Texas Blue Mailbag: Week of November 25

This week's Mailbag has questions on voting in Texas, as well as a note about our many, many words.

Ken Leach says:

I always thought it was, “Texas became the 28th state by annexing by the United States.”

Ken Leach

Democratic Candidate

26th Congressional District

Josh says:

No.

(George notes that Josh can't take a joke.)

Bill King says, in reference to Ed Martin's feature:

I read this and thought it was good. Would liked to have forwarded it to my email group (70 local Democrats) but considered it too long. Wish future articles could be held to two pages or less. Recognize that some will only read the first screen that comes up. The essence of the message must be discernable in the first few paragraphs.

You guys are doing good and I enjoy all your articles and analysis. Please keep it up.

Bill King
Kendall County

George says:

Thank you! Yes, some of our stuff gets pretty long. Our featured articles, in particular, can be analysis-heavy and therefore a bit of a pain to email.

We do try to make the first couple or three paragraphs indicative of the story as a whole, so you could email those and a link to the rest. Or, you can click on the "email this page" link at the bottom of a story, and it will conveniently email the story's teaser plus a link to the rest to as many people as you like. Hope that helps!

Carrie asks:

What's up with Kinky Friedman?

Josh says:

He keeps saying he's going to run as a Democrat in 2010. The Democratic Party has said that he can say what he wants, but he isn't running as a Democrat. If I had to describe him in a concise manner, I would call his presence in Texas politics "a blight."

Diana asks:

Is there such a thing as a Hispanic voting bloc in Texas?

George responds:

That's a good question, and a trickier one than I think it would first seem. The short answer is, yes, sure there is. But it doesn't do any sort of service to the topic.

In my opinion, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that there are many Hispanic mini-blocs in Texas. The picture is made more complicated by the fact that turnout for Hispanics on the whole tends to be somewhat unreliable, but it can be said that generally, Mexicans tend to trend Democratic, while Colombians and Cubans tend to trend Republican. That's just picking some of the larger Latino populations in Texas, but it still doesn't quite tell the story — there are strong local social influences in Texas Latino communities. Myself, I tend to think of the Hispanic vote as a number of subgroups geographically divided within Texas, with the majority country of origin more strongly determining the trend of the other members of that particular subgroup as well.

Of course, that's as much a guess as anyone else's. About the only thing that can be said for certain is that the Texas Hispanic vote is a complex thing — many have tried to somehow try and "get out the Hispanic vote," on the premise that it could be simplified to one universe, and just about everyone who has tried has resoundingly failed.