Author: Sherry Sylvester

New York City hauled the 884-pound statue of Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall recently because city leaders said the statue “shouldn’t exist” and that Jefferson should be forgotten. I can understand New York progressives forgetting that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence but it is surprising that they don’t remember that this Founding Father also brokered the deal that made New York City the financial capital of the nation. Didn’t they see Hamilton?

New York City does dumb things like this routinely and I bet most New Yorkers have just about had enough of it. I lived in New York City in another lifetime and I have seen this movie before. Even the names of some of the characters are the same.

In the 1980’s New York City was overrun with crime—murder, robbery, and drugs. The filthy streets stank, the city was broke—taxes were high and services were non-existent.

I came to New York City as a left-wing liberal, what we would call a progressive today, and the people running the city were people I knew and agreed with.

Mario Cuomo, father to former Gov. Andrew and infamous former CNN Host Chris, was governor. The Democratic majority of voters who elected him were very upset about all the crime. To demonstrate that he wasn’t a bleeding heart, Cuomo imposed mandatory sentences for drug users. His move didn’t solve the drug problem, but it did fill up the prisons, so he built a lot of new prisons all over the state. Most of them were many hours from New York City, making it virtually impossible for families to visit incarcerated family members. Cutting off family connections made rehabilitation almost impossible.

I started working for a liberal prison reform group shortly after I arrived in New York City and I soon got a call from the New York Times asking for a comment on Cuomo’s criminal justice policies. I told the newspaper Cuomo’s mandatory sentencing and prison policies were costing the state and the city millions and not making a dent in the crime problem.

By the time I got back to my office, it was reported to me that then-Gov. Cuomo had called the chairman of the board of the group I worked for and asked him “who the f***” I thought I was.”

My colleagues just shrugged and apologized—to the governor, not to me. I was pulled aside and told bluntly that Gov. Cuomo was a bully and it was not wise to cross him.

Sound familiar?

Long-time New York City Mayor Ed Koch, was popular but his tirades and narcissism—including his on-going tabloid war with Donald Trump—had gotten old for most New Yorkers. The City’s problems—the crime, the taxes, the waste and the mismanagement—had become chronic. People were exhausted by it.

David Dinkins was a low-energy politician and there was no evidence that he had a plan to change things, but he was somebody new and that was enough to convince people he represented change. At a minimum, he was calm and soft-spoken and I knew he would lower the noise level in City Hall, so I went to work on his campaign. After Dinkins beat Koch, I took a job in his administration.

But a change in tone wasn’t enough. New York City only got worse. In addition to bankruptcy, the City was experiencing four simultaneous epidemics—AIDS, low-birthweight babies, asthma and tuberculosis. Crime and homelessness skyrocketed, hospitals and public schools were both failing, the city bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and New Yorkers were walking the streets every day barraged by homeless people who were living on streets littered with garbage bags.

Finally, it got so bad that the unthinkable happened—New York City elected a Republican mayor. Then as now, there were barely enough registered Republicans in New York City to make a blip on a chart, but Rudy Giuliani, the GOP U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, defeated Dinkins’ re-election bid.

New Yorkers had finally had enough and they were tired of hearing Dinkins and Cuomo say that they only way things could get better would be higher taxes and a massive federal bailout.

Like every New Yorker, I noticed a difference almost immediately after Giuliani took office. The garbage was picked up and street crime dramatically declined. He privatized the hospitals (which had been city owned) and they got the epidemics under control. You could walk down the street without being accosted by panhandlers. Police reforms finally began without creating a union war. Zero-tolerance policies were controversial, but they worked.

Giuliani’s transformation of the city changed a generation of New Yorkers. They were still Democrats but they didn’t elect another Democrat to lead the city until the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, took office.

I am sure it is not lost on older New Yorkers that the same problems they had with Koch and Dinkins returned with de Blasio. That’s undoubtedly why they rejected progressive mayoral candidates this fall and instead elected a retired police officer, Eric Adams.

It wasn’t lost on me either. People often ask me how I became a movement conservative after years working as a progressive Democrat. While there was never a “road to Damascus” moment, seeing the turnaround that occurred in New York City under conservative leadership created some huge cracks in my liberal ideology.

When I see so many great American cities today, like San Francisco and Austin, that are being ruined by liberal policies, I recall what happened in New York and it gives me hope.

When the failure of left-wing progressive policies are in your face everyday—when they’ve wasted your tax dollars, ruined your downtown, mismanaged services, and told you to do stupid things like forget Thomas Jefferson, ultimately voters who will finally say “enough!” We’re beginning to see some changes across the country and I am betting we are going to see more.

TPPF is proud to introduce 9^th & Congress, a newsletter from our new Distinguished Senior Fellow, Sherry Sylvester.

Sherry has spent decades working at the nexus of public policy and politics. She began as a decidedly left-leaning Democrat on the East Coast, but years of working closely with the left-wing pushed her to the right. After two decades in Texas, she is a committed conservative and a data-driven operative ready to fight to Keep Texas Texan — a beacon of freedom and liberty, a center of innovation, and a major force in the global economy. Coming off a 17-year stint working around the Texas Capitol, including 7 years as Senior Advisor to Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Sherry is currently helming TPPF’s Keeping Texas Texan campaign and will be sharing what she sees from her current vantage point at 9^th & Congress.

Shortly after public poll results were released last week that a majority of Texans support Senate Bill 1, the fair election legislation, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in a federal court challenging the law. Apparently, DOJ believes their mission is to protect Texans from legislation that most of them say they want.

Not that poll results showing broad support for SB 1 wasn’t big news. This headline screamed across my hometown paper in San Antonio last week and also showed up in Houston.

The implications were immediate.

If a poll conducted by the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston and the Barbara Jordan – Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University showed that most Texans support the Senate Bill 1 — the Election Reform Legislation that passed in the second special session this year, that means the Democrats who walked off the Texas House floor in June and shut down the Texas legislature were not speaking for the majority of Texans, as they insisted. They weren’t even speaking for a good chunk of the people who elected them. Instead, they were speaking for a minority of the minority.

The “Most Texans Support Election Reform” headline was like headlines we have become accustomed to seeing the day after November elections when Texans have been told for months that the conservatives who are governing the state are so unpopular that they will be voted out of office — the House will flip — the Congressional delegation will be replaced.

It never happens. Apparently, those who actually believe it will happen have a huge misunderstanding of who the people of Texas are.

Going beyond specific issues like support for the Election Reform Bill or the long-standing track record of Texans electing conservatives to run the state, there’s much more to know about the 29 million Texans whose families have either been here for hundreds of years as well as those who just unpacked their U-Haul from California last week.

One thing we know from focus groups and other available data is that Texans – regardless of their age, race, ethnicity, or political ideology – are proud of being Texan. Most say that the thing they are proud of is that our state is a place that does things right – the cost of living is low, jobs are plentiful, families flourish here. Texans are proud of our state’s reputation for independence – as well as the deep roots of our diverse population. We value both freedom and faith and, for the most part, we like each other.

Which is why the polling results were not surprising – or they shouldn’t have been. Despite the lawsuits and media outrage when it became law, 85% of Texans believe it is perfectly appropriate to be asked to show a photo ID before you cast a ballot. Three-fourths of Anglos, 64% of Latinos, and 63% of African Americans also believe that public high school and middle school students should only compete in sports associated with their biological sex. And when it comes to elections, majorities support most every provision included in the elections reforms legislation – 82% agreed that ballot harvesting, which has a long, ugly history in Texas, should be made a felony and 74% support providing your driver’s license number on your mail-in ballot. Even the most controversial provision on the reforms – prohibiting drive-through voting – is supported by 59% of Texans who understand that voting requires the privacy of a voting booth. It can’t be done in a car full of people.

Headlines like “Most Texans Support Election Law” demonstrate a big gap between who Texans are and who the left and the media think they are. The conservative majority values life and liberty, they embrace opportunity and diversity – in short, they want to Keep Texas Texan. No one should be surprised that people with those values would want to ensure that every election is fair and honest to keep the state on the right track. The headline and polling results tell us something else the people of Texas value – common sense.

A Los Angeles Times reporter wrote earlier this month that the media should stop even trying to cover both sides of political issues — since the conservative side is just wrong. She tells her fellow journalists to stop reporting what she calls “both-siderism.”

The idea of only reporting one-side of a political debate is not new on the left. Al Gore said the same thing years ago when he urged the media to stop reporting on anyone who did not agree with his climate change theories. They complied.

Here in Texas, covering the conservative perspective of the news — “both-siderism” — ended in the media years ago. In what appears to be an effort to counter news of Texas’ persistent success based on conservative policies, the Texas media dishes out daily news stories that portray the Lone Star State as a miserable backward place held captive by extremist leaders. The distortion is mind-boggling, starting with the Texas media coverage of what is going on at the southern border.

There have been almost no Texas news reports of the problems of South Texans whose safety is threatened and whose hospitals and schools and homes are overrun with migrants who have crossed the border illegally. Instead, although the border is the No. 1 concern of Texans, the “one-sider” press portrays leaders and legislators who are working to secure the border as extremists or even racist.

Virtually every poll shows that after illegal immigration, Texans are concerned about their property taxes — but there are almost no news reports of Texans telling their stories of how high property taxes affect their lives and their businesses.  Instead, the Texas press has pushed out hundreds of stories on why local governments need more property tax revenue. “One-sider” media portray legislators who advocate for property tax reform as anti-local government, not pro-tax payer.

There has also been no Texas coverage of what critical race theory actually is and why parents are concerned about it. During the regular legislative session, lawmakers advocating for parents read aloud from actual books in Texas schools that encouraged children to look at each other in terms of color, not character. The books were not reported. Throughout the debate, lawmakers repeatedly noted that topics including slavery, the Underground Railroad, the impact of Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many other issues dealing with race in Texas are already part of the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) and thus must be included in the Texas public school curriculum. But the “one-sider” press continue to report that opponents of critical race theory want to “whitewash” our history, stop teaching about slavery and cover-up our past.

Half the country and a majority of Texans oppose abortion, but the “one-sider” press uses Orwellian terms like “choice” and “abortion rights” and portrays those who fight against American abortion laws — which permits some of the latest term abortions in the world — as extremist. They use the same trick with what they call “transgender rights,” ignoring the fact that this is a women’s rights issue in most of the western world and many feminists see it as an attack on our hard-earned rights as women.

The election reforms finally passed in Texas’ special session had the support of a majority of Texans in both parties, as well as most African-Americans and Hispanics. The Texas media treated those reforms as some kind of racist plot.

The majority of Texans know “one-sider” news when they see it and they have given the Texas media a giant thumbs down. A recent Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll found that less than 20% of Texas Republicans watch local TV news and only 5% say they read their local newspaper. The reality of our lives in Texas disputes those lies.

More than 1,000 people move to Texas every day — and we all know why. The Texas economy was one of the first to recover after the pandemic and we continue to be the job creating engine for the entire country. We have the 9th largest economy in the world and our oil and gas industry almost single-handedly made the U.S. energy independent before Biden shut them down.

The national press can stop covering both sides of the political debate — most have already — but what we have found out about “one-sider” media in Texas is that reality — and truth — will still triumph.

When the Census 2020 numbers were finally released late last month, Texas Democrats jubilantly joined the national press in celebrating that the number of white people in the U.S. had declined over the last decade — 8.6% nationally and 5.3% in Texas. Predicting the data would make a huge impact on the redistricting in Texas, some gushed that Republicans must face the “demographic reality that the state is growing in ways that put the party’s [GOP] stranglehold in question.”

Now that the maps have been released, the left is screaming that they have been robbed because there are no new Hispanic or Black opportunity districts—a tough blow for identity-politics sycophants. The irony is that these so-called “opportunity” districts actually isolate minority candidates, depriving them of the opportunity to demonstrate their appeal to a broad base of Texans which would give them a springboard for a run for statewide office—as we are seeing this cycle with state Rep. James White, R-Hillister.

Analysts are still looking at what the racial and ethnic data in the 2020 census means, since the census questions changed in 2020. Over the last decade, we have also begun to identify ourselves differently. Six times as many Texans described themselves as “mixed” race and “other” on the 2020 census than did so in 2010.

But whether there are more or fewer white people in Texas won’t make much difference to the political prospects of the left. It has been betting on its demographic ship to come in for decades, but each time it issues a “Blue Wave” warning, it fails to make landfall.

The left keeps losing and it doesn’t have a clue why.

A post-2020 election autopsy report leaked last year concluded that “…there was a pronounced differential turnout effect among Latino voters in Texas that hurt Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.” The report also found that “Republicans did a better job of getting their African-American voters out than Democrats did.”

What most Texans know about liberals is that they strongly support abortion and they oppose gun rights. Because the majority of Texans are on the other side of those issues, the left’s candidates start out with two strikes against them. Add in their attack on the Texas oil and gas industry—the source of millions of jobs in Texas including many worked by Hispanics—and they are in a bigger hole. That’s one reason they took such a beating in South Texas in 2020.

Then there’s the left’s disdain for businesses, which ultimately is an attack on every Texas business owner, both large and small, regardless of race. Texans know our state is the nation’s job creator because of low taxes and reasonable regulations, which the left consistently vows to reverse.

As if that isn’t enough, remember that a majority of Texans also support school choice, ending taxpayer funded lobbying, and lowering property taxes. Majorities don’t want boys playing on girls’ sports teams and they don’t want their kids to be taught racial division in public schools. It makes no sense to most Texans—regardless of what color they are.

Despite opposing virtually everything most Texans support, the left continues to insist that somehow it is being robbed. But the right to draw the maps was won in the 2020 election—in which the left was soundly defeated. As for gerrymandering, it began in Massachusetts in 1812 and has been used in every election since. It wasn’t invented by Texas conservatives.

Census 2020 won’t bail out the left in Texas. Behind all the hoopla, elections are always about policies and ideas—and all of the left’s are bad.