The Absent Uncle: Primaried
Going into this last weekend of the month and the last before Texas has its Primary Election (first in the nation along with North Carolina) and will end the frenzy of television ads, junk mail, and “official advice” on the candidates, I truly can’t wait until Wednesday morning when the political news will turn to the political experts explaining what happened at the polls and we get some amount of relief until May when the second round of the primary season (run-off Election day) will be held.
You South Dakotans will have your chance at the polls in May and June to get your fill of the misinformation, attacks, and general political mayhem to get candidates in place for the main event in November.
My wife and I apply yearly for mail-in ballots, granted in Texas for a very few specific reasons, age being one of them. This year the mail-in ballot was certainly valuable because of the length of the ballot, the number of candidates for the offices and the lack of non-partisan information that can be used to determine who should get your vote.
Unlike the Brandon Valley Journal, we don’t have a local publication that attempts to put together information on the local races. No list of standard questions to be asked in a straight-forward fashion on local issues and asking the candidates stance on each of them.
If all you have to go on is the mailers and TV ads you would be sadly under-informed and probably greatly mislead.
It used to be just statewide or national candidates who used this style of electioneering, but now here in Texas even the local races are filled with rancor, deliberate misinterpretation of past records, and sensationalism.
If this Primary election is a sample of what to expect come this September/October leading up to the first Tuesday in November, it will be an unforgettable bewildering doozy of an election.
As I mentioned earlier, we voted early with our mail in ballots. I’ve heard or seen nothing that would have changed my ballot with all this information thrown our way. I am still smarting from the last-minute congressional re-districting that affected our neighborhood in a huge way. Suddenly, we were added to a congressional district that is totally on the opposite side of Houston, almost 50 miles to our east.
It doubled our amount of information for that race, as even the candidates couldn’t sort out who their constituents were.
We were all ‘Primaried.’
