War, it's said, is God's way of teaching Americans world geography, and I'm pretty sure that I could not name three cities in either Vietnam or Iraq but for two wars fought in my lifetime.
Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon)
Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad
If you'll trust I didn't whip up those answers in the cyber ether, I'll confess that the number three was strategically selected. I think that Khe Sanh—
Had a brother at Khe Sanh
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there
He's all gone . . . .
—refers to a region, not a town, so yeah, three's my limit. Just thought of Fallujah, but had to look up how to spell it: maybe only counts if the test is oral.
Consuming political journalism during an election season, on the other hand, can be a primer in the geography of our own country. For example, I've been reading about the remarkable voter turnout in Texas, where the number of ballots cast in the recently concluded early voting period surpassed the total votes cast in any previous statewide election. Tuesday's voters will only pad the record. Readers of tea leaves are naturally curious about where in the state early voting has been especially heavy, and what this might portend. The usual unit of comparison is the county: that is, ballots cast in a particular county in the 2016 presidential election compared to the number of presidential ballots cast in the same county so far this year. One therefore comes across lists such as this, showing counties with the largest percentage increase (so far):
Hays +20%
Montgomery +18%
Williamson +15%
Denton +14%
Comal +14%
Collin +12%
Fort Bend +11%
Rockwall +6%
Travis +6%
Guadalupe +5%
Nice, but means nothing unless you know where these counties are and what they're like politically. I won't bore you with every detail uncovered in my google searches, but only one county on the list, Travis, is home to a major Texas city, Austin. High turnout there is good news for Biden and M.J. Hegar as Austin is overwhelmingly Democratic: Clinton beat Trump in Travis County by 66 to 27 percent and netted over 180,000 votes. Most of the others are part of a big city metro and are a more mixed bag politically, but what they have in common is large, growing populations that are trending Democratic. In this respect, they resemble the big cities they abut. Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties sandwich Harris, which is home to Houston. In 2012, Obama beat Romney in Harris County by 585 votes and lost the state by about 1.2 million; four years later, when Trump was the Republican candidate, Clinton won the county by 161,959 and lost the state by around 800,000; two years after that, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, challenging incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz, carried Harris County by 201,298 and lost the state by about 215,000. What will happen in 2020?
We'll find out in a few days, but you can see, perhaps, why the Republican party in Texas has asked a federal judge to throw out about 127,000 early votes cast in Harris County. The complaint doesn't allege that the voters did anything wrong. Plaintiffs just object to the method, "drive thru voting," the plan for which had been announced well in advance. The Republicans waited, however, till 127,000 people had voted that way before discovering . . . nothing, really, the voting all came off according to the publicized plan. But it was looking as if the election might be pretty close and they know who appointed the judges. It's voter suppression, straight-up: they hardly bother denying it anymore.
I see I've strayed from my geographical theme!
UPDATE: This afternoon (Nov. 2) the judge, Andrew Hanen, a W Bush appointee with a reputation for being a bit of a conservative crank, told Plaintiff (Republicans): "Get out of here! It's the day before the party, you're late, and you have no standing." (I paraphrase.) The Texas Supreme Court had already said the same thing about the virtually identical state case. So the ballots will be counted (although Hanen also said they should be separated so that, in the event of more litigation, everyone will know which ones they are.)
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