The latest PPP poll has David Dewhurst still leading the Senate race at 36%, but that’s down five points since their last poll, while Cruz is up 6 points at 18%. Leppert is a distant third at 7% and Craig James comes in at 4%.
Most surprising piece of data: 39% of Dewhurst supporters identify with the Tea Party.
Caveats: The margin of error is +/-4.2%, and PPP is a left-leaning polling company. Still, even at twice Cruz’s support, the Dewhurst campaign can’t be happy with the overall trends…
David Dewhurst only raised $1.54 Million from donors in Q4.
While far from chicken-feed, those numbers seem really disappointing to me, especially given that he pulled in $2.64 million in donor contributions in Q3. Those are just donor numbers, and we don’t know much of Dewhurst’s own considerable wealth he tossed in until he tells us, or his official FEC numbers go up (there’s usually a significant lag between the campaign announcement and the FEC putting the numbers up).
As the establishment candidate and presumptive favorite, Dewhurst should be running away in the fundraising race. He’s not.
I was busy with a family even over the weekend, so I haven’t had a chance to sit down and watch the debate all the way through. But I’ll go ahead and put it up for others to take a gander at (Hat tip: The Right Side of Austin). Be aware that the debate doesn’t actually start until over an hour into the video. I’ve heard of long intros, but that’s ridiculous…
I’ll save my own comments until I get a chance to watch the whole video.
Here’s a live blog of the debate.
The Cruz campaign sent out a list of links, and rather than link all of them and claim them as my own, I’ll just direct you thataway.
One link they didn’t send out was this review over at Big Jolly Politics, where he gave James, Addison and Dewhurst As, Cruz a B, and Leppert a C.
Kathleen McKinney ranked it Cruz first, James second, and Leppert last (“Not a lot of flash there”), though her overall impressions of all were positive.
In other Senate race news:
I’ve been busy hosting a family even this weekend, so I haven’t been able to do a post on Thursday’s debate. But I wanted to point out the results of the straw poll at Saddle Up Houston (which, with 3,321 voters, had a lot more attendees than I suspected).
Keep in mind all the usual caveats that apply to straw polls: They don’t tend to mean a lot when it comes to real voting.
Ron Paul: 54.4%
Rick Santorum: 15.6%
Rick Perry: 13.3%
Newt Gingrich: 11.9%
Mitt Romney: 4.2%
Jon Huntsman: 0.5%
Charles “Buddy” Roemer: 0.0% (Jeeze, how do you not manage to snag even .1% of the vote?)
That’s an excellent showing for Ron Paul, but Paul has consistently proven himself much more adept at winning straw polls than primaries. Caveats aside, it’s a bad showing for Rick Perry (if you can’t win a straw poll in your own state, where can you win it?) and Mitt Romney (the frontrunner should get more than 4.2% of the vote, even against two favorite sons).
Ted Cruz: 49.1%
Craig James: 12.9%
Glenn Addison: 12.0%
Tom Leppert: 9.1%
Lela Pittenger: 9.1%
David Dewhurst: 7.1%
Charles Holcomb: 0.3%
“Doc Joe” Agris: 0.3%
Curt Cleaver: 0.0%
Ben Gambini: 0.0%
That’s good news for Ted Cruz, Craig James and Glenn Addison, and bad news for David Dewhurst. And even though Tom Leppert outpointed Dewhurst, he can’t feel good at merely tying Lela Pittenger, who has neither campaigned as much as him, nor spent 1/1000th of what he has. (Also, Doc Agris can’t feel good about putting up such a paltry total in his own back yard.) Gambini getting 0% isn’t a surprise, since he’s been the invisible man. Cleaver getting 0% is a bit more surprising, since he’s had at least the semblance of a campaign.
But again, these results don’t mean much, as I seriously doubt we’re going to see Craig James battle Glenn Addison for a spot in the runoff against Cruz. They do highlight an enthusiasm gap between Cruz and Dewhurst, but just how much of that gap will translate into votes remains to be seen. I don’t think we’ll get a glimpse of how the race is shaping up in the minds of actual primary voters until we see polls from some of the established polling companies like Gallup, Zogby and Rasmussen.
France’s credit rating, that is. “Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s credit rating, French TV reported Friday, while several euro zone countries face the same fate later in the day, according to reports.” Maybe because that “strict” 2012 budget France passed still had a budget deficit of 4.5% of GDP, despite the EU having a “limit” (in much the same way the Professional Wrestling has a “limit” on fouls) of 3.0%.
That would be the second largest economy in the Eurozone behind Germany, and the fifth largest in the world.
And the U.S. Federal Government’s 2012 budget deficit is running at about 6.9% of GDP…
I had a maid service come clean my house in advance of a family event I’m hosting this weekend. It’s amazing the difference between “Bachelor Clean” and “Clean Clean.” It’s almost as big as the difference between “Obama Smart” and “Actually Smart”…
If we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things.
(Hat tip: Slashdot)
Something to show those who think the rising national debt is no big deal…
I expect the campaigns to start announcing Q4 fundraising results any day now, and I just sent off a list of interview questions to the Craig James campaign today. So here’s one final news roundup of the senate race before an expected avalanche of news.
Looking at James’ Twitter feed, he seems to have done a number of radio shows.
The race to a Euro-crackup seems to have slowed down to merely a jaunty saunter this week. Maybe once everyone made it to the New Year without a sovereign default, the Eurocrats might have breathed a sigh, confident that there’s still a few miles yet before they went over the falls…
Germany could create a parallel currency—a new D-Mark, pegged at 1.0 to the euro. The German government would guarantee that holders of German government bonds could convert euro securities to new-D-mark instruments on a one-to-one basis up to some designated date, perhaps two years in the future. Private German contracts expressed in euros would switch to new-D-mark claims over the same period. The transition would likely feature a period in which the euro and new D-mark circulate as parallel currencies.
Other countries could follow a path toward reintroduction of their own currencies over a two-year period. For example, Italy could have a new lira at 1.0 to the euro. If all the euro-zone countries followed this course, the vanishing of the euro currency in 2014 would come to resemble the disappearance of the 11 separate European moneys in 2001.
Of course, this would mean that any bonds from the PIIGS with a maturity date more than two years in the future would trade at a heavy discount, but that’s far preferable to the looming Euro crash. But a bigger problem to this proposal actually being implemented is that it reverses the drive to centralize European bureaucracy, and Eurocrats will never stand for that.
(Hat tips: Insta, Ace (most of the Greek stories), and Sundry.)
This morning former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee endorsed David Dewhurst’s Senate campaign.
That’s a very good pickup for Dewhurst, and along with his previous Pro-Life endorsements, it shows that he’s doing better than expected among social conservatives.
In his endorsement, Huckabee said that “Lt. Gov. Dewhurst is a strong fiscal conservative, with a record to show for it,” However, Huckabee is not exactly known as a small government conservative. As far as I can tell, Dewhurst has yet to pick up any significant small government/budget cutting/Tea Party endorsements, which thus far Ted Cruz has monopolized (as well as picking up some social conservative endorsements of his own).
The MSM loves to play up the economic-conservatives-vs.-social-conservatives angle (primarily because they hate both, and intramural GOP brawls help increased the chances of their favored liberal candidates), but the most successful conservative politicians (Ronald Reagan most conspicuously) have been fusionists that embodied policies that appealed to both. Texas voters are socially conservative, but they also love low taxes and small government. Whoever wins the GOP nomination will have to appeal to both groups.