With over 99% of the Texas primary vote in, there were no alarms and no surprises. All the statewide Republican incumbents won their primaries, though George P. Bush and Sid Miller garnered less than 60% of the vote against underfunded challengers.
Greg Abbott pulled in 90% of the vote, handily beating Barbara Krueger and Larry SECEDE Kilgore, the later of whose 1.3% of the vote gives lie to the theory that Texas is currently a hotbed of secessionist fervor.
Ted Cruz garnered 85% of the vote against four underfunded opponents.
On the far left side of the the aisle, conventional wisdom also triumphed. Lupe Valdez (43%) and Andrew White (27%) are headed to a runoff, leaving Cederic Davis Sr., Grady Yarborough and Seth Payne (and my own runoff prediction) in the dust.
As expected, Beto O’Rourke won over two underfunded challengers, but at a mere 61.8% of the vote, he was hardly the juggernaut Democrats were making him out to be. Liberals have been talking up the chances for their fair-haired boy to take Ted Cruz, but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it; O’Rourke garnered less than half the votes Cruz did.
Other Democratic race results: For Lieutenant Governor, Mike Collier edged Michael Cooper 52% to 48%, and for Comptroller, Joi Chevalier eeked out a 52% to 48% win over Tim Mahoney.
Other races:
Texas Second Congressional District: Republicans Kevin Roberts and Dan Crenshaw head to the runoff separated by less than a thousand votes in a 9 candidate field. (Previously.) On the Democratic side, lawyer Todd Litton won outright.
Texas Third Congressional District: As predicted, Republican state senator Van Taylor stomped his primary opposition with 85% of the vote, and lesbian-rights lawyer Lorie Burch and “the other” Sam Johnson are headed to a runoff for Democrats.
Texas Fifth Congressional District: Republican state Rep Lance Gooden and former Jed Hensarling fundraiser Bunni Pounds head to the runoff, leaving former Rep. Kenneth Sheets and Ted Cruz regional director Jason Wright behind. Democratic candidate Dan Wood was unopposed in his primary.
Texas Sixth Congressional District: as predicted, Tarrant County Tax Assessor-Collector Ron Wright went into the Republican runoff leading Jake Ellzey 45% to 21%. The top two Democratic contenders, Ruby Faye Woolridge and Jana Lynne Sanchez ended in a dead heat, each with 36.9% of the vote, setting up a bruising black vs. Hispanic runoff.
Texas Sixth Congressional District: As expected, Republican John Culberson won handily, but the real interest there is in the Democratic Party match, where the DCCC-targeted Laura Moser (yes, the DCCC went out of their way to attack a progressive political candidate in their own primary) made the runoff five points behind Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, but way ahead of the establishment-recruited Alex Triantaphyllis. Expect a nasty, no-holds-barred runoff.
Texas Twenty-First Congressional District: As expected, Chip Roy heads into the Republican runoff with a significant lead. However, his runoff opponent is not the expected William Negley, but Matt McCall. (I wonder if name confusion between Matt McCaul and adjacent district Republican incumbent Mike McCaul benefited McCall here.) However, on the Democratic side, Mary Street Wilson came out of nowhere to edge the well-heeled Joseph Kopser by two points going into the runoff, leaving AFL-CIO endorsed former Nancy Pelosi staffer Derrick Crowe on the outside looking in.
In State Senate District 9 Republican primary, which got a lot of attention, Ken Paxton’s wife Angela Paxton beat Don Huffines’ brother Phillip Huffines.
Texas 114th State Congressional District: Lisa Luby Ryan defeats Jason Villalba!
Sadly, both Charlie Geren and Giovanni Capriglione survive to bedevil conservatives.
The Twenty-First U.S. Congressional District, the seat held by retiring Republican Lamar Smith, runs from Austin to San Antonio, encompassing much of the western Hill Country. It’s heavily Republican and largely white, though with a significant Hispanic population.
There are no fewer than 13 Republicans candidates for this seat, including a former U.S. Representatives, Ted Cruz’s former chief-of-staff, a State Rep, two previous candidates, and not one but two candidates who are ex-CIA. Also worth noting: The candidate who has the raised the most money so far is a Democrat.
Republican
Ivan A. Andarza: Austin lawyer and a former or current member of several state boards. That suggests and ability to self-fund that might get him into the runoff…in another race. But I don’t see him making headway in this packed race.
Eric Burkhart: Has an interesting history as an ex-CIA agent. But I can’t tell his current job, and thus don’t see an ability to self-fund.
Former U.S. Congressman Francisco “Quico” Canseco: Unseated Ciro Rodriguez for the U.S. 23rd congressional district in the Republican wave year of 2010, and who was unseated in turn in 2012 by Pete Gallego in 2012. (Disclaimer: I donated money to Canseco in 2010, because I perceived (correctly) that he had a good chance to knock off a Democratic incumbent.) However, Canseco’s fundraising doesn’t even show up in the latest report, suggesting he’ll struggle mightily to make the runoff, name recognition or not.
Mauro Garza: Former Director of Grants and Contracts at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. Nothing about his profile or website suggests he’ll be a serious contender.
Foster Hagen: Has a barely-used Facebook page, and his website is missing. So I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest he’s not going to be a factor…
Texas State Rep. Jason Isaac: Normally being a State Rep at least gives you a good shot to get into the runoff, but probably not here. He’s got some good endorsements (including Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian), but nothing the level of Chip Roy’s endorsements. Has raised $203,050, third among Republicans. A chance to make the runoffs, but it appears to be an uphill struggle right now.
Ryan Krause: Not seeing any indication he’ll be a competitive candidate.
Matt McCall: Already run twice for this seat and got clobbered by Lamar Smith both times. Has raised $168,606, which is not trivial, but I don’t think the third time is the charm for him.
Susan Narvaiz: Formerly lost to Lloyd Doggett in the U.S. District 35 race. Lagging in fundraising, I don’t see her making any headway in this race.
William Negley: Another former CIA member, a former member of Kay Baily Hurtchison’s staff, and backed by deep-pocketed businessman Red McCombs, which explains how Negley raked in $307,127, second only to Chip Roy. A serious contender to make the runoff with Chip Roy.
Al Poteet: A veteran and former CEO of Humana Veterans Healthcare Service. Nice hat, but he’s at the very bottom of fundraising for the race.
Autry Pruitt is a black media commentator. Maybe he’s flown below my radar, but seeing that his fundraising doesn’t even register, probably not.
Chip Roy: Ted Cruz’s former chief of staff, who has been endorsed by both Cruz and Rick Perry, has raised $372,574 (the most of any Republican candidate), and the odds-on favorite in the race. It’s possibly that he wins without a runoff, but with so many candidates in the race that seems unlikely.
Anthony White: Former Marine Colonel. I couldn’t find a webpage, but his Twitter feed has 24 followers…
Democrats
Derrick Crowe: Former Nancy Pelosi staffer. Has a bunch of endorsements. Has raised $119,392, or less than one-sixth what Joseph Kopser has. A solid chance to make the runoff, but it may be hard for him to overcome Kopser’s fundraising muscle.
Joseph Kopser: At $772,335, he’s raised twice as much as anyone in the race, Republican or Democrat. (Notable donors include game designer Richard Garriott, plus lots of lawyers and CEOs in New York, San Antonio, New York City and Washington, D.C. “Kopser is a U.S. Army veteran and has worked in private industry. Leading up to the 2018 primary election, he was serving as president of the advisory and analytics firm Grayline as well as a member of the Defense Council of the Truman National Security Project. His other professional experience includes serving as the director of Texas Lyceum, a member of the board of directors of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, and the chairman and co-founder of Bunker Labs Austin. Kopser’s military experience includes serving as the department chair and professor of leadership and strategy at Texas Army ROTC and as the special assistant to the Army chief of staff. Kopser spent several years deployed in Iraq. He graduated from Harvard University with his M.P.A. and from the United States Military Academy at West Point with his bachelor’s in aerospace engineering.”
Kopser probably has better chance than Roy of avoiding a runoff, just based on the sheer size of the Republican field. Otherwise, expect a Roy/Negley runoff among Republicans, and Kopser/Crowe runoff for Democrats.
A former State Department employee was arrested Thursday and charged with espionage for allegedly transmitting Top Secret and Secret documents to a Chinese government agent, according to an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA.
Kevin Mallory, 60, of Leesburg is a self-employed consultant who speaks fluent Chinese. Court filings show that Mallory was an Army veteran who worked as a special agent for U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service from 1987 to 1990. Since then, Mallory has worked for various government agencies and defense contractors, maintaining a Top Secret security clearance. The Washington Post reports that Mallory was also an employee of the CIA.
We do know that Wednesday’s congressional attacker, James Hodgkinson, shared a conspiracy-tinged Change.org link on March 22, accompanied by the caption, “Trump is a traitor.” Once again, it has to be stressed that this information is woefully insufficient to conclude that the perpetrator was motivated by Russia-oriented conspiracy theories. Motivations are multifaceted, and often political beliefs “intersect” with mental distress, causing people to act violently. But the sharing of the link does indicate that Hodgkinson has been affected by the frenzied climate Democrats have stoked around the Russia issue.
Once again, for extra emphasis: calling attention to the link Hodgkinson shared is not to say that Democrats are directly culpable for this shooting. That would be ridiculous. But the shared link does show that he was to some extent enmeshed in the conspiratorial paranoia that Democrats have knowingly fostered, at full-blast, for approaching an entire year. One ancillary consequence of fostering conspiratorial paranoia for a full year is that certain people with unstable mental predispositions may latch on and commit violent acts. But Democrats and liberals, in their self-assuredness, have been reticent to acknowledge this byproduct of their current political strategy. Proclaiming that the president engaged in treason — as many members of Congress and media figures have — is going to have an influence on the broader public, and included in that broader public are people who might be deranged and/or have violent inclinations.
If you deny that the kind of overblown rhetoric that Democrats have specialized in over the past months — warning about traitorous subterfuge and foreign infiltration — can have any trickle-down effect on regular people, you’re deluding yourself.
Democrats want a resistance. They want to impeach the President. They want full-blown socialism. They want to go further to the left than the tea party wanted to go right. A lot of activist Democrats are already interpreting Jon Ossoff’s loss as him not being aggressively anti-Trump enough.
The Democrat base has moved way further left than where the American public is and at a time we seem to be in a pendulum swing back to the right, that could hurt them. As they start challenging Democrat incumbents with more liberal activists and start winning primaries in swing seats with radical progressives, they risk their ability to win.
What makes this fun to watch is knowing they reject that idea and think the more radical and more militant the more likely their candidates will win. I cannot wait to watch their slate of moonbat crazy challengers.
All those “Ossoff’s loss was a moral victory” excuses? Vox says don’t believe it: “Don’t sugarcoat it — Ossoff’s loss is a big disappointment, and a bad sign, for Democrats. Democrats need to outperform Hillary Clinton to take back the House. Ossoff did worse than her.”
“A professor at a Connecticut college said he was forced to flee the state after he received death threats for appearing to endorse the idea that first responders to last week’s congressional shooting should have let the victims ‘f**king die’ instead of treating them.” Step right up, Trinity College Professor Johnny Eric Williams! You’re the next contestant on “Trump Derangement Syndrome Ruined My Life!”
“This May was the Democratic National Committee’s worst May of fundraising since 2003. The DNC raised $4.29 million in May of this year, according to data recently released by the Federal Election Commission. It is the weakest take for national Democrats since May of 2003, when the party raised a paltry $2.7 million.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
TPPF’s Chris Jacobs is not impressed with the Republican Senate ObamaCare replacement bill. TPPF’s Chip Roy said:
Simply put, the bill doubles down on the fundamentally flawed architecture of Obamacare and if implemented, will neither increase the actual care available to the people nor drive down the cost of care or insurance. It maintains Obamacare’s subsidy regime, retains almost the entirety of the regulatory architecture driving up people’s premiums and deductibles, continues the previous Administration’s unconstitutional bailouts to insurers, and maintains the Medicaid expansion for five more years before slowly attempting to reform the program.
Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz states that Presidnet Trump’s tape bluff is perfectly legal. “What President Trump did was no different from what prosecutors, defense attorneys, policemen, FBI agents and others do every day in an effort to elicit truthful testimony from mendacious witnesses.” Also: “We must declare an armistice against using our criminal justice system as a political weapon in what has become a zero-sum bloodsport.”
“Trump Imposes New Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine.” Insert record scratch sound over derailment of the “Trump is Putin’s stooge” narrative here. Oh, also, New York Times: When you invade, occupy and annex territory, it’s not an “incursion,” it’s an “invasion.”
Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who oversaw German reunification, dead at age 87. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“The amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light. The cost has fallen by a factor of 500,000 and the quality of that light has transformed from unstable and risky to clean, safe, and controllable.”
“A mentally ill homeless woman in Florida is accused of vandalizing a policeman’s patrol car and smearing feces on a church where she left the walls defaced with nonsensical writings against ‘patriarchy.'”
The extraordinarily high prosecutorial burden of proof in any criminal trial is intentionally designed to heavily favor defendants, because we long ago embraced as a society Blackstone’s principle. Formulated in the seventeen-sixties by the English jurist William Blackstone, the presumption is that it is better to have ten guilty people go free than that one innocent person suffer. Hard as it is to stomach today, embracing that calculus means that we should even want ten rapists (not to mention terrorists and murderers) to go free in order to protect the one falsely accused. Unfortunately, Cosby is one of those to escape criminal punishment. And, to put a fine point on the over-all gendered impact of requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the inevitable effect of the heavy tilt toward defendants is that in sexual-assault trials, which involve mostly male defendants and mostly female accusers, men are favored over women.
I just got off a conference call with the Texas Public Policy Foundation on the House GOP ObamaCare replacement discussed yesterday. Here are some brief notes from the call:
Chris Jacobs:
Only one mandate repealed, retains the rest and maintains federal control over health care.
The current bill doesn’t limit Medicaid expansion the way the 2015 bill did.
Federal subsidies for insurers remain.
The bill actually increases federal control of health care.
Conservatives need people to stand up for actual repeal of ObamaCare.
Dr. Deane Waldman:
The GOP treatment plan doesn’t address why the patient is actually sick.
The problem is federal control of the health care system.
It’s not repeal and replace, it’s mend and expand.
Need control at the state level.
Chip Roy:
Fundamentally not a repeal of ObamaCare.
Maintains the medicaid expansion to able-bodied adults.
Maintains the preventative and contraception mandate.
Maintains the incentive to drive more people into Medicaid.
I asked a followup question of Chris Jacobs about the preventative and contraception mandate. He said it’s left entirely in place. While that mandate can be eliminated administratively by HHS Secretary Tom Price, Democrats could reinstitute it by the same method in the future.
Chip Roy: This bill fundamentally embraces all that is wrong with ObamaCare.
