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:
Read the whole thing.
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:
Read the whole thing.
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!
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.
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:
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…
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…
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. )
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.