An energized Democratic electorate wasn’t enough to defeat Texas Sen. Ted Cruz this month, but in the state’s most populous county, it created a blue landslide.

Nearly every Republican in Harris County, home to Houston, was unseated on Nov. 6, including 59 judges and the top executive, Ed Emmett, a moderate who won in 2014 with 83% of the vote.

Mr. Emmett, whose official title is county judge and who was widely lauded for steering the county through the devastation of Hurricane Harvey last year, lost to political novice Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat who said she has never previously attended a meeting of the Harris County Commissioners Court, which she will soon oversee. The 27-year-old won by less than 2 percentage points and will now help run a metro area that encompasses some 4.6 million people, the third-most-populous county in the U.S.

The Harris County election drew national attention in part because 17 African-American women, all Democrats, won judgeships, a symbolic shift for one of the nation’s most diverse cities. But it also demonstrates the growing political divide between more liberal cities and conservative rural areas that is evident even in red states like Texas, where every elected statewide official is a Republican.

Hi All,
On Tuesday, Mike Espy could be elected the first African-American US Senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. He is the former US Secretary of Agriculture and US Congressman. Espy is a moderate Democrat who was within 1 point of his opponent on election day. (Tuesday is the runoff election). His opponent has said that we should make it harder for students to vote (because they will vote Democrat) and recently publicly complimented one of her supporters by saying that if he invited her to a public hanging she would "be in the front row." (Mississippi had the most lynchings of any state in the south.) If this feels like we are still fighting the Civil Rights battles of the 1960's, you are not alone.
With a runoff election the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, turnout for this will be low (on election day the total turnout was less than 900,000) so every phone call or text message will make a difference. A lot of folks (especially low income) can't be reached by phone, so in person door knocks are huge. (This isn't a persuasion activity. We literally just have to get people to show up, as many don't even know there's an election happening).
I am going to be flying into Jackson at 1:30pm on Friday, staying through Sunday night. (If anyone wants to drive back together, that would be great).
If you want to get to Jackson earlier than me, they start canvassing at 10am. The address is :
460 Briarwood Dr, Jackson, MS
Otherwise just give me a call when you arrive:
202-651-0892
If anyone wants to split an Air BnB, let me know.
See you in Mississippi!

FiveThirtyEight: “The 2018 election has become a tale of divided government: the House broke for Democrats, but the Senate held for Republicans — and what’s more, Republicans were even able to expand their majority in the Senate. The election has also become a tale of blue waves. But don’t those tales contradict one another? Not really. What the ‘split decision’ narrative sometimes misses is just how well Democrats performed in the Senate despite having to defend more seats than Republicans — and in territory that was largely more favorable to the GOP.”

“Much of this is overshadowed because Democrats did lose Senate seats… But if we look at a state’s partisan lean and the vote share margin in each Senate race, we see Democrats managed to outperform how their states leaned politically in almost every single race — including in the 10 states with a Democratic incumbent that President Trump won in 2016.”

However, First Read notes that Democratic performance in red states might have been their ceiling.
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