What Do Richardson and Gilmer Have in Common?

It takes about two hours of driving on I-20 into east Texas to get from Richardson to Gilmer. What do they have in common? At first glance, maybe nothing. Taking a closer look, maybe a lot.

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District 32 is Richardson's district. It's my district. Or was. Gilmer, Texas, now has first dibs on the district representative. Gilmer is in Upshur County. Before this election, I can't say I had ever heard of Gilmer, Texas, or Upshur County. (That's on me, I know. My bad.) The new District 32 stretches east, almost to the Louisiana border. Gilmer is just 35 miles from Louisiana, but 130 miles from Richardson. TX-32 was sliced and diced with precision, replacing enough voters in old TX-32 with safe conservative voters to ensure GOP representation in Congress.

The "Dallas Observer" did some traditional "man-on-the-street" interviews of voters, asking how they feel about sharing the newly-drawn district. That's what's called lazy journalism. You know what people are going to say before you read the article. You'll hear about the divide between red and blue cities or between urban and rural communities. You may read that those divides are what are going to define the Congressional election in District 32.

I wasn't interviewed but you can predict what I think about gerrymandering. It's politicians choosing their voters instead of the way it ought to be, voters choosing their politicians. But if that's all I had to say, you can skip over this blog post as quickly as you can skip over the Dallas Observer article. I'm going to tell you, not what divides Richardson and Gilmer, but what unites them.

The politicians want to make the next election all about Trump. But voters already know all about Trump. Voters are either in the cult or outside the cult. That's not going to change. So, instead, I'm going to tell candidates that they need to ignore Trump and run against the billionaires. Against all the AI tech bro billionaires building data centers. That's where you can find common ground between voters in Richardson and voters in Gilmer. That's where you can build a winning coalition between Richardson and Gilmer.

Subscribers to "The Gilmer Mirror" care about what's happening when data centers come to town. Their newspaper is watching. In a recent article, they wrote, "While the Dallas-Fort Worth 'Silicon Prairie' has traditionally seen the most development, several massive 'hyperscale' projects have recently broken ground or been announced in more rural parts of the region." ("Data center activity in Northeast Texas" — The GIlmer Mirror). East Texas is already nursing a grudge against Dallas-Fort Worth for siphoning all their water. AI driving up electric rates is not a winning issue in east Texas, either.

How is AI going over with the young, urban voters? The fear for them is more than just growing demand for water and electricity. It's the demolition of jobs. "Fox Business Network" is covering stories like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting booed at a university commencement address when he talked about the growth of artificial intelligence ("Eric Schmidt met with boos"). That's Fox telling voters that. Believe them.

Eric Schmidt. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. Every last billionaire widening the wealth gap. Make them the incumbents in this election, because they are calling the shots. Make it look like all of them are on the ballot. Make common cause between Richardson voters and Gilmer voters. Because they have a lot more in common in this election than lazy journalism would have you think.

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"District stretches east,
Close to Louisiana.
Find the common ground."
—h/t ChatGPT