First, Texas Right to Life PAC endorses David Dewhurst. That’s a very good pickup for him, as he has not exactly been overwhelmed with conservative endorsements. I’m sure the Ted Cruz campaign is not happy that Dewhurst snagged this one. (Also not happy: ex-senate candidate Elizabeth Ames Jones, now running for the state senate from District 25…where they endorsed rival Donna Campbell for the same seat the same week Jones (who has repeatedly stressed her pro-life credentials) got into the race…)
Of the two, I have to rank the Dewhurst endorsement as the better pickup, mainly because his conservative endorsements for this race have been thin on the ground.
Can Dewhurst snag more conservative endorsements? Maybe. He’s been endorsed by groups like the NRA and Texans for Lawsuit Reform in the past…but that was when he was running against Democrats as Lt. Governor. Such groups may decide that Cruz is the better alternative, or pass on endorsing anyone before the primary.
Ted Cruz will be on Sean Hannity’s show at 8:30 PM tonight, discussing Fast and Furious, Occupy Wall Street, and no doubt many other topics. Since there does not appear to be a radio station that carries Hannity in Austin, and since I will be celebrating Nigel Tufnel Day tonight anyway, I guess I’ll have to catch it in reruns.
While on the subject of Cruz, I wanted to partially take issue with some of the assertions in the Kevin Brennan National Journal piece called “Popping the Ted Cruz Bubble.” Essentially it argues that Cruz is not the frontrunner and that previously mentioned internal Dewhurst poll shows that Cruz is way behind.
These two consecutive sentences get to the heart of the problem with Brennan’s piece: “Of course, a poll conducted for one of Cruz’s rivals is by no means a definitive take on the race. But that poll mirrors results of other surveys conducted privately in the state in recent months.”
The first part of that sentence is true but incomplete, since it is missing the word “internal” before poll, and the Dewhurst campaign has not deemed to share with us any of the methodology with which it was conducted. Despite Brennan’s assertion that its finding “come from live-call surveys that follow best-practices methodology most top-quality pollsters use, ” the only thing we actually know (thanks to Brennan) is that it was conducted by Mike Baselice.
Likewise, the second sentence makes assertions which are completely unverifiable to readers, and Brennan offers no convincing argument why we should take those assertions at face value. “Lots of super-secret polls that no one else but me has seen totally agree with the point I’m making.” Which polls? Conducted by who? Surveying how many voters? Registered or likely voters? With what methodology? With what margin of error? Etc. Without that knowledge, Brennan is simply making an unfounded assertion and asking us to take it on faith. And the rest of his article depends on taking those assertion at face value.
Honestly, if Dewhurst’s internal poll was rock solid, they would have released the full poll and methodology to the public, not merely leaked tidbits to favored journalists, especially given how favorable it is to Dewhurst. The fact that they haven’t indicates there are either methodological problems that can’t stand up to real scrutiny, or that the poll show other things (low likability scores for the Lt. Governor, perhaps?) that the Dewhurst campaign doesn’t want us to see.
Ultimately, Brennan uses those unnamed, unshared polls to offer the conclusion that “Cruz is virtually unknown among Texas conservatives,” a statement that is not merely false, but actively risible. The guy who was endorsed by Jim DeMint and the Club for Growth, has raised just shy of $3 million from contributors, and who was the poster boy for a laudatory cover story in National Review is “virtually unknown among Texas conservatives”?
Tom Leppert picked up the endorsements of the mayors of Corpus Christi, Arlington, Sugar Land, Richardson, Denton, and several other Texas cities. Though some of those are from his Metroplex base, those are good pickups for him, and it is interesting that he picked up the support of mayors of high-growth, suburban “ring” cities.
Robert T. Garrett of The Dallas Morning News calls Ted Cruz a “social conservative spearchucker.” (I can just picture Garrett using this phrase about Michael William or Herman Cain, and then Having a Little Talk with his editor.) Potentially offensive phrasing aside, “social conservative” is not quite accurate, since Cruz is a classic “fusionist” conservative Republican candidate, as both a social and economic conservative. In this race, Glenn Addison and Curt Cleaver fit the mold of social conservatives more fully than Cruz. And it does make one wonder, yet again, why Garrett insists on pushing the “Cruz sucks/Dewhurst is invincible” angle that has become his recent stock-in-trade…
The Houston Chroniclehas a poll for which Senate candidate you support.
USA Today deigns to notice Sean Hubbard. That’s probably the political highlight of his week, although last week he attended Occupy Dallas, which seems appropriate, since both will be entirely forgotten by this time next year. Judging from the pictures, I’ve thrown parties that had more attendees than Occupy Dallas…
Many candidates have offered up thanks to veterans today, but it took Ricardo Sanchez to turn it into an election pitch. I have no problem with Sanchez running on his military record, or if he had mentioned it in passing in a post appreciating veterans, but to turn a Veterans Day message into a pitch of Democratic talking points while hustling for votes seems…unseemly.
Trailing in polls, fundraising, name recognition, and stage presence, Elizabeth Ames Jones announced she’s dropping out of the Senate race to run for the Texas Senate District 25 against incumbent Sen. Jeff Wentworth.
Setting aside of the question of why you would want to move from the Railroad Commission to the State Senate (which seems like a slight downgrade to me), the Senate District 25 race already had one Tea Party challenger to Wentworth in Donna Campbell, who may find herself financially outgunned if Jones transfers her U.S. Senate race money. (Naturally, Wenworth wants Jones to return the money.) There have been mutterings in some quarters (at least stretching back to last decade’s redistricting fight) that Wentworth is too liberal for his district. Should all three stay in, this should prove to be a very interesting primary fight.
Clearly Jones was overdue to get out of the Senate race, and had been for some time. Not only were David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz firmly established as the top two candidates, but they and Tom Leppert were all clearly outperforming Jones in every phase of the campaign. From all that I could see, Jones performed poorly at the the various candidate debates and forums and fell woefully behind in the fundraising race. I think there was a much greater possibility that Jones could have come in behind long-shot Glenn Addison in the March primary than that she could overtake Cruz or Dewhurst.
Jones was the very first candidate to declare for the U.S. Senate race, filing her paperwork way back on November 3, 2008, but never seemed to gain any traction once additional candidates jumped in after Kay Baily Hutchison announced she was retiring.
This is good news for the Ted Cruz campaign, and bad news for David Dewhurst, since it gives Cruz a clearer shot at him. Dewhurst clearly has no desire to debate Cruz one-on-one, and the more candidates in the race, the less likely it is for conservative voters to coalesce around Cruz as the anti-Dewhurst campaign.
Now that Jones is out, will Leppert bow out as well? I doubt it. Though he clearly hasn’t caught fire, Leppert has (thanks to a generous measure of self-funding) stayed on pace with the front-runners in the fundraising derby, and he’s clearly a better campaigner, and has a much better organization, than Jones. My hunch says that he stays in until March, and then comes in a distant third. But there’s still an awful lot of campaign left…
I suppose I should do these updates some day other than Friday night Saturday morning, since few people read them then or over the weekend, but it’s been a busy week…
Mario Loyola discusses Ted Cruz and his father Rafael as part of a longer story on the Cuban exile experience in America, the widespread Cuban opposition to the Batista regime, and how Castro betrayed the revolution to impose Communism. And he delivers such a complete and utter bitchslapping of The Dallas Morning News that I have to quote the last few paragraphs:
Cubans here and there have had to endure the calamities of the Revolution alone. Conservatives in America reached out to us and supported us, and our parents found solace in their enmity to Communism. But they weren’t really with us either, because they had no idea how awful Fidel Castro really was. It simply isn’t within the comprehension of any American that someone could actually choose to be as evil as Castro. The sheer depravity of his crimes against the Cuban people helped to keep the depredations of his rule a secret hiding in plain sight, where only other Cubans could see them.
It’s no surprise that liberal papers such as the Dallas Morning News now think they’re in some position to judge which families are truly exiles and which aren’t. It was liberal papers — particularly the New York Times — that originally built Castro up into an international hero and persisted in romanticizing him long after he offered Cuba’s young men to the Kremlin as a Third World army. It was liberal papers that blamed the U.S. embargo for the economic catastrophe into which Castro plunged Cuba. It was liberal newspapers that helped to occlude the unspeakable daily abuses of Castro’s regime beneath the fantasy of a romantic nationalist who was bravely willing to stand up to imperialism.
“There is power,” the Dallas Morning News tells us, “in linking your past and your future to this unending struggle [against Fidel]. But because the fathers of both these men [Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio] migrated several years before the revolution, as is now clear, the link is at best a stretch. In the case of Cruz, the situation is even more complicated because his father originally supported Castro.” What utter nonsense. It would be offensive if the editors actually had any idea what they were talking about. No Cuban exile would for a second say that the Rubio and Cruz families were any less exile than anyone else. All of our families lost their homeland. That some were already here when it happened is irrelevant — nobody meant to forsake Cuba by coming here. We lost Cuba because Castro took it from us, from all of us, born and unborn, both here and back there.
Among Cuban-Americans, having been an early supporter of Castro in no way diminishes your anti-Communist credentials. On the contrary, it is the typical story for almost every family. Virtually all of our families opposed the dictatorship of Batista. Virtually all of our families believed Castro’s rhetoric of democracy and liberty. The first thing everyone hated about him was his evident relish in betraying his most ardent supporters. That was the first of many very personal reasons he would give us to hate him, reasons that only we can really understand.
What makes us exiles is not merely the fact that our families can’t go back to Cuba. It is that Castro wantonly ruined the land that our families grew up in, the land of our forefathers, and now that land exists only in the fading black-and-white pictures and memories of the happy childhoods of a generation that is dying now. Compared with that, what possible difference could it make that our grandparents arrived one year and not another? Senator Rubio didn’t know exactly what year his father first got here because it doesn’t matter.
Still, I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised by the Dallas Morning News’s display of presumptuousness and ignorance. The editors are decent people, and if they knew even 5 percent of what I know about the Revolution and its exiles, I’m sure they would be deeply ashamed of what they’ve written. But they don’t and they never will — Castro has already seen to that.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of people that Mario Loyola just made look like petty, misinformed idiots, The Dallas Morning News‘s Robert T. Garrett (who we talked about last week) covers Cruz’s accusations of MSM outlets like The Dallas Morning News targeting conservative Hispanics. Tune in next week for Garrett reporting on Cruz’s complaints about Garrett’s reporting on Cruz’s complaints. Presumably from the inside of a mirror box.
The Ted Cruz campaign has challenged David Dewhurst to five one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas debates (and the King Street Patriots were quick to agree to host at least one). This is a smart way for Cruz to help break further away from Tom Leppert and Elizabeth Ames Jones, and turn the race into a two man contest between him and Dewhurst…which is why Dewhurst would be foolish to take Cruz up on the offer. And, indeed, he does not seem so inclined.
ABC News notices the hit pieces on conservative Hispanic politicians in this interview with Cruz:
New Revolution Now emailed to say that Cruz won the straw poll at the Tuesday’s Texarkana senate forum. The total results were:
Ted Cruz: 54%
Glenn Addison: 21%
Lela Pittenger: 20%
Andrew Castanuela: 5%
David Dewhurst: <1%
Speaking of polls, this David Catanese Politico piece says that Dewhurst’s “internal poll” has Dewhurst at 50%, Leppert at 9%, and Cruz at 6%. I’m sure it does.
The Texas Tribune says “Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is running a state version of a Rose Garden strategy.” As indeed he is.
I get the distinct impression that someone at D magazine doesn’t like Leppert. They also evidently don’t like using anything that’s actually funny in their “comedy.”
This page on possible Senate race takeover targets had the Texas race down at 21st (i.e., not bloody likely), and had this to say: “Ricardo Sanchez hasn’t made the impact the local Democrats hoped he would.” Indeed.
Evidently all tuckered out from his 18-minute interview October 23, Sanchez seems to have returned to hibernation this week.
Other than appearing in that poll and turning 55 on October 29, Elizabeth Ames Jones doesn’t seem to have been much more active than Sanchez. Hey, here’s an idea: They’re both from San Antonio. Why not meet each other for a weekly debate? Nothing else they’re doing seems to be attracting donations or attention, and both need to bone up on their public speaking skills…
The Ted Cruz campaign noted that a new UT/Texas Tribune poll showed Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s support among Republican voters down to 22%, which is about half what previous polls have shown, and even less than that possibly anomalous Azimuth Research Group poll that showed both Cruz and Dewhurst tied around 30%. The UT/TT poll shows Cruz in second place at 10%, with a whopping 50% undecided. Still, to have such huge name recognition and to only be sitting at 22% must be frustrating for Team Dewhurst.
The same poll shows Ricardo Sanchez at a mere 11% of Democratic voters. He’s even running behind Chris Bell at 15%, even though Bell isn’t in the race…
A roundup of Texas Senate Race news, some of which I would have reported sooner if my week hadn’t been so packed…
Rep. Mike McCaul passes on the race. Big news, and I think the Ted Cruz campaign is heaving a sigh of relief at not having someone as rich as David Dewhurst (but demonstrably more conservative than the Lt. Governor) in the race.
Here’s the audio for Ted Cruz’s appearance on the Mark Levin show.
Standard democratic talking points, well-spoken, but delivered in the tone of a slightly bored high school algebra teacher. Gravitas he’s got, but if this is the best he can do charisma wise, I don’t think any of the likely (or even unlikely) Republican candidates have anything to worry about. That accomplished, Sanchez seems to have gone back in hibernation for the rest of the week.
Robert T. Garrett of the The Dallas Morning News offers up a hard-hitting expose that absolutely nails Cruz…on not doing reporter’s homework for them. The upshot is that Cruz’s father was tortured by and fled the Batista regime rather than Castro’s communist regime. Did Cruz tell his story in a way that led people to believe that his father fled Castro? Yeah, he did. And that’s worth reporting. I can see doing at least a paragraph on that as part of a general article on Cruz. But it doesn’t explain why Garrett felt the need to expend 769 words explaining not that Cruz lied, but that he told an easily misinterpreted truth. Given that he hasn’t lied about anything, and has told the precise story forthrightly upon being questioned about it, it’s hard for me to work up any indignation about people misconstruing one part of a candidate’s father’s history.
Curt Cleaver raised $3,208, which is respectable for a longshot, especially considering his late start. (Psst, Curt, handy campaign tip: It actually costs you nothing to update your Facebook and Twitter pages more than once a month…)
Andrew Castanuela has raised $1,503. Coming up the rear is Beetlebaum Stanley Garza with $200…of which he’s spent $199. Got to save up for that big ad blitz…
David Dewhurst has finally stepped down from his ivory tower and entered the political fray in person, joining his fellow candidates at the Spirit of Freedom Republican Women candidate forum in Sugar Land. This might be the first result of Dewhurst’s campaign staff shake-up.
It sounds like time constraints (“Friday’s event at the Sugar Creek Baptist Church chapel had to wrap up on time to make way for a funeral”) prevented much in the way of candidate interaction.
The report also says that Tom Leppert is running statewide ads, which I have not seen. It’s pretty early to start running TV ads, but understandable, given how badly he lags Dewhurst and Ted Cruz in the latest poll.
According to an email from the New Revolution Now folks, Cruz won the straw poll for the Tyler candidate forum, with 39%, Glenn Addison came in second with 30%, Lela Pettinger took third with 18%, and Tom Leppert took fourth with 10% (which is, I think, an improvement from his previous straw poll performances). David Dewhurst, Elizabeth Ames Jones, and Ricardo Sanchez all polled less than 1%. And Jones was scheduled to be at the forum…
Addison raised $35,059 for the Q3 fundraising quarter. This brings his total fundraising up to $60,486, and he has $35,557 on hand. While that amount will not cause Dewhurst or Cruz to lose sleep, it’s still impressive for a longshot candidate. It’s also more than a third what ostensibly “serious” candidate Ricardo Sanchez raised this quarter, and Addison did it without (as far as I can tell) a professional campaign staff or professional fundraisers. If someone with Addison’s intelligence and drive were competing in the Democratic primary, Sanchez would be in serious trouble…
The Wall Street Journal does a piece on the Tom Leppert-occupy Wall Street story, clarifying that Washington Mutual, upon whose board Leppert sat, didn’t receive a bailout, but that J.P. Morgan Chase, which absorbed WaMu assets at a deep discount after WaMu melted down, did.
Curt Cleaver…hasn’t update his Facebook or Twitter feeds since September 15, preventing me from completing the Republican Senate Candidate Longshot News Perfecta.
Both Sanchez and Sean Hubbard (according to his Facebook page) will be speaking at the Dallas County Democratic Party’s Annual Fish Fry Friday, October 21. Strangely enough, however, Sanchez’s name is the only one on the flyer.
Sorry, absolutely no Stanley Garza news to be had. Believe me, I looked.
Finally, according to his Facebook and Twitter feeds, Glenn Addison became a grandfather today. Congratulations!
Digging into his Q3 FEC report makes his quarter seem, if anything, even worse. I get a total of 108 individual donations for the period, or an average of only slightly more than one a day. You should be able to get more than that by having a guy with a sandwich board standing next to a campaign table down in Hemisfair Park. I count only $25,249.26 in out-of-state donations, which is pretty sad for the DNC’s hand-picked candidate. And only four of those were max donations; a serious Democratic candidate should be able to get twice that many just from a single luncheon with trial lawyers. And a Melanie Gray of Houston sent in $4,600, which is over the FEC $2,500 limit.
Let’s look at some of his largest disbursements:
$51,625.30 to D.C.-based Hilltop Public Solutions for campaign management. As an outside observer, I have to ask: What campaign? Some of the principals seem to have worked on John Edwards 2004 Presidential campaign, which is not one I would chose for a model.
$27,265.19 to Taylor Collective Solutions, which I’ve mentioned before, for fundraising. Judging from the evidence, I don’t think he’s getting good value for his money.
$16,000 for “fundraising” to a Joe Livoti, who lists his position on LinkedIn as “Finance Director Gen. Ricardo Sanchez for Senate.” Oddly for a Texas senate candidate, Mr. Livoti works out of New York. Mr. Livoti does not seem to have been overly successful at his fundraising duties.
Lots of airfare and hotel charges; a puzzling amount, given how few public appearances he made during the period. Given how little he’s taking in, maybe he should consider driving rather than flying, at least for in-state fundraisers, and staying with supporters rather than sleeping in hotels.
$1,000 to Sparkpoint Strategies. From their website: “Sparkpoint is an online community mobilization tool that allows you to easily organize, inform and engage your supporters by offering them a private-branded platform to voice their opinions, stay informed and take immediate action to further your progressive cause.” Given that today the Sanchez campaign has 681 Facebook friends, 96 Twitter followers (for one tweet), and 9 followers for an empty YouTube page, his expenditures in the social media arena have not resulted in any notable gains in the social media venues we can actually track.
There are an awful lot of checks to First Bank San Antonio for “Merchant Services.” I get a total of $4,586.95. Unless his bank charges some steep credit card fees, it’s hard to figure out what those charges were for. Unless those were for cashier’s checks, in which case they’re probably not properly accounted for expenses under FEC rules.
So we have a candidate picked by the Democratic establishment, a campaign run out of D.C. and New York, that none the less doesn’t seem to be pulling in Democratic establishment money.
Just what has the Ricardo Sanchez campaign been doing the last three months? (Besides scrubbing any mention of tax cuts from his campaign website.) He hasn’t been raising money. He hasn’t been making campaign appearances. He hasn’t been tweeting. He hasn’t been generating any notable buzz.
All this is good news for whoever wins the Republican nomination, but if I were a Texas Democrat, I’d feel insulted. The DNC has foisted a Potemkin Candidate on you, one who shows no signs of being willing to run a serious, energetic campaign. More than ever, Sanchez looks vulnerable to a serious challenge from the left. But so far it doesn’t look like there’s a single Democrat in the state of Texas up to that challenge.
