The Third Court of Appeals covers a large swath of central Texas, stretching from Fayette up to Sterling county:
I don’t ever recall so much obvious money and effort being put into a down ballot judicial race before.
The most important race is Field’s attempt to unset the very liberal Diane Henson. Speaking of Field, this is what was on the back of the card he handed me at last week’s Ted Cruz/Tony Dale event:
I think that’s pretty much all you can ask for in a judicial philosophy.
I was going to have an insightful, data-filed post on the Texas 23rd Congressional district race, but then I realized that the Los Angeles Times data I was relying on flipped at least one bit of information (NRA-ILA is doing independent expenditures against Pete Gallego, not against Rep. Francisco “Quico” Canseco), which means I can’t trust the rest. Super executive summary: Canseco has a huge cash on-hand advantage, $785,623 to $23,250, but assuming the other LA Times numbers are right, the independent expenditure race is a lot closer to even.
Now on to a LinkSwarm a week before the election:
Obama is clearly winning the race for military endorsements, having 6 endorsements to Romney’s paltry 359.
Given that Miklosi has raised about half of what his Republican opponent incumbent Mike Coffman has for the Colorado Sixth Congressional District race, but only has about one-fifth the cash on hand, Livoti seems to have retained his magic touch.
When I looked over the new redistricting numbers, the Texas U.S. Congressional seat that leapt out at me as the most competitive was Rep Francisco “Quico” Canseco’s CD23, a swing seat which got minimal Republican reinforcement during redistricting. But right now I’m feeling better about that one. (Hopefully more on that topic in the next day or two.)
Right now the seat that worries me most is CD 14, Ron Paul’s old seat, where the Democrats are making a hard run to snag an upset in what looks to be a very down year for them both statewide and nationally.
Going off of Obama’s 2008 vote, the district got 9% less Republican in redistricting. The old 14th went 66% for McCain, the new one only 57%. That’s still a considerable advantage, but not necessarily an insurmountable one.
Moreover, in Nicholas Valentino “Nick” Lampson of Beaumont, the Democratic party has actually found a reasonably popular local politician with qualifying experience in Congress (including one term in Tom DeLay’s old seat). National Democrats have had this seat painted as a takeover target all year. Lampson’s FEC report includes a number of Texas lawyers and some out-of-state juice, including ACTBLUE, the Professional Airways Specialists PAC, and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Campaign Assistance Fund. (And who knows how much soft money will be spent on behalf of Lampson by outside groups this cycle?) The Lampson campaign was also one of two TX CD campaigns that flew in Bill Clinton for a campaign appearance. An internal Lampson poll released in August showed a very close race (usual internal poll caveats apply).
The Republican nominee, Randy Weber, is a two-term State Rep. Unlike Lampson, Weber had a crowded primary and a runoff to contend with, which ate up significant funds.
That Roll Call piece says that Lampson has $422,000 in cash on hand, while Weber only had $55,000. However, looking at the actual FEC numbers, updated in October 17 filings, it doesn’t seem quite so bad, with Lampson having $151,218 cash on hand compared to Weber’s $83,617.
Since I didn’t manage to get any good pictures of Tony Dale at his last event, I got two good ones this time around to make up for it:
Here are some pics to give an idea of the Wilco GOP digs:
They had a wide selection of GOP literature available:
Ted Cruz solo:
Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas Steve Munisteri, who I hope will forgive me for taking a picture than makes him look like The Joker:
I get the impression that it was a very long day for both him and Cruz. Two ravenous Cruz staffers went to town on the chicken nuggets; I think they’d been too busy to eat before then.
It was a good crowd (I’m guessing about 50-75 people) and Cruz gave a very solid stump speech. I think things look pretty good for Cruz, Dale, and (fingers crossed) Mitt Romney.
Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog endorses Ted Cruz for United States Senator. I believe that Cruz is the best candidate, that he has a long, strong, and deep commitment to conservative principles, and that he will make a great Senator for Texas.
I originally endorsed Cruz on April 30, a month before the Republican primary, and gave extended reasons why Cruz was the best candidate of all those running in the Republican primary, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each. This post reiterates that endorsement, and explains why Ted Cruz is a vastly superior choice for Senator than Democrat Paul Sadler.
Sadler had a reputation as a “moderate” Democrat in the Texas House, which meant he wanted government to get bigger and spend more at a slightly slower rate than his fellow Democrats, and was reportedly a skilled legislator on education issues. But I don’t want a “skilled legislator,” I want a conservative fighter. I want someone to fight for shrinking the size and scope of the federal government and reign in the insanely bloated federal spending that’s holding down the economy, not manage the bloat. There are quite enough Democrats in Congress who pretend to be moderate until the votes really count (see also: ObamaCare); we don’t need another one.
Like his party, Sadler has moved steadily left over the years. After failing to win a U.S. House seat, Sadler worked first as an asbestos trial lawyer, and then as head of a Texas wind power coalition putting him in not one but two of the biggest recipient groups for liberal big government crony capitalism largess. This suggests that he would try to roll back tort reform and would make a very poor representative for Texas’ vital oil and gas industry.
Further, given the positions Sadler has taken in interviews and debates, there seems to be very little of that old “moderate” patina left on him. He’s for higher taxes, bigger government, green pork, public employee unions, illegal alien amnesty, and ObamaCare. He’d fit right in among the big spenders in a Harry Reid-led Senate.
By contrast, Ted Cruz is not only the unquestioned Tea Party representative for shrinking big government, he has a broad, deep and impressive conservative background. You don’t specialize in 9th and 10th Amendment studies because you want to be rich, and you don’t work at the Texas Public Policy Foundation if you want to be a squishy moderate. Cruz is not only exceptionally sharp, an excellent debater and a gifted public speaker, he’s also a classic fusionist candidate with both strong free market and social conservative credentials. He beat all his Republican opponents despite millions spent to smear him and came out of the runoff not only unscathed, but with a national reputation. He was a great Texas Solicitor General, and I think he will make a great Senator. I urge all my Texas readers to cast their votes for him as the next United States Senator from Texas.
Mitt Romney just kept slamming them out of the park at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. “In the spirit of Sesame Street tonight, the President’s remarks are brought to you by the letter O and the number 16 trillion.”
The Libyan embassy had repeatedly asked for additional security and were refused In fact, their security was reduced. “We couldn’t even keep what we had.”
Watching and listening to Romney now, who do you agree with more: Mitt Romney, or reporters sounding outraged at his criticisms of the Obama Administration?
Both the Obama Administration and their lapdog media surrogates seem far more interested in defeating Obama’s political opponent than America’s Jihadest enemies, or telling the American people the truth.
Iowahawk reports on a recent outbreak of scrutonium, “a deadly poll-eating supervirus that attacks the immuno-hope system, leaving victims vulnerable to material facts.”
I attended Tony Dale‘s fundraising luncheon, and snapped a few pictures of the swells assembled there. Click to embiggen.
First, the lovely and talented Holly Hansen of Williamson County Conservative, who I finally got to meet in person! We’ve only been trading blog links for two years. Next to her is Cedar Park Mayor Matt Powell.
Congressman John Carter and Williamson County Commissioner Lisa Birkman.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.
Abbott next to Your Humble Blogger and his freakishly long torso.
And naturally, since this was a luncheon for Tony Dale, none of the pictures I got of him came out. Go figure. But don’t let that stop you from voting for him…
Edited to Add: Tony Dale was kind enough to send this picture along:
Remember how how incredibly tight the 1980 election was? How Ronald Reagan managed to edge Jimmy Carter at the last minute despite losing Texas and New York?
Probably not, mainly because that didn’t happen. But as Jeffrey Lord’s story makes clear, that was the narrative the New York Times was pushing most of the fall, and they had “polls” to back it up.
In the pantheon of lies, damn lies, and statistics, polls aren’t even as valid as statistics. At this point, polls by the usual MSM suspects (NYT, PPP, CBS, MS/NBC, Time, Newsweek, NPR, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, just to name a few) aren’t designed to gauge the race, they’re designed to encourage Democrats and discourage Republicans. They are, as Lord notes and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee admitted to Ed Rollins, offering up “in kind contributions” to the Democrats.
So let’s take a brief look at the many ways in which the MSM is distorting polls for the benefit of Obama and the Democrats.
Dick Morris (who knows a thing or two about polling) thinks the idea that an Obama victory is in the offing is bunk. “All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.” He also notes that even the skewed polls show Obama at less than 50%, and “the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent.”
By one analysis, pollsters are oversampling Democrats by an average of 6.1%.
Jay Cost notes that “polls that do a poor job of differentiating enthusiastic non-voters from enthusiastic voters are going to overestimate Obama’s margin.”
Every week you see the media going to bat for Obama, and every week we see more evidence of lack of enthusiasm on the part of Democrats compared to 2008. 2010 did happen, no matter how much the media would like to pretend it didn’t. The Tea Party hasn’t gone away, nor suddenly decided that they like Obama’s free-spending ways after all. The fundamentals of our ailing economy and staggering unemployment haven’t gone away either. And remember: Republicans now outnumber Democrats in party identification.
There’s a lot better chance that this election’s results will look like 1980 than that they will look like 2008.
