Posts Tagged ‘Republicans’

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New Poll Shows Support for Dewhurst Down to 22%

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

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…

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Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

Texas Senate Race Updates for October 19, 2011

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
  • Ted Cruz appeared on the Mike Berry radio show:

    Great line: “Where is it written that Republicans have to be spineless jellyfish?”

  • Cruz will also be (is?) appearing on the Mark Levin show at 7:30 PM.
  • 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…
  • Leppert’s Q3 FEC report is up.
  • 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…
  • David Dewhurst has reorganized his Senate campaign staff. That’s seldom a sign of overwhelming confidence.
  • A minor Ft. Worth Star-Telegram piece on the Cruz-Dewhurst battle.
  • 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.
  • Pettinger is appearing at a campaign event with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on October 25. Though sponsored by the Clear Lake Tea Party, the even is actually in La Marque.
  • An Andrew Castanuela sighting in Lubbock.
  • Curt Cleaver…hasn’t update his Facebook or Twitter feeds since September 15, preventing me from completing the Republican Senate Candidate Longshot News Perfecta.
  • Still, that’s more recently than Ricardo Sanchez updated his news page.
  • 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!

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 2 Comments »

    New Poll Shows Cruz and Dewhurst Neck and Neck

    Monday, October 17th, 2011

    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.
  • One of the polls they did earlier this year showed Ron Paul leading the Presidential race at 22%, substantially higher than any other polling company.
  • 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.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 3 Comments »

    Leppert Raises $640,000 in Q3, Tosses in Another $500,000 of His Own Money

    Friday, October 14th, 2011

    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.

    Those are significant sums, and by no means disasterous, but it’s slightly less than the $750,000 in contributions he raised in Q2, which was, in turn, less than the $1 million in contributions and $1.6 million in self-funding he raised in Q1.

    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.)

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Senate Race Fundraising Numbers: A Historical Comparison

    Thursday, October 13th, 2011

    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.
  • Both were Tea Party favorites.
  • Both have been endorsed by Sen. Jim DeMint.
  • Both have been endorsed by George P. Bush.

    • I’m hardly the first one to make comparisons between Cruz and Rubio. (The Cruz campaign has not been shy about it either.)

    However, there are some differences that will make Cruz’s campaign against Dewhurst more difficult than Rubio’s was against Crist:

  • Dewhurst is more of a squish while Crist had gotten to be a full-blown RINO (no matter how hard others might make the comparison). None of Dewhurst’s disappointments compare to Crist embracing Obama-Pelosi-Reid’s budget-busting, pork-laden Stimulus.
  • 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.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Ted Cruz Raises $1 Million+ in Q3

    Thursday, October 13th, 2011

    It’s time for candidate’s Q3 fundraising totals to start trickling out, and the Ted Cruz campaign is first out of the gate with the news that he raised $1,057,953 in Q3 and has $2.4 million cash on-hand. This is in line with his Q1 and Q2 fundraising totals, and I would expect a huge bump in Q4 thanks to his cover appearance in National Review.

    Now we wait for the Q3 fundraising numbers for the other candidates. How much personal money will David Dewhurst sink into his own campaign? Will Tom Leppert continue to self-fund at his $1 million a quarter clip? Has Ricardo Sanchez been fundraising in Q3? Or doing anything at all?

    Stay tuned…

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 4 Comments »

    In Which My Texas Senate and Fast and Furious Updates Converge

    Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

    Former Texas Solicitor General and current senate candidate Ted Cruz calls for a Special Counsel to investigate Fast and Furious. The text of his announcement:

    Today, I’m calling for the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate Justice Department corruption in the weapons-trafficking scheme, “Fast and Furious.” The facts require a serious investigation. We cannot trust the Attorney General to “investigate” himself. The grave nature of these allegations—and the appearance of multiple obfuscations and evasions—demand an investigation free of political second guessing from the Obama White House.

    The more we learn about Fast and Furious, the more disturbing the revelations are. The public has a right to know who knew what and when. Americans deserve an open, transparent investigation free of political spin. It is clear that this case has now reached a critical point where an impartial investigator is required.

    Attorney General Eric Holder has been far from forthcoming in this investigation. Questions about what Holder and his staff knew about the operation, and their repeatedly changing stories, warrant an outside review.

    Everyone has the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, but the continual stonewalling in this case has undermined the public trust. That trust can only be ensured by appointing a Special Counsel to review the case.

    As part of the Fast and Furious operation, more than 2,000 weapons were provided to Mexican drug cartels as part of a failed attempt to identify weapons smuggling networks. Many of those weapons have turned up at Mexican crime scenes. Two weapons were found at the scene of the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

    And then a link to an email for to join the call for the investigation (and, no doubt, provide a handy list of potential Cruz supporters).

    There may be a few national gun bloggers reading this who haven’t heard of Cruz, but that will no doubt change when the issue of National Review with him on the cover hits the stands. This is another example of Cruz getting a jump on his main rival, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, in addressing vital issues for movement conservatives.

    More Fast and Furious information here.

    More Texas Senate Race information here.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Elections, Guns, Obama Scandals, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Cruz, Dewhurst Trade Punches

    Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

    I think it’s safe to say that Ted Cruz now has David Dewhurst’s attention.

    First came the Chupacabra ad, then news of the National Review cover. Then yesterday, the Cruz campaign noted that Dewhurst floated the idea of a wage tax (i.e., a thinly disguised income tax) back in 2005.

    Today the Dewhurst campaign stepped down from the Ivory Tower to punch back, calling attention to a story that Cruz, in his career as a private appellate lawyer, represented a Chinese firm in a patent dispute with an American firm, and to an interview with Laura Ingraham in which he expressed opposition to a Senate bill that seeks sanctions against China for currency manipulation. (A complete transcript of the Ingraham show appearance can be found here.)

    Here’s the exact language from Steven Cheung of Dewhurst for Texas:

    The day after Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka reported on Ted Cruz acting as legal counsel to a Chinese company accused of patent infringement against an American inventor, Cruz again showed his true colors by again defending China’s interests on the Laura Ingraham Show. To check out our latest video that has highlights, please click here.

    By standing on the same side as President Barack Obama, a fellow elitist, Harvard attorney with zero business experience, Cruz and Obama strongly oppose a bill that would curb China’s predatory trade and currency practices in a time when they are taking over ownership of the American economy.

    “It’s about holding China accountable for what China is doing that is completely without integrity and subverting the principles of free trade,” said Ingraham. Moments later, Ingraham correctly declared, “Obama’s with you on this bill!”

    At a time when millions of Americans are without jobs, why does Ted Cruz consistently put the needs of China before America?

    To my mind, this is fairly weak sauce by the Dewhurst campaign, and the tone is overreaching. Representing clients is what lawyers do, and it’s not like Cruz is working pro bono for convicted terrorists.

    And I happen to be on Cruz’s side on the China bill, as are (as far as I can tell) the vast majority of conservitive commentators and economists. Sure, China manilpulates it’s currency…but so do we, Europe, and just about everyone else. Protectionism is still loser economics, and starting a trade war in the midst of a recession is not a great idea.

    Whether these criticisms will play with Republican primary voters is another question. Tom Leppert’s been using the lawyer line of attack on Cruz without any notable effect for months now, but China bashing is seldom unpopular; it’s also, as far as I can tell, seldom an effective wedge issue, either.

    But it’s interesting to note that the gloves have finally come off for the Dewhurst campaign. I don’t think his soi distant Ivory Tower approach was going to tide him over until he could carpet-bomb the primary with big direct mail and ad buys. Despite Dewhurst’s status as presumptive frontrunner, Cruz continues to make noise and rack up conservative endorsements both locally and nationally.

    The Dewhurst campaign seems to have finally realized they have a fight on their hands.

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    Posted in Economics, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 6 Comments »

    Texas Senate Race Update for September 23, 2011

    Friday, September 23rd, 2011
  • The Ted Cruz campaign is having a lot of fun with David Dewhurst’s ducking of candidate forums:

  • Jim Geraghty calls it the “Demonsheep” ad of the current election cycle.
  • Cruz also got more love in the form of a fundraising push from Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund PAC.
  • A new poll from the Dem-leaning PPP shows Dewhurst with (no surprise) a big lead in name recognition. The poll also shows Dewhurst, Cruz and Tom Leppert all beating Ricardo Sanchez (who, while theoretically running, has been about as scarce on the campaign trail as Dewhurst) and former Congressman Chet Edwards (who isn’t running, and hasn’t been running).
  • The most surprising thing from the full poll results? Elizabeth Ames Jones edges out Tom Leppert for third place.
  • Ross Ramsey calls Dewhurst “the Mitt Romney of the Texas Senate race.” Ouch! “There’s the part of Dewhurst that’s like Romney. Both entered their races as presumptive front-runners. Neither is the sort of guy who’d be at the barbecue at 4 in the morning starting the fire and working on the briskets and ribs. They’re business aristocrats. Swells.” Double ouch!
  • The Leppert campaign has put up the endorsements of Job Creators for Leppert. Of course, it doesn’t really help defend against the charge of his limited regional appeal when some 90% of the names on the list hail from the greater Dallas area…
  • Leppert also got some attention from the Houston Chronicle‘s political blog.
  • A roundup of the various candidate’s job plans.
  • Cruz wins another straw poll, this time at the Garland Tea Party.
  • There was evidently another candidates forum conducted by the Kingwood Area Republican Women, but I can’t find any news or blog reports about it.
  • Speaking of which, why is it that Texas Republicans have had dozens of candidate forums, and Democrats can’t even muster up one?
  • The Garland Tea Party event was evidently not a flawless success for the organizers.
  • And speaking of Garland, there was another longshot Republican there I hadn’t heard of before: Curt Cleaver, who seems to be running on a full-tilt Christian conservative platform. He evidently started running in August. I guess I’ll have to update my cheatsheet of candidate’s web pages. I just sent him email to ask why he’s running, as I do not think the Republican side of the race suffers from a dearth of candidates…
  • And this week, besides appearing as a question in the PPP poll, Ricardo Sanchez…did absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. It’s been a month since his news page was updated, a month since his Facebook page was updated, and three months since his lone, solitary tweet was released unto the cold, cruel world. Does Sanchez actually want to run for the Senate?

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 4 Comments »

    Interview With Texas Senate Candidate Tom Leppert

    Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

    After my interview with Ted Cruz, I was contacted by the Tom Leppert campaign in late August and asked if I wanted to do an interview with Leppert. And they did this despite my very public doubts over several aspects of Leppert’s record. Leppert’s comments on the campaign trail have always been very solidly conservative; my doubts have been over how much Leppert’s actions match his rhetoric. So I agreed to do an interview, after which is was just a matter of finding a date and time when he would be in Austin, which turned out to be Monday, September 19.

    From shortly after each of them jumped into the campaign, Cruz and Leppert have been neck and neck in who has the most effective campaign organization, with both seeming very polished and professional. (David Dewhurst’s start was late enough that I haven’t yet collected enough data to make a determination. So far I’m more than little skeptical that the “Ivory Tower” strategy of avoiding the candidate forums is the right choice.) Early on, I sought to get interviews with all of the major Republican Senate candidates, starting in the order they joined the race. I heard absolutely nothing back from the campaigns of Roger Williams, Michael Williams, or Elizabeth Ames Jones, not even the polite “our candidate is really busy but we’ll see if we can work something in” blogger brushoff. By contrast it’s been very easy and hassle free to get information out of the Cruz and Leppert campaigns.

    As I mention in the interview itself, this was designed so be a mixture of general and specific questions, as well as mixture of softball and hardball questions.

    A few observations:

  • This was conducted in the atrium of the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum, which I thought was the easiest north Austin location to sit down in undisturbed. I think it worked OK, but the acoustics (including some soft background music from hotel sound system) were not necessarily ideal.
  • Unlike the Cruz interview, which was filmed and edited by their campaign A/V guy, I shot this myself on a Mino Flip camera and did a light edit in iMovie. I think it came out OK, but not spectacularly. Sorry for the tilt and the busy background. Maybe in the long run I need to set up a mini-studio in my guest room for filming interviews and such.
  • After I finished editing it, I found out that YouTube had imposed a new limit of 15 minutes per video…and removed the button to request lifting the length limit for the videos you post. After I spent an hour uploading it. Thanks a lot, YouTube! That’s why I had to split it into two parts. Plus one part is over 10 minutes, which means you can’t upload it directly from iMovie to YouTube, which is why the aspect ratios of the two may seem slightly different.
  • I really need to do something about my Jabba the Hutt-like countenance. (I have recently stepped up both diet and exercise efforts, so we shall see.)
  • Despite my reservations about Leppert, I tried to make this a fair, balanced interview, with some tough questions, but not a piece of “ambush journalism.”
  • In person, Leppert comes across as a smart, affable politician. He seems more effective in one-on-one retail politics than he’s been at some of the candidate forums. He talks significantly faster than Ted Cruz did.
  • I had the opposite problem I had with Cruz, when we ran out of time for all the questions I had. Knowing that I only had 25-30 minutes for the interview before Leppert had to go off to his next appointment, I only had 11 questions written down. In fact, he answered the questions fast enough that I got through all my questions and still had several minutes left, so I ended up winging it for the rest of the interview.
  • Knowing the interview was going to be this short, I couldn’t really follow up on portions of questions, such as those on the Trinity Toll Road Project, and the roles of Lynn Flint Shaw and Willis Johnson.
  • As Cruz did, Leppert side-stepped some questions, and brought back others to many of his standard talking points. Indeed, “I don’t talk in seven second sound-bites” seems to be Leppert’s favorite seven second sound-bite. As in the Cruz interview, “nothing personnel.” This is what politicians do (indeed have to do) based on the demands made on them by the campaign. Those caveats aside, I think it was pretty successful and interesting interview.

    • I expect to have more information on Leppert (both positive and negative) in the next week or so.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

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