Trailing in polls, fundraising, name recognition, and stage presence, Elizabeth Ames Jones announced she’s dropping out of the Senate race to run for the Texas Senate District 25 against incumbent Sen. Jeff Wentworth.
Setting aside of the question of why you would want to move from the Railroad Commission to the State Senate (which seems like a slight downgrade to me), the Senate District 25 race already had one Tea Party challenger to Wentworth in Donna Campbell, who may find herself financially outgunned if Jones transfers her U.S. Senate race money. (Naturally, Wenworth wants Jones to return the money.) There have been mutterings in some quarters (at least stretching back to last decade’s redistricting fight) that Wentworth is too liberal for his district. Should all three stay in, this should prove to be a very interesting primary fight.
Clearly Jones was overdue to get out of the Senate race, and had been for some time. Not only were David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz firmly established as the top two candidates, but they and Tom Leppert were all clearly outperforming Jones in every phase of the campaign. From all that I could see, Jones performed poorly at the the various candidate debates and forums and fell woefully behind in the fundraising race. I think there was a much greater possibility that Jones could have come in behind long-shot Glenn Addison in the March primary than that she could overtake Cruz or Dewhurst.
Jones was the very first candidate to declare for the U.S. Senate race, filing her paperwork way back on November 3, 2008, but never seemed to gain any traction once additional candidates jumped in after Kay Baily Hutchison announced she was retiring.
This is good news for the Ted Cruz campaign, and bad news for David Dewhurst, since it gives Cruz a clearer shot at him. Dewhurst clearly has no desire to debate Cruz one-on-one, and the more candidates in the race, the less likely it is for conservative voters to coalesce around Cruz as the anti-Dewhurst campaign.
Now that Jones is out, will Leppert bow out as well? I doubt it. Though he clearly hasn’t caught fire, Leppert has (thanks to a generous measure of self-funding) stayed on pace with the front-runners in the fundraising derby, and he’s clearly a better campaigner, and has a much better organization, than Jones. My hunch says that he stays in until March, and then comes in a distant third. But there’s still an awful lot of campaign left…
I suppose I should do these updates some day other than Friday night Saturday morning, since few people read them then or over the weekend, but it’s been a busy week…
Mario Loyola discusses Ted Cruz and his father Rafael as part of a longer story on the Cuban exile experience in America, the widespread Cuban opposition to the Batista regime, and how Castro betrayed the revolution to impose Communism. And he delivers such a complete and utter bitchslapping of The Dallas Morning News that I have to quote the last few paragraphs:
Cubans here and there have had to endure the calamities of the Revolution alone. Conservatives in America reached out to us and supported us, and our parents found solace in their enmity to Communism. But they weren’t really with us either, because they had no idea how awful Fidel Castro really was. It simply isn’t within the comprehension of any American that someone could actually choose to be as evil as Castro. The sheer depravity of his crimes against the Cuban people helped to keep the depredations of his rule a secret hiding in plain sight, where only other Cubans could see them.
It’s no surprise that liberal papers such as the Dallas Morning News now think they’re in some position to judge which families are truly exiles and which aren’t. It was liberal papers — particularly the New York Times — that originally built Castro up into an international hero and persisted in romanticizing him long after he offered Cuba’s young men to the Kremlin as a Third World army. It was liberal papers that blamed the U.S. embargo for the economic catastrophe into which Castro plunged Cuba. It was liberal newspapers that helped to occlude the unspeakable daily abuses of Castro’s regime beneath the fantasy of a romantic nationalist who was bravely willing to stand up to imperialism.
“There is power,” the Dallas Morning News tells us, “in linking your past and your future to this unending struggle [against Fidel]. But because the fathers of both these men [Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio] migrated several years before the revolution, as is now clear, the link is at best a stretch. In the case of Cruz, the situation is even more complicated because his father originally supported Castro.” What utter nonsense. It would be offensive if the editors actually had any idea what they were talking about. No Cuban exile would for a second say that the Rubio and Cruz families were any less exile than anyone else. All of our families lost their homeland. That some were already here when it happened is irrelevant — nobody meant to forsake Cuba by coming here. We lost Cuba because Castro took it from us, from all of us, born and unborn, both here and back there.
Among Cuban-Americans, having been an early supporter of Castro in no way diminishes your anti-Communist credentials. On the contrary, it is the typical story for almost every family. Virtually all of our families opposed the dictatorship of Batista. Virtually all of our families believed Castro’s rhetoric of democracy and liberty. The first thing everyone hated about him was his evident relish in betraying his most ardent supporters. That was the first of many very personal reasons he would give us to hate him, reasons that only we can really understand.
What makes us exiles is not merely the fact that our families can’t go back to Cuba. It is that Castro wantonly ruined the land that our families grew up in, the land of our forefathers, and now that land exists only in the fading black-and-white pictures and memories of the happy childhoods of a generation that is dying now. Compared with that, what possible difference could it make that our grandparents arrived one year and not another? Senator Rubio didn’t know exactly what year his father first got here because it doesn’t matter.
Still, I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised by the Dallas Morning News’s display of presumptuousness and ignorance. The editors are decent people, and if they knew even 5 percent of what I know about the Revolution and its exiles, I’m sure they would be deeply ashamed of what they’ve written. But they don’t and they never will — Castro has already seen to that.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of people that Mario Loyola just made look like petty, misinformed idiots, The Dallas Morning News‘s Robert T. Garrett (who we talked about last week) covers Cruz’s accusations of MSM outlets like The Dallas Morning News targeting conservative Hispanics. Tune in next week for Garrett reporting on Cruz’s complaints about Garrett’s reporting on Cruz’s complaints. Presumably from the inside of a mirror box.
The Ted Cruz campaign has challenged David Dewhurst to five one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas debates (and the King Street Patriots were quick to agree to host at least one). This is a smart way for Cruz to help break further away from Tom Leppert and Elizabeth Ames Jones, and turn the race into a two man contest between him and Dewhurst…which is why Dewhurst would be foolish to take Cruz up on the offer. And, indeed, he does not seem so inclined.
ABC News notices the hit pieces on conservative Hispanic politicians in this interview with Cruz:
New Revolution Now emailed to say that Cruz won the straw poll at the Tuesday’s Texarkana senate forum. The total results were:
Ted Cruz: 54%
Glenn Addison: 21%
Lela Pittenger: 20%
Andrew Castanuela: 5%
David Dewhurst: <1%
Speaking of polls, this David Catanese Politico piece says that Dewhurst’s “internal poll” has Dewhurst at 50%, Leppert at 9%, and Cruz at 6%. I’m sure it does.
The Texas Tribune says “Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is running a state version of a Rose Garden strategy.” As indeed he is.
I get the distinct impression that someone at D magazine doesn’t like Leppert. They also evidently don’t like using anything that’s actually funny in their “comedy.”
This page on possible Senate race takeover targets had the Texas race down at 21st (i.e., not bloody likely), and had this to say: “Ricardo Sanchez hasn’t made the impact the local Democrats hoped he would.” Indeed.
Evidently all tuckered out from his 18-minute interview October 23, Sanchez seems to have returned to hibernation this week.
Other than appearing in that poll and turning 55 on October 29, Elizabeth Ames Jones doesn’t seem to have been much more active than Sanchez. Hey, here’s an idea: They’re both from San Antonio. Why not meet each other for a weekly debate? Nothing else they’re doing seems to be attracting donations or attention, and both need to bone up on their public speaking skills…
The Ted Cruz campaign noted that a new UT/Texas Tribune poll showed Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s support among Republican voters down to 22%, which is about half what previous polls have shown, and even less than that possibly anomalous Azimuth Research Group poll that showed both Cruz and Dewhurst tied around 30%. The UT/TT poll shows Cruz in second place at 10%, with a whopping 50% undecided. Still, to have such huge name recognition and to only be sitting at 22% must be frustrating for Team Dewhurst.
The same poll shows Ricardo Sanchez at a mere 11% of Democratic voters. He’s even running behind Chris Bell at 15%, even though Bell isn’t in the race…
A roundup of Texas Senate Race news, some of which I would have reported sooner if my week hadn’t been so packed…
Rep. Mike McCaul passes on the race. Big news, and I think the Ted Cruz campaign is heaving a sigh of relief at not having someone as rich as David Dewhurst (but demonstrably more conservative than the Lt. Governor) in the race.
Here’s the audio for Ted Cruz’s appearance on the Mark Levin show.
Standard democratic talking points, well-spoken, but delivered in the tone of a slightly bored high school algebra teacher. Gravitas he’s got, but if this is the best he can do charisma wise, I don’t think any of the likely (or even unlikely) Republican candidates have anything to worry about. That accomplished, Sanchez seems to have gone back in hibernation for the rest of the week.
Robert T. Garrett of the The Dallas Morning News offers up a hard-hitting expose that absolutely nails Cruz…on not doing reporter’s homework for them. The upshot is that Cruz’s father was tortured by and fled the Batista regime rather than Castro’s communist regime. Did Cruz tell his story in a way that led people to believe that his father fled Castro? Yeah, he did. And that’s worth reporting. I can see doing at least a paragraph on that as part of a general article on Cruz. But it doesn’t explain why Garrett felt the need to expend 769 words explaining not that Cruz lied, but that he told an easily misinterpreted truth. Given that he hasn’t lied about anything, and has told the precise story forthrightly upon being questioned about it, it’s hard for me to work up any indignation about people misconstruing one part of a candidate’s father’s history.
Curt Cleaver raised $3,208, which is respectable for a longshot, especially considering his late start. (Psst, Curt, handy campaign tip: It actually costs you nothing to update your Facebook and Twitter pages more than once a month…)
Andrew Castanuela has raised $1,503. Coming up the rear is Beetlebaum Stanley Garza with $200…of which he’s spent $199. Got to save up for that big ad blitz…
David Dewhurst has finally stepped down from his ivory tower and entered the political fray in person, joining his fellow candidates at the Spirit of Freedom Republican Women candidate forum in Sugar Land. This might be the first result of Dewhurst’s campaign staff shake-up.
It sounds like time constraints (“Friday’s event at the Sugar Creek Baptist Church chapel had to wrap up on time to make way for a funeral”) prevented much in the way of candidate interaction.
The report also says that Tom Leppert is running statewide ads, which I have not seen. It’s pretty early to start running TV ads, but understandable, given how badly he lags Dewhurst and Ted Cruz in the latest poll.
According to an email from the New Revolution Now folks, Cruz won the straw poll for the Tyler candidate forum, with 39%, Glenn Addison came in second with 30%, Lela Pettinger took third with 18%, and Tom Leppert took fourth with 10% (which is, I think, an improvement from his previous straw poll performances). David Dewhurst, Elizabeth Ames Jones, and Ricardo Sanchez all polled less than 1%. And Jones was scheduled to be at the forum…
Addison raised $35,059 for the Q3 fundraising quarter. This brings his total fundraising up to $60,486, and he has $35,557 on hand. While that amount will not cause Dewhurst or Cruz to lose sleep, it’s still impressive for a longshot candidate. It’s also more than a third what ostensibly “serious” candidate Ricardo Sanchez raised this quarter, and Addison did it without (as far as I can tell) a professional campaign staff or professional fundraisers. If someone with Addison’s intelligence and drive were competing in the Democratic primary, Sanchez would be in serious trouble…
The Wall Street Journal does a piece on the Tom Leppert-occupy Wall Street story, clarifying that Washington Mutual, upon whose board Leppert sat, didn’t receive a bailout, but that J.P. Morgan Chase, which absorbed WaMu assets at a deep discount after WaMu melted down, did.
Curt Cleaver…hasn’t update his Facebook or Twitter feeds since September 15, preventing me from completing the Republican Senate Candidate Longshot News Perfecta.
Both Sanchez and Sean Hubbard (according to his Facebook page) will be speaking at the Dallas County Democratic Party’s Annual Fish Fry Friday, October 21. Strangely enough, however, Sanchez’s name is the only one on the flyer.
Sorry, absolutely no Stanley Garza news to be had. Believe me, I looked.
Finally, according to his Facebook and Twitter feeds, Glenn Addison became a grandfather today. Congratulations!
The Cruz campaign alerted me to a new poll from the Azimuth Research Group that shows David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz neck and neck. In fact, they show Cruz leading, 32% to 31%, though they note that before rounding, the actual amount is less than 1%, and in any case within the +/-3% margin of error. Tom Leppert was third with 8%, Lela Pittenger as fourth with 5%, and Elizabeth Ames Jones edged out Glenn Addison for fifth, 4% to 3%.
While this is certainly good news for the Cruz campaign, a few caveats are in order:
Azimuth is a relatively new polling organization; in fact, I think they only started doing polling this year. Without a track record to for results in previous elections, there is no way to judge how effective their polling methodology is.
That, plus Pittenger coming in fourth, would suggest that the poll disproportionately samples people who are unusually active in politics, and thus not reflective of the actual makeup of Republican primary voters, which would boost Cruz in comparison to Dewhurst.
As such, I would take these results with several grains of salt until replicated by one of the more established polling services like Gallup or Zogby.
Still, even with those caveats, this is great news for Cruz five months out from the primary, as it shows a huge bump from the PPP poll of a month ago, which showed him at 12%. Even if you think the methodology overstates Cruz’s gain by 50%, that would still put him at 22%, a 10% increase in a single month. The poll was conducted 10/12-10/17, so it might show the effect of Cruz’s National Review cover appearance.
Outlier or not, I can’t imagine anyone is happy with this result over at the Dewhurst campaign. With his money and name recognition, Dewhurst was supposed to be winning the race running away at this point. He’s not.
BattleSwarm Blog gets named by the Ted Cruz campaign as the blog of the week. Sweet! Though I do feel compelled to point out that I have not endorsed any Senate candidate, that I try to give all the candidates a fair shake, and report things as I seem them without fear or favor. That said, I think Cruz is a very strong, conservative candidate who has run a very smart, effective campaign.
Politico notes that Dewhurst’s $2.6 million haul “is the biggest total of any GOP Senate candidate over a three-month period this cycle.”
Tom Leppert puts up an Anti-occupy Wall Street petition. (Caveat: Remember that The American Independent isn’t.)
The Hill reports on the China dust-up. “It shows that Dewhurst is taking Cruz’s challenge very seriously, and that the two do not fear going on the attack against one another.”
Elizabeth Ames Jones is keynoting the the DUG Eagle Ford Conference, which is not for owners of a particular model of car, but which is about developing unconventional gas. Again, while it’s good that she’s taking her day job as Railroad Commissioner seriously, these days Jones’ event schedule makes it look like she’s running for Secretary of Energy in a Perry Presidential administration more than she’s running for the U.S. Senate.
There will be another candidate forum in Tyler this Saturday, at the Ramada Inn Conference Center, 3310 Troup Highway, Tyler, TX 75701. In attendance will be Cruz, Leppert, Jones, Glenn Addison, Andrew Castanuela, Lela Pettinger and Curt Cleaver. Lt. Gov. Chupacabra will once again be skipping the festivities.
That flyer is interesting for a number of reasons. Not only do they list and give one page bios for the attendees, but they also do they same for candidates they invited who aren’t attending. In fact, a lot (maybe all) Tea Party event have invited all the declared candidates, and I don’t know why Democratic longshots Sean Hubbard and Stanley Garza haven’t taken advantage of the offer, since their campaigns are generating zero buzz otherwise, and the forums would provide a chance for more exposure.
This Texas Tribune piece is a pretty standard brief roundup of the race, but it is notable in that it mentions Addison (and none of the other longshots) along with Cruz, Dewhurst, Leppert and Jones. Given Addison’s earlier complaints about being excluded from the Tribune’s June Senate candidate forum, I think he should rightly see this as an accomplishment.
Finally, signs of a Ricardo Sanchez campaign! He’ll be holding a “kickoff fundraiser” in Austin on Tuesday, October 18. Given that Sanchez first announced he was running on May 11, isn’t October a little late to be holding a kickoff fundraiser? What’s he been doing the past five months?
Tom Leppert’s campaign announced that it raised $640,000 in donations in Q3. In addition, it announced that Leppert, as he did in Q2, threw in another half million of his own money.
So far Leppert has run a relatively smart and disciplined campaign, and currently has more cash on hand than Cruz, but he’s still in third place. He hasn’t generated the grassroots enthusiasm and buzz that Cruz has, and I’m reasonably sure he can’t self-fund at nearly the level David Dewhurst can. Though Leppert has positioned himself as a conservative (and issued many conservative position papers on a range of issues), he seems to draw more from Dewhurst’s establishment base in the business community, and the slight decrease in Q3 numbers may indicate that Dewhurst is already eating into those funding sources. Further, I see no signs that Leppert has successfully moved beyond his geographical base of support in the greater Dallas Metroplex.
On the plus side, Leppert hasn’t seen quite the falloff in donations predicted by Cruz consultant Jason Johnson and he’s continued to attend the candidate forums (though he does not seem to be generating a lot of enthusiasm at them), which is more than you can say for Dewhurst. Also, no more skeletons have fallen out of his closet since the SEIU and ACORN revelations. That might change. (I might even shake a bone or two myself in coming weeks…)
Obviously the Cruz campaign would like to see Leppert drop out to make it a clear one-on-one campaign against Dewhurst. However, while Leppert has not set the grass roots on fire, he has run a solid race, which is more than you can say for Elizabeth Ames Jones. If things continue on in the same vein, Leppert is well-positioned if one of the frontrunners stumbles or withdraws. After all, it’s politics, and stranger things have happened.
However, right now Leppert is clearly in third place, and I expect Cruz’s new, National Review-boosted profile to result in a Q4 contribution increase sufficient to erase Leppert’s current self-funded edge in cash-on-hand.
Leppert is hanging tough and running a competitive campaign, but in the end I don’t think that will be enough to get him into the runoff.
(Edited to add: After I published, this I noticed that the Dallas Morning News link at the top had been updated to say that Elizabeth Ames Jones pulled in $235,000 for Q3. He doesn’t provide a link for this, and I can’t yet find confirmation on her website, Facebook page or Twitter feed. If true, I don’t see how Jones thinks she can compete with three candidates who all have ten times as much cash on hand as she does.)
Here are are some impressive fundraising numbers: Through the end of Q3 on September 30, the odds-on senate favorite has raised $6,444,926.
The challenger? A comparatively paltry $1,615,165.
Given those numbers, it should be pretty easy to figure out who the eventual winner is going to be, right?
Wrong.
Those numbers are from 2009, the odds-on favorite was sitting Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and the underfunded challenger was then-Speaker of the state House of Representatives Marco Rubio. Of course, that’s Senator Marco Rubio now, since he ended up pantsing Crist so badly the latter dropped out of the Republican primary and ran as an independent …whereupon Rubio kicked his ass.
What happened? The Tea Party happened and Rubio caught fire as a better (and more conservative) candidate. Also, this happened:
After that, Rubio’s fortunes (and fundraising) climbed while Crist’s fell. That’s why this:
Should throw a sense of deep unease into David Dewhurst’s campaign team.
Of course, that’s not the only similarity between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio:
Both are the sons of Cuban exiles.
Both earned law degrees.
Both were involved with conservative Republican politics from an early age.
Dewhurst is considerably wealthier than Crist ever was.
The Florida primary was much later, on August 24, whereas the Texas primary falls on March 6 in 2012.
Crist had been in politics since about 1986, whereas Dewhurst wasn’t elected Land Commissioner until 1998.
Rubio-Crist was pretty much a two man race, whereas Cruz must also contend with Tom Leppert (and, to a lesser degree, Elizabeth Ames Jones) as high-profile, well-funded candidates.
The Cuban-American community is not nearly as influential in Texas as Florida.
The chances of Dewhurst dropping out and running as an independent are, I think, pretty close to zero.
Still, at this point Dewhurst is running behind where Crist was during the same period, and Cruz is likewise running ahead of where Rubio was. Also, Texas is considerably more conservative than Florida.
All this is a prelude to saying that Dewhurst’s and Cruz’s Q3 fundraising numbers are interesting, but hardly dispositive. There’s still a lot of race to be run.
