After a week on the job, Biden’s team is still trying to locate upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — a mystery that has hampered plans to speed up the national vaccination effort. They're searching for new ways to boost production of a vaccine stockpile that they've discovered is mostly empty. And they're nervously eyeing a series of new Covid-19 strains that threaten to derail the response.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel peace prize for the way its call for systemic change has spread around the world.

In his nomination papers, the Norwegian MP Petter Eide said the movement had forced countries outside the US to grapple with racism within their own societies.

“I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality,” Eide said. “Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice.

“They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness about racial injustice.”

The threshold factor for determining how likely a state is to flip from red to blue is the composition of the population and the demographic trends of that population. Largely overlooked in the celebration of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory was the fact that he got 47 percent of the vote in Georgia although he had removed staff from the state and stopped advertising there. Obama lost the Peach State by 205,000 votes, and there were nearly 1 million people of color who were eligible to vote but didn’t cast ballots. You didn’t have to be great at math to see that increasing the number of voters of color was the path to making major change in Georgia.

Texas at the start of this decade is actually even more promising than Georgia was at the start of the last decade. The Lone Star State has the second-largest pool of nonvoting people of color of any state in the country (second only to already-blue California), and the number of potential voters of color far exceeds the margin of difference in statewide elections. Joe Biden lost Texas by 631,221 votes, and despite the record turnout on both sides, 4.5 million eligible people of color still did not vote, according to exit polls and Census data. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid by 215,000 votes in an election in which 5.4 million people of color didn’t cast ballots. The still-untapped potential in Texas is enormous, which is exactly why the conservatives work so hard to suppress the vote there.

Texas is blessed to have Level 5 Leaders as well. Two of the key ones are Michelle Tremillo and Brianna Brown, the executive director and deputy director of the Texas Organizing Project. The fact that you probably haven’t heard of them is actually a testament to their Level 5 humility. Like Stacey, they are maniacally focused on “doing the work,” and have built TOP into a relentless and effective civic engagement machine that has helped tip electoral outcomes in cities and counties across the state. As graduates of elite universities, they each could have had far more lucrative and prestigious professional careers, but they have made meaningful life decisions to focus their energies and talents on the cause of transforming Texas.

Texas has so many Mexican Americans and African Americans (a combined 53 percent of the state’s population) for a reason—the land there used to belong to Mexico and was annexed into the United States through war and bloodshed in the 1840s so that the residents of the state could continue to hold Black people in chattel slavery. Just as Abrams’s success is rooted in Georgia’s civil rights history, it is not inconsequential that Mexican-American and African-American daughters of Texas are leading an organization that is entrenched in and driving change.

O’Rourke May Run for Texas Governor
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) said he is considering a 2022 gubernatorial run, setting up a potential challenge against incumbent Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), The Hill reports.

Said O’Rourke: “It’s something I’m gonna think about.”