Very Bad News In TX-21

The Intercept was courageous to publish Zaid Jilani's post about TX-21 yesterday, a full day before the Texas runoff about how the DCCC had guessed wrong and backed a former Republican against a grassroots progressive. They must have imagined that Mary Street Wilson was a day away from replicating Kara Eastman's breathtaking victory over DCCC/Blue Dog-backed reactionary Brad Ashford in Omaha last week. But, alas, they miscalculated. Kopser won the primary runoff, looking more like the Lipinski win over progressive challenger Marie Newman:

• Kopser- 14,636 (57.9%)
• Wilson- 10,622 (42.1%)

Kopser, who serves on the board of the corrupt, anti-worker Texas Association of Businesses, identified himself as "the business candidate" and, although, he tries to brush over the differences between himself and normal Democrats, he's a conservative likely to be a truly horrible member of Congress. As of the May 2 FEC reporting deadline, he has raised $1,155,771. Mary had raised $91,105.

For Wilson and her supporters, Kopser’s insistence on maintaining his ties to the business lobby while it sues to force sick workers to show up or lose their jobs is just another example of why the Democratic Party is betting on the wrong horse in this race. National Democrats have coalesced around Kopser and have largely ignored Wilson, a favorite among progressives, who outperformed Kopser in the first round of voting, despite having significantly less resources than he did. (Derrick Crowe, the most left-wing candidate in the race, was eliminated in the first round and immediately endorsed Wilson.)

In December, Kopser earned the endorsement of Congress’s No. 2 Democrat, Maryland’s Rep. Steny Hoyer. He’s backed by the Democratic-leaning Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence, and, having spent over two decades in the U.S. military, he successfully won the backing of Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton’s Serve America PAC. VoteVets is backing him for similar reasons.

Wilson, meanwhile, is supported by a number of national and local progressive organizations, including Justice Democrats, Our Revolution Central Texas, and the Stonewall Democrats of Austin. The Austin Chronicle issued no endorsement in the runoff between the two candidates, with its editorial board split on the issue.

In Kopser’s telling, there is little difference between the candidates on the big issues. “I think in terms of policies, when people look at our websites, you’re going to find out that our policies are very aligned,” he told The Intercept.

But a look at the two candidates’ issues pages elides some significant differences. On health care, Wilson favors a single-payer health care system, under which the government would provide insurance, while Kopser prefers a public option and Medicaid buy-in, where Americans could voluntarily buy into a public insurance program with their own money, rather than automatically being covered by one. (That distinction is also a symbol of how the health care debate has moved. In 2009, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, the public option was the rallying cry of progressive activists; now progressives prefer a single-payer system and establishment Democrats prefer a public option.)

When it comes to college education, Wilson has endorsed the House tuition-free college bill, which would make four-year public colleges and universities free for families earning up to $125,000 annually. Kopser, on the other hand, supports a more modest approach that would give tuition-free college to students whose families make less than the median income in their state and offer partial subsidies to other students.

The national Democratic support for Kopser, who has expressed his admiration for Ronald Reagan, could be explained by the fact that the district leans heavily Republican. In 2016, GOP Rep. Lamar Smith easily carried the district with 57 percent of the vote; his retirement as a longtime incumbent may weaken the party’s chances in the district, but few would describe it as anything other than conservative. Cook Political Report ranks the district as “likely Republican.”

But Wilson proved to be a formidable opponent in the first round of voting in March. Of five candidates, she led the field with 30.93 percent of the vote, to Kopser’s 28.98 percent. She did this despite having only a fraction of Kopser’s resources. Wilson spent around $39,000 to Kopser’s more than $600,000 prior to the first round of voting. That means she spent nearly two and a half bucks for every vote she earned, while Kopser spent over $40 per vote. The surprising strength of Wilson’s campaign may show that the district is becoming more progressive.

Shannon Proctor, an Indivisible activist in the district, described herself as a “Derrick fan girl” to The Intercept, referring to Crowe, the now-defeated candidate. After Wilson’s surprising performance in round one, she quickly aligned herself with the candidate. “I was guilty of having said that Mary didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell because I honestly didn’t think Texas District 21 was ready for a woman or a gay minister,” she admitted. But Wilson’s first-place finish changed Proctor’s mind, and she now believes Wilson is the strongest candidate in the race.

In an interview with The Intercept, Wilson sought to cast the race as the difference between a grassroots candidate and someone supported by Washington, D.C.-based organizations with substantial resources. She pointed to heavy-handed interventions by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in other Texas districts. The DCCC has not formally gotten involved in the 21st District yet, but did call Wilson to learn about her campaign after her surprising performance in the first round of voting on March 6. Wilson has not heard from the committee since, she said.

“I am more concerned, however, with the DCCC handpicking our candidates. The DCCC has completely misread the mood of the electorate. They continue to recruit and push candidates who do not represent voters’ needs or interests,” she said. “That’s why I came in first place in our primary after being outspent 20 to 1 by my opponent. Voters want to support candidates who will give a voice to working-class people, not multimillionaires. This year, voters are standing up and saying ‘our elections can’t be bought.'”

Like many other first-time Democratic candidates, Wilson was inspired to run for office after Donald Trump’s election to the White House, but her politics are more populist than anti-Trump. She has a track record as a social activist who has used her background as a lesbian member of the clergy to push back against the religious right. In 2005, she testified against Texas’s proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. More recently, she has been involved in activism in support of Planned Parenthood and against so-called bathroom bills that would require people to use public restrooms that correspond with the gender listed on their birth certificate.

In early April, Kopser’s campaign dealt with complaints after it field-tested messaging that referred to Wilson’s sexuality. The San Antonio Express-News summarized the poll as so:

Poll respondents were presented with a glittering narrative about Kopser. They were asked if they agreed that it would be important for Democrats to have a candidate who is a 20-year military veteran and has been described by former President Barack Obama as a champion of change.

When it came to Wilson, the poll profiled her as a lesbian minister and asked if Democrats should vote for her in the runoff whether they think she can win in November.

Kopser’s campaign told the paper that it was not seeking to make the poll an attack on Wilson’s campaign. “We have great respect for Mary and wanted to understand the extent to which the electorate finds her profile and message compelling,” the campaign said in a statement.

Prior to the first round of voting, Kopser ran a primary campaign strongly branded around the Democratic Party and progressivism, using mailers and digital ads to tout an award he received from the Obama White House for his private sector work in green energy.

But Wilson’s supporters are skeptical of Kopser’s Democratic credentials, pointing to a 2016 CNN segment in which he is portrayed as a Republican who opposed Trump. “He’s a Republican. I don’t give a shit what anybody says,” Proctor said. “He’s a Republican.”

“At a taco joint in Houston, Kopser shared how the self-described Reagan, Republican, West Point graduate army veteran who served in Iraq turned high-tech entrepreneur sees Trump as a dangerous choice,” CNN correspondent Ed Lavandera narrated.

“If Ronald Reagan and John Lennon had a kid, I’d be their son,” Kopser said in the clip, describing his politics. “Donald Trump is not who he appears to be. Donald Trump is a great entertainer. Donald Trump is a great showman if you will, but Donald Trump doesn’t really represent the views of so many millions of Americans.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Kopser said that the CNN segment misrepresented him. “I wish I had control over how reporters or papers editorialize their summaries,” he said. “He decided for spite or for whatever reason was the purpose of his article that he was going to describe me as a Ronald Reagan Republican. What he failed to do was add that very important prepositional phrase or description: ‘as a kid in the 1980s.'”

Kopser said he comes from a longtime Republican family but that he started to drift away from the party in the late ’80s.

At an event last year, Kopser said he had voted for Democrats in every general election since 1992. For Wilson, Kopser’s political history remains a question mark. “Regarding Joseph Kopser’s voting history, from what I understand, there is no evidence that Joseph has voted in a Democratic primary, and it is unclear to me when he became a Democrat,” she said. State voting records provided by the secretary of state to The Intercept only went back to 2014 and showed Kopser voting in just one primary: his own Democratic race in 2018.

In a November 19, 2016, Medium blog post titled, “On Trump, Reagan was right, ‘Trust but Verify,'” Kopser expressed dismay that Trump had been elected, but rhetorically reached across the aisle to his supporters to ask them to adopt the Gipper’s slogan when it came to the incoming president. He didn’t espouse a strong partisan identity in the post.

“Moderation and conversation will solve this problem as well as people starting to put country over party,” he wrote. “I look forward to working with anyone who wants to work to solve our problems in a moderate, thoughtful way to achieve a compromise we can all live with.”

Kopser cites his military history as the reason for avoiding partisan political activity prior to his announcement that he was running for Congress.

“It has been a tradition in military service going back to the days of George Washington,” not to have strong political affiliations, Kopser said in an interview.

“I made it a point when I was in the military to have never registered with a particular party,” he added. “And so, if given a choice whatever of the nine places I lived in my 20 years in the army, I would either choose nonaffiliated, unregistered, no party-- I forget what the different options were-- or in some cases, if they gave me no option, I put independent just to be my own person, independent not following the current-day independents, whatever the heck that means, that labeling.”

As recently as February, Kopser showcased his sometimes noncommittal approach to partisan political labels. During an event at the Ranchers and Landowners Association of Texas, he explained to the audience that his time in Iraq was part of the reason he wanted to secure the U.S.-Mexican border.

The hawkish remarks took some in the audience by surprise.

A member of the audience called out, “Are you sure you’re on the right ticket?”

He replied, “I’m on the American ticket.”

Now TX-21 voters are stuck with a choice between the lesser of two evils in November. Good luck figuring that out. Nor did any of the other Texas congressional primary runoffs last night have happy endings. The DCCC can congratulate itself for having wrecked Laura Moser's campaign. An anti-union Democrat, Lizzie Fletcher beat her in a very low turnout race, 67.9% to 32.1%. Fletcher will lose miserably to Republican Jon Culberson in November. The DCCC would prefer that than to see Moser take the seat. In the 23rd, Gina Jones beat Rick Trevino 68.1% to 31.9% and in the 32nd, Colin Allred beat Lillian Salerno 69.5% to 30.5%.

Vote For Mary Street Wilson On Tuesday

Mary Wilson is a progressive. Kopser is not, not at all

The Austin Chronicle editorial board made its endorsements for the May 22 run- off last week. In the preface they describe themselves as "left-leaning," but their non-endorsement in TX-21 is absurd and, perhaps, sexist:

No Endorsement

We could not reach a consensus of support in this race. The Chronicle issued a dual endorsement in the primary, of Elliott McFad­den and Derrick Crowe, who both lost out on the run-off. (Crowe took 23%, McFad­den 17%.) But we remain split on Mary Wilson and Joseph Kopser, whose run-off represents a litmus test of what a party's nominee in a historically Republican district should be, and what we believe the 2018 electorate will want. Though he classifies his political transition from Reagan Republican to registered Democrat (with two decades of military service sandwiched in between) as "progress" and not opportunism, Kopser remains a centrist Democrat who is pro-business, and whose measured approach to enacting progressive policies raised concerns from some of our Board that he is, in essence, Republican-lite. His political credentials are indisputable-- establishment party support, both locally and nationally-- but what remains open to interpretation is the utility of that support following the 2016 presidential election, when he and his opponent were both galvanized to wage their first campaigns for public office. Kopser believes a combination of that support and a friendly rapport with Joe Strausian Republicans, who care more about economic development than who uses which bathroom, makes him the best candidate for a general election. For those who see irrelevance in that establishment and want the party to move more left, there's Mary Wilson, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who does not employ a generic campaign staff. She is a lesbian minister in suburban Texas (Cedar Park) with experience bringing individuals from all political stripes together under her congregation and who believes her place on the political spectrum (unapologetically on the social justice left) will be a feature and not a fault in both energizing Democrats and winning over disenfranchised Republicans should she make it to the first general midterm election since America got stuck with Donald Trump.

Blue America originally endorsed Derrick Crowe, with great enthusiasm. When he missed out on the run-off, we had no problem going over to Mary Wilson. Kopser is exactly what the Democratic Party and Texas do not need. Derrick endorsed Mary as well. He sent me this post yesterday about this current state of the race for the 21st, which goes from West Campus, the Drag, Downtown and Claksville in Austin, through Travis Heights, Sunburst, Tanglewood Forest, south though Buda, San Marcos and New Braunfels into northeastern San Antonio and west into the Hill Country beyond Fredericksburg, Boerne, Bandera and Medina.

Yesterday, one of Joseph Kopser’s most visible public supporters requested that I respond to his social media posts about Mary Street Wilson’s public disclosure that her family holds shares in Exxon. Given the issues it raised for both candidates and the fact that voting is underway in the runoff, I initially thought it best not to respond and just stay out of it. However, since subsequent social media posts make it clear that Team Kopser will continue to request that I respond, I’ve reconsidered.

Let me be absolutely, crystal clear: Exxon is a terrible company, and everyone should divest from it. No other corporation is more responsible for deceiving the public about the effects of fossil fuels on the climate, and their actions may have already cost us a livable future in the long term. Prior to running for this congressional seat, I took part in numerous protest actions and public education efforts to hold Exxon accountable. That climate-change-focused activism was eventually what drew me back into politics to challenge climate change denier Lamar Smith in TX-21. So, of course, I was concerned by the prospect that a candidate I support would hold shares in Exxon.

However, Team Kopser left out an important piece of context: the assets in question were left to Wilson’s spouse as an inheritance from a close family member. That changes things significantly. Since the asset wasn’t left to Wilson, divesting from it is not her decision alone to make-- just like it’s not Kopser’s decision alone to dispose of his wife’s holdings that include significant fossil fuel investments.

According to Kopser’s financial disclosure form, Amy Kopser has personal investments (not received from a deceased person’s estate, mind you) in funds GWX, SPDW, SPEM, SPMD, SPSM, SPYG, SPYV. According to Fossil Free Funds, all of these funds have significant oil, gas, and coal investments, including investments in:

• top owners of coal/oil/gas reserves;
• the largest coal-fired utilities;
• coal-/natural-gas-fired utilities; and
•the fossil fuel industry in general.

Again, a candidate’s spouse is a person who makes their own choices, and how they resolve that kind of thing and how it will relate to the campaign’s climate change platform is a matter for them as a couple. What should be a matter of concern to voters, however, are Kopser’s own investments in those funds. He also holds his own investments in all of them. A self-described “clean energy warrior” ought to go to war to clean up his personal investment portfolio.

This same disclosure document also reveals that Kopser has a lovely $50,000–$100,000 investment in a company, Cross CHX, whose most visible product is Olive, a medical services AI intended to replace workers doing repetitive tasks in the for-profit medical industry! Here’s how Cross CHX introduces your “new employee,” the 24-hour, 7-day-a-week, 365-day, salary-free droid! Sorry, workers!

This AI investment is flabbergasting to me. Kopser and I had repeated discussions and debates about automation, labor, and the minimum wage, and not once did he disclose his financial interest in automation and AI — which I’m sure would have been of note to the labor unions who backed him in the runoff.

Wilson and Kopser have significant, important differences between them on climate change, fracking, and whether and when we should set a deadline for our country’s transition to net-zero carbon emissions. Kopser’s evasiveness on these points and his willingness to accept additional fossil fuel use “for centuries” as part of a “holistic mix” are nonstarters for me. By contrast, Wilson’s support for a 2035 deadline for getting this country to net-zero carbon emissions fits with my own view of the urgency of the climate crisis. Furthermore, her participation in the heroic protests at Standing Rock show me that she’s willing to put herself on the line to fight for a livable future and for environmental justice.

Everyone should divest from Exxon. Everyone should leave candidate spouses out of it (a stance #TeamKopser has hitherto held to, admirably). And Kopser and his supporters have absolutely no standing to make this kind of attack.

Vote for Mary Wilson on May 22.

Can Progressives Win-- In Texas? Of Course They Can... But They Have To Overcome The DCCC First

The Texas runoffs are May 22. And as The Nation noted this week, "Insurgent populists are facing off against establishment picks in a series of high-stakes runoffs." D.D. Guttenplan wasn't deterred by a bunch of progressive defeats in Tuesday's primaries in Ohio, North Carolina and Indiana. (Exception-- Kendra Fershee won her congressional primary in West Virginia.). Maybe he thought there's more at stake in Texas--. and he should... because there is. Chances are, for example, that whomever wins the runoffs in TX-07 and TX-23 will be going to Congress. The awful DCCC picks in each-- Jay Hulings in TX-23 and Alex Triantaphyllis in TX-07-- were already defeated in the first round.

Guttenplan begins with the longest of long shots-- Rick Treviño, who miraculously beat the heavily backed and heavily financed Jay Hulings, to come in second in Round 1. Hulings, with help from the DCCC, the Blue Dogs, the New Dems and the San Antonio Castro Machine, spent $554,903 for the first round. Treviño, who was endorsed by Blue America, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, spent $29,121. Treviño, wrote Guttenplan about the primary, "stood out from the Democratic field for his youth (he’s 33) and his Chapo Trap House rhetoric, describing Goldman Sachs as 'evil,' ridiculing corporate Democrats, and tweeting 'Neoliberalism fucking sucks.'" He told Guttenplan "I’m not a liberal-- I’m a lefty" and "My headquarters is in the cloud or whatever restaurant has good Wi-Fi."

Stretching west from San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso and running south along the Mexican border, the 23rd Congressional District covers 58,000 square miles, making it bigger than the entire state of New York. It’s also one of the most flippable districts in the country, swinging from Republican to Democrat and back repeatedly over the last 12 years. The current incumbent, Will Hurd, a former CIA officer and one of three black Republicans in Congress, was reelected in 2016 by just 3,000 votes.

Most reporting on the March 6 primary tended to depict it as a two-person race between Gina Ortiz Jones, who served in Air Force Intelligence during the Iraq War and would be the first openly LGBTQ representative from Texas, and Jay Hulings, a former federal prosecutor who was in the same Harvard Law School class as Julián and Joaquin Castro, the twin brothers who dominate local politics. Hulings, who was endorsed by House minority whip Steny Hoyer, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Blue Dog Democrats, and End Citizens United [a front for the DCCC], raised and spent over $600,000. Jones, backed by Emily’s List as well as LGBTQ and veterans’ groups, raised more than $1 million, three-quarters of which came from PACs and wealthy donors, and spent about $700,000.

As for Treviño, he raised a little more than $40,000, including about $3,200 from himself. “I took out all my savings and cashed in my retirement. I took the 20 percent hit,” he says. “Hopefully I don’t twist my ankle or get sick, because right now I don’t have health care.”

Instead of the consultant-crafted mailings and TV ads deployed by his opponents, Treviño relied on shoe leather and gasoline, seeking out voters in places like the unincorporated colonias along the border, where some of the poorest people in North America live without basic services. “They’d tell me, ‘I vote every year, but nothing’s changed. We still don’t have paved roads.’ Most of them had never seen a candidate before. And none of them thought Medicare for All or the right to a living wage was a crazy idea.”

When the ballots were counted, Hulings’s $92-a-vote campaign bought him a fourth-place finish with 6,600 votes. Jones led the field with 18,000, at a cost of about $39 per vote. And Treviño, who spent just $29,000, came in second, making it into the May 22 runoff with a little over 7,600, at a cost of just $3.80 per vote. “There are no established laws of political science by which this should have been possible,” noted a San Antonio Express News columnist.

"Big wave coming-- get off the beach,” said seven-term congressman Charlie Dent (R-PA), explaining his decision not to seek reelection this year. If Dent is right, then anybody on a board has a chance of catching a wild ride-- perhaps explaining why some Democrats are putting so much time and effort into pushing other Democrats off the ballot. Maybe the real fear isn’t that voters in Texas and other supposedly red states aren’t ready for Medicare for All or a $15-an-hour minimum wage or tuition-free education at public universities-- but that they are.

The same poll that put Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke in a dead heat in his bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz also showed that Texans are a lot less conservative than the stereotype, favoring tougher gun laws, a process for DACA Dreamers to stay and apply for citizenship, and the legalization of marijuana possession-- all by considerable margins. Yet somehow, you never hear corporate Democrats being told, “Kid, this ain’t your night” so that a more progressive candidate can avoid an expensive primary fight over “minor policy differences.” Pragmatism “is a moral imperative,” preaches Jonathan Alter in the Daily Beast-- as if ignoring the urgent needs of the rural poor, or the criminalization of African-American men, or the terrible damage to our environment were some kind of higher wisdom.

Alter’s not alone. Lately, the airwaves and pixels have been full of centrist Democrats warning the rest of us to quit griping about health care or Wall Street corruption and take one for the team. That list includes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which, having decided that it can do a better job of picking “winners” than the party’s own electorate, keeps putting its thumb on the scales in contested primaries across the country. And Hoyer, who was recently caught on tape pushing a progressive challenger in a Colorado congressional race to drop out. And Emily’s List, which picked sides in a race between two equally pro-choice women here in Texas-- while refusing to back another who was the only woman on the ballot in her district, and is now in a runoff against a former Republican. All this so-called pragmatism comes from the assumption that the parameters of practical politics are already fixed-- and as narrow as the space separating Andrew Cuomo from Chuck Schumer.

But what if that’s just plain wrong? For example, Alter’s claim that only candidates whose policies are acceptable to big donors can raise enough money to compete against the “mountains of cash” coming from Republican billionaires isn’t actually true. Ever since Howard Dean out-fund-raised all his competitors-- and all of his predecessors-- Democrats have known they don’t need to rely on corporate money to win. As pollster Stan Greenberg recently warned the party, if Democrats just keep talking about Trump or Russia, let the Republicans get away with tax cuts for the rich, and ignore the fact that for most people, wages still haven’t caught up with the cost of living, that big blue wave might not happen at all. “Momentum has stalled,” Greenberg warned, encouraging the party to refocus on health care and the economy because “Democratic voters are genuinely struggling… They remain in pain.”

What if the election of Donald Trump represents not merely a rightward swing of the pendulum, requiring Democrats to do little more than wait for the inevitable counterstroke, but a wrecking ball to politics-as-usual? What if the shape of the electorate is changing, making the kind of left-populist coalition the Bernie Sanders campaign never quite managed to put together a real possibility? Insisting we can’t win-- that young people or minorities won’t turn out to vote, that what divides us is more important than our shared knowledge that the system is rigged and our shared anger at those who rigged it-- is an old stratagem. But it may not be a winning one any more.

Just ask Laura Moser. A fifth-generation Texan, Moser is part of the surge of women who reacted to Trump’s election by deciding to run for office themselves. A longtime journalist and the founder of Daily Action, a text-messaging service that sends its 300,000 subscribers one concrete call to action every day, Moser had a national profile-- and Washington connections from her husband Arun Chaudhary’s years as official videographer in the Obama White House. Although Chaudhary’s consulting firm, Revolution Messaging, had done some work for Sanders in the 2016 primary, Moser herself had rung “hundreds of doorbells for Hillary” in Houston during the fall. She even cited Clinton as her inspiration for powering through a cold on the campaign trail in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District.

Then, just over a week before the March primary, the DCCC dumped a dossier of opposition research onto its website, attacking Moser as unelectable in a move that appeared designed to bolster one of her opponents, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. As The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim reported, Fletcher was backed by Houston megadonor Sherry Merfish, a longtime Emily’s List supporter who’d also bundled more than $250,000 for Clinton. Though both candidates are vociferously pro-choice-- Moser’s parents were active in Planned Parenthood, and her mother Jane organized the clinic defense during the 1992 Republican convention that Fletcher features in her own campaign literature-- Emily’s List came in hard on Fletcher’s behalf. Despite the attacks, Moser made it through to the May 22 runoff.

...Ironically, getting monstered by the DCCC precipitated a spike in Moser’s fund-raising; in less than a week, she raised more than $86,000. Besides falsely implying that she’d put her husband on the campaign payroll, the DCCC dug up a snarky Washingtonian piece in which Moser had written that she’d rather have her “teeth pulled out without anesthesia” than live in rural Paris, Texas. The DCCC press release left that last part out, making it sound like Moser was dissing her entire home state. The oppo researchers had even tracked down some insensitive comments she’d made as a 22-year-old freelancer after attending a gospel service in London. So Moser’s endorsement by the group Houston Black American Democrats in late April meant a lot to her.

The DCCC “tried to paint her as some kind of racist [and] totally misrepresented who she is as a person,” says Ginny Stogner McDavid, president of the Harris County AFL-CIO, which opposes Fletcher, citing her firm’s work on an $8 million lawsuit against the Justice for Janitors campaign. “Lawyers are the new Pinkertons,” McDavid continues. “Half a century ago, corporations hired Pinkerton operatives to break strikes. Now they just use lawyers-- Pinkertons with cuff links.”

Having Emily’s List against Moser hurt her, too. Not just because she’s a feminist who describes her support for Medicare for All as “a feminist issue,” but because the group’s imprimatur matters here. Norri Leder, a former Texas chapter leader of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told me, “The Emily’s List endorsement made me sit up and take notice. I don’t think they would endorse someone unless they thought she could win.” Incensed by Republican incumbent John Culberson’s vote to repeal the Obama administration’s rule preventing people with severe mental illnesses from buying guns, she’s volunteering for Fletcher.

In a district that Clinton carried in 2016, it’s hardly surprising that the Democratic primary would be competitive. But the nastiness of the race signals there’s more going on here than personal rivalry, though that may also be a factor. When I ask Fletcher if it’s true that her father and Moser’s were once law partners, she says they were, adding: “Laura was a couple of years behind me in high school.” (Wes Anderson fans will recognize their alma mater, St. John’s, as the setting for Rushmore.)

Both candidates are formidable women with extensive connections to Houston’s Democratic establishment. Fletcher’s campaign manager, Erin Mincberg, is the daughter of David Mincberg, former chair of the Harris County Democratic Party. Both are endorsed by Moms Demand Action and by CWA Local 6222. Moser is also endorsed by National Nurses United, the Harris County AFL-CIO, the Seafarers, the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Either would be an enormous improvement over Culberson, a Tea Party drone with a A-plus rating from the NRA who co-sponsored a “birther” bill in 2009 and opposes abortion, marriage equality, and the “liberal obsession with climate change.” Yet the turnout in the Republican primary, where Culberson faced token opposition, was 5,000 votes higher than in the seven-person Democratic slugfest.

One response to that cautionary note is that, to flip this district, Democrats need to give Republicans-- people who voted for Greg Abbott for governor-- somebody they don’t feel uncomfortable voting for. In other words, a rerun of the Jon Ossoff campaign in Georgia, with no need to change the “Panera Bread strategy” of ignoring economic inequality and the party’s own dependence on corporate donors. “Democrats are winning Harris County,” Fletcher told me. “We don’t need a new approach.”

Moser disagrees. “We have tried something over and over in Texas politics which is to run to the middle and to the right, and it’s not working,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “So why not stand firm for the values that we share?” Fletcher says she’s for defending DACA; Moser says she would have voted to shut down the government to force a deal. Fletcher’s website calls for “maintaining and improving the Affordable Care Act”; Moser is for Medicare for All-- the surest dividing line between Democrats who just talk the talk and those who walk the walk.

But it isn’t only Moser’s messaging-- which stresses the need to get big money out of politics, federal aid to rebuild Houston’s flood defenses, as well as health care and immigration reform-- that sets her apart. Fletcher’s running a campaign; Moser is building a movement.

“We started [the runoff] with 1,300 volunteers and created a grassroots structure around that,” says Josh Levin, the campaign’s field director. Relying on volunteers to “grow their own” teams for phone-banking and block-walking means that, win or lose, Moser is expanding the progressive base of the party. “We are planning to flip this district whether or not we make it through the runoff,” says campaign manager Linh Nguyen. “We regularly meet with the Democratic precinct chairs, helping them with digital organizing and advising on when to start GOTV [get out the vote] efforts.” It’s an approach that has already convinced one prominent Ossoff supporter, actor/activist Alyssa Milano. She’s backing Moser this time.

Thanks to years of GOP gerrymandering, any Democrat now faces an uphill fight in Texas. (Last December, the New York Review of Books blog ran one of the best analyses I’ve seen of the classic racist techniques of “packing and cracking” voting blocs. The writer? Laura Moser.) But that fact, and the results of this year’s elections, shouldn’t obscure what’s at stake-- in Texas and across the country. Despite what you may have read, this isn’t a fight “for the soul of the Democratic Party”-- an entity whose very existence, like other supernatural phenomena, is a matter of faith, not evidence.

What’s at stake here is power: Who has it, who gets it, and how they use it. Those who believe that “America is already great”-- perhaps because they themselves have done so well-- will never deliver more than gradual change. But as Jim Hightower, the veteran Texas populist, put it to me when I stopped by to see him in Austin: “People aren’t interested in incremental change. People are being fucked.”

Travelling the state in his role as a board member of Our Revolution, Hightower got a close look at what he calls “the culmination of a two-party duopoly doing nothing for regular people.” Reminding me that the 19th-century Populist revolt first caught fire just a few hours north, in Cleburne, Hightower says his group has endorsed 29 candidates in Texas-- of whom “17 won or made the runoffs.” Yet he worries that some of the current crop “are running for the wrong races. Running too high on the ballot.” After half a century in the fight, Hightower knows that our side needs some wins.

One of the most improbable could be gathering force just on the other side of town. When Mary Wilson first entered the campaign to unseat Lamar Smith, the climate-change denier who represents the 21st Congressional District, nobody paid her much attention. Though Smith, with ample backing from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers, had done enormous damage as chair of the House Science Committee, he had also been repeatedly reelected by 20-point margins since first winning the seat in 1986. (Smith’s 2006 Democratic challenger, John Courage, was backed by Our Revolution in his successful race last year for a seat on the San Antonio City Council.)

Yet when Smith announced last November that he wouldn’t be running for reelection, the open seat drew a crowded field, including Derrick Crowe, an environmental activist and former Nancy Pelosi staffer backed by Our Revolution and (Nation) writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Already in the race was Joseph Kopser, a former Republican and West Point graduate backed (surprise!) by 
Steny Hoyer and other “national Democrats.” The DCCC promptly added the seat to its target list.

Here again, the primary coverage focused on Kopser and Crowe. Wilson, when she was mentioned at all, was described merely as the “fourth Austin Democrat in the race” or, more expansively, a “gay math teacher turned pastor.” (Although it’s been largely ignored, Texas has also seen a lavender wave this year, with more than 50 openly LGBTQ candidates running for office statewide.) Kopser, who spent over $800,000 in the primary, came in second with 14,787 votes, beaten by Wilson, who spent less than $50,000 for 15,736 votes-- or about $3 each compared to Kopser’s $54.

“Being first is not always easy,” Wilson told me when we sat down over pancakes in Austin. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told I’m going to hell.” Though her campaign office looks like a converted garage, Wilson seemed determined to prove “that caring for one another is really a viable political position.” Despite her political commitments, she still spends Sundays at the Church of the Savior, the pulpit she took up while teaching mathematics for 20 years.

“I come at this whole campaign from the perspective of people impacted by policies that favor the wealthy,” she continued. “My father worked at McDonnell Douglas, helping to build the Mercury capsules. He was a ‘drop-hammer guy’-- a union machinist. At 91, he has a pension and health care. Everyone who works hard deserves that.”

Last spring, Wilson spent days at the Texas Legislature protesting, testifying, and lobbying. “I testified against the bathroom bill. Got there at 7 am; testified at 9 pm. Afterwards, I said to myself, ‘I want one of those votes.’ This felt like the next step.”

“How do you make the House of Representatives reflect the country?” she asks. “Joseph’s not a bad guy. It’s just that we have a ton of guys like him already. I’ve been in courtrooms, jails, detention centers. How many people do we have in the House who’ve lived paycheck to paycheck? Or who have listened, as I have, to a 69-year-old woman say, ‘I got sick, lost my job, and now they’re going to evict me.’ If he wins the primary, there are progressives that will stay home.”

Wilson credits her victory partly to her message and partly to “being the only woman in the race in the Year of the Woman…. I can bring together the entire party, from Our Revolution to Hillary voters. The women who dominate the crossover vote will look at me and see the mom and grandma, and see someone who does the same things they do.” Although a spokesperson from Emily’s List told The Nation that “we hope to see Mary Wilson in the general election,” the group has yet to endorse her in the runoff against Kopser.

I've never talked with Guttenplan but all of the candidates he wrote about-- O'Rourke, Moser, Wilson, and Treviño-- can be found on Blue America's Take Back Texas Act Blue page. If you click on the thermometer on the right... you'll be there. All these grassroots candidates need the bucks, especially Treviño and Wilson, who have raised next to nothing and have especially difficult districts to win on the 22nd. No one says this is going to be easy, but anyone saying it isn't going to be possible was probably positive that Hulings was going to come in first, not fourth and that Triantaphyllis was a sure bet in Houston. And, by the way, the other candidates on the page the thermometer takes you to are great as well.

TEXAS EARLY VOTING STARTS MONDAY

Meet Mary Street Wilson-- The Surprise Winner In TX-21 This Week

Before TX-21 Republican Lamar Smith announced his retirement, there were at least 9 candidates running for the Democratic nomination in the district. One, Tom Wakely, decided to run for governor. Another, Chris Perri, decided to run in an adjacent district-- TX-25, which also has a chunk of Austin, and he came in first of 5 candidates and now faces a primary runoff with Julle Oliver May 22. The winner will face ethically-challenged right-wing multimillionaire Roger Williams in a district that Trump won 55.1% to 40.2% and that still has an R+11 PVI. The others who dropped out of the TX-21 race included Ryan Allen, Rixi Melton and Scott Sturm. In the end there were just 4 candidates, 3 men and a woman. In order of how much they spent on the primary:

• Joseph Kopser- $614,514
• Derrick Crowe- $131,108
• Elliott McFadden- $82,716
• Mary Wilson- $37,088

Another way to look at the field is that 3 of the candidates-- Crowe, McFadden and Wilson are progressives and Kopser is an "ex"-Republican, a corporate Democrat GOP-lite conservative. But ultimately the way to look at it was who won and who lost Tuesday.

• Mary Wilson- 15,669 (30.9%)
• Joseph Kopser- 14,684 (29%)
• Derrick Crowe- 11,686 (23.1%)
• Elliott McFadden- 8,625 (17%)

No one expected Mary, a Baptist minister and former math teacher, to win. So why did she? And what happens next? Well, the one woman/3 guys sure worked in her favor. And she ran a bare-bones volunteer-based grassroots campaign-- as Rick Trevino did, also successfully, south of TX-21 in TX-23 (another total shocker). As for what happens next... McFadden and Crowe don't like what Kopser stands for and I expect they will both put some effort into helping Wilson. In fact, just hours after the votes were counted, Crowe issued this statement to his supporters and the media:

For almost a year now, I have watched Mary Street Wilson run a tough, tenacious campaign that defied all establishment expectations. She fought for every last vote in every corner of this district and led with her progressive values. She faced with grit both a deep fundraising disadvantage and a dismissive attitude from the establishment. Last night, the Democratic voters in Texas’ 21st Congressional District responded by giving her more votes than any other candidate in the race.

Though I am disappointed to not make the runoff, it’s impossible not to be inspired by Mary’s campaign. Last night’s result gives me deep hope that this year, our elections can’t be bought. She will make an excellent representative for the people of the 21st District of Texas. I am proud to endorse her.

And Blue America is proud to add her to our Take Back Texas ActBlue page. Please consider contributing to her runoff campaign against the corporate Democrat (and then her general election campaign against the corporate Republican)-- by clicking on the thermometer on the right.