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…
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.
You may remember back in June, when I noticed that Ricardo Sanchez’s campaign website mentioned tax cuts as a means of creating jobs and improving the economy. Given that was so out of character for a Democrat, I thought I better get a screen shot to prove it was there:
The best approach to creating jobs in Texas is for us to provide tax cuts, incentives and increase financing support for small businesses.
That same sentence today has excised the words “tax cuts”:
The best approach to creating jobs in Texas is for us to provide incentives and increase financing support for small businesses.
In fact, as far as I can tell, that’s the only change to that page.
I have written the Sanchez campaign for an explanation of the change. I’ll let you know what they have to say if I ever receive a reply.
Evidently tax cuts are so anathema to Democrats that even the hand-picked DNC candidate, running without serious primary opposition, running to be Senator from a very conservative state, and sure to be a heavy underdog in a general election in which Democratic control of the Senate will be up for grabs, is not allowed to mention them on his website.
It’s time for candidate’s Q3 fundraising totals to start trickling out, and the Ted Cruz campaign is first out of the gate with the news that he raised $1,057,953 in Q3 and has $2.4 million cash on-hand. This is in line with his Q1 and Q2 fundraising totals, and I would expect a huge bump in Q4 thanks to his cover appearance in National Review.
Now we wait for the Q3 fundraising numbers for the other candidates. How much personal money will David Dewhurst sink into his own campaign? Will Tom Leppert continue to self-fund at his $1 million a quarter clip? Has Ricardo Sanchez been fundraising in Q3? Or doing anything at all?
Cruz also got more love in the form of a fundraising push from Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund PAC.
A new poll from the Dem-leaning PPP shows Dewhurst with (no surprise) a big lead in name recognition. The poll also shows Dewhurst, Cruz and Tom Leppert all beating Ricardo Sanchez (who, while theoretically running, has been about as scarce on the campaign trail as Dewhurst) and former Congressman Chet Edwards (who isn’t running, and hasn’t been running).
The most surprising thing from the full poll results? Elizabeth Ames Jones edges out Tom Leppert for third place.
Ross Ramsey calls Dewhurst “the Mitt Romney of the Texas Senate race.” Ouch! “There’s the part of Dewhurst that’s like Romney. Both entered their races as presumptive front-runners. Neither is the sort of guy who’d be at the barbecue at 4 in the morning starting the fire and working on the briskets and ribs. They’re business aristocrats. Swells.” Double ouch!
The Leppert campaign has put up the endorsements of Job Creators for Leppert. Of course, it doesn’t really help defend against the charge of his limited regional appeal when some 90% of the names on the list hail from the greater Dallas area…
And speaking of Garland, there was another longshot Republican there I hadn’t heard of before: Curt Cleaver, who seems to be running on a full-tilt Christian conservative platform. He evidently started running in August. I guess I’ll have to update my cheatsheet of candidate’s web pages. I just sent him email to ask why he’s running, as I do not think the Republican side of the race suffers from a dearth of candidates…
And this week, besides appearing as a question in the PPP poll, Ricardo Sanchez…did absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. It’s been a month since his news page was updated, a month since his Facebook page was updated, and three months since his lone, solitary tweet was released unto the cold, cruel world. Does Sanchez actually want to run for the Senate?
Cruz has an Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle calling for a real jobs program of limited government. “Government doesn’t create jobs. The private sector – entrepreneurs risking capital to meet a demonstrated need – creates jobs. But government can kill jobs.”
Tom Leppert had an interview with William Luntz of The Lone Star report.
Leppert was also at a Christian Legal Society luncheon today, but I can’t find a report of it, only photos.
The Texas Tribune says that if Rep. Mike McCaul gets in it could be a game-changer. Maybe. But thus far, The Texas Tribune staff have not impressed me with their deep understanding of inter-Republican Party dynamics.
Elizabeth Ames Jones has an Op-Ed piece up on Real Clear Conservatives.
She also appeared at, um, some sort of dinner for the William Barret Travis Chapter of the Sons of the Republic of Texas. It’s an odd little piece on what sounds like an odd dinner.
Here’s part of a previously mentioned Cruz interview with The Texas Tribune, in which he goes after Dewhurst:
An actual Ricardo Sanchez sighting! (And here you thought he was in a dive bar in Laredo slamming cold ones with David Dewhurst and Fake Ted Cruz.) Granted, it was to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in Community Service from the National Hispanic Sports Hall of Fame, rather than a campaign appearance. But still…
Addison also participated in a Llano Tea Party meet-and-greet last week. If it seems like Republican longshot Addison is running a harder-working, more serious campaign than Democratic frontrunner Sanchez in every area but fundraising, that’s because he is.
I had two separate science fiction conventions to go to (Worldcon in Reno, and Armadillocon here in Austin) back to back, plus some personal upheavals, so it’s taking me some time to get back in the swing of things. So here are some quick Senate race updates for the last two weeks:
Another Senate candidate forum, this time in Waco. Cruz earns points for defense of the Tea Party. Other attendees included Elizabeth Ames Jones, Tom Leppert, and “folksy Magnolia mortician” (to use The Waco Tribune‘s phrase) Glenn Addison. Addison seemed to get off the best line, a shot at Anthony Weiner, when asked if he’d resign if caught in a scandal. “The good lord knows I have my struggles, but I don’t struggle with holding cameras different ways.”
Cruz warmed up the audience before Rick Perry’s announcement at Red State.
Ross Ramsey polls the insiders again. Ramsey also consigns Sean Hubbard and Stanley Garza to the ranks of the invisible men, using the phrase “Ricardo Sanchez, the only declared Democratic candidate.” This is what old school journalists used to call “a factual error.” Do they not teach “Accuracy 101” in The George Soros Academy for Left-Wing Journalism?
Is Rep. Mike McCaul considering getting into the race? I don’t see a lot of running room, but McCaul is frequently ranked as the wealthiest member of congress with a reported fortune for $294 million (his wife, Linda McCaul, is the daughter of the founder of Clear Channel Communications). Given that, his willingness to “spend $4 million to $6 million of his own money” seems pretty penny-ante for a Texas Senate seat, especially with David Dewhurst already in the race. Now, if he were to announce he was spending $25 million of his own money…
There was also evidently a candidate forum put on by Congressman Pete Olsen in Ft. Bend County, but I can’t find any mention of it except on Dewhurst’s site. Also watch Jim Bognet refer to himself as “Manager for Governor David Dewhurst’s senate campaign.” Might want to make sure to slip in that “Lieutenant” before “Governor” next time…
Elizabeth Ames jones endorses Rick Perry for President. I see no indication that Perry has returned the favor for Jones’ Senate race…
And finally, as far as I can, over the last two weeks, Ricardo Sanchez…did absolutely nothing.
A few senate race updates for these dog days of summer:
There will be a Clear Lake Tea Party senate candidate forum Thursday, August 11. Expected to attend are Ted Cruz, Glenn Addison, Tom Leppert, Elizabeth Ames Jones, Andrew Castanuela and Lela Pittenger.
Ricardo Sanchez has come out of hibernation to give a speech at UT. The Houston Chronicle story is a bit better, but still long of Democratic party platitudes and short on policy specifics.
There are rumblings that Craig James may jump into the Senate race, but I don’t see it happening; I don’t see him being able to make any headway against Cruz and Dewhurst. (Psssst, Michael O’Brien! Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, Comptroller Susan Combs, and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples aren’t running for the Senate, they’re all eying the Lt. Governor’s and (depending on what happens with Perry and Dewhurst’s respective runs) Governor’s races in 2014.)
