To make it easier to see how the fundraising race has progressed, I made a chart tracking donations to Ted Cruz, David Dewhurst and Tom Leppert:
Since this just tracks campaign donations, it doesn’t include self-funding, which both Dewhurst and Leppert have made extensive use of. After Dewhurst’s full Q4 FEC report is up, I’ll do another chart on those numbers.
A testy exchange between Ted Cruz and Tom Leppert at last week’s Texas Republican Assembly Biennial Endorsing Convention Biennial Endorsing Convention on Leppert’s gay rights parade and ACORN baggage that I, Matt Dowling and whoever was behind the now-silent Race to Replace KBH dug up.
Last week Ted Cruz was on the Glenn Beck Show:
Glenn Beck: “There’s no way you’re ever going to get elected. You make too much sense.”
Craig James appeared on WFAA (again, apologies for their crappy, non-YouTube video embedding):
Ted Cruz, Lela Pittenger and Ben Gambini all appeared at the North Shore Republican Women’s forum in Montgomery County.
Craig James is just fine with a later date for the primary. That piece isn’t particularly information, but I thought I would put it up since they do actually manage to mention all the Republican and Democratic candidates filed for the race, a sharp contrast with other news stories I could name…
The Texas Association of Business will have another Senate candidate forum in Austin tomorrow from 200-3:30 PM. Scheduled to attend are Ted Cruz, David Dewhurst, Tom Leppert and Craig James. I’ve been sending email back and forth with the James campaign to try a find a time to interview him while he’s in town, but it doesn’t look like we’ll find one that matches both our schedules. (It’s a busy time for my day job.) So we might end up doing an email interview instead.
The National Association of Realtors endorses Dewhurst. I’m sure this is a shocking turn of events completely unforeseen by anyone following the race.
Texas Sparkle lends her blog to Kevin Jackson so he can make the case for Craig James. His upshot seems to be that James is a tough competitor. Well, great. But getting your chin stitched up without anesthetic is probably a skill that will never be needed on the senate floor, and Mr. Jackson’s piece seems to be devoid of any actual discussion of political positions.
Of them, Paul Sadler gets endorsed by the AFL-CIO. So that’s a second traditional Democratic interest group Sadler has in his corner along with the legacy news media.
Profile of Democratic candidate Jason Gibson. “Gibson considers himself a mainstream Democrat who believes in lower taxes and efficient government and who supports the Second Amendment. He’s pro-labor, he said, with an abiding interest in worker safety, but still is working to fill in the blanks on most issues. Jobs and the economy, he said, are key. He has hired several well-regarded campaign consultants and has said he is willing to spend into the seven figures.”
I had both a wedding and a book release party to attend this weekend, so I haven’t had time until today to note that David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz have followed the lead of Craig James in releasing their tax returns.
The Dewhurst campaign announced they were releasing two years of tax returns (plus estimates for 2011)…and then failed to link to the returns from the announcement. (Perhaps it’s up somewhere on the Dewhurst site, but the lack of a press or social media contact listing makes such information difficult to ascertain.) They can be found at this Texas Tribune page. The Dewhurst campaign seems entirely too comfortable with letting the MSM continue in their role as information gatekeepers rather than allowing voters to access information directly.
And here’s the Tribune’s summary of those documents: “Dewhurst reported a total income of $1.01 million and tax payment of $281,188 in his 2010 report, and a $1.4 million loss and tax payment of $443,646 reported in his 2009 report.”
The Cruz campaign followed suite by releasing five years of tax returns, which can be found here. And here are links to the individual years:
(To be fair to the other candidates, I must note that there seems to be no way to find this from the Cruz website itself. However, unlike Dewhurst, the Cruz campaign is much better at giving contract addresses for the campaign team.)
Once again the Texas Tribune provides the too-lazy-to-flip-through-tax-forms overview: “Over the past five years, Cruz has increased his earnings with every filing. In 2006, he reported an income of $347,716. In 2007, that increased to $395,494. It jumped to $780,198 in 2008, and to $1.5 million in 2009.” Good for him. They also go on to note “With Cruz’s disclosure, this leaves only former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert among the major Republican U.S. Senate candidates who has yet to release his tax returns.” The Leppert campaign has promised to do so, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it takes a few days to dig out and digitize his tax returns.
If I have time (a commodity in short supply right now), I’ll try to dig through the James, Dewhurst, and Cruz returns for nuggets of insight. Kudos to all three of the candidates for releasing their tax forms, and especially to James for getting the ball rolling.
No word on whether any of the Democrats in the race will follow suit. Maybe no one has asked them yet…
For those of you whom don’t regard paging through an ex-football player’s tax returns an exciting pastime, here’s the executive summary: James earned earned more than $9 million in the past five years, mostly from capital gains on investments. That means he’s Leppert rich, but not Dewhurst rich. Good for him. It’s always nice to see a professional athlete who saved and invested their money wisely, since there are so many who didn’t. He also seems to have given a fair amount to charities over the years.
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?
In covering the American Jewish Committee/World Affairs Council of Houston senate candidate forum on foreign policy I mentioned previously, we have a news story that is demonstrably deficient in several areas:
You get told who wasn’t there (Craig James, Paul Sadler, and Lt. Governor Chupacabra), and even how many of each flavor were there (“six Republicans, three Democrats and one Libertarian”), but the article itself only lists five of those ten. That would be the very first “W” of the “Five Ws and an H,” assuming they still teach that at journalism school. (Maybe they’re replaced it with another class on “Reporting Social Justice.”)
However, because I’m so Old School, I actually went out and got a list of who attended the forum from the AJC: Republicans Ted Cruz, Tom Leppert, Glenn Addison, Lela Pittinger, Charles Holcomb, and Ben Gambini (yes, an actual Ben Gambini sighting!), Democrats Daniel Boone and Jason Gibson, Libertarian Jon Roland, and independent candidate Mike Champion. So it turns out that even the summary of candidate affiliations was wrong.
In an article on a foreign policy forum that runs just shy of 500 words, a grand total of 96 of them actually dealt with the candidate’s foreign policy views, and even those are essentially free of concrete information. Let’s repost those parts in their entirety:
Cruz also said that “President Obama has been the most anti-Israel president this nation has ever seen.”
[snip]
Leppert emphasized his experience as an international businessman familiar with issues of currency and international trade.
[snip]
Cruz and Leppert were the only two candidates who were able to respond with practiced ease to a series of sophisticated questions dealing with world affairs, ranging from Israel’s response to the Iranian nuclear threat to whether the United States should help bail out faltering European economies. Most of the others on the stage seemed unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues.
That’s it. That’s the extent of coverage of the candidates’ foreign policy views in a forum dedicated to that very subject. We are no wiser as to what any candidate thinks of our troops levels in Afghanistan, what our relations with Pakistan should be, whether we should help topple the Assad regime in Syria, how to counter an increasingly bold China, or whether we should use military force to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Were those topics covered? We don’t know, as Holley and the Chronicle do not deign to tell us.
Instead of giving the candidates’ actual views, Holley merely gives us his dismissive analysis of eight of the ten candidates, telling us they are “unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues” without bothering to provide a single example of this ignorance.
The rest of the piece consists of horse race analysis, noting Dewhurst’s absence, audience attendance figures, and an interview with a random forum attendee. All of which would have been fine in a longer piece.
Joe Holley and/or his editor have missed a chance to actually inform their readers. I have a hard time thinking of a blogger who couldn’t have done a better job.
The Cruz campaign announced that it raised $1.1 million in Q4. That’s slightly up from the $1.05 million he raised in Q3, but honestly, I find it a bit disappointing; I would expect him to have a bigger Q4 fundraising bump from his National Review cover than that. They go on to note that the Cruz campaign ended the quarter having raised nearly $4 million for the race overall, and have $2.8 million cash on hand.
David Dewhurst, as previously reported, raised $1.54 million from donors in Q4, which was down from his Q3 totals, but we don’t know yet if he kicked any more of his own money into his campaign.
Dewhurst was always going to be the leading fundraiser in this race. The good news for the Cruz campaign is that, given the later primary date from the redistricting court fight, he has more time to close the fundraising gap. And Cruz is still winning the passion and momentum battles. But his campaign still needs to do more to leverage those advantages into 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 latest PPP poll has David Dewhurst still leading the Senate race at 36%, but that’s down five points since their last poll, while Cruz is up 6 points at 18%. Leppert is a distant third at 7% and Craig James comes in at 4%.
Most surprising piece of data: 39% of Dewhurst supporters identify with the Tea Party.
Caveats: The margin of error is +/-4.2%, and PPP is a left-leaning polling company. Still, even at twice Cruz’s support, the Dewhurst campaign can’t be happy with the overall trends…
While far from chicken-feed, those numbers seem really disappointing to me, especially given that he pulled in $2.64 million in donor contributions in Q3. Those are just donor numbers, and we don’t know much of Dewhurst’s own considerable wealth he tossed in until he tells us, or his official FEC numbers go up (there’s usually a significant lag between the campaign announcement and the FEC putting the numbers up).
As the establishment candidate and presumptive favorite, Dewhurst should be running away in the fundraising race. He’s not.
