Posts Tagged ‘Beau Boulter’

Texas Election Results Analysis: The Warning Shot

Thursday, November 15th, 2018

This is going to be a “glass half empty” kind of post, so let’s start out enumerating all the positives for Texas Republicans from the 2018 midterms:

  • Ted Cruz, arguably the face of conservatism in Texas, won his race despite a zillion fawning national profiles of an opponent that not only outspent him 2-1, but actually raised more money for a Senate race than any candidate in the history of the United States. All that, and Cruz still won.
  • Every statewide Republican, both executive and judicial, won their races.
  • Despite long being a target in a swing seat, Congressmen Will Hurd won reelection.
  • Republicans still hold majorities in the their U.S. congressional delegation, the Texas House and the Texas Senate.

    • By objective standards, this was a good election for Republicans. But by subjective standards, this was a serious warning shot across the bow of the party. After years of false starts and dead ends, Democrats finally succeeded in turning Texas slightly purple.

    Next let’s list the objectively bad news:

  • Ted Cruz defeated Beto O’Rourke by less than three points, the worst showing of any topline Republican candidate since Republican Clayton Williams lost the Governor’s race to Democratic incumbent Ann Richards in 1990, and the worst senate result for a Texas Republican since Democratic incumbent Lloyd Bentsen beat Republican challenger Beau Boulter in 1988.
  • O’Rourke’s 4,024,777 votes was not only more than Hillary Clinton received in Texas in 2016, but was more than any Democrat has ever received in any statewide Texas race, ever. That’s also more than any Texas statewide candidate has received in a midterm election ever until this year. It’s also almost 2.5 times what 2014 Democratic senatorial candidate David Alameel picked up in 2014.
  • The O’Rourke campaign managed to crack long-held Republican strongholds in Tarrant (Ft. Worth), Williamson, and Hays counties, which had real down-ballot effects, and continue their recent success in Ft. Bend (Sugar Land) and Jefferson (Beaumont) counties.
  • Two Republican congressmen, Pete Sessions and John Culberson, lost to Democratic challengers. Part of that can be put down to sleepwalking incumbents toward the end of a redistricting cycle, but part is due to Betomania having raised the floor for Democrats across the state.
  • Two Republican incumbent state senators, Konni Burton of District 10 and Don Huffines of District 16, lost to Democratic challengers. Both were solid conservatives, and losing them is going to hurt.
  • Democrats picked up 12 seats in the Texas house, including two in Williamson County: John Bucy III beating Tony Dale (my representative) in a rematch of 2016’s race in House District 136, and James Talarico beating Cynthia Flores for Texas House District 52, the one being vacated by the retiring Larry Gonzalez.
  • Democratic State representative Ron Reynolds was reelected despite being in prison, because Republicans didn’t bother to run someone against him. This suggests the state Republican Party has really fallen down on the job when it comes to recruiting candidates.
  • In fact, by my count, that was 1 of 32 state house districts where Democrats faced no Republican challenger.
  • Down-ballot Republican judges were slaughtered in places like Harris and Dallas counties.
  • All of this happened with both the national and Texas economies humming along at the highest levels in recent memory.

    • There are multiple reasons for this, some that other commentators covered, and others they haven’t.

  • For years Republicans have feasted on the incompetence of the Texas Democratic Party and their failure to entice a topline candidate to enter any race since Bob Bullock retired. Instead they’ve run a long string of Victor Moraleses and Tony Sanchezes and seemed content to lose, shrug their shoulders and go “Oh well, it’s Texas!” Even candidates that should have been competative on paper, like Ron Kirk, weren’t. (And even those Democrats who haven’t forgotten about Bob Kreuger, who Ann Richards tapped to replace Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen when the latter resigned to become Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, getting creamed 2-1 by Kay Baily Hutchison in the 1993 special election, would sure like to.) Fortunately for Texas Republicans, none of the non-Beto names bandied about (like the Castro brother) seem capable of putting them over the top (but see the “celebrity” caveat below).
  • Likewise, Republicans have benefited greatly from a fundraising advantage that comes from their lock on incumbency. Democrats couldn’t raise money because they weren’t competitive, and weren’t competitive in part because they couldn’t raise money. All that money the likes of Battleground Texas threw in may finally be having an effect.
  • More on how Democrats have built out their organization:

    Under the hood, the damage was significant. There are no urban counties left in the state that support Republicans, thanks to O’Rourke winning there. The down-ballot situation in neighboring Dallas County was an electoral massacre, as was the situation in Harris County.

    “This election was clearly about work and not the wave,” [Democratic donor Amber] Mostyn said. “We have been doing intense work in Harris County for five cycles and you can see the results. Texas is headed in the right direction and Beto outperformed and proved that we are on the right trajectory to flip the state.”

  • “Last night we saw the culmination of several years of concentrated effort by the left — and the impact of over $100 million spent — in their dream to turn Texas blue again. Thankfully, they failed to win a single statewide elected office,” Texas Republican Party chair James Dickey said in a statement. “While we recognize our victories, we know we have much work to do — particularly in the urban and suburban areas of the state.”
  • The idea that Trump has weakened Republican support in the suburbs seems to have some currency, based on the Sessions and Culberson losses.
  • That effect is especially magnified in Williamson and Hayes counties, given that they host bedroom communities for the ever-more-liberal Austin.
  • Rick Perry vs. The World ended a year-long hibernation to pin the closeness of the race on Cruz’s presidential race. He overstates the case, but he has a point. Other observations:

    3. What if Beto had spent his money more wisely? All that money on yard signs and on poorly targeted online ads (Beto spent lots of money on impressions that I saw and it wasn’t all remnant ads) wasn’t cheap. If I recall correctly, Cruz actually spent more on TV in the final weeks, despite Beto raising multiples of Cruz’s money. Odd.

    4. Getting crazy amounts of money from people who dislike Ted Cruz was never going to be the hard part. Getting crazy good coverage from the media who all dislike Ted Cruz was never going to be hard part.

    Getting those things and then not believing your own hype…well if you are effing Beto O’Rourke, then that is the hard part.

    5. Beto is probably the reason that some Dems won their elections. But let’s not forget that this is late in the redistricting cycle where districts are not demographically what they were when they were drawn nearly a decade ago.

  • For all the fawning profiles of O’Rourke, he was nothing special. He was younger than average, theoretically handsomer than average (not a high bar in American politics), and willing to do the hard work of statewide campaigning. He was not a bonafide superstar, the sort of personality like Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Donald Trump that can come in from the outside and completely reorder the political system. If one of those ran as a Democrat statewide in Texas, with the backing and resources O’Rourke had, they probably win.
  • A lack of Green Party candidates, due to them failing to meet the 5% vote threshold in 2016, may have also had a small positive effect on Democrat vote totals in the .5% to 1% range.
  • None of the controversies surrounding three statewide Republican candidates (Ken Paxton’s lingering securities indictment, Sid Miller’s BBQ controversy, or George P. Bush’s Alamo controversy) seemed to hurt them much. Paxton’s may have weighed him down the most, since he only won by 3.6%, while George P. Bush won with the second highest margin of victory behind Abbott. Hopefully this doesn’t set up a nightmare O’Rourke vs. Bush Senate race in 2020.

    • Texas Republicans just went through a near-death experience, but managed to survive. Is this level of voting the new norm for Democrats, or an aberration born of Beto-mania? My guess is probably somewhere in-between. It remains to be seen how it all shakes out during the sound and fury of a Presidential year. And the biggest factor is out of the Texas Republican Party’s control: a cyclical recession is inevitable at some point, the only question is when and how deep.

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Texas Senate Race Spending: A Look at This Point In Previous Cycles

    Monday, July 25th, 2011

    Now that half the fundraising year has passed, I wanted to take a look at how the funds raised this year compare to this point in years past.

    Unfortunately, it’s been so long since there’s been a competitive regular Republican Senate primary in Texas (I’m discounting the special election of 1993 because it’s difficult to compare special elections to regular elections) that it’s hard to find a precedent for that side of the race. John Cornyn had no serious competition in 2002. Indeed, you’d have to go back to Beau Boulter vs. Wes Gilbreath in 1988 for a truly competitive regular Texas Republican senatorial primary. And the main FEC page doesn’t go back before 1999.

    So let’s look at the Democratic side of the race, where there’s a lot more precedent for an open race. While my initial assessment of Ricardo Snachez’s $160,000 was it was about what you’d expect given his late start, it seems disappointing in light of what previous Democratic senatorial candidates were able to raise.

    2008 Senate Race

    For the 2008 race against John Cornyn, trail lawyer Mikal C. Watts had already raised over $3 million by July of 2007, mostly through self-funding. What, you never heard of Watts? That might be because, despite his financial firepower, he dropped out of the race before the primary. Why? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that letters came out showing him pressuring litigation targets to settle by bragging about how much money he had contributed to appellate judges who would hear the case:

    “This court is comprised of six justices, all of whom are good Democrats,” Watts wrote. “The Chief Justice, Hon. Rogelio Valdez, was recently elected with our firm’s heavy support, and is a man who believes in the sanctity of jury verdicts.”

    The letter goes on to name Justices Errlinda Castillo, Nelda Rodriguez, J. Bonner Dorsey, Federico Hinojosa and Linda Yanez, and says his firm also has financially supported them.

    Strangely enough, this was seen as injuring his election chances, and he dropped out in October. Sanchez might take comfort in the fact that eventual Democratic nominee Rick Norgiega, didn’t even file his paperwork until July 11 of 2007, and that he eventually raised over $4 million. Or it would be comforting, if not for the fact that Cornyn raised $13 million and beat him by 12 percentage points despite the Obama wave in 2008.

    2006 Senate Race

    In the 2006 election cycle, eventual Democratic nominee (and yet another trial lawyer) Barbara Ann Radnofsky had already raised $355,218 by April 5, 2005. By July 5, 2005, she would amass a total of just under half a million dollars. By the time the race was done, she would raise just shy of $1.5 million, and, despite it being a Democratic wave election year, Kay Baily Hutchison would raise over $6 million and would wallop her 61.7% to 36%.

    2002 Senate Race

    Eventual Democratic nominee Ron Kirk didn’t even file his first campaign report until December 7, 2001, and still managed to raise over $9 million for the race. Kirk was part of the Democratic Party’s 2002 “Dream Team” along with Tony Sanchez and John Sharp: One black, one Hispanic, and one white all running serious, well-funded, top of the ticket campaigns in a year in which the party out of the White House usually does well. They all lost. Kirk did better than Sanchez (losing to Rick Perry), but worse than John Sharp (losing to David Dewhurst).

    By the way, Tony Sanchez spent $60 million of his own money for the privilege of getting creamed by Rick Perry, who took over 60% of the vote, thus disproving two theories beloved by political consultants (money is everything, and the Hispanic vote will make Democrats in Texas competitive Real Soon Now) in one fell swoop.

    Conclusion

    Ricardo Sanchez’s military background gives him several distinct advantages other Democratic candidates have not had, but quick access to significant campaign funds is not among them. Certainly the pay for Lieutenant (three star) General in the united States Army isn’t chickenfeed (about $143,000 a year), but it’s far short of what he would need to self-finance his campaign. Financially, Sanchez’s campaign is going to suffer from him not being a trial lawyer, or, well, Ron Kirk, who was (and presumably still is) amazingly well-connected in both business and Democratic political circles.

    Ricardo Sanchez is already behind where most recent Texas Democratic senatorial candidates were during this part of the fundraising cycle. And all of them lost.

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | No Comments »