Rick Perry vs World

19 July 2012

Post 1686

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Posted by Evan @ 07/19/12 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

18 July 2012

This was post 1685

archived.

Posted by Evan @ 07/18/12 03:49 PM | Comments (0)

17 July 2012

are we human or are we dancer?

Posted by Evan @ 07/17/12 11:06 PM | Comments (0)

14 July 2012

Dewhurst linked

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Posted by Evan @ 07/14/12 04:47 PM | Comments (0)

13 July 2012

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Posted by Evan @ 07/13/12 11:12 AM | Comments (3)

12 July 2012

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09 July 2012

To the paid archive

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Posted by Evan @ 07/09/12 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

08 July 2012

to the archive

Posted by Evan @ 07/08/12 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

07 July 2012

Dewhurst admits that he's a conciliator

30 seconds after saying that he wanted to sit down with conservative groups after the election on the Matt Patrick show, David Dewhurst said:

David Dewhurst: If there's anyone I have said or done that has put someone off, that's not my style. (Matt Patrick Show, July 5, 2012)

Posted by Evan @ 07/07/12 08:51 AM | Comments (0)

06 July 2012

David Dewhurst promises to campaign AFTER the election on the Matt Patrick show

Although David Dewhurst has avoided grassroots events for the entire campaign, Dewhurst yesterday told Matt Patrick that he wants to sit down with people after the election to "just talk."

Matt Patrick: When this is over with, whoever wins this thing....there's going to be a period of time when you or whoever wins this thing is going to have to go out and soothe some ruffled feathers.

David Dewhurst: Well um, I'd love an opportunity if anyone has ruffled, um...feelings...to let me sit down with you, your group. Uh, individually...larger groups. And...just talk.

So during the campaign, Dewhurst has avoided debates, candidate forums, Republican Women's clubs and Tea Party groups that invited him, yet he says he wants to sit down with those groups after the election?

That's a unique style of campaigning. "I'll ignore you during the election, but after the campaign is over, then I will really want to talk...promise!"

Posted by Evan @ 07/06/12 02:16 PM | Comments (0)

05 July 2012

Rob Portman's Texas connection

NYT:

Mr. Portman can deliver a speech in Spanish. He learned the language while living on a ranch near the Rio Grande in Texas during a college break, working alongside illegal immigrants. The experience intrigued him enough that he used it to write his anthropology thesis at Dartmouth.

He recorded radio ads in Spanish during his Senate race and promoted his jobs plan to Hispanic voters. With a light accent and a trill of his R's, he introduced himself by saying, “Soy Rob Portman, candidato para el Senado de los Estados Unidos."

3 months to learn Spanish. Not too shabby.

The Senator from Ohio looks like the choice to me, if I were Romney. But honestly the "who will be the VP pick?" parlor game wouldn't get so much attention if it didn't occur in the slow news months of the summer.

Posted by Evan @ 07/05/12 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

03 July 2012

Dewhurst's muddled messaging

Is it me or is Dewhurst's campaign remarkably messageless right now? Dan Patrick played the role of Dewhurst surrogate on his radio show and got into a heated debate with Ted Cruz. Yawn. That's really what they're pushing hard?

If this were a presidential campaign, we'd be about a week away from the Politico piece where the consultants start blaming each other.

Posted by Evan @ 07/03/12 08:32 AM | Comments (0)

02 July 2012

The Ted Cruz v David Dewhurst supporter enthusiasm gap

One more data point when thinking about the enthusiasm gap between supporters of Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff.

From Targeted Victory:

1. Ted Cruz had the most views [in all America] with 69,458 and the largest increase in subscriber growth with 20.00%.

2. The most watched political video [in the nation] was "Desperate Dewhurst's Amnesty Lies" by Ted Cruz with 47,302 views.

The "Desperate Dewhurst Amnesty Lies" video was in response to the last minute Dewhurst attempt to play the race card, under-the-radar.

So Ted Cruz had double the YouTube views. And, again, that understates the true enthusiasm gap. I've seen many paid Google ads from the Dewhurst campaign which lead to landing pages where the Dewhurst ad plays automatically. I have yet to see the Cruz campaign advertise to get people to watch their videos.

Posted by Evan @ 07/02/12 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

30 June 2012

Obama isn't working...in one chart

This says it all on how Obama has been a terrible president.

Obama's legacy of crushing debt

What's worse is that lots of Obama's spending is back-loaded, so America's fiscal situation is much worse than this makes it appear.

credit to PIMCO.

Posted by Evan @ 06/30/12 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

29 June 2012

Measuring grassroots enthusiasm for Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst in the Republican Senate runoff

I thought it would be interesting to take a quick-and-dirty measurement of the enthusiasm in the 2012 Texas Republican Senate primary runoff. So I reviewed all the tweets sent by Ted Cruz (@TedCruz) and David Dewhurst (both @DavidHDewhurst* and @TeamDewhurst) over the last 24 hours. I used the common measure of Twitter retweets (RTs) as a yardstick.

	@TedCruz	@TeamDewhurst	@DavidHDewhurst
Total Retweets	569	65	42
Avg # of RTs	26	3	10
Tweet with highest # of RTs	142	12	28
Tweet with 2nd highest # of RTs	123	5	7

@TeamDewhurst and @TedCruz tweeted 21 and 22 times respectively, while @DavidHDewhurst tweeted just 4 times.

That's a huge difference in enthusiasm: Ted Cruz got over 5 times the number of RTs. Cruz even had two tweets that got more retweets than all of Dewhurst's retweets combined from both accounts. The disparity is actually even greater than it appears:

1. Half of @TedCruz's tweets were fundraising tweets which are notoriously difficult to get retweeted. If you removed the fundraising tweets from the sample then the average number of RTs for any given @TedCruz tweet would probably have been near 50. Not surprisingly given how little enthusiasm they have, Dewhurst doesn't fundraise through Twitter.
2. A huge percentage (maybe a majority though I didn't count) of Dewhurst's tweets were from paid staffers. I noticed because they would be the same few accounts retweeting on all of Dewhurst's tweets. If you took those out, Dewhurst's totals might be half of what they appear to be. To be fair, Cruz's staffers also retweet their boss's tweets, but it is a much smaller percentage.

Ted Cruz probably had about 10-15 tweets yesterday that got more retweets than Dewhurst's highest tweet from either account.

Bottom line:
Ted Cruz has a clear advantage in grassroots support and enthusiasm. Twitter users with enough enthusiasm to retweet for their candidate is a rough approximation of some demographics who will vote in a July runoff. Although Twitter is hardly a perfect proxy or scientific, the massive disparity confirms what we see everywhere else: there is no enthusiasm on Dewhurst's side. Kay Bailey Hutchison may have even had more grassroots support in 2010's Republican primary than Dewhurst has in this runoff.** That's a huge danger sign for Dewhurst.

* After I called them out on a profile that hadn't changed in months, a few days afterward Texas Conservatives Fund Dewhurst SuperPAC edited their profile.
** At least Hutchison had the excuse of being the challenger and being outspent by Perry, whereas Dewhurst is the quasi-incumbent and is spending millions and millions more than Cruz.

Posted by Evan @ 06/29/12 12:01 AM | Comments (5)

27 June 2012

Dewhurst's "blur the difference" strategy

The Texas press corps has been repeating a silly meme recently. It goes something like this: "David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz have similar views on issues." Hardly.*

Dewhurst's entire campaign strategy is to blur the differences between Ted Cruz and himself.

It started when Dewhurst started stealing every broad theme that Cruz would use. When Cruz entered the race, he put the proven record page prominently on his website and referred to it in every speech. So when Dewhurst entered the race a few months later, he started repeating the phrase "proven record." As a reaction, Cruz started saying that he was a proven conservative. Then Dewhurst started proclaiming himself that as well to blur the difference. To further distinguish himself, Cruz pointed out that he was a proven conservative fighter. And that has led to Dewhurst's obsession for the last few months with calling himself a fighter.

Posted by Evan @ 06/27/12 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

22 June 2012

David Dewhurst v Ted Cruz Texas Republican Senate debate

It was a rough night for the Dew.

Posted by Evan @ 06/22/12 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

19 June 2012

Rubio brings the awesome in English or Spanish

Marco Rubio really does crush it in English or Spanish. Watch this interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos for a good example. Univision aired a hit piece on Rubio's brother-in-law awhile back because Rubio didn't do an interview with Ramos. This interview is about as hostile as you can get on Ramos' part, and Rubio just swats it away with aplomb.

[6/27 Note: I changed the original video from Univision's site for the youtube one that doesn't start playing automatically. This one has English subtitles too, which is helpful for at least 99% of the possible readers of this blog.]

In English, here's Rubio at a recent fundraiser in South Carolina, introduced by Senator DeMint.