Sean Hubbard now has company in the “Declared Democratic candidates sure to be ignored by the MSM” purgatory, although Stanley Garza’s website says he’s only formed an exploratory committee.
In 2008, he ran for Tax Assessor/Collector in San Jacinto County…as a Republican. He says border control bills in the most recent legislative session caused him to switch parties. (Someone should tell him that pictures of him with Rick Perry and Michael Williams are not the ideal way to win Democratic votes.)
A threat to split the Hispanic vote away from Ricardo Sanchez? Given that Garza raised a grand total of $140 in his first quarter of fundraising (including a $100 loan to himself), the answer would tend to point towards no…
Lots of reaction to Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s long-awaited announcement that he was getting in the Senate race yesterday.
Here’s Dewhurst’s official announcement:
Ted Cruz offers a video response:
That video offers a URL for another Cruz website, https://www.provenconservative.com/, but it’s just a fundraising splash page with a link that leads to the main Cruz website.
In response to the Dewhurst announcement, the Tom Leppert campaign sent me a press release (which doesn’t appear to be online) stating:
“It comes as little surprise to me that David Dewhurst has thrown his hat into the ring. Like other career politicians, he has long expressed his interest in a host of higher offices, and I’m glad he has finally settled on the job he wants next.
“As my Twitter followers know, I have been asking David where he stands on a number of important issues. Now that he’s a candidate he should be ready to tell us whether he will support Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget, fight the NLRB’s attacks on Right to Work, call for an end to Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium and sign the Cut Cap Balance Pledge.
“This election is about which candidate knows how to spur job growth and restore fiscal responsibility to Washington. The career politicians and lawyers have had their chance, and they’ve failed. It’s time to send a real-life job creator to the U.S. Senate. I’ve signed both sides of a paycheck, and I’ve made the tough choices in both the private sector and as Mayor of Dallas to cut spending and balance budgets.
“At a time when families are struggling and Washington continues down the wrong path and ignores the tough calls, Texans will choose a new Senator to represent them. They will have three clear choices – a career politician, a lawyer, or a businessman who brings a unique conservative approach to government. Someone who’s signed both sides of a paycheck, grown a business, and cut wasteful spending in both the public and private sector. Who understands firsthand how decisions made in Washington affect the economy. Only one candidate in the race for Senate has created thousands of jobs and made the hard calls that are so lacking in Washington right now.”
More about the Leppert “lawyer” attack line against Cruz anon (I don’t think it will be successful), but it’s interesting how the Leppert campaign plays up his businessman credentials and never mentions (at least here) that he was Mayor of Dallas for four years.
I can find no online reaction from Elizabeth Ames Jones to Dewhurst entering the race, but she just went from a distant third to an even-more-distant fourth.
Paul Burka is not impressed with Dewhurst’s announcement. Laid-off teachers, yadda yadda, but what’s interesting to me is that Burka says he received a Dewhurst robocall for his announcement. This does not strike me as the optimal strategy for disseminating information in the internet age…
Dewhurst is a billionaire and has proven that he can run and win statewide contests in Texas, which can be a challenging state to run in due to its size, its five or six (depending on how you count) major media markets and slew of mid-sized markets, and its diversity. He’ll be formidable, and may even jump to the favorite slot due to his high name recognition alone. And, he speaks Spanish fluently. I’ve seen him handle interviews with Spanish-speaking media on the fly; he’s a pro.
The Spanish-speaking bit is interesting, but I’m not sure the billionaire part is accurate. Dewhurst is rich, certainly, but I didn’t get the impression that he was that rich.
The Daily Kossacks still seem to regard Cruz as the real conservative in the race: “While Dewhurst has been dithering on the parapets, his chief rival for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz, continues to cement his position as the movement conservative standard-bearer.”
At least one blogger was underwhelmed by the Dewhurst announcement: “With all the fanfare and enthusiasm of a Baptist funeral, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst announced Tuesday that he’d like to be among the number of people Ted Cruz will pwn next March.”
Other Senate race news:
The Washington Post says that Ricardo Sanchez’s fundraising efforts are off to a poor start.
Over at the Houston Chronicle, Patricia Kilday Hart displays her poor research skills by declaring that “Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez is the only announced candidate in the Democratic Primary U.S. Senate race.” Perhaps Sean Hubbard should take up robbing banks, since he seems to be invisible to vast swathes of the MSM.
Yes, Tom invested more of his own money in the campaign. That was not part of the 750k.=
Not sure if you received our press release—it may help clarify further.
[Excerpt from attached press release]
DALLAS, Texas, July 15, 2011 – Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Leppert announced today that his campaign banked $1.25 million in the second quarter of 2011. Fueled by over $750,000 in second quarter contributions and another personal investment in the campaign, Leppert continues to lead the field of announced candidates in fundraising. Leppert now has $3.4 million in total cash on hand, with almost $3.2 million in all-important primary cash on hand to spend before voters go to the polls in March.
Thanks for the clarification. I was half-right in spotting the loan, and mostly wrong in my interpretation of its meaning.
Still waiting for Dewhurst to announce his candidacy. (It would be tempting to write a Waiting for Godot parody with Dewhurst in the Godot role, except I suspect the intersection between Texas political junkies and people who would appreciate a good Samuel Beckett parody would result in a fairly small set.) But there’s still plenty of news on the race:
Shortly after the Ted Cruz jumped in, he started garnering an impressive array of conservative endorsements, but opponent Michael Williams started with the very impressive endorsement of South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and the Senate Conservative Fund. Since then, of course, Williams dropped out of the race. And today, DeMint made things more or less unanimous by endorsing Cruz.
I might be confused, but Tom Leppert’s Q2 fundraising totals are up, and it seems to me that something awful screwy is going on there. Remember, in Q1, Leppert raised $2.6 million, but $1.6 million of that was in the form of a personal loan to his own campaign. Then the Leppert campaign declared that he raised $750,000 in Q2. But you look at his cumulative figures on the FEC page, and his debt is now up to $2.1 million. This would suggest that two-thirds of that $750,000 figure consisted of yet another personal loan to his own campaign, meaning Leppert only raised a paltry $250,000 in contributions. Perhaps I’m wrong, and there’s another explanation, but unless their are similar loans among the yet-to-come Q2 reports of his opponents, not only has Leppert fallen badly behind Cruz, he’s actually fallen behind Elizabeth Ames Jones’s $313,000. It would also validate the Cruz campaign’s contention that Leppert suffers from a very narrow fundraising base. After I post this, I’ll write the Leppert campaign for clarification on his fundraising numbers. Done. See here for an update on those numbers.
…who will be hosting a Senate forum with Ted Cruz, Tom Leppert, Elizabeth Ames Jones, Lela Pettinger, and (presumably) Dewhurst.
Jason Embry in the Statesmanjoins the chorus of those saying that Cruz has the momentum in the race.
Ex-senate candidate Michael Williams Q2 fundraising report is up. He raised a respectable $550,018, which would have been better than his Q1 numbers, but still behind Cruz and Leppert. If he can transfer these funds to his congressional race (I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that he can), then he’ll go into his match with fellow Senate race dropout Roger Williams with a substantial warchest.
You might have noticed that I have not been overly kind in my assessments of Paul Burka’s political observations. He comes across as a world-weary, old school, middle-of-the-road liberal reporter who can’t come to grips with the changing political landscape, yearning for the days when the two wings of the Democratic Party controlled Texas politics, Republicans were an exotic novelty, and big-government policies could safely be forged in smoky backrooms over rounds of whiskey without input from those butinski outsiders known as “taxpayers.” He doesn’t understand why the Tea Party won’t just go away and let him go back to a time when the people in power returned his phone calls. (More on Burka’s textbook liberalness in this Kevin D. Williamson piece over at NRO.)
All that said, he offers some very useful advice to his Yankee cohorts (i.e., fellow liberal journalists) on mistakes to avoid in covering Rick Perry. I doubt they’ll take that advice (Burka is, after all, a native Texan, and didn’t graduate from an Ivy League college (I’m sure the idea that Rice might be as good or better than many Ivy league schools is not the sort of thought likely to penetrate their mind) and is therefore automatically suspect), but it’s good advice none the less. The short essays next to Points 1 (Perry is not George Bush) and 5 (Perry is not a male hair model) are particularly good.
It is true that Perry has a much-remarked-upon coif, but don’t let this lead you to assume that he’s soft, or feckless, like that other recent walking shampoo ad, John Edwards. Perry is a hard man. He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved—or respected. And he has gotten his wish.
Ricardo Sanchez raised $160,000. Which is about what you would expect the DNC’s hand-picked candidate to raise.
The FEC reports aren’t up yet, so we can’t look at the details. In truth, Cruz did a bit worse than I expected him to with all the endorsement momentum he’s been building up, and Leppert did significantly better. Jones managed to raise her quarterly fundraising totals from disastrous to merely disappointing.
Q2 is usually a slow fundraising quarter the year before an election, but both Cruz and Leppert will need to pick up the pace if Dewhurst does jump in.
A few more pieces of senate race news:
Last week Paul Burka was confidently predicting that Dewhurst would blow away the competition with his money. Now he’s wondering if Dewhurst is too complacent. “There is an enthusiasm gap in this race, and it favors Cruz.” It’s like Burka fell asleep at his desk and woke up in pain, discovering that someone had inexplicably jabbed a sharp clue into his side while he slept…
The San Antonio Express-News says that Ted Cruz has the momentum, especially compared to one “Tom Lippert.”
Elizabeth Ames Jones has announced that former GM Chairman (and fellow San Antonian) Ed Whitacre would be her campaign manager. If he brings several million dollars in campaign donations with him, this will be a brilliant move. If not? Not so much. Usually candidates like to have someone with, you known, political campaign experience running their campaign. Hiring a guy who is most famous for taking over GM right after Uncle Obama dumped a ton of taxpayer money on them probably isn’t going to vault her into first place. She also named oilmen W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. and George P. Mitchell as honorary chairman.
According to Jones’ and Tom Leppert’s Facebook pages, there was supposedly a Ronald Reagan Republican Women Senate candidate forum in Houston last night, but I can’t find reports on it anywhere today…
In the course of naming Rick Perry the “winner” of the recent legislative session, the Texas Tribune’s Jay Root repeats the lie that Education funding was decreased in the recent session, rather than receiving a slight increase. Does the MSM just believe that if they repeat the lie enough times people will believe it’s true?
A Daily Kossack looks over the phony-baloney PPP Texas senate race poll and stills comes up gloomy about Democratic chances. Also manages to display his ignorance, stating “On the Democratic side, the only announced candidate is retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez,” not only ignoring declared Democratic candidate Sean Hubbard, but also his appeal for votes on Daily Kos. I guess it’s just a case of the far left hand not knowing what the other far left hand is doing…
I hope everyone is enjoying their July 4th weekend, even though those of us in drought-stricken central Texas won’t be firing off any fireworks this year…