Posts Tagged ‘Bill White’

Even More on Wendy Davis Failure

Monday, March 17th, 2014

Will Franklin has dug even deeper in to the primary voting statistics and they are, if anything, actually worse than previously reported (which were already plenty bad).

A few examples:

  • Her vote totals were down in the Rio Grande Valley when compared with Bill White.
  • Bill White’s two Hispanic opponents in 2010 received 2.83% and 4.95% of the statewide primary vote, compared to Davis Opponent Ray Madrigal pulling in just under 21% despite no fundraising and minimal campaigning.
  • “Despite Wendy Davis’ massive, hyped, well-funded, all-star staffed voter registration effort with Battleground Texas and millions of dollars from out-of-state, today there are 45,000 fewer Texans registered to vote than in November 2012.”
  • “In Texas’ 5 most populous counties, there were 12,897 fewer total Democratic votes than in 2010 and 62,469 fewer than in 2002.”
  • “In a practically uncontested primary, Wendy Davis spent more than Bill White in a contested primary, to achieve poorer primary results.”
  • The total vote margin Greg Abbott received in Harris County alone is almost double the vote margin Davis earned in the five largest counties she won more votes than Abbott in.
  • Read the whole thing.

    In Which Ace of Spades HQ Declares War on your 23″ Monitor to Show Why Wendy Davis Can’t Win

    Saturday, March 8th, 2014

    Ace of Spades, showing considerable time, effort, and a somewhat shaky grasp of MS Paint, has produced a single, superginormous .PNG that will annoy everyone without a 30″ Apple Cinema Display that shows, in great detail, why Wendy Davis is doomed.

    It’s essentially a color-coded county-by-county breakdown map of Texas that shows negligible voter growth in the most heavily Democratic counties since the Ann Richards—Clayton Williams gubernatorial election of 1990, while East Texas has flipped Republican and the big suburban Republican counties have grown tremendously as of the 2010 Rick Perry-Bill White gubernatorial election.

    “The GOP margin out of Montgomery Co ALONE almost completely negates that of the D’s in Harris, Travis, and Bexar Cos combined, falling just 1300 votes short!” [all sic from the PNG]

    For those outside the state who may not immediately twig to what that sentence is saying: A single suburban county north of Houston has enough of a Republican margin to negate the Democratic advantage in Houston, Austin and San Antonio combined.

    Red areas have gotten redder, blue areas have flipped red or gotten pink, even deep urban areas are less Democratic than they were two decades ago, and the few counties in the Rio Grande Valley who have stayed deep blue have barely added new voters.

    All that adds up to Wendy Davis being slaughtered in November.

    And Ace’s map only goes up to 2010. Since then, things have gotten even worse for Democrats.

    Hey Ace: Is there any reason you couldn’t have stacked the two Texas images vertically? Are you in the pay of the Big Monitor Lobby? Inquiring minds want to know!

    WILLisms Breaks Down Democratic Turnout Failure

    Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

    Will Franklin has an interesting piece up detailing just how poorly Democrats did in primary turnout on Tuesday, noting that both the Democratic Party total, and Wendy Davis’ numbers compared to Bill White, were down significantly from 2010. By contrast, “Abbott received 1,219,831 votes, or 91.50% in a four-way primary race. 1,333,010 Republicans voted in the 2014 primary.”

    For all the money BattleGround Texas is pouring into the state, Democrats are doing worse than they did in 2010.

    Although Franklin doesn’t go into the 2012 numbers, I’d also like to note that overall Democratic votes are down from 590,164 in 2012 to 546,480. Normally a presidential election year will have higher numbers, but there were no big-money, hotly contested races at the top of the Democratic ticket that year. Turnout should have been up this year. It wasn’t.

    More Will Franklin:

    In short, there is a partisan enthusiasm gap in Texas, and Republicans are winning it. Democrats have years of soul searching and retooling to do before they’ll even sniff winning their first statewide race since the early 90s. Anointing someone known almost exclusively for filibustering on behalf of elective late-term abortion post 5 months of pregnancy may have set the Democrats’ plan back at least one full election cycle, if not more.”

    Read the whole thing.

    How Big Will Ted Cruz Win Tomorrow?

    Monday, November 5th, 2012

    I’m pretty confident that Ted Cruz will win the election (and deservedly so). The only question now is: By how much?

    To determine that, let’s look at the recent history of non-Presidential top-of-the-ballot races in Texas:

  • 2000 Senate: Kay Bailey Hutchison 4,078,954 (65%) over Gene Kelly 2,025,024 (32%)
  • 2002 Senate: John Cornyn 2,480,991 (55%) over Ron Kirk 1,946,681 (43%)
  • 2002 Governor: Rick Perry 2,617,106 (58%) over Tony Sanchez 1,809,915 (40%)
  • 2006 Senate: Kay Bailey Hutchison 2,661,789 (62%) over Barbara Ann Radnofsky 1,555,202 (36%)
  • 2008 Senate: John Cornyn 4,326,639 (55%) over Rick Noriega 3,383,890 (43%)
  • 2010 Governor: Rick Perry 2,733,784 (55%) over Bill White 2,102,606 (42%)
  • (I’m throwing out the 4-way 2006 gubernatorial race as not germane. All numbers via Wikipdia, % rounded.)

    In terms of financial resources, Sadler’s fundraising has been very poor, having raised just over $800,000; poorer even than Rick Noriega, who managed to raise over $4 million, or Barbara Ann Radnofsky, who raised about $1.5 million. Then again, money isn’t everything: Tony Sanchez spent $60 million of his own money to garner a meager 40% against Rick Perry in 2002.

    I don’t think Sadler will do as poorly as vanity candidate Gene Kelly did in 2000. I expect Obama to run 4-5 points worse than he did in 2008, and I expect Sadler to probably lose a point or two off Obama’s total. So, I predict: Ted Cruz gets 61% of the vote, and Paul Sadler gets around 39%.

    Texas 2012 Senate Campaign Fundraising Reports

    Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

    Just as a modern army runs on gasoline, a modern political campaign runs on money. Several of the Senate candidates have been quite active in that regard, according to FEC documents for the 2009-2010 period:

  • Michael Williams has received a total of $743,458 in donations from 519 individuals. As noted previously, he also received significant support from the Senate Conservatives Fund, and was (if I’m scanning this correctly) the only non-2010 candidate to receive funding from them last year.
  • Roger Williams has received a whopping $1,643,928 in donations from 1335 individuals. Moreover, since Williams was the earliest candidate to announce, he raised $131,000 in the 2007-2008 election cycle, though $100,000 of that was a loan to himself, the rest from 18 individuals.
  • Elizabeth Ames Jones has raised $989,765 from 1051 individuals.
  • I don’t think State Senator Florence Shapiro has a high enough profile to win the Republican nomination, but that didn’t keep her from raising $525,285 for a Senate run. However, there seem to be almost as many refunds as donations listed in her filing, many for people who have multiple entries for the same amount on the same day. I can’t tell whether she refunded people because she decided not to run, or if it was just to offset a data glitch. (I sent off a question, but the address on her campaign website bounces.)
  • On the Democratic side, holy moly! John Sharp may have been invisible on the campaign trail, but he’s already got $3,994,490 in his war chest, having raised money from 722 individuals. However, over $3 million of that comes from a “Candidate Loan.” So Sharp hasn’t been lazy the last year, he’s been in “stealth mode.” But that still doesn’t explain why johnsharp.com redirects to Network Solutions…
  • Though he says he’s not running, Bill White has raised an even larger $6,015,014 for his Senate campaign from 4521 individuals. (As these are federal disclosure forms, my understanding is that none of White’s funding for his Governor’s race would be included here.) But it’s possible the bulk was raised before he switched to run for Governor.
  • I can’t find any Senate fundraising reports on any of the other likely serious candidates. (Democrat Chet Edwards shows up, but only for his unsuccessful attempt to hold onto his House seat.)

    Keep in mind that these are very early figures, only go through 9/30/10 for most candidates, and several potential candidates haven’t started raising funds yet. I have little doubt that, should David Dewhurst jump into the race as expected, he would easily be able to amass somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million by year’s end.

    We’re not even at the starting line yet, but contestants are already starting to mosey out to the track…

    Still More 2012 Texas Senate Candidate News

    Friday, January 21st, 2011

    Add Republican Rep. Mike McCaul to the list of names of those considering a run.

    Polls show Dewhurst doing the best in polls against potential Democratic challengers, but all named Republicans beat all named Democrats. Given the state of Texas politics, that sounds about right.

    On the Democratic side, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro says he’s not running. Bill White also says no, despite Nate Silver’s pimping. Houston Sheriff Adrian Garcia also says he’s not interested, but his statement (“I have no interest in running for U.S. Senate at this time”) leaves a good bit more wiggle room.

    I keep hearing that John Sharp is going to run, but I wonder if anyone has told Sharp. He was making noises about it last March, and since then has been pretty much invisible. Signs of a Chet Edwards Senate run are even more non-apparent on the web.

    The Texas Tribune lists all sorts of wacky possibilities: Chris Bell (Maybe), George Prescott Bush (Bush41’s grandson, and No), Kinky Friedman (probably not, though he can’t do much worse than many of the other Democratic possibilities), Craig James (Maybe, but hard to see him gaining any traction in the Republican field; try running for the House first), Florence Shapiro (another Maybe, another person who couldn’t find traction in the Republican field), Leticia Van Putte (who?), and Farouk Shami (they actually asked him). Why not see if Phil Gramm or Dick Armey was coming out of retirement while you’re at it? Or some random Bullock or Hobby offspring?

    Not that it probably matters too much; there hasn’t been a Democrat elected in Texas statewide since Bob Bullock won in 1994, and Texas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 (the same year the Dukakis/Bentsen ticket lost to Bush/Quayle). Things are always fluid in politics, but there does not appear to be any instant revival for the Texas Democratic Party over the horizon in the near future…

    Rick Perry Doesn’t Pull Any Punches

    Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

    As seen by this video by a Houston Police Officer talking about how her husband (another police officer) had been killed by a multi-arrested illegal alien while Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White was touting Houston as a “sanctuary city”:

    I haven’t spent much time on the Texas gubernatorial race as I’ve thought all along that Perry was going to beat White like a drum, and this video is a good example why.

    (Hat tip: Dwight. )

    More on Perry’s Victory

    Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

    This Michael Barone piece shows Perry beating Hutchison pretty much everywhere, but racking up a particularly large margin in metro-Houston, which would seem to bode well for defeating former Houston Mayor Bill White in November.

    Updated: A piece from Kevin Williamson in NRO on Perry’s victory. I think he overstates the Ron Paul component of the Tea Party. (I also think most Paul supporters themselves were less wedded to his fringe isolationist and conspiracy theory views than they were with his populist anger at the GOP establishment that had abandoned conservative principles of fiscal discipline in favor of pork-fueled cronyism.)

    Updated 2 From Danny Huddleston at American Thinker: “Note to all Republicans running for office anywhere in America, stick to Reagan conservatism and you will win. Contrary to popular belief independents don’t want moderate candidates, they want authentic candidates with core values.”

    Free Electricity, Courtesy of Farouk Shami!

    Sunday, February 14th, 2010

    If you live in Texas, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Farouk signs festooning fences along major highways. They belong to one Farouk Shami, who is waging an underdog gubernatorial campaign against Houston Mayor Bill White for the Democratic nomination.

    There’s much that’s commendable in Farouk Shami’s personal background. A Palestinian-American entrepreneur (that’s the Palestine that’s east of Jerusalem, not the one east of Mexia), he might bring much-needed private sector experience to a race dominated by political insiders.

    Many of his positions are pretty standard liberal boilerplate (for a death penalty moratorium, against cracking down on illegal aliens, etc.). On the other hand, he favors limiting abortions to the first trimester, a moderately cultural conservative position that probably puts him to the right of most Democratic primary voters on this issue.

    Oh, and did I mention that he also wants to provide everyone in the state free electricity? Yes, indeed. He said that goal could be achieved in ten years thanks to through “expansion of wind and solar energy use.”

    Let’s do a little math, shall we?

    In 2005 (the most recent period for which I was able to locate reliable data), Texas consumed 334,258 million kilowatt hours of electricity. Or, to put it Big Scary Number form, 334,258,000,000 kwh, or 334,258,000,000,000 watt hours.

    Of that 334,258 million kilowatt hours of electricity, a grand total of 7 million kwh is currently supplied by wind power. There’s no separate figure I’ve been able to find for solar. My suspicion is that it is similarly a drop in the bucket.

    Prices to generate solar power are all over the map, but most seem to agree that 10 cents a kilowatt hour is the “holy grail” of solar electricity consumption, the point at which it becomes marginally price competitive fossil fuel energy sources. (For comparison, the City of Austin currently charges 7.82¢ per kWh for residential customers who exceed 500 kWh during the summer.) That means Governor Farouk could provide power to all Texans for a mere $33.4 billion in taxpayer money. Every year.

    The Texas State biennial budget for 2010-2011 is $182.2 billion, or $91.1 billion a year. So Farouk Shami is suggesting we spend well over 1/3rd of the state budget to supply energy to residents, money that would presumably have to come from either massive tax hikes or massive budget cuts. This is, to belabor the point, in no way, shape or form “free.”

    Now these are quick and dirty, back-of-the-envelope calculations. If you have better numbers for any of the above, let me know. But I suspect the conclusions will remain the same.

    I do not think that it is too much to ask that Texas gubernatorial candidates be capable of performing basic math. This, combined with his recent announcement that he’s invented a blow-dryer that grows hair makes me conclude that Farouk Shami is not, in fact, a serious candidate for Governor of Texas.