This is the first real (not internal) poll released since the primary, and confirms that all the momentum on the race is on the Cruz side. The Cruz team seems to be working harder and generating more buzz than Dewhurst. I’ll let you know more when I have a chance to review the full poll numbers, methodology, etc.
Meanwhile, an internal Dewhurst poll shows Dewhurst at 50%. You know, the same poll that had Dewhurst winning outright and Leppert coming in second earlier in the race. If anything, the mere 50% makes me more inclined to believe Cruz has pulled ahead, as it makes me think they had to fiddle with screening criteria just to get a bare majority.
However, Dewhurst is still rich, and it’s still just under three weeks until the election. A lot can happen.
More on the poll’s methodology. If memory serves, they never released any methodology on those Michael Baselice internal polls the Dewhurst team kept leaking to favored journalists…
One effect of the ObamaCare ruling is that states can safely reject ObamCare’s Medicaid expansion without losing access to all Medicaid funds. It appears that Texas, wisely, will be doing just that, as will Florida.
Hopefully all this won’t matter, as Republicans will take the White House and Senate in November and repeal ObamaCare as job one in 2013. But in the unfortunate scenario where ObamaCare isn’t repealed, here’s an example of Blue States increasing the size and scope of government while converting more of their residents from independent citizens to wards of the state while Red States continue to either scale back intrusive government or at least refrain from expanding it. And with the Medicaid portion of the ObamaCare ruling, it’s going to be easier than ever for Red State government to Just Say No to new federal welfare initiatives with new funding strings attached.
So Red States will continue to stay lean, while Blue States move ever more quickly toward bankruptcy.
Even though I’ve endorsed Ted Cruz, I think it only fair to point out that Dewhurst has, in fact, constantly stated that he’s in favor of repealing ObamaCare pretty much since he joined the Senate race. (I even used the Wayback machine to verify it.) However, Cruz has been more fervent and articulate in campaigning against ObamaCare, making the phrase “repeal every syllable of every word of Obamacare” one of his stock talking points from the very beginning of his campaign. He’s also discussed the 10th Amendment reasons why ObamaCare is unconstitutional, something that I don’t recall Dewhurst doing. (Dewhurst has mentioned the 10th Amendment in support of the Texas Voter ID law.)
Cruz’s worry (which I think is legitimate) is that Dewhurst might be willing to compromise on ObamaCare. And I could easily see Dewhurst signing on with some “Group of 14” (or whatever) to needlessly save ObamaCare despite a Republican House, Senate, and White House, rather than push for full repeal.
Which is why this rings a little hollow to me:
But unlike some of Dewhurst’s other ads, at least that one probably won’t cost him votes…
Here’s the video of last week’s Cruz-Dewhurst debate:
The Dewhurst campaign is pointing to this Cruz appearance on the Dan Patrick show as evidence Cruz is a hothead:
34 minutes? No time to listen tonight…
And here’s still another journalist opining that the mid-Summer runoff date will mean. Memo to the MSM: IT’S TEXAS! IT’S HOT! WE’RE FREAKING USE TO IT!
Grady Yarbrough and Paul Sadler also debated last week. Yarbrough said he supported a border wall, saying that the Berlin Wall was effective. Hmmm, I don’t think I would have made that analogy…
Speaking of things I’m not watching tonight, here’s KERA’s embeddable video of the Democratic debate:
More on the Democratic debate. Another summary. My summary of those two summaries: Yarbrough wants a border wall and legal pot, and Sadler is against both of those. Sadler does actually say the national debt is too high.
A typical piece on the race. But notice how the reporter mentions “As he did at the Republican State Convention, Cruz got a more vocal and enthusiastic reception than Dewhurst.”
The Texas Tribune looks at the immigration/amnesty muddle in the race. Some voters are still confused about where Cruz stands.
Paul Burka wonders if this is a viable attack issue for Dewhurst to hit Cruz with. Since it takes him a thousand words just to explain it (Cruz evidently overlooked an obscure military statute in arguing a Supreme Court case over whether imposing the death penalty for raping a child was constitutional or not), I’m guessing not. Also, the headline (“Cruz Control”) is just lazy.
For some reason, I feel a lot more braindead than usual after a one hour bike ride, so today seems like an excellent day to perform that long-contemplated update of the blogroll.
Today’s additions:
Rick Perry vs. the World: You might previously remember Evan from Texas Iconoclast, a local political aggregator until it went into hibernation earlier this year. Now he’s back blogging at this, his original blog. Well worth a look for Texas politics. And speaking of a local political aggregators:
Push Junction offers up a forest of Texas political links. Don’t know who runs it, but I’ve grabbed many a link from it.
More Lane: National blogger and indefatigable tweeter. He also turns out to share my affection for Peter Gabriel and Ogre (the board game), so he’s obviously a man of taste and discernment…
Ann Althouse: Another national blogger I’d frequently read when linked from Instapundit, but one who was absolutely essential for Wisconsin Recall coverage.
Michelle Malkin: Still another national blogger I’d read when linked by Instapundit, but more recently she’s not only been a driving force to expose convicted felon Brett Kimberlin, she’s also the Queen of the Conservative Twitterverse, which lead her to launch Twitchy, a Twitter roundup blog, which is also worth checking out.
I put off putting up the latest Texas Senate race update until the Republican Party of Texas convention in Ft. Worth concluded. Good thing, too, since a lot of news came out of it, almost none of which was good for Dewhurst, but some of this news may be a bit old.
Ted Cruz appears on Fox News:
Dewhurst claims he wants more than five debates with Cruz. Since Dewhurst did extremely poorly in the ones he did have, color me skeptical.
The Cruz campaign says it’s raised a lot more Texas contributors and small donors than Dewhurst does. While I think they’re probably correct, honesty compels me to point out that comparing Cruz’s internal June 4 donation stats with Dewhurst’s May 17 FEC stats is not an apples-to-apples comparison for many reasons, not last of which is that FEC reports only show donations over $200, so the 69 number for “donations under $250” is simply misleading. (When I pointed this out to the Cruz campaign, they noted that Dewhurst is free to release his own small-donor statistics. Which is true.)
A look at various reasons Dewhurst couldn’t win without a runoff. Ahem: “Just about everybody bet on Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to win outright.” yeah, Ross Ramsey, everyone except those of us who were actually paying attention to the race.
And as far as I can tell looking at the stats on his official page, the most people who have listened to any David Dewhurst YouTube radio interview posted in the last month is…35.
Still more Wisconsin recall tidbits continue to trickle out. I may have a more substantial reaction to a particularly egregious type of liberal self-delusion regarding the results later, but here’s a nice sampler of links:
“Public employee unions insist that dues money be deducted from members’ paychecks and sent directly to union treasuries. So in practice, public employee unions are a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of taxpayers’ money to the Democratic Party.”
The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point. They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. An institution founded to protect its members grew in size, wealth, power and arrogance, thanks to decades of symbiotic deals with bought politicians, to the point where it grossly overreached. A half-century later these unions were exercising essential control of everything from wages to work rules in the running of government — something that, in a system of republican governance, is properly the sovereign province of the citizenry.
“The left picked this fight, on the issue and in the place of its choice; it chose to recall Walker because it believed it could win a showcase victory. That judgment was fatally flawed.”
The Walker reforms hurt AFSCME in Wisconsin almost as badly as Ronald Reagan hurt PATCO, the air traffic controller union he famously crushed in 1981. Public sector workers have deserted their unions in droves since the state clipped union bargaining rights and stopped automatic collection of dues. After a string of bitter, humiliating and expensive defeats, labor in Wisconsin will now be a shadow of its former self, lacking the troops, the money and the morale.
The public sector unions are critical to what remains of the American left. The power of the public service unions in Democratic politics pulls the entire party to the left and gives ideas that are important to the left an access to power that they would otherwise lack. But more important than that, they provide a kind of center to a movement that otherwise threatens to fragment into antagonistic cliques.
It is not clear the left was outspent in its attempts to reverse Gov. Walker’s reforms. And the widely-repeated claim that the left was outspent by more than 7-to-1 in the most recent recall election is clearly false.
More lessons from Wisconsin, including the note that liberals weren’t complaining when union money was dominating elections, or when Obama raised over $1 billion in 2008.
Despite liberal assertions to the contrary, “none of the money spent on Walker’s behalf would have been illegal before Citizens United either.”
Jim Geraghty says that Scott Walker has done the Wisconsin Democratic Party, the public sector unions, the progressives and angry leftists a favor: “He has liberated them from the soothing illusion that they are popular, and that the public agrees with them.” Sorry Jim, can’t agree with you there. Go over to Daily Kos, or Democratic Underground, or even Twitter, and you’ll find that the liberal capacity for self-delusion is essentially infinite. For example, many are crowing that they actually won the recall because they picked up the state senate seat they needed to flip that chamber to Democratic control. Oh, one problem: It’s not scheduled to meet anytime between now and November, when redistricting will probably flip it back to Republican control.
Let’s take a look at the reactions of one of the less delusional liberals. Of course, there’s the usual hard-left refusal to consider the possibility that public employee unions have become a parasitic class that is helping to drive government toward insolvency, and an insistance that if they just fought harder they could have won. But there’s also a fairly cold-eyed realization that Republicans fought better, organized better, and played to win:
The Republicans mobilized, just like we did. But they mobilized their party, they mobilized their donors, they didn’t do it in a half-assed cover your ass way where their ego wasn’t on the line. They doubled down on Scott Walker. They showed no weakness. They played to won, and, ultimately, they won.
(Some snippage, including how the DNC was willing to pour money into the losing campaigns of Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson but not Wisconsin.)
I hope we can see from this that when it comes to certain people and certain causes, the Democratic Party pulls out all the stops. They spend it in ways that are not related to any strategy of furthering progressive goals or shoring up progressive long term assets like union organization and GOTV. This isn’t about strategy to them. It’s about control.
So when you look at the Republicans gleefully celebrating, give them credit, because this is a massive victory for them. They didn’t just win handily. They saved a hero, a man who stood up to the unions and didn’t flinch, a man who, while divisive, divided things correctly as far as they were concerned. And he’s just one of many to come. Because if you can get away with this shit in Wisconsin, as mad as people were there, and if you can get away with this without the Democratic Party even really putting its ego on the line… Well, keep on going. To the sea, if necessary.
I raised the image earlier of a Confederate general on his horse on a hill watching the Sherman’s Union soldiers raze the fields. Imagine now a woman, down there in the fields, her fields, looking up, and seeing that general on his horse, shrugging, saying, “I guess shit happens. Madame, you have my sympathy.”
There was talk on CNN today with Democratic experts like Paul Begala addressing the issue of whether what happened today in Wisconsin would affect Obama in November. The somewhat strained consensus of the Democratic experts was, naw… Wisconsin ALWAYS votes Democratic in presidential elections.
It votes Democratic because of unions and grass roots GOTV organizing. The money and effort that they DID NOT put into Wisconsin today would have gone to strengthening and shoring up that organization. You can be quite certain that the Republicans, who busted their asses on this election, built up their Wisconsin organization. That’s permanent asset-building. The Democratic Party saw no value in it.
That’s why they won. That’s why we lost. Koch brothers, Citizen United: all of them are less important than you really think. You can’t win if your party doesn’t think it’s important enough to really try.
If you want to drink deep, deep droughts of liberal anger, denial, and self-delusion, then head on over to this Democratic Underground thread which is (as you might imagine) NSFW.
In 2002, when I asked Nealy what she did with all the money sluiced into her account by the Citizens Council candidate, she called me a racist.
It’s strangely heartening to learn that black political functionaries are just as eager to play the race card on their fellow liberals as they are on conservatives.
I want to point out that black southern Dallas has consistently voted against honesty, against progress, against inter-ethnic neighborhood cooperation and against any kind of civic responsibility in citywide elections.
But we are told nevertheless — we are beaten about the ears, in fact — that it’s everybody else’s job to clean up and bring prosperity to the black precincts.
After decades of watching this dismal scam operate, you may have to forgive me if I have become a bit jaded. I look at the editorial campaign of The Dallas Morning News, 10 holes in the bucket or something, about all the stuff it’s my job to clean up in South Dallas, and I can’t help wondering if this isn’t part of the same old sleazy political deal.
You know what? I’m starting to wonder if maybe it isn’t time for southern Dallas to clean up its own crap and leave me the hell alone.
Mr. Schutze and I might differ over our respective definitions of “progress,” but I suspect the rest is accurate.
Maybe it’s time for the rest of Dallas to start consciously and deliberately voting against southern Dallas, as long as southern Dallas continues to support the Price/Nealy machine. How the hell can we be expected to fix all the holes in southern Dallas’ damn bucket if we don’t fix the holes in our own first?
Moving from the specifics of the Price case to the issue of urban black machine politics in general, a few politically incorrect questions:
How pervasive is this type of black political machine corruption in other cities with significant black populations?
To what extent has black America’s overwhelming allegiance to the Democratic Party created such corruption, since it prevents the sort of inter-party competition that could sweep the corrupt from office?
To what extent has the Democratic Party’s need for black votes encouraged such corruption, by making them turn a blind eye to it as long as they votes keep rolling in?
Fair or not, the impression I get from the Price case, from the decades-long mismanagement of Detroit, etc., is that a significant portion (and perhaps a majority) of the urban black community is just fine with pervasive political corruption, as long as it’s black politicians that are the ones with their fingers in the pie. Is this impression correct, or is it too cynical even for me?