Winners and losers: primary night edition
Winners
Dannie Goeb -- Leading by 13 as of this moment, the former shock jock has shocked us again. Barring a blowup, he'll be the leader of the Texas Senate in 2015. He went on offense and stayed there. But I have to wonder...how much do Todd Staples and Jerry Patterson regret their 2012 Dewhurst endorsement? Their campaigns were dead in the water from the start.
Ken Paxton -- He's leading by almost 11% right now. Smitherman did well in Houston, so Paxton will pink up a large chunk of that vote by default. Dan Branch has almost no chance to win this battle of the DFW lawyers.
Greg Abbott -- 91% is pretty good in a four-way race. His party is united behind him. Compare that to John Cornyn who also faced a bunch of no-names and yet is running just under 59%.
#TxLege conservatives running for higher office -- Democrats may continue to make Joe Straus the Speaker of the House, but it is quite clear that if you ever want to move up in Texas politics, then you should stay far away from Joe Straus.
I heard people talk about Straus staffer Eric Opiela as a shoo-in and he won't even make the runoff. Meanwhile, Straus tried to end Wayne Christian's political career, but now he is poised to be a statewide officeholder.
Losers
MSM slate candidates -- they all did worse than expected. Why would any Republican running in a competitive statewide primary spend time seeking endorsements that lose you votes? I don't understand how any of their consultants let them.
Wendy Davis -- yeah, she couldn't motivate anyone to vote in the Democratic primary, but that's no surprise and no big deal. General elections are not won or lost based on how many people vote in the primary.
The big deal is that -- as of right now with 67% in -- she is getting 78% of the vote against a no-name AND SHE IS LOSING IN SOUTH TEXAS. A Democrat can't pull off a miracle upset when losing against a no-name in South Texas counties. Are the folks down there turned off by her pro-Obama liberalism or do they just not care enough to vote for her?
There's really no good way for the Obama staffers running her campaign to spin this. It shatters the whole "we'll win non-voting Latinos" myth that Texas Democrats try to make themselves believe every four years. "But it's different this time," they cry. The data does not support their claim.
Online polls -- Polling primaries is not always easy. But it's even harder when you change the whole basis of random sampling and then hope that your opt-in sample uses demographic features that are enough to construct a sample that is similar to primary voters.
In fact, one might expect that certain subgroups like libertarians would be drastically oversampled online. Oversampling libertarians has long been a problem with online polling. And, voila! Debra Medina, who previously played footsie with 9/11 Truthers, is at 19%. She's got the same libertarians she got 4 years ago, and not a voter more.
David Dewhurst -- will he even decide to burn more money on the runoff? Short of a Patrick blowup, I see zero paths to Dewhurst even getting 45% of the vote, much less the 50% he needs to win. By the way, he frequently trashed his 2012 campaign team over the last couple years, but this sub-30% performance tonight actually suggests that they did a good job (as I contended at the time).
Trial lawyers -- the Ted Cruz #SCOTX endorsements crushed any hopes their slate had of winning. The money they spent to try to stop Dan Patrick was wasted.
Posted by Evan @ 03/05/14 12:16 AM
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