Eight years ago, the right was terrified of ACORN, determined to crush it under a flood of lies (see, for example, MM: WSJ editorial leaves out relevant information in smear of ACORN). It took eight years, but ex-ACORN staff came storming back on election night, 2016, the Democrats took Houston.
Unlike the rest of the country, Houston Democrats had a full-scale Republican rout to celebrate. The party had swept the polls in Harris County, the vast region encompassing Houston, arguably the nation’s most diverse city (as locals never tire of repeating). With 4.5 million inhabitants, the county is more populous than half the states in America. Now Harris voters had elected a Democratic district attorney — a very powerful post in Texas law enforcement — for the first time in thirty-six years. The Democrats had also captured almost every other slot on the ballot, including the tax assessor’s office, which oversees voter registration: a crucial win in an age of Republican voter suppression.
It was not enough to turn Texas blue, but Hillary did better there than Obama in 2012:
Hillary Clinton trounced Donald Trump by more than 160,000 votes in a county that Barack Obama had carried by fewer than a thousand in 2012. While others in the defeated party were subsiding into melancholy, hand-wringing, and consolatory tales of Russian hackers, the county’s newly elected sheriff, former Houston police sergeant Ed Gonzalez, was assuring supporters that he would defy any orders to round up undocumented immigrants. Across the street, the new D.A., Kim Ogg, promised her exuberant audience a progressive agenda: “We’re going to have a system that doesn’t oppress the poor.”
Austin is known as the blue dot in the red state. Houston may be known for oil wealth, but it is dirt poor. Among real estate attorneys, it’s known as the only city that has no zoning laws to separate residences from factories:
Despite Houston’s international cachet as the headquarters of the global oil industry, the Johnson Space Center, the Texas Medical Center (which employs more people than the entire United States coal industry), Rice University, and other dynamic manifestations of power and prosperity, many of its neighborhoods are more evocative of the Third World than the moon landings. Open ditches, often choked with garbage, line the streets of poor districts such as the Third Ward, Acres Homes, and Sunnyside. Thanks to Houston’s zealous rejection of zoning in any shape or form, industrial sites, including the huge Valero refinery in the Manchester district and the abandoned CES Environmental Services plant in South Union, a cemetery of toxic chemicals, sit just across backyard fences. It was in these neighborhoods that TOP found its constituency, and its first campaign.
The Houston result was achieved in part by a group of ex-ACORN organizers.
The Texas Organizing Project was launched in 2009 by a small group of veteran community organizers.
…
Both Tremillo and her TOP cofounder Ginny Goldman, a Long Island native, had worked for ACORN, the progressive national community organization that enjoyed considerable success — registering, for example, half a million minority voters in 2008 — before becoming a target of calculated assaults by right-wing operatives. By 2009, the group was foundering, and it was dissolved a year later.
Soros helped: These Prosecutors Campaigned for Less Jail Time — And Won :
In addition to the small number of close races on Tuesday, several African-American prosecutors sailed to victory after mounting upsets in party primaries earlier this year. . . Many of these challengers received support from liberal billionaire George Soros, who joined with racial justice groups in an effort to increase diversity among the nearly 2,500 prosecutors who are elected to office, four out of five of whom are white men.
Yesterday, George Soros wrote an editorial in The New York Times: George Soros: When Hate Surges. Soros cited facts to fight the hate:
Contrary to Mr. Trump’s claims, immigrants commit significantly less crime than native-born citizens. This has been borne out in study after study, using a wide range of methodologies, dating back decades. According to the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, the percentage of the population that is foreign-born grew to 13.1 percent from 7.9 percent between 1990 and 2013. F.B.I. data shows that the violent crime rate dropped 48 percent during that time and today remains near historic lows. A recent study by the Journal on Ethnicity in Criminal Justice shows that immigrants actually drive down crime rates in the neighborhoods where they live.
But targeting immigrants and minorities with false and prejudicial rhetoric, as Mr. Trump has done during the campaign and in the early weeks of his presidency, has spurred a surge in hate acts against them.
Soros also acted:
As hate incidents surged after the election last fall, I announced a $10 million investment to provide legal and social services to victims of hate crimes, to encourage local organizations across the country to do the same and to propose improvements and new ideas. This week we opened our Hate Incident Database to monitor the scope and depth of hate incidents across the country.
Having survived the Nazi persecution of Jews in Hungary, I escaped from Soviet occupation at age 17 and made my way first to Britain and then to America. This is not the America that attracted me. I have seen the damage done when societies succumb to the fear of the “other.” And I will do all I can to help preserve the openness, inclusiveness and diversity that represent our greatest strength.
Demonizing immigrants weakens our country. Fighting against hate crimes makes us grow stronger together.
Soros, this sane, wealthy, successful businessman, terrifies the right. Soros is the latest target of the RW hate machine — just see what they’re saying on a Google News search of his name. I hope that the Democratic party stands up for him.