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September 22nd, 2018:

Two from PPP (RV): Cruz 48, O’Rourke 45, and Cruz 49, O’Rourke 46

Sep 22nd, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
17 comments

Fourth in a series from PPP.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke

A new Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey commissioned by Protect Our Care finds that 62 percent of voters in Texas say health care will be one of the most important issues they consider when casting their vote in November. What’s more, 44 percent are deeply concerned about Senator Ted Cruz’s work to repeal health care and nearly 60 percent oppose the Trump Administration’s lawsuit to end protections for those with pre-existing conditions, which Cruz has refused to oppose.

The poll shows that for Cruz, who has been among the GOP’s fiercest advocates for repealing the American health care law, the issue is a drag on his prospects for reelection. In the poll, Cruz is in a dead heat against Democrat Beto O’Rourke 48 (Cruz) to 45 (O’Rourke). The poll was conducted September 19th and 20th among 613 Texas registered voters. The survey has a margin of sampling error of +/- 4 percent.

“Ted Cruz thought he was going to score political points shutting the government down trying to repeal health care, but what he actually did was put his own reelection prospects in serious jeopardy. Ted Cruz’s constituents say health care is one of the most important issues to them this election, and as a result he’s taking on some pretty serious water in this race. Whether it is Cruz’s opposition to protections for people with pre-existing conditions or his vote for an age tax, Ted Cruz’s extreme health care views are rejected by his constituents.”

The full polling memo is here. That hit my inbox on Thursday. On Friday, I got this:

A new poll of likely voters in Texas, commissioned by End Citizens United (ECU) and conducted by PPP, shows that Beto O’Rourke continues to close in on Senator Ted Cruz. ECU’s latest poll shows O’Rourke behind Cruz by three points, 46-49 percent. Click here to see the full polling.

When voters learned of O’Rourke’s decision to reject all PAC money and Cruz’s reliance on special interests, O’Rourke takes the lead 48-46 percent.

This is the fourth poll ECU has conducted in the race with each poll showing O’Rourke increasingly closing the gap. In January, O’Rourke was within eight points of Cruz, 37-45 percent. By June, O’Rourke had moved to within six points, 43-49 percent. In July, he closed the gap to four points, 42-46 percent. The latest poll conducted this week has him within the margin of error.

“Beto and his message of reform continues to win over Texans,” said ECU President Tiffany Muller. “He’s spent the last 18 months visiting every county in the state, listening to voters, and inspiring people to get involved. With just a few weeks until Election Day, Beto has pulled even with Ted Cruz and is in position to win this race.”

PPP surveyed 603 Texas voters from September 19-20. The margin of error is +/- 4%.

Based on his record of fighting for reform and his decision to reject all PAC money, Beto O’Rourke was the first challenger ECU endorsed in the 2018 midterms. For O’Rourke, ECU was his first national endorsement. ECU’s grassroots members have donated over $350,000 to O’Rourke’s campaign, averaging just $13 per contribution. Beto is one of only a handful of members of Congress to reject all PAC money, a decision that has made him a leader of a growing trend, with 124 no corporate PAC candidates advancing to the general election.

That poll memo is here. I think these are two different polls – they have different sponsors, slightly different results, and slightly different sample sizes (613 for the first, 603 for the latter), though they were all done between September 19 and 20. The End Citizens United-sponsored polls done by PPP are the ones I have linked on my sidebar. Protect Our Care references earlier polls, which could be these ECU polls, but doesn’t provide links, so who knows. I will say that ECU’s characterization of this as “within the margin of error” is correct, and POC’s “in a dead heat” is wrong and should be avoided. Both of these polls, plus that Ipsos poll arrived after the Quinnipiac poll, to vastly less fanfare; at least RG Ratcliffe acknowledged the existence of the Ipsos poll. The 18-poll average is now 46.83 for Cruz, and 41.83 for Beto.

On a side note, I also received a press release from the Republican Party of Texas announcing that they had filed a complaint with the FEC against End Citizens United for “ECU’s failure to file a direct expenditure for public communications in support of – or as an in-kind contribution to – the Beto for Texas campaign.” You can search the Internet for the eyeroll GIF of your choice here. It’s the weekend, and I can hear a beer calling my name.

Harvey and the Congressional races

Sep 22nd, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
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This was from a couple of days ago.

Dayna Steele

A year ago this week, Dayna Steele was standing in 29 inches of water inside her Seabrook home. Her family had already made it through Hurricane Ike in 2008, when the water in her home had come up even higher. Nearly nine years later, Hurricane Harvey would once again force Steele to rebuild.

But this time around, Steele was also a candidate for Congress. She had filed months earlier as a Democrat to challenge U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, R-Woodville, in a historically Republican district that stretches northwest from Houston across eight counties. In the days and weeks after the storm, as she heard about the worry and confusion from others in the region, Steele found it amplified her desire to represent her community in Congress.

“We still have entirely too many blue tarps, empty homes,” said Steele, who still sees local residents living in trailers parked in the driveways of their damaged homes. “It’s still a big issue.”

A year after one of the worst storms in the state’s history, Steele is one of several Texas congressional candidates emphasizing Harvey as a key issue heading into November, honing in on the details of its aftermath, the region’s long-term recovery and whether enough is being done to prepare for when the next major hurricane arrives.

Steele’s opponent, Babin, was also personally impacted by Harvey. For a few hours, he and his family were stuck in their Woodville home due to flooding in their neighborhood. Three months later, Babin was a part of a group of Texans in Congress who teamed up to secure more Harvey relief after an initial proposal put forth by the White House was criticized as too small by many Texans.

Steele said when she travels around the district, she hears from voters that they either don’t know who Babin is or say they never saw him in the aftermath of the storm.

Babin, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, has tweeted multiple timesabout his push to send additional federal aid to Texas. Recently Babin, along with other Houston-area congressional members, met with Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, to discuss giving more money to the Army Corps for “future flood mitigation.” The congressman also tweeted that he toured disaster areas with U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan in the storm’s immediate aftermath.

A similar back and forth — challengers accusing the incumbent of not being physically present after the storm or fighting hard enough for relief funding and the incumbent insisting otherwise — is emerging in multiple races in Harvey-impacted districts.

“The lack of response from our representative is visceral,” said Sri Kulkarni, a Democrat vying to unseat U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land. The prevailing sentiment from constituents in the Republican-leaning 22nd Congressional District, Kulkarni argued, is that “Pete Olson was absent on Harvey.”

That recent Atlantic story on CD07 covered this in the context of Lizzie Fletcher’s campaign. She and Todd Litton in CD02 have different challenges in their races; Fletcher is attacking John Culberson for basically doing nothing before Harvey to help with flood mitigation, while Litton has not incumbent to run against. As I said in that post, it makes sense to make Harvey response and recovery a campaign issue. The Republicans were in charge of the government when Harvey happened, so what happened after that is on them. How effective that will be is not clear. I’d love to see some polling data on that, but even if we never get to see such numbers, I’d bet that the candidates themselves have explored the question.

We ultimately may or may not ever know what if any effect the Harvey issue has. If an incumbent gets knocked off, there may be some followup reporting that sheds light on it, but if a race is just closer than one might have expected – Dayna Steele, running in a 70% Trump district, has a lot of room to gain ground without winning, for instance – we may never get an examination of why. Most likely the best we’ll be able to do is draw our own conclusions from the data that we get to see.

Distributing the VW settlement money

Sep 22nd, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
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Good for some, less good for others.

Texas cities will soon get millions of dollars to help clean up air quality, but Houston officials say the plan for distributing all that money isn’t fair.

The money is coming from a settlement in the Volkswagen (VW) emissions cheating scandal. Local governments will be able to use the money to reduce emissions from their vehicles and other equipment.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) plans to give the biggest chunk of the money – more than $73 million – to the San Antonio area, mainly because that city is closer than others to getting in line with federal pollution rules it’s currently violating.

Under the state’s plan, the Houston area, which has worse air quality, would get about $27 million.

The City of Houston says about a quarter of the cheating VW cars that were in Texas were driving in the Houston region.

“So we deserve at least a quarter of those funds, because we’re the ones that were harmed,” said Kris Banks, a government relations assistant with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s office.

See here, here, and here for some background. Mayor Turner expressed his disenchantment with the amount allocated to Houston in a press release; you can see all of the city’s documentation on the matter here. The full TCEQ plan for the VW Environmental Mitigation Trust is here, or you can save yourself some time and read the Texas Vox summary of it. The TCEQ is still accepting feedback on the draft plan through October 8, so send them an email at [email protected] if you have comments. The Rivard Report has more.