Newsletter

Honor the dead

By voting on Tuesday

Today is Dia de Muertos.

I put out voting guides on social media for my friends every election. This election I wanted to use it to remember the good people we’ve lost this year, but also highlight how they came to be so important to us for so long. It's all about systems: public education, unions, healthcare, arts education, access to programs in your community.

Public schools in Texas are struggling. The school voucher program was, as predicted, a handout to the wealthy. Our teachers are underpaid. Per-student spending has never been sufficient. Librarians have lost their jobs. With the state takeover of Houston ISD schools, curriculum has been severely downgraded. Books are banned, if there at all. AI slop homework is here to stay. More district takeovers have happened and others are planned.

If elected as governor, Gina Hinojosa has promised to put a teacher at the head of the Texas Education Agency and improve our public school system that Republicans have spent decades dismantling. We should vote for that.

I was watching during last year’s legislative session as Texas Republicans held hearings on drag shows and trans people and watched as the drag queens and the trans people showed up to defend themselves. They were very brave. We must change the makeup of the #txlege in order to undo these regressive policies.

I always knew Patrick Stewart was a good man, but as stories rolled out after his death, it became clear that he supported all the right things. One thing I didn’t know about was that he and his mother were survivors of domestic violence and he become an outspoken advocate for survivors. We’ve experienced cuts to so many programs that support the arts, sciences and social programs during Trump 2 to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. And in many cases just to be cruel to poor folks. We’ve got to regain power in Congress if we’re going to make anything better in this country.

The Texas Comptroller race is one that really bothers me. It’s not a flashy office so people don’t know how important it is. It’s the office that manages the state’s huge budget. There are some pretty nasty shenanigans going on in that office currently, led by little gremlin Don Huffines, a real estate millionaire who was installed earlier this year by Greg Abbott. In the time he’s been in the office, he has kept school voucher program spending shrouded in secrecy, proposed doubling the school voucher program by another billion dollars, has a 20-something white boy DOGE-ing the state government, and he’s planning a $3 million upgrade to his literal office using taxpayer funds that aren’t meant for that.

Plus he bought an Epstein ranch. The guy is a creep.

Or we could have a serious person in office. A woman, even! Vote for Sarah Eckhardt.

Y’all know I hate that sniveling scold Mayes Middleton. He’s running to make the Attorney General’s office even more of a clown show than it is currently. He doesn’t even have a law degree, he’s just a trust-fund oil and gas billionaire. I dearly hope people are voting for his opponent Nathan Johnson, who I genuinely like. Good sense of humor on that guy.

There are so many great women running. We need more women at every level of government. That’s all.

This is the race that might break my soul if we lose it. Like, even if this is the only statewide race we win, that will mean that Texans CAN reject gutter racism. If we can’t? I don’t know why I continue living here knowing that a majority of Texans were faced with an experienced engineer who knows the oil and gas industry and knows how state government works VS a trust-fund millionaire with no industry experience who wants to deport 100 million Americans, likely based solely on the color of their skin. I mean, at some point can Republicans put country over party? Do they even HAVE a boundary?

Finally, we have a race between everyone’s awful ex-stepdad Dan Patrick and the very sensible and likable Vikki Goodwin. The lt. governor is the most powerful statewide office because it sets the legislative agenda. Goodwin has been effective and a powerful voice for women in the legislature, and she has been taking great advantage of the fact that Dan Patrick is a narc who wants to ban all forms of THC in the state. He made enemies with all of the hemp business councils and the small business owners and veterans groups who support the expansion of legalization, so they’ve thrown their support behind Goodwin, which is nice to see.

If you’d like to share this guide with others on your own social media, it’s available on Facebook and Instagram.

I doubt that if you’re reading this that you haven’t yet voted, but Election Day is on Tuesday. Polls are open 7 a.m.-7 p.m. In Harris County, there are more than 620 voting centers and you can vote at any one of them. There are wait times listed.

Expect lines at the popular locations. Go somewhere else if you don’t have time to wait. It will probably be raining, so bring an umbrella. You could have voted early, but ya didn’t. I think I used to find some, I don’t know, purity in voting on Election Day, but I don’t mess with that anymore.

Three. Good. Things.