With just a week to go in probably the longest Senate race Texas has ever seen, expect a lot of election news between now and May 29:
I am given to understand that this Hannity fellow is kind of a big deal.
It’s probably a more effective ad than all of Dewhurst’s previous ads put together.
According to the UT/Texas Tribune Poll released today, David Dewhurst is at 40% and Ted Cruz is at 31%. In April, the same poll had Dewhurst 38%, Cruz 26%. In January, it was Dewhurst 36%, Cruz 8%. So Dewhurst has gone from an 18 point lead to a 12 point lead to a 9 point lead. And this during the same period Dewhurst has been spending more than $1 million a week on the race, much of it in negative advertising aimed at Cruz. That would explain why Dewhurst felt compelled to drop another $6 of his own money into the race.
The poll also shows that all Tom Lepeprt’s spending has done is allow him to solidify his grip on third: he’s at 17%. Craig James languishes within the statistical range of Lela Peitinger and Glenn Addison.
Right now the race is exactly where the Cruz team wanted it to be: heading for a runoff between Dewhurst and Cruz.
All sorts of news bubbling up, reportage of which is in various stages of completion.
State Senator Deb Fischer was sitting in third place in the race for Nebraska’s U.S. Senate seat. Then Sarah Palin endorsed her. Now? She just won the GOP nomination.
Let’s see if we can detect a pattern:
Will the streak continue? We’ll find out in two weeks…
Sometimes you post even though you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, if only because you have more of them than the average voter.
With early voting upon us, I wanted to try to come to grips with the Williamson County Precinct 1 Commissioner’s race, where Lee Ann Seitsinger is challenging incumbent Lisa Birkman. The Seitsinger camp has a run a very active race, walking neighborhood and putting up a lot of signs, and have done several direct mailers, which suggests a fairly serious commitment to the race on their part.
And Seitsinger is certainly talking the conservative talk. On Friday, I sent three questions off to the Seitsinger campaign, and received a reply back yesterday. Questions in italics, answers in bold.
1. Do you support or oppose the EPA’s attempts to designate several Williamson County salamanders as endangered species?
Opposed. In fact, I’m opposed to the very existence of the EPA. The federal government has no business being involved in our local decisions.
2. Do you support or oppose attempts to make allow automatic payroll deductions for the Williamson County Employees Association?
Opposed. Employees should have to make the conscious decision every month to contribute. Otherwise the potential for abuse is great. It’s a bit like the withholding tax with the IRS. If we had to write a check quarterly to the IRS instead of having it automatically deducted from our paychecks, people would be marching in the streets and we’d finally get real IRS reform.
3. I’m having a hard time finding information out about you online. Can you point to evidence of your involvement in Republican politics prior to this election cycle?
I have not been involved in politics prior. I’ve been serving in the U.S. Navy and running a small business while raising a son. I’m just a conservative citizen who has watched our county debt grow to the point that we are the third most indebt county in all of Texas. My neighbors came to me and asked me to run, and so I did.
All solid, conservative answers. But for all of that, some things just don’t seem to add up.
For instances, her biggest blog supporters (and Birkman’s biggest detractors) seem to be Williamson County public employee representatives at http://blog.wilcoea.org/ and http://wilcowatchdog.org/. Those are constituencies that usually campaign and vote Democratic, and their biggest beef seems to be that Birkman has held the line on spending and not given them the raises they want.
Holly Hansen, who usually follows these things far more closely than I do, is not impressed with Seitsinger and is backing Birkman. Birkman has also been endorsed by House District 52 Rep. Larry Gonzalez, who’s a pretty good guy. By contrast, Seitsinger’s endorsements seem pretty heavy on public employee groups.
There also seems to be significant overlap between Seitsinger supporters and those supporting Jana Duty’s District Attorney run against John Bradley, another race I don’t have a firm grasp on (though I do know that Rick Perry has endorsed Bradley, which counts for something, even if I’m not taking Perry’s advice in the Senate race).
I poked around Seitsinger’s supporters, and found many Republicans (including a few vocal Ron Paul supporters), a number of realtors (her day job), a few Democrats, and a number of public employees groups.
For all those reasons I’m leaning toward Birkman. I wish I could come up with a more definitive judgment, but Google has a distinct paucity of information about Seitsinger.
I get the feeling this is going to be a very close race.
You know all those lovely jobs the free market has been creating in Williamson County? Well, they’re about to be salamandered:
The Williamson County Conservation Foundation is gathering a task force of various communities and stakeholders to try and prevent the endangered listing of several salamander species in Central Texas.
This has been churning away in the background for a while, but I’m hearing that it’s about to impact some local Williamson County Republican races. I don’t think I have a good handle on all the angles yet. I’ll try to post when I do.
It’s been a few days since I went down to the south capitol steps to watch the Tea Party Express featuring Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul. It’s a bit late for me to do a comprehensive write-up of the speeches there. I caught all of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz’s speech, but could only stay for about ten minutes of Ron Paul’s, because I had to get back home to write my review of the Avengers. The crowd was friendly, enthusiastic, and about 75% Ron Paul supporters, with the other 25% there either for Ted Cruz or various other candidates, including Richard Mack and the Libertarian candidate for the U.S. 25th congressional district Betsy Dewey, who was running around in one of those Firefly cunning hats and has the virtue of being quite cute.
Rather than a blow-by-blow description of what was said, or an attempt to construct a coherent Venn diagram depicting conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, the Tea Party, and Ron Paul supporters, I’m going to just put up some pictures:
As usual, click to embiggen.
“Just four days before the start of early voting in the Texas Senate primary, the Ted Cruz campaign announced the endorsement of Governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd Palin.”
In response to a letter from Ted Cruz, Governor Sarah Palin wrote: “We’re proud to join conservatives in Texas and throughout the nation in supporting your campaign to become the next Senator from the Lone Star State.”
“Your conservative principles, passionate defense of our Constitution and our free market system come at a time when these cornerstones of our freedom and prosperity are under attack,” Governor Palin added. “Our shared goal isn’t just to change the majority in control of the Senate, but to assure principled conservatives like you are there to fight for us.”
Palin is not only a superstar, she’s also a Tea Party kingmaker; numerous of the candidates she endorsed in 2010 won their primary and general election races over GOP establishment types, even when the challengers weren’t initially favored. Expect a lot of donors (both large and small) to look at contributing to Cruz, as well as a lot of on-the-fence Texas voters who hadn’t been paying attention to the race yet seriously considering Cruz. So this endorsement is just a wee bit more important than my own.
Team Dewhurst can’t be happy campers today…
Yesterday, I endorsed Ted Cruz. Today National Review did the same. Coincidence?
Almost certainly!
After all, it was hardly a surprise given the cover issue treatment they already gave him. But it’s good to be ahead of the curve, if only for one day. And their endorsement is well worth reading:
To borrow a phrase from baseball, Cruz is what one might call a “five-tool” candidate: He is good on the Constitution, on the economy, on social issues, and on foreign policy, and he possesses the intellect and rhetorical gifts to combine these views into a clear, cogent, and compelling conservative vision for America.
