Rick Perry vs World

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.