"People have been watching the Latino vote for decades now. I've never seen a 50-point swing away from either party," Madrid said. "This is historic, and there's no question that a huge part of this is a direct result of Trump's policies on immigration. The voters are now beginning to separate the idea that this is about immigration. It's really about overreaching government. Militarizing our streets is having an impact."This is not a permanent shift like the one FDR ushered in (locking the GOP out of the White House until Eisenhower, who would be considered a dangerous liberal by MAGA), but it will last as long as the GOP doesn’t learn its lesson (and no longer than if the Dems don’t learn the lessons of FDR and LBJ).
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"There's clearly a Latino corollary that's pushing back and saying we as a community are not going to put up with this," Madrid said. "We may have given you that chance. You've blown it. We're going to come back to the other side of the aisle and resist what's going on in our streets."
Which is going to be long enough, because I still don’t think the GOP incumbents (the ones not quitting Congress) see what’s coming. Or will soon learn what it was that hit them.
We all know it’s Trump and Stephen Miller (everyone else are just shills and toadies). They are clinging desperately to the “paid agitators” line. If Trump doesn’t end up destroying the GOP, he’ll certainly have turned it inside out.
I think it's starting to dawn on the Republicans that they are going to get clobbered. Political insiders in New Hampshire have long said that outside money is fueling the school voucher program here. We are small state with a gigantic state legislature relative to the population, so there is little oversight of candidates for unpaid part time jobs. So even modest donations to each can make a real difference. New Hampshire is dead last with what it gives local schools. The state funds only 22%, the national average is 47%. Not content with draining the education reserve fund to finance vouchers for the wealthy to send their kids to private schools, evangelical schools or home schooling (where the state will fund shooting lessons), they have been proposing a property tax cap, which will slowly strangle the schools of any town that adopts it.
ReplyDeleteBut the tax cap that hasn't been playing well with the public, so suddenly the senate attached to another bill a proposal to allow students to attend public schools outside their districts, and there is a formula for how that gets funded by the towns. All towns have to participate, and people who understand school funding say it will overtime result in wealthier towns paying even less property tax, and the poorer towns more because of the transfer formula. It will ultimately kill the local schools in poorer towns, and then there will be no support for public schools.
Last week the senate used a procedure to avoid any public debate and passed the legislation in a few days. The house votes Thursay, again without hearings or public debate. The legislation takes effect immediately. There is a frantic urgency to get this in place right now, so it will be harder to unwind later.
Someone knows this is their last chance, and they aren't going to miss it!!
Texas is on a tear to lower property taxes (the single largest tax base, except for sales tax). Obviously aimed at ending public schools, since that’s how they are funded.
ReplyDeleteBut Texas tried vouchers, sort of, under W, and it was such a disaster the Lege ended it two years later (they only meet once every two years). People are going to be sorely disappointed when private schools won’t take vouchers or automatically accept their children. And any schools that pop up to take the money will be crap (the same problem as before). And the rural areas that support the GOP don’t have private schools to begin with. Public schools (and Friday night lights) are their backbone. Even the district I live in still thinks like a rural district (been a long time ago, but as you’ll find in churches, culture is genetic even without family connections). They don’t want to see their school taxes taken away. The Lege has promised not to do that, but there’s only one outcome to slashing property taxes in a state with no other real tax base.
I think this school plan, and cutting taxes to kill public education, is going to have a very short shelf life. Dan Patrick runs the state senate, and has already announced more property tax cuts for the 2027 session. I think the result in Fort Worth has him shitting bricks. Because I think the voters are paying attention, and maybe not just to ICE.