Wrath of the Soccer Moms

Nice article in the Observer about the Texas Parent PAC and its rather impressive debut in the March primaries. One thing to highlight:

In addition to sponsoring the five pro-voucher challengers, Leininger funded a second entity, the Future of Texas Alliance PAC, to aid Republican incumbents such as Grusendorf and Rep. Elvira Reyna (R-Mesquite), whom the Parent PAC had targeted.

[...]

Parent PAC is now a significant player in Texas politics. Carolyn Boyle still has her work cut out for her. She’s busy with a few runoff elections. Then she will focus on the November elections and supporting a slate of Democrats and Republicans to ensure that whenever the Legislature reopens its debate on financing and improving schools, it will pay more attention to PTA moms.

This suggests to me that the Dems' failure to field a candidate against Reyna was an even bigger missed opportunity than I first thought. A decent Dem candidate might have been able to peel away some of those Parent PACers who voted to oust Reyna in the GOP primary. Such a candidate might have been able to convince the PAC not to bother with a primary challenge, or to be in a position to woo them had it failed. The district is not as Republican as you might think, so who knows? Maybe with enough crossover votes, it would have been attainable. Now, of course, those potential crossovers are gone for good, since the Parent PAC achieved its goal there. It's good that there's one less pro-voucher vote now, but still, it's a missed opportunity. Link via Capitol Annex.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 23, 2006 to Election 2006 | TrackBack