The Vox article is about a Silicon Valley group analyzing how to best spend their money to support candidates. They came to the conclusion that spending in the last two weeks had the most impact and set out to do just that in support of Biden.
Included in the article was this gem regarding Texas and our US Senate race.
A " 'confidential' four-page memo circulated to major donors last week and obtained by Recode, Future Forward and four other Democratic outside groups — Senate Majority PAC, the Strategic Victory Fund, Way to Win, and Mind the Gap — planned $28 million in advertising to boost MJ Hegar, the Democrat challenging Texas Sen. John Cornyn in an uphill race. $10 million of that money was expected to come from a Senate Majority PAC, according to the memo, while another $18 million needed to be raised as of last week for the groups to pull the trigger.
“Based on an extensive analysis undertaken by Future Forward PAC and Senate Majority PAC (SMP), we believe that Democrats have a plausible chance to flip the TX Senate seat with a major financial investment in the race over the next week,” the groups wrote to donors last week. “We can push the odds of victory up significantly—from 23% to 35-55%—by blitzing the airwaves in the final two weeks.”
It is not clear to me that they in fact raised the money to place the ads from this article. The entire article is worth a read regarding how they evaluated ads and placement.
$28 million is a significant ad buy even in a very expensive state to advertise in.
Free Vox article
Austin Travis County Early Voting
Here are tonight's early voting numbers from Austin Travis county. We have 97% of the eligible population registered to vote this year a total of 855,175 people.
As of tonight, day 8 of 18, the total early in person and mail in votes cast is 308,718 which is 36.10% turnout.
39% of Travis county registered voters are under 35 yoa (25%, 14% under 25 yoa). There are 2 locations open on the University of Texas campus and a little over 11,300 people had voted there as of this evening.
We traditionally vote early with only about 14% of the vote being cast on election day. In 2016 our total turnout was 65% with HC winning 66% of our votes coming out of Travis county with a 181,051 margin. Beto got 74% in 2018.
I hope we increase that margin to 250,000 in 2020.
GOTV