I’ve been going through all 767 pages of David Dewhurst’s Q1 FEC report to see if anything leapt out at me. Honestly, this is really more of a sampler, since as the bank in the race, there’s just no end of Presidents, CEOs, Founders and Owners of various oil companies, insurance companies, banks, car dealerships, etc. donating to Dewhurst.
Some notable names among Dewhurst’s individual donors. Unless otherwise noted (or I screwed something up) these are current donations to date and are earmarked for the primary:
Retired Republican State Senator Kip Averitt gave $2,500.
Clayton Bennett, chairman of Dorchester Capital and chief owner of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team gave $2,500.
Frank Camp, founder of the liberal No Texas Teacher Left Behind, gave $1,000. The only other donation I can find on record from Mr. Camp went to Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak, who lost his 2010 Senate race to Republican incumbent Pat Toomey.
Phrma head John J. Castellani gave $1,000. Castellani is an example of what’s wrong with Washington these days, spewing money to swells on both sides of the aisle, including Republicans like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Mike Castle, and Democrats like Chris Dodd, Max Baucus, and Harry Reid. Oh, he also gave money to the “Every Republican is Crucial PAC.”
Noted heart surgeon Denton Cooley gave Dewhurst $600.
Houston philanthropy diva Carolyn Farb (who you can see with Dewhurst here) tossed in $250.
Former UT engineering department Dean Ernest F. Gloyna (who I did some temp work for some two decades ago) contributed $425.
Democrat-turned-Republican and current Texas Tech chancellor Kent Hance gave $2,500 (though he listed his current position as attorney with his own law firm, Hance Scarborough and Wright).
Ken Hicks, the New York/Connecticut-based CEO of Foot Locker, gave two donations of $2,500 each, and his (I’m assuming) wife Lucille gave $5,000, all marked for the primary, of which $2,500 (if I’m reading the form correctly) was refunded.
Tom Love, Frank Love, Greg Love, and Judy Love, all of Love’s Travel Stops of Oklahoma, each gave $2,500 for the primary and $2,500 for the general election.
Joseph A. McBride, owner of Austin gun store McBride’s Guns, gave $1,350.
Top Austin lobbyist Dean R. McWilliams gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds).
Harriet Miers, withdrawn Bush43 Supreme Court nominee, gave $2,500.
George P. Mitchell, oil and gas pioneer, gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds).
H. Ross Perot, Jr. gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds), and his wife Sarah tossed in another $2,500.
Retiring State Senator Florence Shapiro (who considered running for this seat herself) gave $2,500.
Former State Senator (and former Waco Mayor) David Sibley gave $3,500, of which $1,000 was transferred to the primary fund.
Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon/Mobile, gave $1,000.
Power lobbyist and Rick Perry capo Mike Toomey gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds), as did his wife.
Now a brief look at the corporate donors. I’m omitting the ones already announced on Dewhurst’s website that I’ve been including in the regular Senate race updates.
Bill Miller Bar-B-Q gave $1,000. (There are lots of legendary BBQ places in Texas. Bill Miller is not among them.)
Bass Brothers Enterprises Inc. PAC (operated by the wealthy Bass family of Ft. Worth) gave $10,000 (half primary, half general).
Cadance Bank PAC of Birmingham, AL gave $2,500.
Citigroup PAC of Pennsylvania gave $5,000.
Dr Pepper Snapple PAC gave $2,500.
Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. Citizenship Committee of Arizona gave $10,000 (half primary, half general), plus some individual donations from officers.
As did the DC-based McMoran Exploration Company Citizenship Committee
Humana’s DC-based PAC gave $2,500.
Pfizer PAC gave $5,000.
As did the PACs of TI, Time Warner, Union Pacific, and United States Steel.
Overall impressions: Lots of oil industry people, bankers, real estate developers, lawyers, and, for some reason, a statistically improbable number of dairy owners. And give Dewhurst credit for one thing his campaign team has been emphasizing: The overwhelming majority of individual donor money he’s raised has come from inside Texas.
A look at the expenses side of Dewhurst’s FEC report when I have time.
A new PPP poll shows that Ted Cruz continues to gain ground on David Dewhurst. Dewhurst’s lead has decreased 6 points from a PPP poll in January, when it was Dewhurst 36% and Cruz 18%. I think this is also the first public poll where we can track numbers from the previous poll. Tom Leppert was well back at 8%, followed closely by Craig James at 7%. Margin of error was +/-4.0%.
Remember Jason Altmire? The Blue Dog Democratic representing Pennsylvania’s 4th District who didn’t roll over when Nancy Pelosi snapped her fingers, and voted against ObamaCare? Thanks to that, while scores of his fellow Democrats were booted out of office in the Great Red Wave of 2010, Altmire hung on to his seat.
It appears his luck has run out. During redistricting, Pennsylvania lost a seat, so Altmire’s district was merged with the 12th District, and early returns show him losing to 12th incumbent Mark Critz (who won the seat in a special election after the death of pork king Rep. John Murtha).
Either way, he 12th should be a pickup opportunity for Republican candidate Keith Rothfus, who had no primary challenge and finished Q1 with $385,000 on hand.
I have a few major posts in various stages of gestation, so here’s a LinkSwarm to tide you over in the meantime:
Mark Steyn on our heroic Secret Service agents: “It’s not just the entitlements. Everywhere you look in the bloated federal Leviathan, all is waste, all is excess. But the absurd imperial presidency is a good place to start. The next citizen-executive of this republic would be sending a right message were he to halve the motorcade, halve the security detail, halve the hookers.”
Does Obama have an $8 billion slush fund to soften the impact of cuts to the Medicare Advantage program until after the election? (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
Pew Survey: GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
Borepatch reports on the Dallas Blogshoot. I was too busy and it was a bit too long of a drive for me to make. Which is a shame, since I would have liked to try some of the machine guns, and the .50 cal. Bonus: Ponies!
Here’s a superb example of a viral attack ad that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: attract attention, create an impression, make viewers question their previous view on a subject, and provide a few laughs:
Until I saw this, I had no idea how much the Humane Society had come to resemble PETA. But you start digging down into the information, and not only do you find out that they’re a lousy charity, but that they have indeed signed on to the whole anti-meat/anti-farming PETA agenda.
Here’s James Bernsen of the Cruz campaign making the case that Dewhurst employed accounting gimmicks and increased state budgets an aggregate of $25 billion for the 2004–2011 period. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to bring you some expert opinion on how how balanced the Texas budget has been, what Dewhurst’s role in the budget has been, etc.
Before he had sort-of endorsed Dewhurst in an offhand way on the Presidential campaign trail; this is the real deal. It certainly helps Dewhurst, but the language is a bit tepid, “I’m a loyal supporter” rather than “David Dewhurst is awesome and is far and away the best man in the race.” (Hat tip: The Weekly Standard.)
Dewhurst’s Q1 FEC report is up. Just shy of $3.2 million cash on hand, or slightly less than Cruz. Presumably Dewhurst could start pouring millions in self-funding into his campaign at any moment. So why hasn’t he? Is he already assuming he’s going to be in a runoff and will carpet-bomb the race with dough then? (I’ll try to look through Dewhurst’s report more thoroughly when I have time.)
Team Dewhurst strikes back at Dewbious with their own attack website, The Real Ted Cruz, which seems to be all about the Chinese business case. I still think it’s pretty weak sauce, but I must admit that the Photoshoping of Cruz’s face onto Chinese currency is a nice touch…
Dewhurst has also put up a parody Cruz Pintrest site. Remember the Saturday Night Live 2.0 cast, the one after the entire original cast quit but before they promoted Eddie Murphy? Yeah, it’s not quite that funny.
KYFO has a poll asking which Senate candidate you support. So far Cruz is creaming the rest of the field.
Garrett is also reporting that Craig James had “$525,000 in cash as of March 31, and most of it’s probably money he can use before the May 29 primary, because he himself accounted for three-quarters of his campaign’s $1 million haul.” James’ FEC report isn’t up yet, and I don’t see it linked from James website.
James appeared before the Clear Lake Tea Party:
If you watch all 24 minutes of that, congratulations! You have even more dedication to covering this race than I do…
Democrat Paul Sadler finally starts to look like the Democratic frontrunner, having raised $72,800 this quarter, including $17,500 in union money. That won’t keep Cruz or Dewhurst up at night, but it may be enough to finish off Sean Hubbard. Lots of contributions from his home base in Henderson, a few from Austin, not much from the rest of the state. (One $500 contribution is from Austin political consultant G. K. Sprinkle, who I knew slightly back in the 1990s when she got a few science fiction stories published.)
Sean Hubbard picked up the endorsement of the Stonewall Democrats of Dallas Hubbard has been pursuing the endorsements of the gay rights community hard, so this isn’t a surprise, but compared to a lot of other Democratic special interest groups (blacks, Hispanics, unions, government employees (but I repeat myself), etc.) there just aren’t that many votes there.
There are supposedly two candidates (David B. Collins and Victoria Ann Zabaras) running for the Green Party nomination for the Senate race. Neither seems to have bothered to put up a website.
Although I’ve frequently talked about various Heritage books auctions on my other blog, I think some of my readers here will be interested in hearing about their firearms auction coming up on April 30 as part of the NRA Firearms for Freedom program. I’m not enough of a gun collector to tell you what’s notable, but the gyrojet pistol looks interesting, and they have several vintage Winchester rifles and a couple of flintlocks.
Big Jolly ranked the debate Leppert, Dewhurst, Cruz, James. He notices the pauses before Dewhurst’s answers, but doesn’t seem to notice the ones in the middle of them, the rambling nature of his answers, or the times he looked absolutely lost in mid-argument. I’m sure Tea Party activists across the state will also take exception to his defense of Dewhurst for not attending “every podunk forum.”
There’s some chatter on Twitter that Cruz’s comment that the Dallas Morning News had “retracted” the story about Cruz hiding the date his father fled from Cuba was wrong. Well, here’s what Robnert T. Garrett said in the DMN: “CLARIFICATION: On some occasions since 2005, Ted Cruz has publicly mentioned the date of his father’s departure from Cuba and even the fact he fought on the same side as Fidel Castro. However, in the past two months, the newspaper found no instances in which he offered audiences any clues that his father was a pre-Castro exile.” That sounds pretty darn close to a retraction to me, even if they didn’t use the word “retraction.”
