Daniel Miller is back behind the microphone after a month off the air, and he uses this Late Night Coffee Talk to push back on the wishful thinking that keeps landing in his inbox. The petition to put TEXIT on the March 2024 primary ballot runs 180 days and closes December 1, and he is blunt about how these campaigns actually work. Roughly 80 percent of signatures on a statewide effort arrive in the final two months, which is why the TNM does not publish running totals early. Doing so only hands the opposition a target and saps the morale of supporters who do back-of-the-envelope math and wrongly conclude the goal is unreachable.
He spends most of the hour dismantling two recurring fantasies. The first is the myth of the one-email solution, the idea that a single blast to the full list would produce a hundred thousand signatures. Miller notes the TNM has already sent twelve emails and run a peer-to-peer texting pass, and people still open, read, and decline to sign. With the average statewide signature costing more than twelve dollars and a paid firm having quoted eight hundred thousand dollars last cycle, the only realistic path is an army of certified petition circulators and volunteers doing retail work. Miller says he personally has over 800 signatures.
The second fantasy is the TEXIT party. Miller explains why Texas election law and a first-past-the-post system make a new party a trap, not a shortcut, and why the UKIP and Brexit comparison people cite actually proves his point. UKIP won the third-highest vote total in the 2015 UK general election and elected zero members to Parliament, succeeding only as a pressure group that moved public opinion. The TNM, he argues, is already a more effective pressure group, and the smarter play is connecting pro-TEXIT voters with candidates who have signed the Texas First Pledge.
Questions answered in this episode
- Why won’t the TNM just send one email to its whole list to collect the signatures it needs?
- Why does the campaign refuse to publish signature totals until it is well underway?
- What can the TEXIT movement actually learn from the so-called failure of Brexit, and why does Miller say Brexit is not a failure?
- Why won’t the TNM form a TEXIT political party, and why does the case against one keep getting worse?
- How do proportional representation and first-past-the-post differ, and why does that difference doom a minority party in Texas?
- What organizational and ballot-access hurdles, including the roughly 81,000 precinct-participant threshold, would a new party have to clear?
- What happens after December 1, and how do the Resolution Revolution and Chair the Vote campaigns fit in?
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