As fewer and fewer Democrats were elected in Texas over the past two decades, liberals would console themselves with the thought that demographics were on their side. “Just you wait, Hispanics will turn Texas back into a blue state.” Indeed, the likes of Ruy Teixeira considered the triumph of Democrats riding an ever-rising tides of Hispanic immigrants to permanent majority party status all but inevitable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Blue State Nirvana: Illegal alien amnesty failed, even with Democratic majorities in both House and Senate, depriving Democrats of what they assumed were certain Democratic voters. And thanks to both the recession and various state-level illegal alien measures in places like Arizona and Alabama, illegal aliens are now leaving the United States faster than they’re entering it.
Now fast forward to 2012. After the Ricardo Sanchez’s withdrawl from the senate campaign, there are now absolutely no Hispanic Democrats running a statewide race in Texas this year. As horrible and lackluster a candidate as Sanchez was, at least you could see him protecting down-ballot races. But now Republicans will have at least one Hispanic (incumbent Judge Elsa Alcala of Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Place 8) and as many as three (including incumbent Judge David Medina in Texas Supreme Court Place 4), one of whom, Ted Cruz, could be the top statewide name on the ballot.
Hell, even the Libertarians (Texas Railroad Commission Place 2) and the Greens (U.S. Senate) managed to find Hispanic candidates to run statewide. That’s a major Hispandering failure for the Texas Democratic Party. And to add insult to injury, by failing to run a candidate for Railroad Commission Place 2, where the Greens do have a candidate, Democrats have pretty much ensured that Greens will continue to qualify for automatic ballot access (and thus continue to leach liberal votes away from them).
In an ideal world, people would choose all their candidates based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. In the real world, ethnic identification does affect voting patterns. Even a few percentage points of Hispanic voters crossing the aisle to vote for Cruz rather than straight-ticket Democratic might be enough for Republicans to pick up a handful of down ballot races.
And that dream of a Blue State Texas grows still more distant.
Remember Jason Altmire? The Blue Dog Democratic representing Pennsylvania’s 4th District who didn’t roll over when Nancy Pelosi snapped her fingers, and voted against ObamaCare? Thanks to that, while scores of his fellow Democrats were booted out of office in the Great Red Wave of 2010, Altmire hung on to his seat.
It appears his luck has run out. During redistricting, Pennsylvania lost a seat, so Altmire’s district was merged with the 12th District, and early returns show him losing to 12th incumbent Mark Critz (who won the seat in a special election after the death of pork king Rep. John Murtha).
Either way, he 12th should be a pickup opportunity for Republican candidate Keith Rothfus, who had no primary challenge and finished Q1 with $385,000 on hand.
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.
Reminder: I will be liveblogging the Texas Senate debate here tomorrow at 7 PM. Feel free to drop by for insightful commentary, snarky asides, and no doubt a veritable cavalcade of deeply embarrassing typos.
Now this week’s Senate race news:
Ted Cruz decries Obama’s understanding of the constitution over at NRO.
Ted Cruz picks up the endorsement of…Pat Boone? Actually it’s in his role as spokesman of the 60 Plus Association. Like Dewhurst’s many business association endorsements, it won’t hurt, but I don’t actually see it swaying anyone’s vote. Unless hipsters suddenly made Pat Boone cool while I wasn’t looking…
The Cruz campaign also rolled out a new website to attack Dewhurst with, http://www.dewbious.com/. No new revelations there if you’ve been following the campaign closely.
The Houston Chronicleprofiles David Dewhurst. Honestly, it’s less interesting for the Dewhurst coverage than the usual liberal MSM talking points scattered throughout, including the classic “or like Perry, whose budget called for cuts to public education that some have labeled extreme.” And by cuts he means “increase” and by “some” he means “all my fellow liberal reporters.”
The Dewhurst camp dings, quite properly, Cruz-supporter Dick Armey’s reference to Dewhurst being backed by “Daddy’s money.” Dewhurst’s father died when he was three, and Dewhurst spent time in the Air Force and the CIA before making his own fortune in the oil industry. Armey owes Dewhurst an apology, but Cruz does not; receiving someone’s endorsement does not make you responsible for their every dumb statement.
Craig James blasts Cruz for suggesting to him (via text message) he bring up Dewhurst’s constant debate ducking at tomorrow’s debate. A rare misstep for Cruz.
Evidently you have to suck as bad as Keith Olbermann. He went from CNN to MSNBC to Current TV (whose audience ratings clock in slightly higher than a rounding error), where he was just fired and replaced with Client 9. To continue the pattern of moving to ever-smaller markets, I guess he’ll next have to host the SUNY Stony Brook Revolutionary Hour of Power on cable access.
I don’t usually spend my time and attention attacking the likes of Olbermann, Bill Maher, Paul Krugman, etc., simply because doing so takes time and attention that could be used describing the many failures of the Obama agenda, and the incompetence, corruption, and cronyism of both the Obama Administration and Democratic officeholders in general. But sometimes your shotgun is in the shop, and you need to restock the barrel with pike…
So Keith Olbermann is out of a job. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are up by as much as 60%. So how’s that war against conservative media working out for you, liberals?
It should be no surprise that Democratic senate candidate Paul Sadler supports the the whole liberal checklist of Obama initiatives. However, what’s surprising is how easily he plays the “Obama’s opponents are racist” card on his fellow Texans:
“If he had an ‘R’ behind his name—and unfortunately, in some parts of this state, if his skin color was different—they would hail him as one of the greatest presidents of this country.”
I’m sure Texans are absolutely delighted to hear they’re racists for opposing Obama’s failed Blue State model of big government, out-of-control spending and higher taxes. The Race Card used to be the last refugee of black liberal scoundrels. Now it seems to be the first refugee of even white Democrats.
Later on he mentions that “fundraising isn’t going too well.” Imagine that.
And next week the Supreme Court will hear arguments on its constitutionality. Many are suggesting that a decision in ObamaCare’s favor will actually damage Obama’s reelection chances.
More specifically, eight out of the eleven “Stupak Block Flippers” (i.e., the theoretically staunch pro-life Democrats who swore up and down they would never, ever, ever vote for ObamaCare if it included taxpayer funding for abortion, right up until they voted for taxpayer-funded abortion) went down in electoral defeat. At the time, the insistence for public funding for abortion seemed like a tactical error on the part of liberals. After all, why bother with that tiny sop to feminists when you’re busy nationalizing one-sixth of the economy?
But since then, the fervor with which Democrats have pursued imposing this mandate on Catholics (part and parcel of their contempt for religion), their white hot fury at Rush Limbaugh’s (admittedly foolish) remarks, and the continuing overheated, drama queen “war on women” rhetoric coming from the left side of the blogsphere suggests that yes, that was what ObamaCare was really about, and they’re willing to remain a permanent political minority to maintain it.
So be it. If forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions is the hill they want to die on*, I suppose we should let them. (Though not at the cost of failing to mention Obama’s failure on the economy, on creating the conditions for private industry to create jobs, Fast & Furious, or his naked cronyism.) As Mickey Kaus has noted, this issue is a serious political loser for Obama, and we should keep hammering away on it, not despite the shrieks of outrage from liberalism’s feminist amen corner, but because of them.
*”Violent, eliminationist” military metaphor offered up as free rhetorical bonus!
Now that all the post-redistricting filings have been finalized, I thought I would take a look at Texas U.S. congressional races to see where either the Republican or the Democratic party has failed to field a candidate. While districts are usually drawn to protect incumbents and minimize the chances of the out-of-power party, it’s usually best to contest all possible races, for a variety of reasons:
You can’t beat something with nothing.
It helps tie down time, money and effort that could otherwise be shifted to other races.
It helps down-ballot races by drawing voters to the polls.
It offers a chance for Republicans to get their message of limited government, lower taxes and greater freedom out to people who might not otherwise hear it, and possibly make some converts in the process (the parable of the sower).
Stuff happens. Sudden, unexpected twists of fate can play out at any moment. Incumbents get caught stuffing bribe money into their freezer or consorting with prostitutes. Planes crash. And there’s always the possibility of someone being caught in bed with a dead woman or a live goat.
Unexpected opportunities arise, but you can’t take advantage of them if you don’t have a candidate in place.
With that in mind, let’s see how well Republicans and Democrats have done in finding candidates for all 36 Texas congressional races:
U.S. Congressional Races Where Democrats Failed to Field a Candidate
U.S. Representative District 2: Republican Incumbent Ted Poe
U.S. Representative District 3: Republican Incumbent Sam Johnson
U.S. Representative District 4: Republican Incumbent Ralph Hall
U.S. Representative District 13: Republican Incumbent Mac Thornberry
U.S. Representative District 17: Republican Incumbent Bill Flores (in a seat that was held by Democrat Chet Edwards until 2010!)
U.S. Representative District 19: Republican Incumbent Randy Neugebauer
U.S. Representative District 25: Open seat, formerly Lloyd Dogget’s until he moved to the newly created 35th District following redistricting. No less than 12 Republicans have filed for this seat (including former Senate candidates Michael Williams, Roger Williams, and Charles Holcomb). 56% of the newly reformulated 25th District’s residents voted for McCain in 2008; that’s solidly, but not overwhelmingly, Republican. But not one Democrat bothered to run…
So that’s seven U.S. Congressional races where Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee National Chair for Recruiting and Candidate Services Allyson Schwartz, and, well, whoever the hell it is at The Texas Democratic Party in charge of recruiting candidates, were unable to find a single person out of approximately 688,488 citizens in each of those districts to run for the United States House of Representatives. Say what you want about Alvin Greene running for Senator in South Carolina, but at least he showed up, which Texas Democrats couldn’t even manage to do in almost one-fifth of U.S. Congressional races this year.
By contrast, Republicans only fell down on the job in one congressional district:
U.S. Congressional Race Where Republicans Failed to Field a Candidate
U.S. Representative District 29: Democratic incumbent Gene Green gets a pass. In a district that went 62% for Obama, any Republican was going to have an uphill race. But given that there are five districts even more heavily Democratic (the 9th, 16th, 18th, 33rd, and 35th) where Republicans fielded a candidate, this seems like a lost opportunity, especially for a Republican Hispanic candidate in a Hispanic district headed by an old white guy. (Granted, this didn’t work for Roy Morales in 2010, but I would have preferred that Morales file again and run a token campaign over no one running at all.)
All in all this is good news for Republicans. If I were a Democrat, I’d be mad at how thoroughly the state and national party fell down on the job of recruiting candidates.
A suggestion: All six Republican incumbents who haven’t drawn an opponent should each hold a fundraiser for Republican Incumbent Francisco “Quico” Canseco, who figures to have the toughest race of any incumbent this time around.
In the game of District 35 Chicken, Ciro Rodriguez decided that no, he didn’t want to face off against Lloyd Doggett’s 18-wheeler full of money and swerved aside. Instead he’s going to run against Republican incumbent Francisco “Quico” Canseco for the 23rd Congressional District seat Rodriguez lost to him in 2010. But before that, he has to get past State Rep. Pete Gallego, who has been running for the 23rd for months and tried (unsuccessfully) to warn Rodriguez off what is now likely to be a very bruising Democratic primary fight. (John Bustamante, son of yet another former Democratic congressmen, is also running, but with only $3,000 in his campaign coffers, I see no sign that he has gotten any traction, whereas both Rodriguez and Gallego have broken the $100,000 mark.)
