularly. A daily message, if possible. Control the message. Always.

I think this would even work for local and school district candidates. Once a week, explain what you did and how it helps people. Don't be boring, and make sure your ideas don't suck. Perhaps most importantly of all, if there's some asshole making your job harder, you can use your bully pulpit to get them to fuck off. Especially the book banning homophobes. Remember: when we fight, we win.

Edited by chainsaw
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Posted

A little related…

Celina ISD passed a $2.3 billion bond. I can’t believe fucking Celina has 43,000 people. Jesus

Even my podunk hometown of Gainesville ISD passed a $59 million bond.

 

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Pancho said:

A little related…

Celina ISD passed a $2.3 billion bond. I can’t believe fucking Celina has 43,000 people. Jesus

Even my podunk hometown of Gainesville ISD passed a $59 million bond.

 

Two Dallas-area cities have earned major bragging rights: Celina and Prosper, two boomtowns north of Dallas, are among the top three fastest growing affluent suburbs in the country. 

The cities' new affluent status was unveiled in a new GoBankingRates' study ranking the "30 Fastest-Growing Wealthy Suburbs in America" for 2025. The report examined population changes from 2018 to 2023 among cities and towns in major U.S. metro areas with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 residents. Median household income, average home value, and a "livability score" were also calculated for each locale.

Celina came in at No 2 on the list, with Prosper following one slot behind at No. 3

Posted

I teach in Plano. Lots of Asian and Indian families moved to town and started out in apartments in Plano for the schools. But we have lost many students to Prosper as those families start building houses. Few places left in Plano to build new, and what is built new is mostly townhome type stuff.

So they go to Prosper where they can build a new 5000 sq ft house for the same money that a 30 year old 2000 sq ft house in Plano would be.

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Posted
On 5/4/2025 at 9:27 AM, TwiceHorn said:

I'd say that's a good sign.  Mansfield is one of those semi- or recently rural places that is filled with non-natives, some of which may be Texan-types finding affordable housing and some out-of-staters. So, like a lot of Texas suburbs.

I'm guessing that it has some pretty hardcore Magat types as well as some "convinceable" lean-right types.  And I would take this that once the convinceables saw the Magats in full effect, they flinched.

Mansfield was my beat in the late 90's/early 00's when I was covering HS school sports. It had one 5A high school at the time. They built a new 5A high school in 2003 or 2004. I think there are 10 high schools in Mansfield ISD now. It was the fastest-growing part of the Metroplex for good while. I would consider it MAGA country for the most part. There's some money down there but a lot more working class folks than, say, Southlake.

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Posted

Always good to see wing nuts take a fat L.  But even the GOP internals are now showing that the party is now the low-information, low-propensity movement.  I don’t think you can read into how the burbs will vote in a national election from this. 

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Posted
2 hours ago, troph said:

The libs of Lake Travis ISD won in a sweep 2-0, and now control the school board 4-3. First time in over a decade. I posted more about my experience in that fight in the Texas a failed state thread.

we had significant increase in turnout which was still abysmal. But over 8000 votes which is 1000 more than last election when there was also city council on the ballot (this was just school board and some props).

winning local school board elections is a good sign, I don’t think it means Dems are winning state wide but it does help and could point to less of a defeat in district races.

Didn't happen in Dripping.  A board member whose husband is actively fighting to defund public schools won re-election.

Posted
11 minutes ago, 1978horn said:

Didn't happen in Dripping.  A board member whose husband is actively fighting to defund public schools won re-election.

I saw that. Someone there needs to start building community more aggressively. Need new voters and new donors to step up. We have some momentum in LT and it’s growing. 

8 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

Drip gonna drip. 

 

 

Doesn’t have to be that way.

Posted
1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Always good to see wing nuts take a fat L.  But even the GOP internals are now showing that the party is now the low-information, low-propensity movement.  I don’t think you can read into how the burbs will vote in a national election from this. 

Agree. Lets see what happens when someone is spending millions of dollars on trans panic/ illegal hordes/ evil libs TV ads 

Posted
3 hours ago, C-Man said:

Mansfield was my beat in the late 90's/early 00's when I was covering HS school sports. It had one 5A high school at the time. They built a new 5A high school in 2003 or 2004. I think there are 10 high schools in Mansfield ISD now. It was the fastest-growing part of the Metroplex for good while. I would consider it MAGA country for the most part. There's some money down there but a lot more working class folks than, say, Southlake.

This. I think Mansfield has peaked as the up-and-coming and now it's even regressing a bit and being gentrified in some areas. Still solid middle to upper middle class and solidly MAGA country.

Posted
18 hours ago, Pancho said:

A little related…

Celina ISD passed a $2.3 billion bond. I can’t believe fucking Celina has 43,000 people. Jesus

Even my podunk hometown of Gainesville ISD passed a $59 million bond.

 

Dude, Celina is the hot spot believe it or not. My CEO just bought a mansion out there. Lots of folks fleeing Frisco and the aforementioned Plano due to a variety of reasons, but unspoken ones are brown people and cashing out huge on housing investments that have 5x'ed and buying mini mansions in Prosper and increasingly Celina.

Posted
1 hour ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Agree. Lets see what happens when someone is spending millions of dollars on trans panic/ illegal hordes/ evil libs TV ads 

 No balls in girls sports and make LT schools great again were the leads for the conservative PAC in LT.

Posted
5 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

Dude, Celina is the hot spot believe it or not. My CEO just bought a mansion out there. Lots of folks fleeing Frisco and the aforementioned Plano due to a variety of reasons, but unspoken ones are brown people and cashing out huge on housing investments that have 5x'ed and buying mini mansions in Prosper and increasingly Celina.

And an apparent affinity for living in Oklahoma.

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Posted
On 5/4/2025 at 12:51 PM, Steamboat1874 said:

These are good signs.

It will piss me off if the Democrats don’t seize on all of these opportunities everywhere.

I am not holding my breath.

You have the entrenched folks with experience that also benefit from Dotards tax cuts to the rich.  Need more AOC and less Pelosi and Schumer.  Those two can ride off into the sunset off a cliff.  

Posted

Yeah, but Eanes lost a good school-board member to a lunatic MAGAt.  Now, in fairness, the MAGAt did a real good job of hiding her lunacy.  And Eanes is having to deal with a real tough budget situation, which has pissed off a lot of people who are not accustomed to being told that they can't have everything they want.  So it was a little bit predictable.  But still--it's disconcerting.

Posted
Dude, Celina is the hot spot believe it or not. My CEO just bought a mansion out there. Lots of folks fleeing Frisco and the aforementioned Plano due to a variety of reasons, but unspoken ones are brown people and cashing out huge on housing investments that have 5x'ed and buying mini mansions in Prosper and increasingly Celina.

Median home and per sq foot prices are higher in Prosper than Frisco and have been for a while.
Posted (edited)

Katy ISD also had a few seat flips, which is a huge change for them.  CyFair ISD, which is the 4th largest ISD in Texas, has 3 of their 7 seats up this November. All 3 of them are Christian Nationalist book banners, who need to be sent packing. If all 3 flip, the board flips to a 4-3 sane people majority. 

Edited by Dutchrudder
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Posted (edited)
7 hours ago, troph said:

I saw that. Someone there needs to start building community more aggressively. Need new voters and new donors to step up. We have some momentum in LT and it’s growing. 

Doesn’t have to be that way.

Different communities. Maybe this is anecdotal but I’ve heard that Dripping Springs and Dripping Springs Schools in particular have been aggressively marketed by realtors to MAGA families as a place they can access all the things Austin has to offer but still protect their sweet children from the woke mind virus, DEI, CRT, the trans menace, MS-13, dirty homeless people, etc. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted

We have also had some good success getting nuts out of local government here in Cedar Park over the last few years.

However, these are typically low turnout elections. The main people showing up are high information voters and people pissed off about the nuts ruining our schools and local communities.

I am not getting my hopes up for a general shift.

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Posted
22 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Different communities. Maybe this is anecdotal but I’ve heard that Dripping Springs and Dripping Springs Schools in particular have been aggressively marketed by realtors to MAGA families as a place they can access all the things Austin has to offer but still protect their sweet children from the woke mind virus, DEI, CRT, the trans menace, MS-13, dirty homeless people, etc. 

there’s still a very strong progressive community there to build on and I would expect enough in the middle to overcome at least local elections but my view is biased and only through their lens. So I certainly could be wrong.

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Posted
28 minutes ago, troph said:

there’s still a very strong progressive community there to build on and I would expect enough in the middle to overcome at least local elections but my view is biased and only through their lens. So I certainly could be wrong.

I hope you are right, I like your energy and if you can pull it off in LT, it’s possible (almost) anywhere. 

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Posted
On 5/4/2025 at 1:41 PM, Pancho said:

A little related…

Celina ISD passed a $2.3 billion bond. I can’t believe fucking Celina has 43,000 people. Jesus

Even my podunk hometown of Gainesville ISD passed a $59 million bond.

 

I like Gainesville. I may have mentioned to you before that a friend's mother grew up there and went to Booker T. Washington when schools were still segregated. She left and had her daughter out in SoCal and raised her in Costa Mesa. I remember going up to Gainesville around 2002 or so for church at the CofC. The mom's family made dinner and I had the best fried chicken I have ever had from her brother. It was interesting family. It is former Gainesville basketball state champion JR Harrison's family. Very nice people.

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Posted (edited)
29 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I hope you are right, I like your energy and if you can pull it off in LT, it’s possible (almost) anywhere. 

That’s a very cool thing to say, thank you. But I ain’t headed to DS to try… so who knows. These are so low turn out elections you absolutely can make a difference.

my next goal is to expand the electorate with a series of pool parties and backyard picnics focusing not on insiders but on the folks who hate what’s going on but haven’t internalized the obligation to give and vote. 

I think it’s imperative we get to a point where we (1) know each other, and (2) we text and call and make sure we all vote. 

Basically make voting in local elections cool again. 

it won’t do much for mid terms and presidential elections but it absolutely can move the needle in local elections. 

Edited by troph
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Posted
11 hours ago, 1978horn said:

Didn't happen in Dripping.  A board member whose husband is actively fighting to defund public schools won re-election.

The rest of Hays County voted to increase funding for education, voting in favor of every bond except the bond to fund a new football stadium.

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Posted
57 minutes ago, Larry T. Spider said:

I think it’s part book banning/maga hell raising but it’s also that these types don’t have answers for the real problems. People that show up to these elections understand the challenges with funding, staffing, test scores, growth/decline in student enrollment, etc.

When voters are frustrated because districts can’t hire bus drivers so routes are getting cut, they don’t give a shit about some book their kid is never going to read. When art and music classes are getting cut, people don’t care about fake litter box hoaxes. When half of the teachers being hired are uncertified, people want solutions.

 

 

Can I be your campaign manager? 
 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Parks And Recreation GIF

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Posted

Tammy Nakamura lost her place on the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD school board.  that was a huge win for sanity. 

https://communityimpact.com/dallas-fort-worth/grapevine-colleyville-southlake/election/2025/05/03/may-3-election-foust-ousts-nakamura-for-grapevine-colleyville-isd-place-3-shope-wins-grapevine-city-council-place-4/

Tammy was backed by Patriot Mobile.  she's a die-hard Trump supporter that was pushing a far-right, Christian agenda. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-christian-cell-company-patriot-mobile-took-four-texas-school-boards-rcna44583

People in GCISD were pissed at Nakamura.  She "attended a Republican school board forum at which she publicly said that she has a list of teachers who need to be removed from the classroom because they're 'poison' to the district. Nakamura suggested the reason these teachers were 'poison' was because they were 'activists,' but in reality, it was just that they are different from her and the picture GCISD likes to paint of its teachers--the one of teachers who dress a certain way, wear their nails and hair a certain way, vote a certain way, and practice religion a certain way."

https://www.protectgcisd.com/the-destruction-of-gcisd-as-a-destination-district.html

And yeah, she's a proud Trumpette.

"I have been a Trump supporter since day one. Love what he is doing for this country. Don’t care what he tweets don’t care what he says I care about what he does !!"

https://www.trumpettesusa.com/tammy-nakamura/

tammy.jpg

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Posted
1 hour ago, Jive Turkey said:

Tammy Nakamura lost her place on the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD school board.  that was a huge win for sanity. 

https://communityimpact.com/dallas-fort-worth/grapevine-colleyville-southlake/election/2025/05/03/may-3-election-foust-ousts-nakamura-for-grapevine-colleyville-isd-place-3-shope-wins-grapevine-city-council-place-4/

Tammy was backed by Patriot Mobile.  she's a die-hard Trump supporter that was pushing a far-right, Christian agenda. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-christian-cell-company-patriot-mobile-took-four-texas-school-boards-rcna44583

People in GCISD were pissed at Nakamura.  She "attended a Republican school board forum at which she publicly said that she has a list of teachers who need to be removed from the classroom because they're 'poison' to the district. Nakamura suggested the reason these teachers were 'poison' was because they were 'activists,' but in reality, it was just that they are different from her and the picture GCISD likes to paint of its teachers--the one of teachers who dress a certain way, wear their nails and hair a certain way, vote a certain way, and practice religion a certain way."

https://www.protectgcisd.com/the-destruction-of-gcisd-as-a-destination-district.html

And yeah, she's a proud Trumpette.

"I have been a Trump supporter since day one. Love what he is doing for this country. Don’t care what he tweets don’t care what he says I care about what he does !!"

https://www.trumpettesusa.com/tammy-nakamura/

tammy.jpg

I pictured a Japanese woman.

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