30 June 2012
Obama isn't working...in one chart
This says it all on how Obama has been a terrible president.
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.
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.
Rubio's new book An American Son is out today.
Thanks to the intelligence of Florida's Republicans, we got Marco Rubio. Let's hope Texas Republicans are smart enough to give us Ted Cruz.
Posted by Evan @ 06/19/12 04:55 PM | Comments (0)
14 June 2012
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Posted by Evan @ 06/14/12 03:23 PM | Comments (0)
11 June 2012
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Posted by Evan @ 06/11/12 03:15 PM | Comments (0)
10 June 2012
Paid archive please
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Posted by Evan @ 06/10/12 03:01 PM | Comments (0)
09 June 2012
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Posted by Evan @ 06/09/12 02:52 PM | Comments (0)
08 June 2012
Texas Conservatives Fund -- David Dewhurst's not so Super PAC
I found this pretty amusing. David Dewhurst's Super PACs have developed a reputation for ads that lack veracity.
Check this out from the Texas Conservatives Fund:
Dewhurst's Super PAC can't even get the facts straight for his Twitter name (@DavidHDewhurst).
Posted by Evan @ 06/08/12 07:47 PM | Comments (0)
07 June 2012
Bill King brings the silly
I read with distaste Bill King's Houston Chronicle editorial this morning suggesting that we change the primary system. Among other silliness in his opinion, "fixing the primary system" is a misguided focus and furthermore is rife with opportunities to really screw up our elections.
Like, oh, say California screwed it up. Less than 5 minutes later, I read this in Roll Call:
Rep. Gary Miller (R) not only survived his jungle primary in the totally new, Democratic-leaning 31st district, the endangered lawmaker also finished first and is set to face Republican state Sen. Bob Dutton in the November general election. Redlands Mayor Pete Aguilar (D), the favorite to advance in the top-two primary, finished about 1,000 votes short of underdog Dutton after three other Democrats swallowed up a quarter of the vote.
Recap: the district has a Democrat majority. Yet the general election will contain two Republicans. Only California could come up with such a genius nominating system!
This new nominating system was designed by California Democrats to produce more centrist nominees. How did that work out?
We shouldn't just run around changing the rules of the election because they didn't produce the nominees that Bill King would have picked.the new nominating system...was sold to voters in 2010 as a way to ensure that more moderate candidates could win and that those who chose not to affiliate with either party would have a greater chance to win, Los Angeles Democratic Party Chairman Eric Bauman said.
But after an early look at state legislative and Congressional elections across the state, Bauman said it's likely that not one unaffiliated candidate advanced to the Nov. 6 general election. And it's unlikely independent voters' first chance to participate in California primaries in 14 years led to higher turnout.
RELATED: Cory Crow's take is worth a read.
Posted by Evan @ 06/07/12 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
Four county DFW #txsen results
If you haven't seen the Texas Tribune's map of how Texas voted in the #txsen primary, it's a great way to visualize the data. Incidentally, I'd argue that a map of election day vote will have the highest prediction value for the runoff. It'd even be interesting to which counties swung the most to Cruz between the early voting period and election day.
Let's look at results from runoff battleground DFW. Cruz led the region, followed fairly closely by Dewhurst. In 3rd place in all the big DFW counties was Leppert -- a bad harbinger for another statewide office, and perhaps not even a good sign for another more regional office.
Dallas County
Dewhurst 24,801
Cruz 23,368
Leppert 23,201
Leppert didn't even get 2nd place in his own county where people saw him in action as mayor. That doesn't hold well for any future run.
Tarrant County (Fort Worth)
Cruz 30,499
Dewhurst 29,151
Leppert 21,814
Leppert got the endorsement of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. It didn't matter much. Still in 3rd place.
Collin (Dallas suburbs/Plano)
Cruz 16,578
Dewhurst 14,331
Leppert 12,640
Collin County would be almost as much home territory as Dallas or Leppert. He still got 3rd.
Denton (DFW suburbs on FW side)
Cruz 12,464
Dewhurst 11,271
Leppert 9,575
Posted by Evan @ 06/07/12 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
05 June 2012
Dewhurst "booed lustily" at Republican state convention
Last night in conversation someone mentioned the Republican state convention. Wait...didn't David Dewhurst get booed at the convention a few years ago?
Yes, Dewhurst did get booed in 2008.
Dewhurst was booed lustily later in the speech when he proposed putting Texans' fingerprints on drivers' licenses. It was the first time in at least eight years that an elected Republican was booed so loudly at a state convention.
It's interesting that Dewhurst proposed putting fingerprints on IDs to the state convention. Did he think he was going to get a good reception with that?
Interestingly, Ross Ramsey from Texas Weekly/Texas Tribune captured the same boos, but noted that Dewhurst got cheered for denouncing one of Rick Perry's signature proposals.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst brought out the boo-birds with a line about Real ID and Texas Driver Licenses with fingerprints on them (and got a standing O with a line blasting the aforementioned TTC).
Posted by Evan @ 06/05/12 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
Tom Leppert post-mortem
Here's my post-mortem on Tom Leppert's campaign. It's from about 5 weeks before the election.
Posted by Evan @ 06/05/12 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
01 June 2012
Ted Cruz taxes
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Posted by Evan @ 06/01/12 11:38 AM | Comments (0)