Tag Archives: David Dewhurst

Will Paul Ryan run for the House?

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Paul Ryan Saturday, primaries Tuesday

The biggest news out of Tuesday’s primaries was Wisconsin: former Gov. Tommy Thompson?  Yup. Thompson won with a plurality, 34 percent. If the opposition was a big anti-Thompson vote, it was split–with Grover Norquist’s help, interestingly. Self-funder Eric Hovde was thus unable to put together quite enough votes to beat Thompson.

Former Governor Thompson

If Wisconsin had a run-off rule like that in Texas–where a nominee has to get over 50 percent–presumably Thompson would be headed for a loss like that of Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Thompson’s unofficial vote total yesterday was 197,772. His opponents totaled 384,347, approaching double the vote for Thompson. Again, it is interesting that the big-money wing of the so-called Tea Party insurgency–mainly Norquist’s Club for Growth–would weigh in so decisively in Wisconsin. Surely Norquist’s faction can read opinion polls. Can the big-business anti-taxers and anti-regulationers really have thought that Neumann, who came in third, could be put over Thompson? Or did they achieve their actual goal, of damaging Thompson’s main challenger, who fell to second place, thus sending on a more plausible GOP nominee?

Hovde

Will Paul Ryan resign from the U.S. House?

Also in Wisconsin: incumbent Rep. Paul Ryan won his uncontested primary, to face Democratic nominee Rob Zerban. Speaking of polls–if Ryan and his team are reading current election trends, he may not resign from the House to run for Vice President. It will be mildly interesting to see which way they choose to go.

For major self-financing candidates, it was one up and one down yesterday. Hovde lost in Wisconsin, but Linda McMahon won in Connecticut, running again for Senate, this time against Chris Murphy.

Murphy, McMahon

2012 self funded candidates: Going anywhere?

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2012 self funded candidates

 

This year, with all the rightful attention to Mitt Romney’s undisclosed tax returns and other financial records, the spotlight has moved away temporarily from some other big money–several large self-funded campaigns for federal office. But a quick check into who is self-funding suggests that the phenomenon of self-funding is continuing to drain GOP prospects in fall. This suggestion should not be oversimplified or exaggerated. But so far, glittering vistas are not opening as the result of wealthy individuals’ pouring millions of their own money–or at least half a million–into their own campaigns. See below.

 

U.S. House:

Of the twelve top self funders in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, four faced each other in expensive house primaries in Texas and New York. David Alameel (D) in Texas 33rd, top self funder in the cycle at the time, lost his primary. Domingo Alberto Garcia, seventh in self funding, beat Alameel but faces Mark Veasey in a July 31 run-off. Jack Davis (R) in New York’s 26th lost his primary, possibly not well positioned anyway but further disadvantaged after scuffling with a cameraman. Jane Corwin (R)  successfully weathered the challenge from former Independent Davis and faces incumbent Kathy Hochul in the general election. Hochul , of course, won the congressional seat in a special election after previous incumbent Chris  Lee (R) aired shirtless photos of himself via craigslist.

Former Rep. Chris Lee, R-Conn.

Texas 33 generally votes D, New York 26 generally votes R. These two races fit the familiar pattern of people pouring money into races they think they can actually win.

Not all self-funded candidacies fit that pattern.

Davis and Corwin were # 2 and 3 respectively in amounts self funded. Number 4, Robert Pittenger (R) in North Carolina’s 9th, won the primary race Tuesday July 17 (yesterday) and will face Jennifer Roberts (D) and Curtis Campbell (I) in the general. Numbers 5 and 6, John K. Delaney (D) and Mark Greenberg (R), won their respective primaries in Maryland’s 6th and Connecticut’s  5th.

Maryland 6 and Connecticut 5 are both iffy, though the Maryland district is much less so.

 

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Scott Peters

Number 8 on the house self funding list, Independent Bill Bloomfield, faces incumbent Rep. Henry Waxman in California 33. New rules–CA now has a top-two structure in place. Waxman is still favored. Under the same system, Scott Peters (D) in California’s 52nd will face incumbent Rep. Brian Bilbray (R) in November. Peters and Craig Huey in California’s 36th were ninth and tenth among self funders.

Looks as though CA new top-two rule has done nothing so far to diminish the importance of money in politics, or to invigorate intra-party challenges to incumbents.

Number eleven on the self funder list, Suzan DelBene (D) in Washington 1, is the remaining candidate still facing a primary, also under a top-two rule. Hers will take place Aug. 7. Number twelve, Joseph Carvin (R) in New York 17, won his primary and will face incumbent Rep. Nita Lowey (D).

 

U.S. Senate:

In Senate races as in House, two of the top ten 2012 self-funders faced each other in Texas. Top self-funder David Dewhurst (R) bested #4 Thomas Leppert (R) among others in the primary and now faces Ted Cruz in the July 31 run-off. Two others faced each other in Pennsylvania, where #2 Tom Smith (R) was defeated by #9 Steven Welch. He is running against incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, Jr (D).

 

Wil Cardon

Of the other top senate self funders, #3 Wil Cardon (R) in Arizona, #5 Eric Hovde (R) in Wisconsin, #6 Linda McMahon (R) in Connecticut and #7 John Brunner (R) in Wisconsin are still in primary races. Cardon is challenging Sen. Jeff Flake; Flake is possibly not aided by some remarks just released by the Flake campaign. Hovde, just endorsed by FreedomWorks, is running against former Rep. Mark Neumann and former Gov. Tommy Thompson. The winner of the heated primary will face Dem nominee [ ] Tammy Baldwin.  McMahon faces Chris Shays August 14, to run for the seat being vacated by Sen. Joe Lieberman.  Sarah Steelman in the crowded Missouri GOP field leading to August 7 was just endorsed by Sarah Palin, if that makes a difference. The winner challenges Sen. Claire McCaskill (D).

Last two spots on the top-ten self funder list for 2012: Greg Sowards (R) defeated Rep. Heather Wilson for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in New Mexico, and Julien Modica (D) withdrew before the Virginia primary, won by former Gov. Tim Kaine.

 

Heather Wilson

A few simple patterns emerge, with few surprises.

  • All the top self funders in Senate races, or victorious self funders, are Republicans.
  • The sword may cut both ways, however; of the six victorious GOP self funders in Senate races, four are still running strong in their party’s primaries.
  • Of the six, nominees in five states are or will be in iffy senate races–Arizona, Connecticut, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. One take-away here is to keep an eye out for election rules and other election tactics to suppress the vote in these states (as in Florida).
  • More of the top self funders in House races are Democrats.
  • Self-funded Democratic nominees have a higher win ratio than self funded Republican nominees. That is, if they manage to get through the nomination process, they have a statistically better shot at winning the general. That may be partly a function of more negative Dem attitude toward self funders running for office than GOPers have (in general).
  • Women self funders do not fare better than other women or better than other self funders. It looks as though any negative perception of self funding tends to work more harshly against a woman candidate, just as a negative perception of pennilessness tends to work more harshly against a woman candidate, other things being equal. Male self funders do not fare better than other men candidates but do fare better than women self funders.
  • The state of New York, as ever, demonstrates premier ability to match candidates against each other with extraneous factors level: wealth runs on par with wealth, just as ethnicity tends to meet similar ethnicity, etc. The occasional exception–Jonathan Tasini taking on Hillary Clinton–does nothing to disprove the general rule.

Of the eighteen current top self funders in races for House and Senate, only three at this point look like strong bets to win their elections–Brad Sherman and Scott Peters in California, and Domingo Garcia in Texas.

This kind of guess, of course, is lightweight in some ways despite the destructiveness of money in politics. But it is a reminder that money is not the only thing in the picture. The interplay of media reporting and other media representations with political campaigns is part of the public discourse.

Take 2010, for example. Numerous prognosticators suggested that 2010 would not be a good year for Democrats nationally, and the broad suggestion was right. Predictions about self funding, that year, were less on the nose.

Broadly, here is the pattern of media representations in that cycle. Big pop-news periodicals–specifically U.S. News and USA Today–began with pretty rosy assessments for candidates with more money than Creosote, as they say in P. G. Wodehouse. Here is a May 13, 2010, piece from USNews, and here is a June 22, 2010, piece from USAToday.

The assessment was shared by some progressive publications, less rosily. Here for example is the estimable Washington Independent Aug. 4.

On the other hand, on June 23 the Seattle Post Globe weighed in with a more detached assessment drawn from history, as did Poynter on Aug. 2.

The Center for Responsive Politics crunched the mixed numbers for self funders on Oct. 6. This analysis was quickly followed by similar treatment of the topic in American Prospect on Oct. 8.

With election returns and hard numbers in, the Center for Responsive Politics published a quick results list for self funders on Nov. 3, followed, quickly again, by a WashPost article the next day to the same effect.

Update August 10:

In Missouri August 7, Rep. Todd Akin defeated the self-financing candidate among others to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill. A good editorial on the senate race shaping up is found here. Another win for far-righters–not that Akin was the only one–and another loss for self financers.

Big state, soft support–Primary results in Texas

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Texas Primary Results 2012: Big state, soft support

 

Unofficial results are in for the Texas primary, and on the Republican side Mitt Romney wins with 71 percent of the vote. Not that victory wasn’t pretty certain, since all the other major candidates have already dropped out—but there are a few interesting details.

1)      Rick Santorum got more than 114,000 votes, notwithstanding the fact that he is no longer in the race, suggesting that indeed he might have done pretty well in Texas if he had been able to stay in the contest long enough to make it to the long-belated primary. Thus the state GOP apparatus in Texas delivered yet another state to Romney, one way or another, this one putting him over the top in delegates as it happens. Not as blatant as the measures taken in Virginia, perhaps, but effective nonetheless.

2)      Newt Gingrich, likewise no longer in the race, got more than 67,000 votes—enough to dent Romney’s lead among urbanites, had the major candidates all still been in.

3)      Ron Paul got his usual stalwarts, for a vote total unofficially of almost 172,000, more than 11 percent of votes cast—again, without having remained in the race.

4)      In other drop-out news, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman got 21,800 votes between them. Repeating for clarity: Bachmann and Huntsman are no longer in the race.

5)      The two least-known candidates, Buddy Roehmer and John Davis, got 9,361 votes.

6)      “Uncommitted” got 61,071 votes.

Thus the well-funded Romney, the presumptive nominee and overwhelming establishment favorite, managed to lose more than 445,000 votes in the Republican presidential primary in Texas, give or take.

 

Romney, endorsed by Donald Trump

No wonder Romney is cementing ties with a) big money and b) birthers. As previously written, this guy needs all the help he can get. No wonder the GOP establishment in Florida is doing its level best to eliminate voters from the rolls. No wonder the Secretary of State in Arizona is threatening to take President Obama off the ballot.

 

Arizona SoS Ken Bennett

By the way, if even one state in the union can actually take Obama off its official ballot using the birther pretext, then that whole birther thing is not just nut stuff. It joins other well-funded tactics in the ongoing assault on the middle class, such as

  • crushing labor—wages and benefits—by destroying labor unions including public-sector unions
  • lobbying state governments—legislators and regulators—to undermine public health and public safety protections
  • major advertising campaigns opposing environmental regulation in oil and gas.

None of the state birther challenges will be upheld in court, at least not beyond the appellate level. But any delay in printing and mailing out official ballots, at the state level, would take additional time to correct. A persistent birther challenge not nipped in the bud could conceivably interfere with early voting. Some of the more sincere whack jobs—I say this with love—may actually believe they can keep the president off the ballot in their state. Their backers, more realistic, probably just hope that they can at least divert public resources away from clean and efficient elections. And, of course, entice small donations from pitifully ignorant but hysterical supporters.

 

Cruz on cover

Back to Texas—in the U.S. Senate race, Latino candidate Ted Cruz garners 30 percent of the vote, forcing Lieutenant Gov. David Dewhurst into a run-off for the GOP nomination. Last-minute smarmy attacks on Cruz, implying that he supports illegal immigration, probably helped Dewhurst get his almost 48 percent. No doubt it’s deeply disappointing to party honchos that they didn’t hoist him to the over-50-percent mark.

 

Texas GOP senate front-runner Dewhurst

In the GOP U.S. House races, all incumbents won; open seats with multiple contenders will mostly require run-offs July 31.

 

On the Democratic side there will also be a run-off for the senate nomination, between Paul Sadler and Grady Yarbrough. A new face would be a godsend for the public compared to the solons that the Texas GOP has been electing to the senate. It’s like the old joke about the decadent Romans electing a horse to their senate: At least the Romans had the decency to send the whole horse. In narrowly political terms, the Gulf Coast including Texas is the soft underbelly of red-state strength as Winston Churchill would put it. Too bad the national Democratic party has been slow on the uptake. The national party too often heels at the beck of the national political press, which is reluctant to recalculate and slow to correct its own political misjudgments.

 

Pity about that.

 

In the U.S. House races among Dems, Rep. Silvestre Reyes is the only incumbent who lost, defeated by Beto O’Rourke, son of a late El Paso county judge, Pat O’Rourke. As with the Repubs, some of the open seats will involve primary run-offs July 31.

 

Back to the thought up top: The big news from Texas’ primary is how soft Romney’s support in Texas has proven. The Romney camp doesn’t seem too concerned to counter the perception, even. So far, they’re manning the barricades—money, hysteria—rather than spinning.

Presumably the state party establishment will kick in with a big get-together at some point.