I expect Ted Cruz to beat Paul Sadler handily (and here’s my endorsement of Cruz). Later today I hope to have a prediction up on just how well I expect him to do.
Sadler finally buys some ads a week before the election. Note how Robert T. Garrett references the previous item, but doesn’t have the decency to link to it.
My non-political life is amazingly busy this week, but here’s a roundup of reactions to yesterdays debate between Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst:
Though she bashes both candidates, Patricia Kilday Hart does note that “Throughout his tenure as lieutenant governor, Dewhurst has displayed a maddening tendency to deny inconvenient facts.”
Joe Holley says that the race has gotten personal. Also noted that most of the audience favored Cruz, including “a stay-at-home mom, said she supports Cruz because he will keep the nation from going the way of Europe, ‘where liberties are being stripped away every day. If we don’t elect strong, principled leaders, we’re going to suffer the same fate.’”
Robert T. Garrett’s piece on tyhe debate itself is behind the DSM paywall, but his followup isn’t.
Paul Burka said of Dewhurst that “It’s almost painful to watch him struggle to achieve fluency.” Also said of the Tea Party members watching Cruz debate: “’He’s one of us, and Dewhurst isn’t.’ And it’s true. He’s not.” Also: “If Cruz wins the race, the Dewhurst campaign will go down in Texas political history as one of the worst that has ever been run.”
The lefty Houston Presscalls Dewhurst the “Worst. Campaigner. Ever.”
After the usual Perry and Tea Party bashing.
And not so much on the debate, but if you’re following the Senate race, you need to be reading Rick Perry vs. the World, since Evan has been on fire the last couple of weeks. Just keep scrolling.
Man, the Houston Chronicle editorial board must really hate David Dewhurst: he skipped their meeting, but they went ahead and endorsed him anyway. Ouch!
The left-leaning PPP poll has Dewhurst at 46% and Cruz at 29%. Don’t see any reason to trust this more than the UT/TT poll, though both show Dewhurst shy of 50%.
Ross Ramsey looks at what happens if Dewhurst doesn’t win. Also, what’s the deal with liberals like Ramsey and Paul Burka prattling on about how Texas is some sort of uninhabited wasteland during the summers? Yeah, it’s hot. Those of us who were born here just deal with it. I believe we might even be able to make it to our local polling stations for a runoff without melting.
Democrat Sean Hubbard gets some love from the Houston Chronicle. But it’s ruthlessly realistic love: “Hubbard’s chance of taking the oath of office in Washington next January is even less likely than the Astros sweeping this fall’s World Series.”
Since it’s possible people who haven’t been following the race until now are tuning into this blog, you might want to take a look at:
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.
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.”
It’s been a very quiet week in the Senate race. I suspect that some of the candidates had already scheduled vacation or break time following the original March primary date, so I expect things to pick up shortly. But Both Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst released ads mentioning their fathers:
Ted Cruz has released two radio ads, one called “Fighter” and the other “Delivered”:
Forbes columnist Louis Woodhill looks at Ted Cruz’s economic program. He generally likes them, but doesn’t go far enough in some areas, and goes to far in seeking entitlement reform. I agree with the former and disagree with the latter.
Robert T. Garrett in The Dallas Morning news says that the “guilt by association” wars between Cruz, Dewhurst, and Craig James is more than a little silly. Unless there’s more to the Tony Podesta story than the Cruz campaign has been able to bring forth, I tend to agree.
He also seems to be doing something of a straddle on the Texas Women’s Health Program issue:”I’m all for protecting life. I’m pro-life. I’m also for taking care of women and their health so there’s a balance somewhere in there, personal responsibility, and if they have a need for things, that they need to be able to take care of it themselves. If they can’t, then there needs to be a service to help them take care of their health issues.”
The Texas Tribune talks about Texas having a conservative core of voters, and how that’s affecting the presidential and Senate races (among others). It’s actually not too bad as these things go, but I do wonder if anyone has ever done a similar profile on “extremely liberal” voters?
Finally, I still haven’t been able to meet with David Dewhurst or Craig James for interviews. If the campaigns of either are reading this, and your candidate will be in either Austin or Houston sometime in the next month, please contact me so we can set up an interview.
Trying to catch back up with the Senate race after my trip, so some of this may be slightly old news:
The biggest recent news in the Senate race is the newest Texas Tribune/UT poll that shows David Dewhurst leading the race at 38%, but with Ted Cruz up to 27%. Tom Leppert and Craig James are tied way back in third place at 7% each, an outcome that must be discouraging for the Leppert team, given that he’s been running for over a year and James has only been running for two months. Glenn Addison and Lela Pittenger are the only other candidates to get any support at all at 1% each. However, the margin of error is ±5%. Full results in PDF form here.
Dewhurst managed to pull in big bucks from a big donor in Washington. A big democratic donor. “He was doing what he always does: reaching across the aisle. He’s not a Washington insider yet, and he’s already a Washington insider. No wonder the Texas press has so often labeled him ‘bipartisan’…This is a critical race for the Tea Party and for conservatives across the country. If Dewhurst wins, we’ll have yet another squish on our hands – and a squish who is only too eager to rub elbows with the liberal establishment.” (Hat tip: Must Read Texas.)
This Kate Alexander piece in the Austin-American Statesman is pretty interesting, not so much for the information there (BattleSwarm readers will find very little I haven’t already covered), but for the approach. Overall the piece is probably mildly negative on Cruz, but not unfairly negative. Unlike, say, certain of Robert T. Garrett’s pieces in The Dallas Morning News, the issues she raises are generally real and non-trivial, though not ones that most conservatives will find of burning importance.
Cruz womps the field in a survey of the North Texas Tea Party.
The Dewhurst campaign attacks Cruz for “not supporting Sen. John Cornyn for Republican Senate Whip.”
Cruz has previously told reporters it’s more important to elect Senators who would pledge fealty to a divisive challenge to GOP leadership than it is for Republicans to regain its U.S. Senate majority this year. Cruz’s glaring lack of support for Sen. Cornyn, who’s now responsible for Republican efforts to retake that majority, effectively puts Cruz’s personal ambition and interests above conservative attempts to organize and stop the Obama agenda.
So Dewhurst is attacking Cruz for actually wanting to enact conservative ideas rather than just paying lip-service to it while toeing the Republican establishment line. Got it. (Maybe someone on Team Dewhurst might want to take a look at this.)
Scott Haddock interviews Tom Leppert Part 1 and Part 2.
The Texas Tribune did an interview with Craig James:
Glenn Addison gets a profile by the Houston Chronicle‘s Joe Holley. Addison’s evident friendliness with the John Birch society (yes, it’s still around) is not a plus in my book. I am gratified to see that Holley, who I dinged heavily, correctly lists both the number of candidates for each party, as well as their names.
That same TT/UT poll shows the Democratic side of the race virtually tied, with Sean Hubbard at 12%, Paul Sadler, Daniel Boone, and Addie D. Allen all tied at 10%, and John Morton (who the Democrats kicked off the ballot two months ago) at 3%. That’s good news for Hubbard (frontrunner again!) and Allen (whose campaign might be charitably called “low-key”), and bad news for anointed Democratic establishment candidate Sadler and “Gene Kelly 2.0” Boone. But the margin of error for Democrats is even higher at ±6%, so it’s still anyone’s race at this point.
Democrat Addie D. Allen now has a website (though it just has the GoDaddy parking page for now) and a Twitter feed.
University of Texas Democrats endorse Paul Sadler. That should be good for an extra five, maybe even six votes, easy…
Daniel Boone appeared before the Llano Tea Party, which I think makes him the first Democratic senate candidate to take up the repeated Tea Party offers for Democrats to speak. Good for him.
Pro-tip for Boone: Most people put the newest content at the top of their blog, not the oldest.
As far as I can tell, Craig James, Charles Holcomb, Ben Gambini, Joe Agris and Addie D. Allen have not filed Q4 reports with the FEC. Maybe none of them conducted any fundraising in the quarter.
Time for another update. And since none of the Republicans liked the Keystone Pipeline decision, or Obama’s State of the Union address, I’m not going to list each individual reaction here.
A roundup piece from the Ft. Worth Star Telegram, in which we learn that the academics that MSM reporters usually go to for consensus wisdom say that Tea Party influence is on the wane. Imagine my shock.
Mark Davis of WBAP talks to Michael Quinn Sullivan of Empower Texas about both the Texas redistricting decision and the senate race:
Robert T. Garrett of The Dallas Morning Newsreports that David Dewhurst pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate if elected. As Garrett notes, Ted Cruz and Tom Leppert have also pledged to support term limits. Also, since I have been fairly critical of Garrett’s reporting on the race, I should point out that there seems to be neither errors nor sneers in this piece.
Somehow I overlooked this Garrett piece from 12 days ago where Craig James admits to taking “insignificant” amounts from boosters in his SMU days.
Also in the DSM, John David Terrance Stutz notes that David Dewhurst is preparing a state senate agenda that just happens to dovetail nicely with his U.S. senate race themes. Including “the potential negative repercussions of Obamacare and Sharia law.”
Another poll done for the David Dewhurst campaign comes to the startling conclusion that the David Dewhurst campaign is awesome. As I previously discussed, the partial results of secret polls leaked to the media without full disclosure of the complete results, including the questions asked, the sample size, the screening criteria, etc., is essentially meaningless spin. In fact, I just sent a query off pollster Michael Baselice asking for that information. I’ll let you know if I get a reply…
Addison also announced he would be at the East Texas Conservative candidate forum in Tyler Friday, January 27. Say what you will about Addison, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a longshot candidate keep up such a hectic schedule.
Ben Gambini doesn’t seem to have a website yet, but he does have a Facebook page. Judging from the graphic he put up there, he seems to be running mostly as a social conservative.
Democrat Addie Dainell Allen also has a Facebook page, where she seems to be going by Addie D. Allen.
Still can’t find campaign web presences for Dr. Joe Agris or Charles Holcomb.
Via email, longshot, non-filed Democratic candidate Virgil Bierschwale indicated he could not afford the filing fee, and thus is out of the race.
Via email, longshot, non-filed Democratic candidate Stanley Garza indicated he was giving up his campaign for 2012. Which brings up the question: Will he return that $1 of unspent campaign contributions?
Still waiting on Q4 fundraising numbers from the candidates. In previous quarters they came out around the 15th of the month after the deadline, but maybe the deadline is longer for End-of-Year reports.
Another blogger grading the TPPF debate. He ranks Tom Leppert first (followed by Ted Cruz, Craig James and Glenn Addison) and David Dewhurst last. However, the Leppert campaign will find no comfort in his analysis of their candidate: “Once Texans take a closer look at his actual record (and how deeply he appears to be in the back pocket of T. Boone Pickens), I think he’ll be reduced to what he actually is: the least conservative and—other than Craig James —the least qualified candidate running for KBH’s vacated seat.” Ouch! But his rating of Dewhurst is even worse: “There is a reason that Dewhurst has been ducking Ted Cruz and refusing to attend any of the previous debates: he’s really, really bad at it…Remember the cartoon Droopy the dog? That’s pretty much exactly what Dewhurst sounded like on stage on Thursday evening. No energy, seemed lost and confused at times. Halting, slow speech.” Double ouch!
In The Dallas Morning News, Robert T. Garrett brings newspaper readers up to speed on the Huckabee/DeMint stuff I covered one to three weeks ago. Though he does manage to add some sneering liberal condescension at Fox News.
The American Jewish Committee and the World Affairs Council of Houston are sponsoring a foreign policy Senate candidate debate on Monday, January 23, at the Omni Houston Hotel. According to an email from the AJC, “12 of the 16 [candidates] have confirmed,” though Dewhurst and Democrat Paul Sadler were not among them.
Speaking of which, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention heretofore, but I don’t recall nearly this many debates for statewide elections in previous cycles. I mean, we’ve already had three times as many Texas Republican Senate debates as there were Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858! Thanks to the Tea Party, Texans are really enjoying a golden age of grassroots democracy…
Dewhurst gets the endorsement of Michael Reagan, AKA “Ronald Reagan’s non-goofy son.” That won’t hurt him, but I also don’t see it swaying any undecided voters.
Glenn Addison gets some attention from his local Community Impact newspaper. (For those unfamiliar with the, Community Impact newspapers are very local (I get the one for NW Austin) free monthly newspapers delivered by mail. I generally find the quality of their stories better than the Statesman.)
He also gets compared to Ron Paul by KVUE. The problem with almost right analysis of this sort is that it would probably take way too much time to list the salient differences between the two than it’s worth expending…
David Dewhurst appeared on the Mark Davis show on WBAP:
The filing deadline for all races is coming up on Thursday. Beyond that, the biggest news is probably going on behind the scenes, as I suspect all three of the major candidates are raising money like mad in advance of the Q4 deadline, the last to be reported before the March primary.
So have Glenn Addison, Curt Clever, Charles Holcomb (as mentioned yesterday), and one Ben Gambini of Winnie (about which The Google has precious little; he might as well be Chauncey Gardener).
Still no sign of Ricardo Sanchez’s name. Two days left…
Leppert picked up the endorsements of a number of former Dallas Cowboys, including Roger Staubach (who I mentioned previously as having donated to Leppert) and Troy Aikman. Again, all those play to his Dallas base, but Staubach and Aikman’s endorsements certainly won’t hurt him in the rest of the state.
Dewhurst stated that he was willing to debate once or twice. As Texas Iconoclast noted: “How magnanimous of his highness.”
Once you get beyond the condescending opening (“Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst enters the U.S. Senate campaign with considerable cash and name recognition, but a couple of Republican challengers are nipping at his heels”), this Houston Chronicle piece is a fairly accurate distillation of the consensus wisdom on the race.
Speaking of MSM outlets, Robert T. Garrett in The Dallas Morning News has an interesting bit on Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks setting up a phone bank for Cruz. Garrett has even toned down most of his usual smug condescension…
The Texas Restaurant Association endorses Dewhurst. That link also notes that:
This endorsement follows other major Texas endorsements of Dewhurst’s candidacy in recent weeks, including the Texas Poultry Federation, three former presidents of the Texas Farm Bureau, BEEF-PAC, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association Political Action Committee and the Texas Farm Bureau Friends of Agriculture Fund last week. David has also received endorsements from the Texas State Association of Fire Fighters, the Texas State Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, the Texas Municipal Police Association and the Texas Department of Public Safety Officers Association PAC. Prior to those, he received endorsements Texas Right To Life PAC, pro-life leaders Kyleen Wright and Carol Everett, and the Texas Alliance for Life PAC.
Dewhurst was always going to get the lion share of the business endorsements. The pro-life endorsements I’ve covered. The police and firefighter pickups won’t hurt.
Well, there’s one group that probably won’t be endorsing Craig James if he jumps in: Texas Tech boosters. But I don’t know where the silly “killed 5 hookers” meme started.
Robert Pratt at Empower Texas is not impressed with Tom Leppert’s pledge to “get things done” in Washington. I hardly qualify as a Leppert cheerleader, but I do think they make much ado about nothing for what is essentially a rhetorical flourish.