Grab a cup of coffee. This is going to be a lengthy report.
Congrats To Our Volunteer of the Year
Although I announced this on the previous Nation Builder meeting, I wanted to give a proper “hat tip” to our 2019 Volunteer of the Year, Karl Gleim. Karl, who is our Bexar County Coordinator, blew it out of the box in 2019 by personally collecting over 400 support declarations.
If you want to get in the race for 2020, be sure to head over to the Action Center and start connecting with your fellow Texans today.
New Volunteer Center
As part of our ongoing expansion of the TNM website and following through on our commitment to recruit volunteers and expand the National Leadership Team, we have overhauled the Volunteer page.
Located at the same address (https://tnm.me/volunteer), you can volunteer specifically to help us connect with supporters in your community, apply for specific open positions on the team, or let us know if you have skills that you’d like to use to advance our mission.
We’ve started posting specific open positions with 4 that are open immediately – Business Development Coordinator, Content Writer, Digital Community Manager, and Director of International Engagement. These are in addition to the many open County Coordinator positions throughout Texas. We will be posting many more in the coming weeks and will notify you when new opportunities open up.
I encourage you to visit the page and get in the fight. The Texas Revolution was won be a volunteer army. It will take a new Texian Army to win our independence this time around.
Welcome To Our Newest Member of the National Leadership Team
I want to welcome the newest member of our National Leadership Team, Brent Gleason. Brent is a DFW-based attorney who will be joining us as our in-house General Counsel. He’s on fire for Texas independence and will be working on a whole basket of legal issues related, generally, to operating the TNM and, specifically, on issues related to our mission. I’m very excited to have him on the team.
TNM Votes 2020 Endorsements
Voting is closed and we’ll be announcing your endorsements to the public this week. Here is a list of who you have chosen by your votes:
* Claver Kamau-Imani (Texas House, District 138)
* Carl LeBlanc (County Commissioner, Orange County)
* Scott Robbins (Precinct Chairman, Montgomery County, Republican Party)
* Charles Garrett (Constable, Precinct 4, Smith County)
* Cody George (Sheriff, Fayette County)
* Gregory Gates (Sheriff, Parker County)
* Lawrence Allen (Texas House, District 26)
* Audrey Young (State Board of Education, District 8)
* Kellye SoRelle (Texas House, District 60)
* Robert Martin (County Commissioner, Hardin County)
Interestingly enough, we also had our first-ever tie vote between Rhonda Seth and Mitch Thames in Texas House District 25. It is a crowded race with 5 candidates running in the Republican Primary. Your votes have spoken and you said that either of these candidates would be preferred out of the entire field.
We’ve already received questions about General Election endorsements. I want to be very clear. This round of surveys and votes are for the Primary Elections ONLY. There are expressions of your preference in a particular party’s primary. Once the primaries are held, there will be another round that will include all candidates that will appear on the General Election ballot. That includes candidates from parties that nominated by caucus and independent candidates as well.
One more thing… If your favorite candidate was not on the TNM’s ballot, that means that they did not submit a survey. If we haven’t endorsed in their race, we are going to open up a window of opportunity for them to make their case directly to TNM supporters on our website. Be on the lookout for that news later this week.
Nation Builder Weekly Meetings
For those of you who regularly attend our online weekly Nation Builder meetings, I’m sure that you’ve noticed some issues. Unfortunately, we’ve been having some significant technical issues with Zoom’s webinar platform. We’ve got members who can’t register to attend, registrants who can’t connect when its time for the meeting to start, and issues with video and audio quality for those who do connect which prevent them from participating.
We’ve been working diligently with their technical support agents to pinpoint the specific cause of the issues so that we can get it corrected. However, we’re just not there yet.
Moving forward, this is how we’re going to handle it. I will be pre-recording the Nation Builder meetings and posting them on the Insider section of the website, still exclusively for members. In addition, we’re exploring a live video option on our YouTube channel that will be available to the public.
I believe that these meetings are vital and the feedback from those who have attended has been stellar. In short, we are committed to getting this right for you. Watch for additional news as we get this situation lined out.
Website Login Issues Fixed
We had a member report issues with accessing member exclusive content on the website. After some testing we were able to confirm that there was indeed an issue with directly access member-restricted links unless you were already logged in to the site. We worked overtime to get this fixed and have implemented a short-term fix. On your end, you will notice that it works. However, we’ve got some wrangling to do with the developers to get a long-term solution implemented. You should have no issues now access member content and that’s the best news.
This, however, has raised an issue that I feel needs to be addressed. We only found out about this because a member reported an issue. The fact is that if we don’t know there is an issue, we can’t address it. Please, if you come across any issues at all, communicate them to us.
Got Questions?
If you’ve got questions or need clarification on any of these issues, drop them in the comments below.
Let’s go win!
