Posts Tagged ‘2014 Governor’s Race’

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LinkSwarm For February 13, 2015

Friday, February 13th, 2015

Still recovering from this cold. Enjoy this Friday LinkSwarm compliments of the management:

  • ISIS on the run? Not so much. They just took over the Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, where U.S. troops are training Iraqi troops.
  • 45 “Asian” men arrested on UK child sex charges. And by “Asian,” they mean “Pakistani Muslim.” Et tu, Daily Mail? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Yemen turns into yet another Obama Middle East foreign policy triumph.
  • “The United States has accepted two new immigrants for each additional job created since 2000, according to federal data.”
  • Will that stop the drive for Obama’s illegal alien amnesty? Of course not, since that amnesty will make it easier for illegal aliens to vote.
  • “Who wants to read the inside story of Obama’s ’08 campaign if you know the writer is committed to being kind to Hillary?”
  • What’s behind the most recent uptick in job growth? Stingier unemployment benefits. Insisted on by Republicans.
  • If Putin really wants to subsidize the Greek welfare state, I say let’s kick them out of NATO and let him…
  • Indicted Democratic Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price asked for taxpayers to pay for his corruption trial defense…that is until the judge demanded a complete accounting of his net worth, and which point he dropped the request.
  • The Ghosts of Auschwitz in the Middle East.
  • “The Daily Show always had limited appeal; it just happens that the appeal included the New York media elite.”
  • A look at Greg Abbott’s data-driven gubernatorial campaign.
  • So Obama’s State Department had another one of their dog-and-pony show #AskJen events, where users all over Twitter send questions in to State Department spokeslephrechaun Jen Psaki, which are then summarily ignored in favor of trivial questions from pro-Obama plants. But I was happy to do my part:

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military | No Comments »

    Annie’s List of Fail

    Monday, January 12th, 2015

    Via PushJunction comes word that Amber Mostyn (wife of rich trial lawyer Steve Mostyn) is stepping down as chair of Annie’s List. What’s Annie’s List, you ask? Essentially an attempt to do Emily’s List for Texas, i.e. elect liberal female Democrats to office.

    So how did Annie’s List do in 2014? By one measure they were quite successful: They raised 18th largest amount of money of any statewide political entity in 2014, raising $1,422,009.16 and spending $1,601,945.83.

    But by another, more important measure, namely winning elections…not so hot. Let’s look at the results for the candidates they endorsed

  • Wendy Davis – Candidate for Governor: Lost to Greg Abbott 2,790,227 votes (59.3%) to 1,832,254 votes (38.9%).
  • Leticia Van de Putte – Candidate for Lieutenant Governor: Lost to Dan Patrick 2,718,406 votes (58.1%), to 1,810,720 votes (38.7%).
  • Libby Willis – Candidate for Senate District 10 (Wendy Davis’s old seat): Lost to Konni Burton, 95,484 votes (52.8%) to 80,806 votes (44.7%).
  • Susan Criss – Candidate for House District 23 (Galveston Island, La Marque and Texas City): Lost to Wayne Faircloth 17,702 votes (54.6%) to 14,716 votes (45.4%).
  • Kim Gonzalez – Candidate for House District 43 (San Patricio, Jim Wells, Kleberg and Bee Counties): Lost to Jose Manuel Lozano 17,273 votes (61.4%) to 10,847 votes (38.6%).
  • Susan Motley – Candidate for House District 105 (Irving and Grand Prairie): Lost to Rodney Anderson 13,587 votes (55.4%) to 10,469 votes (42.7%).
  • Carol Donovan – Candidate for House District 107 (Dallas, Garland and Mesquite): Lost to Kenneth Sheets 16,879 votes (55%) to 13,803 votes (45%).
  • Leigh Bailey – Candidate for House District 108 (Dan Branch’s old district): Lost to Morgan Meyer, 24,953 votes (60.7%) to 16,170 votes (39.3%).
  • Celia Israel – Candidate for House District 50 (Austin, Pflugerville and Wells Branch): The lone bright spot among their endorsed candidates, she Won, beating Mike VanDeWalle 22,651 votes (58.7%) to 14,339 votes (37.1%). This is the district Democratic incumbent Mark Strama left to run Google Fiber Austin.

    • So Annie’s List racked up a winning percentage of .111 for the races they publicly supported, which is pretty far below the Mendoza Line, and their lone win came for a seat Democrats already held. Going through Annie’s List campaign reports for 2013-2014 (more about which anon) shows two other campaigns they backed at some point in the cycle:

  • Incumbent Mary Ann Perez’s campaign to retain House District 144 (Southeast suburban Houston area near the chip channel). She Lost to Gilbert Pena, 6,009 votes (50.7%) to 5,854 votes (49.3%). Maybe because it wasn’t a “new” endorsement, they didn’t do as much for Perez, but at just over 150 vote difference between the two candidates, this is one of the few races where additional support could have made a difference.
  • Incumbent Toni Rose’s successful attempt to win the Democratic Primary for House District 110, a 90% black southeast Dallas district that drew no Republican candidate in the 2014 general election.

    • One wonders how long Annie’s pale, middle-aged, female leadership can keep raising money with such poor results.

    For the sake of completeness, and providing a “one stop shop” for information about Annie’s List, here’s their official filing information via the Texas State Ethics Commission:

    POLITICAL COMMITTEE INFORMATION
    Annie’s List
    Account: 00053715
    Committee Type: General Purpose
    Files Reports: Semi-Annually
    8146-A Ceberry Drive
    Austin, TX 78759

    TREASURER INFORMATION
    Pinnelli, Janis W.
    P.O. Box 50038
    Austin, TX 78763
    (512) 478-4487

    And here are their electronic filings covering the 2013 to 2014 fundraising period:

  • October 27th, 2014
  • October 6th, 2014
  • July 15th, 2014 (semiannual)
  • May 19th, 2014 (runoff report; see how many times “The Mostyn Law Firm” appears in that list…)
  • February 25th, 2014 (very brief)
  • February 3rd, 2014
  • January 15th, 2014 (corrected semiannual report; uncorrected version omitted)
  • July 15th, 2013 (semiannual; another report where “The Mostyn Law Firm” makes many an appearance)
  • January 15th, 2013

    • Beyond Mostyn and Lisa Blue Baron, some of the names who gave significant amounts to Annie’s List include Obama bundler Naomi Aberly, Lee and Amy Fikes, and Serena Connelly, the daughter of late billionaire businessman Harold Simmons. So your usual batch of rich left-wing pro-abortion feminists. Fortunately for Texas, the state’s voters seem actively hostile to precisely the message they seek to push…

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Texas | No Comments »

    Wendy Davis Admits She Was Lying About Open Carry

    Wednesday, December 31st, 2014

    Granted, that’s not what the headline says. But we all know that’s what she means.

    Sen. Wendy Davis said in a Monday interview with the Express-News that she opposes allowing the open carry of handguns and that she wishes she had a do-over on the support she expressed for the idea in her ill-fated run for governor.

    Everyone who saw Davis embrace open carry knew she was lying. Everyone, supporters and opponents alike, saw her clumsy, ham-handed lie for exactly what it was: blatant political pandering, and a left-wing media darling’s laughable attempt to move to the center to run statewide in Texas. Indeed, it was so blatant that it probably did more harm than good, helping reaffirm Davis’ reputation for dishonesty.

    So transparent was the lie you wonder why she even bothered. It’s also a mystery why she’s offering up a mea culpa for it just now. I suspect she may be trying to snag a job with a Democratic Party house organ like Media Matters or MSNBC.

    Davis admission reaffirms a basic political truth: there’s no such thing as a pro-gun Democrat. When push comes to shove, they’ll betray gun owners whenever the Party demands them to…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Guns, Texas | No Comments »

    Democratic Failure In Texas: Even Worse Than You Thought

    Wednesday, November 19th, 2014

    I wanted to put up a link to this Wayne Thorburn Politico Piece on the Democratic Party’s 2014 failure in Texas. The piece focuses on the many missteps made by Battleground Texas, such as the decision to send out-of-state Obama activists rather than hire within, the decision to go all-in on Wendy Davis rather than build an organization from the bottom up, and failure to share information with the Texas Democratic Party.

    But the part I found most striking was the description of just how badly Democrats did in lower-level races:

    This lack of a bottom-up strategy was particularly glaring on Dec. 9, 2013, the filing deadline for 2014 candidates. Far from attracting a number of qualified and vigorous candidates to the Democratic banner, Battleground and the party ended up ceding much of the field to the Republicans without even a whimper. In fact, Democrats failed to recruit anyone to run on their ticket for more than 40 percent of all state legislative positions on the ballot. The end result would be almost a two-to-one Republican majority in both the Texas Senate and the House. Even more depressing was the party’s showing at the county level. Democrats could not find anyone willing to run for County Judge (chief elected official in the county) in 165 of Texas’ 254 counties, ceding almost two-thirds of all counties to the Republicans without an election. Thus, by 2015, while the Democrats will retain the county judge in four of the six largest counties, the GOP will hold all 29 suburban county judge positions, 18 of 21 in the other metropolitan counties scattered around the state, and 150 of the 198 small town county courthouses. Of all the major counties in Texas, only Dallas, Bexar, El Paso, Jefferson and Travis, along with the border counties of Webb and Hidalgo, will have a Democratic county judge.

    And even more depressing than that was the fact that not a single Democratic candidate could be found who was willing to run for any county office in 86 counties—more than one-third of the total. These 86 included the heavily populated suburban counties of Denton, Johnson and Parker (outside Dallas-Fort Worth), Montgomery (suburban Houston) and Comal (north of San Antonio) as well as the other urban counties of Bell (Temple), Randall (Amarillo) and Grayson (Sherman). As the saying goes, you can’t win a game if you don’t field a team.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, ObamaCare | No Comments »

    Battleground Texas Pledges We’ll Be Able To Kick Them Around Some More in 2016

    Thursday, November 13th, 2014

    Battleground Texas says we’ll have it to kick around in 2016:

    The head of Battleground Texas is telling supporters that despite an Election Day-shellacking, the group plans to stay put for the next round of elections in 2016. In a memo posted on the group’s website, executive director Jenn Brown says Battleground Texas is analyzing what went wrong. “I know that the losses last week were tough, and there has been a lot of negativity in the aftermath of the election. But I want you to look forward with me. Because we have work to do,” said Brown.

    Funny how pouring tens of millions of dollars into a state, only for Democrats lose even more badly than they did four years ago, might be perceived as “negative.”

    Also: “[Wendy] Davis raised money for her campaign field operation and Battleground Texas spent it. According to campaign finance reports, nearly $400,000 went to a Chicago consulting firm, 270 Strategies, headed by Jeremy Bird, who helped create Battleground Texas.”

    So no matter how badly Davis did, I guess the campaign was a rousing success for Bird.

    That piece also says that Battleground Texas can work with millionaire lawyer Steve Mostyn’s Ready for Hillary super-PAC. I’m having trouble thinking of scenarios where Hillary could win Texas that don’t involve the phases “complete breakdown of civilization” and “widespread cannibalism”…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »

    And Here Come the Wendy Davis Campaign Recriminations!

    Thursday, November 13th, 2014

    You don’t have such a high profile campaign flame-out as Wendy Davis for Governor without either some spectacular mismanagement within the ranks of the campaign, or a truly abysmal performance by the candidate themselves. While Wendy Davis certainly turned in an awful performance, it alone wasn’t the epic meltdown (I’m thinking Edmund Muskie’s tears or Rick Perry’s 2012 brain freeze) needed to derail a campaign all by itself.

    No, the Davis campaign offered up a veritably ecology of dysfunction.

    When a campaign fails this dramatically, the insider recriminations start popping up on why the disaster wasn’t their fault to keep the debacle from staining their own resumes. And now we have the first example from the Davis campaign.

    “Consultants for Democrat Wendy Davis warned her campaign months ago that the Fort Worth senator was headed for a humiliating defeat in the Texas governor’s race unless she adopted a more centrist message and put a stop to staggering internal dysfunction.”

    I once saw Staggering Internal Dysfunction open for No Controlling Legal Authority at Lollapalooza…

    “The warnings are contained in two internal communications obtained by The Texas Tribune and written at the beginning of the year by longtime Democratic operatives Peter Cari and Maura Dougherty.”

    So it would be Cari and Dougherty who want the world to know that “this huge, stinking debacle wasn’t our fault!”

    “Addressed to then-Campaign Manager Karin Johanson, the memo warned that the Davis campaign had ‘lurched to the left,’ was failing to communicate a positive message and offered virtually nothing to the swing voters the senator would need to win statewide.”

    Karin Johnson would be pushed out of the campaign on June 11. And just because the advice comes from two Democratic campaign operatives trying to save their own bacon doesn’t mean it’s not true.

    “The Prism consultants concluded that the campaign was either desperately broken or that the hierarchy had decided to portray Davis not as a Texas moderate but rather a ‘national Democrat, appealing to liberal donors in the mistaken belief that there is a hidden liberal base in Texas that will turn out to vote if they have a liberal candidate to support.'”

    Liberals are particularly good at this specific type of self-delusion.

    The Davis campaign was always going to have a particularly difficult challenge: how to suck up big-buck donations from the national pro-abortion network while still appearing moderate enough to get elected in Texas. It was probably an impossible one, but the Davis campaign certainly could have done a much better job than they did. Instead they made mistake after mistake and launched a series of dishonest and counterproductive attack ads against Abbott. (In this the Davis 2014 campaign made the same mistake as the Dewhurst 2012 campaign, preferring to run attack ads based on nothing rather than any sort of positive ads whatsoever.)

    Davis was the wrong candidate at the wrong time who ran the wrong campaign in the wrong state.

    Expect more recriminations of this type to surface in the coming weeks…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    Two Dissections of Democrats’ Failure to Turn Texas Blue

    Thursday, November 6th, 2014

    Enjoy these two moderately lengthy dissections of liberal failures to turn Texas blue:

    First, here’s this Jay Root/Texas Tribune piece by way of the Washington Post on why Wendy Davis lost the election. The piece soft-peddles Davis’ incompetence as a campaigner, and fails to mention her comparative unpopularity with Hispanics and the overall failure of the Democratic Party’s “War on Women” campaign strategy, of which Davis was a central piece, but is otherwise reasonably accurate.

    Second, here’s a piece on just how comprehensive Battleground Texas’ failure was. It also goes into down-ballot failures for Battleground Texas that I haven’t had time to look at yet:

    In House District 23, which even Republican Party of Texas Chairman Steve Munisteri had described as “neck-and-neck,” Democrat Susan Criss lost to Republican Wayne Faircloth by nearly 10 points. Rodney Anderson, the Republican candidate, bested Democrat Susan Motley by more than 12 points in House District 105. And incumbent state Rep. Philip Cortez, D-San Antonio, was toppled by Republican Rick Galindo, who lost by nearly 6 points.

    The piece also notes that, for all the money Battleground Texas put into the Wendy Davis campaign, she finished a whopping two points above Democratic Agriculture Commissioner nominee Jim Hogan, who didn’t campaign at all.

    Hat tip: Erick Erickson, who notes “bring down a bunch of liberal yankees who hate the ROTC, traditional values, the Alamo, and Texas itself and you’re setting the stage for disaster.” Also “Battleground Texas claims they are not going away. Thank goodness. They should stick around and serve as a money sink for guys like Tom Steyer lest that money go to other states.”

    Erickson touches on something I want to expand upon, namely the obvious distaste in-state liberal elites show for all manner of Texas traditions. Even when they embrace “moderate” positions on, say, gun control or energy regulation, they give off the reek of patronizing condescension. You always get the impression that these people would rather be living in New York City or San Francisco than anyplace in Texas. No matter how much they proclaim a love of football, cowboy boots or country music, they always give the impression of going through the motions as a sop for those gun-toting redneck freaks of JesusLand. (Bob Bullock was probably the last major Texas Democrat who seemed like he wasn’t faking it, and Ann Richards was the last one who was able to fake it convincingly.) Their real constituents are not Texans, but the left-wing politicians, trial lawyers, national media and urban elites who make up the liberal overclass.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Texas Statewide Race Oddities

    Wednesday, November 5th, 2014

    With all the votes in, we can start analyzing some of odder aspects of the Texas statewide race results.

    For those watching the race, it’s no surprise that (discounting 2006’s strange four-way race) Wendy Davis was the worst-performing Democratic gubernatorial candidate this century. The surprising thing is that, as bad as she was, Davis was the Democrat’s best statewide candidate this year. Her 38.9% was the highest statewide vote percentage by any Texas Democrat in 2014. Leticia Van de Putte’s 38.7% was the second highest. Otherwise statewide Democratic candidates ranged from a low of 34.3% for invisible Senate candidate David Alameel to a high of 38% for Attorney General candidate Sam Houston.

    Possible explanations:

  • Perhaps Wendy Davis’ antics didn’t cause people to switch so much as it caused Democrats to stay home entirely.
  • Perhaps in lower-pofile races people felt free to vote for third party candidates.
  • Perhaps there is indeed a staunchly “pro-abortion Republican” segment of the Texas electorate, but evidence suggests that, if so, it ranges from 0.5% to 1% of the total…

    • And those who said Abbott would outpoll Dan Patrick were right…but only by 1.2%.

    Abbott took ten counties that Bill White won in 2010: Harris, Bexar, Brooks, Culberson, Falls, Foard, Kleberg, La Salle, Reeves and Trinity. Harris (Houston) and Bexar (San Antonio) are the 800-pound gorillas on that list. In 2012, Ted Cruz won Harris by 2% (while Romney was edged there by a thousand votes) while losing Bexar by 4%. For a while Democrats were able to stay competitive statewide by racking up big margins in those urban counties even while they were losing rural and suburban counties. If Republicans can now win those counties outright, it may be a long, long time before a Democrat can win statewide again.

    Two statewide Republican candidates got more votes than Abbott’s 2,790,227: Senator John Cornyn and Land Commissioner-elect George P. Bush. The rest of the country may suffer from Bush-fatigue (though I imagine that it’s now dwarfed by Obama-fatigue), but you’d be hard-pressed to find signs of it in Texas…

    Since Democrats failed to contest three statewide court races, both the Libertarian and Green parties reached the minimum 5% threshold to maintain ballot access in 2016.

    Shockingly, David Weigel actually brings the wood when discussing Battleground Texas:

    “These are the greatest geniuses of data in the f**king world and they can’t figure out that less people voted?” asked Carney. “Every publicly pronounced goal of Battleground, every one, has been an abject failure.”

    (snip)

    Davis only out-performed the 2010 ticket in her home base of Tarrant County (Ft. Worth).

    Oh, and it got worse. Abbott’s campaign said throughout the campaign that it would poach Latino voters, especially in the Rio Grande valley. A quick look at a Texas map might tell you that Abbott failed. Not quite true. Perry had lost Hidalgo County (McAllen) by 34 points; Abbott kept the margin down to 28 points. Perry had lost Webb County by 53 points; Abbott lost it by 39. In exit polling, Perry ended up pulling only 38 percent of the Latino vote. Abbott won 44 percent of it, about what was expected in a Texas Tribune poll that Davis allies tried to debunk. Abbott actually won Latino men, 50-49 over Davis. The Democratic wane and Republican outreach helped oust Rep. Pete Gallego, elected in 2012 in a district that sprawled across most of the border. He won 96,477 votes that year; he won only 55,436 this year, allowing black Republican Will Hurd to win, despite being out-fundraised 2-1.

    Weigel may be a partisan, but at least he can read a spreadsheet…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Brief Blurbs on a Brilliant Bloodbath

    Wednesday, November 5th, 2014

    Democrats didn’t just lose last night, they got slaughtered up and down the ballot:

  • Republicans took control of the Senate, flipping seven Senate seats in North Carolina, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, Iowa, giving them 52 and control of the Senate. There’s a good chance that will be 54 after runoffs in Louisiana and Alaska.
  • Republicans added at least 12 House seats to their majority, a margin that is likely to grow as late seats finish counting.
  • Republicans picked up at least three governorships.
  • Republicans continued to make massive gains at the state legislative level. “The Republican wave that swept over the states left Democrats at their weakest point in state legislatures since the 1920s.”
  • Here in Texas, not only did Republicans win all statewide races (again), but Abbott beat Wendy Davis not only worse than Rick Perry beat Bill White in 2010, but worse than Perry beat Tony Sanchez in 2002: Sanchez came in at 39.96% of the vote; right now Wendy Davis is at 38.9%. Davis even lost white women by a 2-1 ratio. Battleground Texas bragged about how they were going to turn Texas blue; instead, it got still redder.

    • More later.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Liveblogging Election Night 2014

    Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

    Davis is currently at 38.1%. Just for the record, I called Wendy Davis dropping below Tony Sanchez’s 39.96% back in September.

    Back

    In local election news, Williamson County Republicans Tony Dale and Larry Gonzalez both won decisively over their Dem challengers.

    OK, I’m heading home. This isn’t a Republican landslide, it’s a Republican tidal wave. Enjoy it now. Tomorrow the hard work begins.

    Congratulations to Greg Abbott on being elected governor of Texas!

    News media now saying Ernst wins and Republicans take control of the senate.

    Republican Joni Ernst takes lead in Iowa.

    A very solid victory speech, with lots of family thanked.

    Wendy Davis called Abbott to congratulate him.

    Nope, family members first. Daughter Cecelia Audrey Abbott.

    Lights went down and they’re about to introduce Abbott.

    Fox just called Kansas Senate race for Republican Roberts.

    Wendy Davis didn’t even win Texas women.

    Right now Wendy Davis is running behind Tony Sanchez’s 39.97% in 2002. $38%.

    Ran into Sen. John Cornyn on my way to the bathroom. Congratulated him. Now he’s being interviewed 3 feet away from me.

    Wisconsin Governor’s race called for Republican Scott Walker.

    Governor Perry speaking after a huge round of applause.

    Whoa!

    Not a shock, but someone calling it this early is.

    Abbott spokesman saying they crushed Democrats AND BattleGround Texas. “Helping them waste their money, the way Democrats always do.”

    Calling West Virginia Senate race for for Republican Capito. Not a surprise, but that’s a flip from D to R.

    Republican Rounds projected to win SD Sen. No surprise.

    Republican Ed Gillispie beating Warner in VA; not final, but if true that would indicate a truly epic Republican wave.

    GOP Sen pickups: Cotton beats Pryor in Arkansas,

    OK, now I’m in on Twitter, but on another browser…

    Hi there! I’m blogging from the Greg Abbott Victory Party at the ACL theater. Can’t seem to get Twitter to take my password, so this may just be LiveBlog rather than LiveTweet.

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    Posted in Elections | No Comments »

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