Glen Maxey - this was a classy thing to do

[Lisa0825]

Congratulations to Nelda Spears

Tuesday night Nelda Spears won a resounding victory. I congratulate her on her race and on her campaign.

Although we have a very different vision of what this office could be, her experience and steady hand clearly resonate strongly with the voters of Travis County. I look forward to her continued service to our County.

And I also wish to complement Ms. Spears staff at the Tax Office. Although they, as County employees, appropriately did not take sides in a race like this one, they were always not only professional but also friendly in all dealings with me and my campaign staff. Class acts.


I Endorse and Pledge my Full Support to Nelda Spears

Ms. Spears now faces Republican Don Zimmerman. I hereby pledge by full support to Ms. Spears and have this race as my number one priority in Travis County. Don Zimmerman has a long history of political work that few of us could even charitably say has been constructive. If you don't remember him, he's the local Ron Paul leader. He opposed creation of our Travis County Hospital District. On just about every issue where I've seen Don Zimmerman take a position, he's been wrong. I intend to help Ms. Spears in every way possible to send him packing.


What I'll be Doing Now

First, I'm not the kind of guy to ever take off and go on a vacation. So I'm already moving on to new adventures. I'm working with the Obama campaign to help him win the maximum number of delegates at the Texas Demoratic State Convention.

The most amusing thing for me on Wednesday was the emails that started "Glad you lost". While nobody likes reading that on the day after getting crushed in an election, I was heartened by their reasons. "We were so upset that if you won, we'd lose you as a partisan Democratic activist." "I'm happy you're going to still be able to organize for the good guys".

And that's my goal: organizing for the good guys.. Yesterday I started discussions with organizers from several groups about how to complement our groups efforts.

We now have thousands of trained precinct organizers in Travis County and across Texas . Our Democratic Party volunteers and Precinct Chairs and those Obama and Clinton precinct captains are a huge resource for November.

I'm going to go full tilt training candidates and volunteers to use the phonebank and blockwalk tools at TrueBlueAction.com and voter registration stuff at RegisterTravis.com. We have an army now that can do door-to-door voter registration in Travis and statewide. We have online phonebankers trained. By end of summer we have the ability to call and ID most of this state where we have contested races for Congress, the Legislature and critical local races.

Lots to be done. You'll all be hearing from me.


Thanks for your support if you helped me.

If you supported Ms. Spears, congratulations!

[TexasThoughtCriminal]

1. Very gracious too when he lost the TDP chair race

I remember him telling a distraught supporter, "Why are you upset? It's only an election." Sometimes the supporters get so wound up in the campaign they take it harder than the candidate. Glen Maxey is truly a class act.

[Melissa G]

2. That man does a really fine concession.

I hope we educate Nelda on the things like VOTER ID WRONG ANSWERS that scared some of us away from her.

[sonias]

3. Exactly

I can guarantee that issue is coming back to bite us in the ass. David Dewhurst was actually sending out messages to his base to sign his petition on his website in support of voter ID. And of course the republicans had it as one of their primary resolutions on their primary ballots. I'm sure they will be announcing almost unanimous support among their base any day now.

Nelda is wrong on that issue of supporting HB626 proof of citizenship.

What I really would like to see is that office actually be split up into two functions. One the tax assessor collector office and the other the voter registrar. Then we could have both of them. Glen would be a far better voter registrar. And frankly I think that having both of those functions be under the same department is more than outdated and a not so nice reminder of our past. If you didn't know why both functions are consolidated it's because of our history of collecting poll taxes in Texas. The tax collection officer collected poll taxes in order for you to be registered to vote. Not a pretty reminder of our past.

Kudos to Glen for his gracious concession!

Sonia

[Melissa G]

4. Excellent point! Travis county ought to split the functions if we can

Do you know if there are there legal impediments or do we just need to get a petition going!

[sonias]

5. No legal impediment it has more to do with money

The county commissioners would have to allocate a budget for another office. It might be a good conversation to have with one of the county commissioners or with Glen himself.

Sonia

[sonias]

6. And here it is - the primary result of the republican voter suppression initiative

PHOTO ID

Vote For 1

(WITH 622 OF 622 PRECINCTS COUNTED) Total % EV Election Day

For . . . . . . . . . . . . 64,385 94.88 32,447 31,938

Against . . . . . . . . . . . 3,473 5.12 1,678 1,795

:grr:


Sonia