Rick Perry vs World

09 November 2015

Winner and losers: Houston municipal elections

Let's do losers first, since that's more fun.

Losers

Adrian Garcia -- Sheriff Selfie got just 17% of the vote in a race that he was expected him to win.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that now all the attacks on his record are out there, mostly put forth by Democrats. That's going to make a partisan run for office much, much harder.

Annise Parker -- She hasn't seemed very interested in being mayor for quite awhile now, particularly when it comes to making sure that core city services are functioning well.

The defeat of HER Ordinance was just as much about Houstonians telling Parker how much they disapproved as it was about whether a broke city should add another layer of bureaucracy to deal with complaints about who urinated where.

Sylvester Turner -- At times this race felt like a coronation. But despite finishing first to make the runoff, he didn't get any more votes than anyone thought he would. In fact, his vote totals have actually declined in each mayoral election.

Bill White -- His unendorsement endorsement of Adrian Garcia didn't swing any votes. All the fundraising help he gave Garcia was wasted.

Winners

Bill King -- As someone who spent a decade telling Houstonians how moderate he was and criticizing both parties, it wasn't really clear if King could even muster enough votes to make it to the runoff. He needed Republican votes to make it happen, and while it took awhile, he got there.

King looks like he is in a good position for the runoff.

Pastors hit with subpoenas -- They won by more than anyone expected, despite Bob McNair flip-flopping on them and only Ben Hall carrying their banner in the mayoral race.

Imagine if Ben Hall had been smart enough to hire someone other than John Weaver?

Posted by Evan @ 11/09/15 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

24 October 2015

A tale of 3 "winning" presidential campaign and 3 "losing" presidential campaigns

If you want to be president, you need to be able to play by the rules of the game -- or hire people who will do so.

Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Rand Paul have already flamed out in large part because they failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them by current campaign finance law. Contrast them to Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Bobby Jindal who showed that they might be able to run the federal government -- because they can at least figure out what is legal and what isn't:

First, Fiorina:

The "super PAC" supporting Carly Fiorina's presidential campaign, Carly for America, has been more involved in the day-to-day running of a campaign apparatus than most other candidates' super PACs.

The group has taken care of arranging tables outside events, setting up staging, gathering voter information and taking on other tasks typically handled by a campaign.

Of the $2.2 million Mrs. Fiorina spent last quarter, only about $27,000 was spent on the hosting of events -- venue rental, equipment rental, catering and the like. This amount does not include travel, which the candidate would incur no matter the type of event.

Emphasis mine. If you understand the rules, then the financial constraint of running for president has been removed, because the only thing that a campaign absolutely must pay for is the candidate's travel. That's the way Fiorina set up her campaign from the start.

Bobby Jindal:

It looks like a Bobby Jindal campaign stop, but there's something strange afoot.

Believe Again, not Jindal 2016, has rented out an Amvets hall.

Believe Again, not Jindal, kicks off the evening Monday with free T-shirts that read "America did not create religious liberty, religious liberty created America," and a promise that the candidate will talk a lot about this.

...

Jindal's third-quarter financial report revealed just $261,000 in the bank. The campaign raised $574,438 in that reporting period; it spent $832,214. But Believe Again hauled in close to $4 million, much of it from a mysterious nonprofit called America Next, and it's all being sprayed across Iowa.

And then there's Ben Carson:

Mr. Giles, aged 67, oversaw the development of Mr. Carson's exploratory committee and pre-campaign apparatus earlier this year. It was Mr. Giles who interviewed and hired the campaign’s future staff in Washington in January. But when Mr. Carson officially launched his campaign in May, "he asked me if I would move over out of the campaign and help with the super PACs," Mr. Giles said in an interview.

After waiting the 120 days mandated by the Federal Election Commission — a period that ended in early September -- Mr. Giles quickly reached out to two officials heading up pro-Carson super PACs. Under Mr. Giles' supervision, the two groups are now joining forces -- an arrangement Mr. Giles called "much more beneficial to Ben."

Mr. Giles said he broke off communication with the super PACs last Saturday. At that point Mr. Carson, Mr. Giles said, asked for his help preparing for future debates. He does not have an official role with the campaign.

Ben Carson's campaign manager jumped to working for Carson's super PACs and then back to the campaign. Per the article, Giles is personally preparing Ben Carson for the next debate by telling him to copy Marco Rubio.

Ben Carson hasn't always appeared to be prepared to be president when he talks about policy (ie: energy). But at least his campaign cares enough to prepare so they know how to play the game.

Now compare this to some of the odd moves from candidates that have quit like Rick Perry and Scott Walker, as well as those who are quasi-quitting like Rand Paul.

First, Texas's own Rand Paul:

His presidential campaign dramatically cut back on its spending pace in the third quarter, a POLITICO analysis of federal records shows. Paul spent $2.95 million in July, $982,445 in August, and only $610,648 in September. His "online advertising" budget, for instance, plummeted from $446,000 in July to $0 in September (though Paul’s campaign does owe undated debts for more than $60,000 of online advertising).

Rand Paul has quasi-dropped out. His Senate colleagues are pushing him to focus on his Senate re-election in Kentucky. At this point, his campaign strategy appears to be hinged on miracle college student turnout in the Iowa caucuses that puts him back on the radar so that he has enough money to keep going.

It's crazy how much Rand Paul has been wasting on pay per click ads, as you've probably seen if you've wandered anywhere around the internet in 2014 or 2015. They were literally just burning half a million dollars every month as recently as July. And Paul's campaign has been paying for these ads since 2014.

They shouldn't have been wasting as much money on paid online ads as they did. But they definitely shouldn't have been spending hard campaign dollars on it instead of shipping it to a super PAC. Impressive profligacy by Rand Paul's consultants -- but I'm sure they were paid well for it!

Scott Walker dropped out because his fundraising dried up and all his money was in his super PAC:

One of Mr. Walker’s selling points was that he would be an effective steward of the country’s finances. But his campaign filings reveal a bloated payroll and high salaries, with Mr. Walker’s campaign manager, Rick Wiley, on course to make $200,000 for the year.

There were travel bills and hotel rentals. But there was little in the way of investment in tangible infrastructure in the early voting states.

By the time Mr. Walker dropped out on Sept. 21, in one of the most surprising turns of events of the early 2016 presidential campaign, his payroll had swelled to cover dozens of people, according to a person familiar with his campaign staff. There would have had to be substantial layoffs for Mr. Walker to remain in the race.

Mr. Walker’s sons, Alex and Matthew, also showed up on the payroll, each making just over $4,000 during the course of the campaign.

$20 million in his super PAC, but in debt for his campaign. The kids being on the campaign payroll is a small thing, but...it's exactly the type of expense that should not have been incurred with campaign dollars.

And then there's this blog's namesake. Politico:

Rick Perry burned through cash at a prolific rate in the final three months of his presidential campaign, from $80,000 in chartered jets and more than $65,000 in "research" in late July.

Perry’s campaign reported paying $200,000 to Abstract Communications, the firm of [Jeff Miller and Rob Johnson], bringing Abstract’s total receipts from the campaign to $591,000 for the year.

$80k in chartered jets? Why was a campaign low on funding possibly chartering jets?

$600k to consultants? I'm sure they were passing some through, but...wow. If they made a penny, then Rick Perry should be calling them up and asking for a refund.

It's hard to make a solid case for any candidate who hires consultants who don't care enough about the campaign to figure out the rules -- and not line their own pockets.

Posted by Evan @ 10/24/15 08:06 PM | Comments (0)

06 October 2015

Is 60% against nobody a resounding victory?

Ross Ramsey had an opinion piece on crowded primaries and runoffs. In general, I felt the piece was quite long on assertion and skint on quantitative support.

However, what I found very surprising was the conclusion:

But falling short can play in favor of the incumbent: Does anybody really think John Cornyn looked weaker after beating seven Republican opponents in 2014?

Quick: can you name any of those seven opponents? OF COURSE NOT.

Ok, maybe you got Steve Stockman. I've met Stockman a couple times, and yet even I had to look him up because all I could remember was "performance art" and Jack Brooks. Yes, I remembered Jack Brooks before Stockman's name. Steve Stockman didn't campaign for Senate. At all. More than a few speculated that he was just getting his congressional campaign out of debt by running for Senate. His Senate campaign was a strange post-modern piece of "performance art" because you couldn't really tell if he was a candidate or not.

There was also the guy in the pickup truck who got some Tea Party support.

John Cornyn got just 61%. When Cornyn faced a bunch of folks no one had ever heard of in 2002, he got almost 80%.

The good thing for Cornyn is that he won a 6 year term, and that's a long time. But if John Cornyn had faced a credible challenger in 2014, he'd probably have lost. Guys like Mike McCaul must be kicking themselves.

Posted by Evan @ 10/06/15 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

03 October 2015

Not linear, but correlated

Noted this today in a Burkablog post on Wendy! Davis (I'm sure Burka loves that his name lives on in a blog he never wanted!)

There are several things I would do differently. When you get into a race of that magnitude – and it was my first experience on a platform of that magnitude – you tend to have to rely on a team of people around you to help shape everything you do, from your day-to-day logistics to your speeches to your priorities and your messaging. And I felt like as the months ticked by, my voice was getting lost.

Campaigns aren't a perfect proxy for governing skills. But if you completely mismanage a gubernatorial campaign, then how can you expect to run the sprawling bureaucracy of the state government? If you can't hire a few good people to run your campaign, then how will you hire good people to run the agencies?

Not to mention her campaign position in favor of open carry, only to flip flop back to being against it as soon as she lost the campaign. No wonder Texans are cynical of their government.

Posted by Evan @ 10/03/15 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

01 October 2015

The Ted Cruz 2016 Texas endorsement list

Take a look at Ted Cruz's endorsements, and it's a pretty amusing mix of true believers and "I sure hope this endorsement saves me from a primary!"

Let's start with the Texas Senate -- no real surprises among those listed here. But where is Dan Patrick? He went from ambushing Cruz to promoting Cruz2016 as the gambit that got him elected lite guv only to . . . be conspicuously absent.

Congress: Does anything in John Culberson's record as a Congressman suggest he'd endorse Ted Cruz? Does he lead fights in Congress? If you don't follow politics, the answer to both questions is no.

TX House: a good deal of these folks are believably Ted Cruz supporters. A few are go-along-to-get-along types whose personal style is quite different from Cruz's but perhaps who are ideologically in sync. It's at least plausible.

But there's a few obvious...ahem, discrepancies: a good example is Debbie Riddle, whose voting record moves progressively left with every session. Or how about John "Implement Obamacare" Zerwas? Those are just the few close to Houston, but I can spot a couple more who fall into a similar category.

At least Sarah Davis, one of the most liberal Republicans in the Texas House, didn't feel the need to pretend to endorse Cruz in order to try to ward off a primary challenger. Cheers to her for avoiding the dishonesty of cynical endorsements.

[Also noteworthy: endorsements aren't easy to get in the crowded field of 2016. Ted Cruz is a sitting senator who is quite popular with the activists in his home state and yet his endorsement list is less than 1/3 of the lege. Look at how many sitting governors and US Senators have endorsed -- it's surprisingly low.]

Full list of Cruz's endorsement below the jump.

[Read More]

Posted by Evan @ 10/01/15 03:52 PM | Comments (0)

28 September 2015

BattleDonkeys

Peggy Fikac got tasked with trying to write something about Battleground Texas that would leave open the possibility that they have a clue. I wouldn't want to get that assignment:

"We were always clear this was going to be very long term. I didn't think about, when we said it, that would mean a lot of heartache every two years," outgoing executive director Jenn Brown said recently over coffee.

A few months before the election those same Yankee Obama consultants were saying:

Without doing anything, Democrats say, they expect to see their vote totals grow slowly over time

With Battleground Texas and its millions, Democrats vote totals went down.

The heartache was on national display when Battleground Texas served as Democrat Wendy Davis' field organization in her longshot effort to beat Republican Greg Abbott for governor and break the GOP's long hold on statewide office.

If you paid any attention to the campaign, there's lots of LOL in that statement. Wendy Davis counted money given to Battledonkeys as part of her fundraising totals, only to disavow them when they did dumb stuff. Plus there's the amusement that many reporters filed pieces (and magazine covers!) acting as if Wendy!'s campaign was anything but longshot.

The group had to speed up its timetable to take on the job, and it wasn't in control of her message.

No independent organization will EVER be in control of the message. With Wendy!, they were about close to having control of the message as possible.

As for speeding up the timetable, they also got to "speed up" their donations.

As it forges ahead, the group last week installed an advisory board including prominent Texas Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk.

Battleground really is Obama's Yankees. Because no Texan would think that the path to victory is highlighting your ties to Obama cronies.

If Battleground Texas were a business, Steve Mostyn would probably already have sued them.

Posted by Evan @ 09/28/15 07:35 AM | Comments (1)

27 September 2015

Annise Parker is not a fiscal conservative

Presumably Annise Parker will attempt to keep feeding at the public trough. If she does so by running for statewide office, I'm sure Parker will call herself a fiscal conservative just like she did when she ran for mayor.

Mayor Annise Parker's administration will not move forward with renovating the Exxon tower at 800 Bell downtown into a new police and courts complex, citing an uncertain financial outlook and a desire not to bind a new mayor with a pricey, decades-long commitment.

Parker had described the project as one of the most important of her tenure, and had hoped a groundbreaking could come as early as the end of the year to replace the city's current aging complex.

...

As of Sept. 14, the city had spent almost $3.2 million on consultants and advisors studying justice complex options.

This is a relatively small point, but moving the police department into the Exxon tower was silly from the start, and it didn't take much genius to realize it:

From the start, however, the estimated annual payments fell roughly between $25 million and $40 million, and it was never precisely clear how the city would cover that payment. . .

So Annise Parker wasted $3,200,000.00 of Houston's money in the hopes that she could push through a boondoggle for her "legacy."

Posted by Evan @ 09/27/15 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

26 September 2015

Minority party chooses the speaker

From a Politico story on Boehner's resignation as speaker:

The reality is that his critics inside his conference would have been hard pressed to ever remove him in this term as speaker. Democrats are reluctant to support any such effort since they don't want Republicans intruding on their own leadership fights in the future.

To those outside of Texas, it's unthinkable that a House minority party would be able to choose the speaker. Yet strangely that is the current equilibrium in the Texas House.

Posted by Evan @ 09/26/15 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

12 September 2015

Crow eating time: Perry first to drop out of the race

I was wrong. Politico's insiders were right. Perry has dropped out of the 2016 campaign.

OK, crow eating out of the way. My initial reaction:

If Perry was going to do this, then why did he get into the race at all? http://t.co/2J1inNqFh3
— Evan PvW (@PerryVsWorld) September 11, 2015

If you go back to the original post, I concluded:

So is Perry going to be the first to drop out? Dropping out comes down to the candidate's psyche -- but rationally, if you're Rick Perry then you stay the course through Iowa. Nothing has changed: may as well give Iowa a shot.

I added the bold and italics now.

As my tweet and prior post indicate, I argue that it is irrational to drop out now. There was never any chance that he was going to do well in the polls at this point. [In fact, I argued in May 2013 that it was "wishful thinking" for Perry to hope of success in 2016 without running for re-election in 2014.] I know it's easy to criticize from the sidelines, but everything up to now should have been expected as part of the campaign plan.

From the very start, his only shot at the nomination in 2016 was to come out of nowhere to win Iowa. Given recent Iowa caucus history, that's not as unreasonable as it sounds. Perry is very good at retail politics and his super PAC has $17 million in the bank -- Santorum won Iowa in 2012 with 24.5% and it might take even less this time.

Why run at all if you're going to quit the game before you even play the only card you've got?

Posted by Evan @ 09/12/15 12:19 AM | Comments (0)

06 September 2015

If I were Rick Perry

[I challenged myself to write a blog post in 8 minutes and edit in 30 seconds. Go!]

If I were Rick Perry:

If I were @GovernorPerry, my strategy would rest on being the polar opposite of Trump.
— Evan PvW (@PerryVsWorld) August 31, 2015

I think it's pretty obvious.

First of all, let's distinguish between strategies which are designed to get you a niche and those which might win you the nomination. For example, Donald Trump came out as the anti-free trade candidate and immediately occupied a niche that no one else was playing in. He immediately dominated that niche, which due to the divided field was good enough to be "#1."

Focus on difficult paths that might get you to 1600 Pennsylvania, not on easier paths that get you to double digits in the polls.

Second, Trump isn't going to be the nominee. Positioning yourself as the anti-Trump isn't a bad place to be.

Right now, Donald Trump is like Paris Hilton a decade ago. Put her name up as clickbait, and you'd get traffic. Right now in politics, talk Trump, get press coverage.

So go after it. Tear into Trump with the most Trumpian of insults: call him a socialist -- Trump would do it to you. And to use Trump's logic, it's entirely fair: he's had zillions of über-big government proposals over the years. Arguably Trump's record is as far left as Obama's or Hillary Clinton's. [To be fair, neither Obama nor Hillary has ever created a job, whereas at least Trump used his inherited wealth to create jobs]

Counterargument: Both Rick Perry and Rand Paul went after Trump and saw their poll numbers drop.

It's a dumb counterargument.

1. Extremely small sample size. Two brief salvos by different candidates? You can't control for the thousands of other variables. Small sample size arguments are quite popular in politics -- for decades journalists and pundits swore that you couldn't get elected president as a US Senator -- but it seems like a prep school kid from Hawaii with a funny name proved that one quite silly.

2. Find a messaging frame, be consistent, and stick to it. Do more than one speech. When you give a couple speeches and soundbites, you just desperate, so it's not surprising that your poll numbers go down. Plan a communications strategy, then commit to it.

3. Donors don't like Trump. Expose his liberal record and bring down his poll numbers? They like you more. You look presidential.

4. Most actual Republican primary voters have already decided they will never, ever vote for Trump. They're not liberals, after all. So you might carve yourself out a niche as the anti-Trump and immediately benefit.

Posted by Evan @ 09/06/15 04:24 PM | Comments (0)

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