Rick Perry vs World

05 November 2010

Is Fort Bend turning blue?

Texas bloggers have liked to speculate about whether Fort Bend County is destined to become a blue county.

As of Tuesday, we have one more data point. Rick Perry beat Bill White 52-47 while the rest of the statewide offices went Republican by about 58 to 40.

Posted by Evan @ 11/05/10 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

Chet Edwards: A lesson for cautious politicians

Chet Edwards was always a pretty cautious politician. He never voted with Democrats unless his vote would change the outcome, and was careful not to do anything that might link him to national Democrats. Until early 08, when there was lots of intra-party pressure to pick a side in the Hillary v Obama battle for superdelegates, including from Nancy Pelosi.

It looked risk-free. Hillary was the polarizing figure in Edwards' district back then, not Obama. He could make Pelosi happy, make liberals happy, and look like a moderate. Win-win all around, right?

It didn't turn out that way. Pelosi lobbying openly for Edwards to be Obama's vice president came back to haunt him. More than anything else, that was probably Edwards' ticket to defeat on Tuesday.

Final note: people who thought that the NRCC pulling its ad buy meant that Edwards was going to win the race were either spinning or not paying attention.

Posted by Evan @ 11/05/10 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

The Texas leg of the Perry book tour

The schedule for Perry's book tour in Texas is below the jump.

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Posted by Evan @ 11/05/10 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

Should I stay or should I go now?, part II

With the election behind us, I am trying to figure out what I want to do with this blog. Definitely a decent chance it gets killed, as it seems unlikely that Perry is going to ever run for election to anything. No, I still don't think he's running for president. Never having worked in the legislature, I generally don't feel like I have much to say during the legislative session. We'll see though, I've thought about ending this blog before and somehow it seems to stick around.

As for the candidates, Bill White is presumably relaxing post-campaign and deciding whether he wants to run for Senate in 2012 or to be guv in 2014. I think he made it fairly clear that he'd rather be a senator than a governor, and I definitely think he made it clear that he'll be running again.

Rick Perry is on his book tour, visiting a variety of TV shows, including the Today show, Fox and Friends, and...a Monday visit to The Daily Show. Perry's interview with Jon Stewart will definitely be a must watch. Fed Up! is officially released November 15, but apparently it is already available in some places. George W. Bush's Decision Points is officially released on November 9. It will be interesting to watch the sales numbers on those two books by the last two governors of Texas.

Posted by Evan @ 11/05/10 10:51 AM | Comments (0)

Final House number should be 64

Assuming that more ballots aren't found in South Texas, the final number of Republican pickups should be 64. That matters to me, of course, because I picked 70, so now 60 doesn't look like they picked better than me.

Evan Smith interviewed Mike Baselice and Mark McKinnon. Great conversation.

TribLive Post-election re-cap 2010 from texastribune on Vimeo.

Posted by Evan @ 11/05/10 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

02 November 2010

Did Bill White win?

People are hitting this blog for those search results.

Bill White lost. Right now the margin is 57-40...almost exactly the same as Tony Sanchez. I'd expect the margin to narrow.

Right now it also looks like Texas House Democrats are being washed away in this wave election.

Posted by Evan @ 11/02/10 09:52 PM | Comments (1)

Live election chat tonight

I'll be participating in the live chat over at BlogHouston. Stop on by and help me balance out the Houston focus with some coverage of the rest of the state. Polls close at 7pm; I'll probably start participating at 8 or so.

Posted by Evan @ 11/02/10 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

Isn't that what you say when someone loses?

Paul Burka says:

I think it is very possible that the Republican far right will splinter and cast its lot with the Tea Party. Rhetorically, at least, Rick Perry has already done this.

Broadly speaking, the Republican Party is comprised of pro-business and social Burkean wings. There's quite a bit of overlap between the two, but there are certainly moments of rupture.

I see zero evidence of such a fissure in Texas or in Perry's coalition.

Posted by Evan @ 11/02/10 05:38 AM | Comments (0)

What I liked about Bill White's campaign

I disagree with alot of strategical and tactical decisions that Bill White made about his campaign. He's quite likely headed for a double digit loss, so now seems like the time when I would trash him since I write about strategy and tactics. In fact, the Texas media already have begun to do so. Recent Dem candidates haven't faired very well in the estimation of their Dem colleagues either: Chris Bell, John Kerry, Tony Sanchez, and Al Gore. All generally criticized roundly after their election losses.

Actually, I'd like to praise White. Bill White ran the campaign that Bill White wanted to run. He was genuine. If you put him in a different state, he might have won (Colorado?).

Now, let me make a list of the biggest failures*, so there's some context:

1) Failure to recognize that 2010 is not like 2008 or 2006, and thus never developed a strategy that might get to 50%.
2) Never broke with Democrats on any major issue, a necessity in Texas, especially 2010.
3) His micromanagement led to him writing TV ads that were, to be kind, pretty weak.

So why is Bill White still only going to lose by 10-11%, or almost defintitely somewhere in the 9-15 range? 'He kept his base and he was genuine.

Admittedly, Perry isn't the strongest Republican candidate, though he is an excellent campaigner. Even Perry seems to recognize this, as he implied to Politico a few weeks ago that his numbers were lower than a normal Texas Republican because he'd been around for awhile and pissed people off.

However, White's campaign was genuine. Bill White ran as Bill White. He was a little boring, but he was earnest. He talked about what he didn't like about Rick Perry and his tenure as governor, and there's alot that Bill White doesn't like. Through some quirks of Houston's 2003 mayoral race, he had won doing that, even though critics said he couldn't. So he was going to just be himself out on the campaign trail.

white didn't take positions that he might have contradicted: he's a pretty mainstream Democrat, albeit on the pro-business side, but he didn't try to pretend that he was a maverick Democrat. So he didn't have to worry about trying to be something that he wasn't. He didn't have to try to weave an ideological flip-flop and parse words. When asked if he'd promise not to raise taxes, he basically told the truth without hiding it behind much verbiage: he couldn't. That's a losing position in Texas, especially in 2010, but it will help a Democrat keep his base. It has a specific ceiling, but it also has a specific floor.

To tell you the truth, I think White did a reasonable job of keeping the Democratic base plus the people who really dislike Perry. Chris Bell couldn't do that, albeit under different circumstances. Tony Sanchez couldn't do that. This could have been a 20% victory (who knows, maybe I'll be wrong and it will be) for a Texas Republican in 2010.

* These will be a separate post at some point, I'm sure, though I've already covered them a bit over the course of the campaign.

Posted by Evan @ 11/02/10 05:09 AM | Comments (0)

01 November 2010

My Texas-centric predictions

Without thinking about it too much, I had this:

Perry 53
White 43
Green 1.5-2
Libertarian 2-2.5

Republican gains in CD23 (Rodriguez) and in CD17 (Edwards). If the wave is quite big, CD27 (Ortiz) too, and if it's a real tsunami then maybe CD25 (Doggett).

Texas House = 10 seat GOP gain. Of my predictions, this is the one I've followed least, by far.

I already picked +9 Republicans in the Senate and +70 in the House.

(I am planning to continue thinking about this and am very likely to edit this post as the night goes on)

Posted by Evan @ 11/01/10 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

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