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Julie Oliver

Bell County to sue over Killeen’s marijuana ordinance

Jan 5th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Something like this was surely inevitable.

Bell County commissioners, along with the district attorney, are determined to settle the question of whether Killeen’s Proposition A is lawful, making the governing body the first in Texas to sue one of its own cities over decriminalization of misdemeanor possession of marijuana.

“Basically, the discussion was going on in consideration of the ordinance that had been passed by the City Council of Killeen and the actions of the result of that particular vote,” Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza told the Herald. “What you saw (on Thursday) was really the beginning of getting this particular question before a court: What is the effect of a local municipal ordinance when it comes into conflict with state law?”

In a unanimous vote on Thursday, Bell County commissioners agreed to file a lawsuit against Killeen over the city’s adoption of Proposition A, the ballot measure that was approved by voters in November to decriminalize marijuana in Killeen.

“The county commissioners voted to direct the county attorney and (me) to get involved in the beginning to get that question answered,” Garza said. “That is the only way to get it into court to begin a legal action.”

None of the other Texas cities where decriminalization initiatives have been approved — Elgin, Denton, San Marcos and Austin — has faced litigation. But in San Marcos, Hays County District Attorney Wes Mau has asked for the Texas attorney general’s opinion on that city’s decriminalization ordinance.

“The good news is the vast majority of the law has actually been researched not only by me and the county attorney, (but) the city attorney in Harker Heights had the opportunity to review the matter legally and so has the city attorney in Killeen,” Garza said.

Opponents of Prop A, including Garza, say it conflicts with state law — where low amounts marijuana is still a misdemeanor — and therefore should not be allowed in individual cities.

It is not clear when the lawsuit will be filed.

“We will plan accordingly,” Garza said.

He and County Attorney Jim Nichols met with Commissioners Bobby Whitson, John Driver, Bill Schumann and Russell Schneider in executive session for an hour on Thursday. County Judge David Blackburn joined the meeting remotely, and Schumann chaired the meeting.

After 10 people spoke and each commissioner offered their opinions on Proposition A, they voted 5-0 on an “authorization to litigate.”

“The Bell County attorney is authorized to file suit against the city of Killeen and its agents to enforce Texas Local Government Code section 370.003 by seeking declaratory relief in district court against the city of Killeen’s actions as unconstitutional; and seeking injunctive relief in district court against the city of Killeen from enforcing either the special order or ordinance; and seeking injunctive relief against the city of Killeen from punishing police officers for enforcing marijuana laws under the Health and Safety Code, Penal Code, and Code of Criminal Procedure,” according to the authorization.

The decision allows Nichols to seek declaratory relief “authorizing peace officers licensed by the state of Texas to fully enforce marijuana laws as it is their duty to prevent and suppress crime under Section 2.13 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.”

See here, here, and here for some background. Activists in Harker Heights, which is also in Bell County, are planning to force another vote on the issue, though that may wind up being moot, depending on how this goes. I don’t know how this will play out in the courts – I’m not optimistic for the Ground Game Texas folks, I’ll say that much – but even a favorable ruling may not help, as I would expect the Lege to weigh in as well, on the side of the opponents. I believe Ground Game Texas is on the right side of the issue and as noted I’d vote for one of their propositions if it were before me, but the power imbalance is what it is, and there’s not a clear way around it. You may have heard me say something like this in the past, but we’re going to have to change our state government if we want things like this to go differently in the future. Not much else to it, I’m afraid. The Current has more.

Trying again in Harker Heights

Jan 2nd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

I admire the determination.

Cannabis reform advocates are pushing back against the city council of the Central Texas city of Harker Heights, which recently rejected a voter-approved ballot measure decriminalizing low levels of pot possession there.

Harker Heights was one of five Texas municipalities in which voters during the November midterms approved decriminalization initiatives. While at least two other of those votes received blowback from local officials, Harker Heights is so far the first to reject voters’ approval outright.

Voter mobilization group Ground Game Texas, which championed Harker Heights’ original ballot initiative, said it’s launched a new petition drive to override the council ordinance, which passed Nov. 22. Some 64% of voters in the city of 34,000 people approved the decriminalization initiative.

“By voting to repeal Prop A, the Harker Heights City Council sent a clear message to their constituents that they don’t respect the will of the voters or the democracy they participate in,” Ground Game Texas Executive Director Julie Oliver said in a news release. “These antidemocratic politicians are trying to throw away the votes of more than 5,000 Harker Heights residents — but we won’t let them. With this new referendum, Ground Game Texas will ensure the will of voters isn’t trampled on by their local elected officials.”

See here and here for the background. I consider what Harker Heights City Council did to be defensible, but I would not feel the same way if this effort succeeds and they override it again. At this point, the opponents of this proposal on City Council can make their case directly to the voters, so there’s no question about conflicting mandates. Whatever happens, this should be the last word, until and unless the state gets involved.

On a related note:

Organizers have gathered more than 26,000 signatures so far for a petition that would give San Antonio voters in May the opportunity to decriminalize marijuana possession, end enforcement of abortion laws, establish a city “justice director” position, ban police from using no-knock warrants and chokeholds and expand the city’s cite-and-release policy for low-level, nonviolent crimes.

The local police reform advocacy group ACT 4 SA aims to collect 35,000 signatures — anticipating that some won’t be verified — to submit to the City Clerk before the early January deadline.

But even if they miss that goal, voters can expect to see the slate of proposed changes, collectively known as the “Justice Charter,” to the city charter on the November 2023 ballot because the signatures collected are valid for six months.

“Two-thirds of the people I talked to sign [the petition],” said Ananda Tomas, executive director of ACT 4 SA, which launched the petition effort in October. “They’re either for the initiatives or they just want to put it up to a vote because they think that this is something we should vote on.”

San Antonio’s police union has criticized the Justice Charter as an overreach into police policies as well as violations of state and federal law. Union President Danny Diaz has pointed out that chokeholds and no-knock warrants already are prohibited, while enforcement policies for marijuana and abortion are determined at the state level.

San Antonio had previously passed an ordinance that “recommends that no local funds be used to investigate criminal charges related to abortions”. I assume this would go further than that, but it’s not clear to me exactly how the referendum differs from the existing ordinance. It’s clear that opinions differ about the legality and enforceability of the marijuana-related measures, and I’d say the same would be true for the abortion one. I strongly suspect we’ll be hearing from the Legislature on the latter, and quite possibly on the former as well. Be that as it may, I will be very interested to see how this turns out, and whether something similar happens in Houston.

More on the post-marijuana decriminalization referendum conflict

Dec 23rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The Trib takes a long look.

The fight in several Texas cities to decriminalize marijuana has entered a new phase, as some city leaders have rebuffed voter-approved rules that largely end criminal enforcement against having small amounts of the substance.

Last month, residents in Denton, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin and Harker Heights overwhelmingly approved ballot measures that sought to ban arrests and citations for carrying less than 4 ounces of marijuana in most instances. They also approved new rules blocking cities from funding THC concentration tests, plus removing marijuana smell as a probable cause for search and seizure in most cases.

Winning over voters was just half the battle.

Since then, organizers behind the ballot questions in some cities have clashed with their city and county leaders who are tasked with putting the new laws in place, as well as law enforcement. Those officials have said the effort violates state law and hinders police officers.

The battle has been the toughest in Harker Heights, a town of 33,000 about 55 miles southwest of Waco. Despite the proposition winning more than 60% of the votes, the City Council decided to repeal the ordinance just two weeks later. City Manager David Mitchell said in a subsequent letter that the decision to decriminalize should be left to the state.

For Harker Heights residents who supported decriminalizing marijuana, the repeal is a stinging show of disrespect for their exercise of democracy.

“I don’t do any kind of drugs nor does my wife, but we’re here for the vote,” said Brian Burt, who casted his ballot for the proposition.

“A vote is a vote,” Alexandra Burt chimed in. “We are also aware that minorities disproportionately take the brunt of the law, so it is time for that proposition to go through.”

To force the City Council’s hand, the Burts and hundreds of other residents backed a new petition by Ground Game Texas, a progressive group that co-led the decriminalization campaign, to put the council’s decision to repeal on the May ballot and revive the ordinance in the meantime.

Julie Oliver, the group’s executive director, said the council’s decision to revoke a popular choice by voters has backfired.

“Shutting down someone’s vote is ill-advised, so this has really brought the community together,” she said.

Organizers across the state facing similar pushback also say they would prefer the Texas Legislature to pass laws that would decriminalize or even legalize marijuana — though they acknowledge how unlikely that is given the state’s conservative power structure.

“We can all see the way that this country is heading, state by state, but it looks like Texas is going to be one of the last,” said Deb Armintor, a Decriminalize Denton organizer and a former City Council member who championed decriminalization during her two terms. “There’s no point in cities waiting.”

[…]

Several cities and towns have since followed. Elgin, a city of about 10,500 people that sits just east of Austin, voted to decriminalize by almost 75%. Its council has made the least amount of noise in putting the ordinance in place.

Other city and county officials, however, have raised concerns about a statute from the Texas Local Government Code that says municipal bodies like city councils and police departments “may not adopt a policy under which the entity will not fully enforce laws relating to drugs.”

Last month, Republican Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza cited it when asking the police chief of Killeen, where close to 70% of voters favored decriminalization, to reverse his order telling officers to follow the vote. Following a pause, Killeen City Council approved the ordinance on Dec. 6 after removing the section banning officers from using marijuana smell as probable cause for search and seizure.

“The amendment was not preferable but now our residents do not have to fear an arrest that will affect their employment opportunities, education opportunities and housing opportunities,” said Louie Minor, a Bell County commissioner-elect who worked on both the Killeen and Harker Heights campaigns.

More recently, Republican Hays County Criminal District Attorney Wes Mau requested an attorney general opinion about the ordinance’s enforceability over similar questions. Mano Amiga — the group co-leading the effort in San Marcos — immediately pushed back, as voters had passed the proposition by almost 82% and the City Council already approved it in November.

Mau said he has “no plans to file a lawsuit” in his last month of office. His Democratic successor Kelly Higgins supports decriminalization.

“The Attorney General cannot overturn the referendum, nor am I asking him to,” Mau said in a statement to The Texas Tribune. “But an opinion as to whether the ordinance is enforceable may be helpful to the City moving forward.”

In the North Texas suburb of Denton, where voters approved decriminalization by more than 70%, the City Council has also certified the initiative, thus enacting the ordinance. But organizers worry about its enforcement because City Manager Sara Hensley has opposed implementing parts of it due to similar issues. Organizers responded in November with a memo arguing that Hensley doesn’t have policymaking authority and that the city has discretion to enact policies conserving scarce resources.

See here and here for some background. I take the concerns of the opponents seriously, even as I would have voted for these measures myself. I expect the Legislature will respond, most likely in a disproportionate matter, to these referenda if they are not at least modified by those city councils. I also think this is a fight worth having, in the courts as well as at the ballot box. There really is a significant disconnect between public opinion and legislative action on this matter. So far, too many people who disagree with the Republicans in general and the Lege/Greg Abbott/Dan Patrick in particular have nonetheless voted for them, or not shown up to vote against them. The point here is to try to change some minds of the former and motivate more of the latter. At the very least, that means seeing this through, whatever happens along the way. I do think the pro-decriminalization side will eventually prevail, but who knows how long that may take. Letting up won’t make it happen any sooner.

There’s only so much that Austin (or any other Texas city) can do to protect abortion rights

Jun 4th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

I appreciate this, I really do, but it’s important to remember that it can only ever be a band-aid, and very likely a temporary one.

The city of Austin is attempting to shield its residents from prosecution under a Texas law that would criminalize almost all abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned — the first push by a major city in a red state to try to circumvent state abortion policy.

Councilmember Chito Vela is proposing a resolution that would direct the city’s police department to make criminal enforcement, arrest and investigation of abortions its lowest priority and restrict city funds and city staff from being used to investigate, catalogue or report suspected abortions.

“This is not an academic conversation. This is a very real conversation where people’s lives could be destroyed by these criminal prosecutions,” said Vela, who shared the details of the resolution first with POLITICO. “In Texas, you’re an adult at 17. We are looking at the prospect of a 17-year-old girl who has an unplanned pregnancy and is seeking an abortion [being] subjected to first-degree felony charges — up to 99 years in jail — and that’s just absolutely unacceptable.”

[…]

The new resolution doesn’t explicitly decriminalize abortion but rather directs police to make it their lowest enforcement priority in an effort to skirt conflict with state law, Vela said. But it highlights the tension between red state and the blue cities, where a new front in the battle over abortion rights is opening as the Supreme Court prepares to issue a decision on Roe in the coming weeks.

A city of Austin spokesperson said in a statement that “the city is prepared to take the steps necessary to implement this resolution upon passage by City Council.” The council passed a similar measure in 2020 that effectively decriminalized marijuana by ending arrests and fines for low-level possession, which the police department has followed.

Vela said he is having “ongoing conversations” with Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon about the proposal and hopes the department will comply with the directive. A department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

“The police do not want to be in the middle of this controversy. The police right now in Austin are struggling with staffing,” Vela said. “I don’t think the police want to dedicate resources to these types of, what I would call, ‘political crimes.’”

A spokesperson for state Attorney General Ken Paxton did not respond to a request for comment. Paxton, a Republican, has been at the vanguard of restricting abortion access in Texas, which has been in the spotlight since the state’s six-week abortion ban, enforced through a private right of action, took effect in September 2021.

Austin’s proposal, which aims to protect both patients and providers, comes as an extension of the city’s efforts to preserve abortion access despite the state’s restrictions. The city has, for instance, provided logistical support for abortion access, including transportation, lodging and child care, since 2019 — a model St. Louis is now looking to replicate.

More cities in Texas could be next. Julie Oliver, executive director of Ground Game Texas, a group that pushes for progressive, local ballot measures, said they are looking at pushing similar measures in San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. If that isn’t successful, the group plans to turn to the local ballot initiative process.

“Home rule charter cities have a tremendous amount of leeway and self-governance, and part of that is deciding which laws you’re going to prioritize,” Oliver said. “And so, because you have a finite number of resources in a finite budget, cities are constantly deciding which laws they’re going to enforce and which ones they are not.”

I support the idea and I love the creativity, as we have discussed what progressive cities can do to protect abortion rights. That includes proactive measures to thwart prosecution, which is very much in a city’s purview. The problem with this approach is simply that as long as the state is run by Republicans, they will pass laws to prevent cities from taking these measures and will punish them for even trying. I’m sure I don’t have to recite to you the long list of attacks on local control lately, but we have already seen reporting to say that the Briscoe Cain uterus-invasion caucus will file bills in 2023 to allow other counties to pursue prosecution of anyone who violates the new forced-birth laws if the local DA refuses. It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine state troopers being given the authority to investigate these claims, which I’d bet will come with a bunch of money to hire more staff specifically for that purpose. I’m sure there will be more private vigilante bounties included as well, to help fund the effort. If recent history is any indicator, they will go much farther than anything Austin tries to do, to send a clear message that they will not tolerate any dissent. Do we really want to test that hypothesis?

Please note that I am not saying that any action on our part is pointless and we should just give up. Not at all! I am just saying – again, and again, and again – that we need to win some statewide elections. The Republicans can only do this as long as they are in control, and they will only be incentivized to do this as long as they perceive there’s no price to pay for it. The antidote for that is obvious. I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m certainly not saying that this will be an opportune year to do it. I’m just saying that as clever and well-intentioned as these ideas sound, they’re sand castles against the tide. The problem is bigger than anything a city can do. We have to solve it at that level if we want to get anywhere. Reform Austin, KVUE, and Daily Kos have more.

The filings I’m still looking for

Dec 13th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Today is Filing Deadline Day. By the end of today, we’ll know who is and isn’t running for what. While we wait for that, let’s review the filings that have not yet happened, to see what mysteries may remain.

Congress: Most of the potentially competitive districts have Democratic candidates in them. The ones that remain are CDs 22, 26, 31, and 38, though I have been told there is a candidate lined up for that latter slot. Of the rest, CD22 would be the biggest miss if no one files. I have to think someone will, but we’ll know soon enough.

For open seats, CD15 has five candidates so far, none of whom are familiar to me. CD30 has six candidates, with State Rep. Jasmine Crockett receiving the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. CD34 has six, with current CD15 Rep. Vicente Gonzalez the presumed favorite. CD35 has three serious contenders – Austin City Council member Greg Casar, former San Antonio City Council Member Rebecca Viagran, and State Rep. Eddie Rodrigues – and one person you’ve not heard of. CD37 has Rep. Lloyd Doggett and former CD31 candidate Donna Imam, in addition to a couple of low-profile hopefuls, but it will not have former CD25 candidate Julie Oliver, who has said she will not run.

Democratic incumbents who have primary challengers include Rep. Lizzie Fletcher in CD07 (I’m still waiting to see if Centrell Reed makes some kind of announcement); Rep. Veronica Escobar in CD16 (I don’t get the sense her challenger is a serious one); and Rep. Henry Cuellar in CD28, who gets a rematch with Jessica Cisneros, who came close to beating him last year. The Svitek spreadsheet lists some dude as a potential challenger in CD18 against Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, but so far no filing. Reps. Al Green, Joaquin Castro, Sylvia Garcia, Colin Allred, and Marc Veasey do not appear to have any challengers as of this morning.

Statewide: Pretty much everyone who has said they are a candidate has filed. Frequent candidate Michael Cooper and someone named Innocencio Barrientez have filed for Governor, making it a four-candidate field. Two Harris County district court judges, Julia Maldonado and Robert Johnson, have filed for slots on the Supreme Court and CCA, respectively. The Svitek spreadsheet lists potential but not yet filed contenders for two other Supreme Court positions but has no listings for CCA. The one potential candidate who has not yet taken action is Carla Brailey, who may or may not file for Lt. Governor.

SBOE: As this is a post-redistricting year, all SBOE seats are on the ballot, as are all State Senate seats. Dems have four reasonable challenge opportunities: Michelle Palmer is running again in SBOE6, Jonathan Cocks switched from the Land Commissioner race to file in SBOE8, Alex Cornwallis is in SBOE12, and then there’s whatever is happening in SBOE11. The good news is that DC Caldwell has company in the primary, if he is actually allowed to run in it, as Luis Sifuentes is also running. I would advise voting for Sifuentes.

There are two open Democratic seats, plus one that I’m not sure about. Ruben Cortez in SBOE2 and Lawrence Allen in SBOE4 are running for HDs 37 and 26, respectively. There are two candidates in 2 and three candidates in 4, so far. Georgina Perez is the incumbent in SBOE1 but as yet has not filed. If she has announced that she’s not running, I have not seen it. There is a candidate named Melissa Ortega in the race.

In SBOE5, the district that was flipped by Rebecca Bell-Metereau in 2020 and was subsequently made more Democratic in redistricting, we have the one primary challenge to an incumbent so far, as a candidate named Juan Juarez has filed against Bell-Metereau. I’m old enough to remember Marisa Perez coming out of nowhere to oust Michael Soto in 2012, so anything can happen here. The aforementioned Perez (now Marisa Perez-Diaz) and Aicha Davis are unopposed so far.

Senate: Nothing much here that you don’t already know. Every incumbent except Eddie Lucio has filed for re-election, and none of them have primary opponents so far. Lucio’s SD27 has the three challengers we knew about, Sara Stapleton-Barrera, State Rep. Alex Dominguez, and Morgan LaMantia. A candidate named Misty Bishop had filed for SD07, was rejected, and has since re-filed for SD04; I’m going to guess that residency issues were at play. There are Dem challengers in SD09 (Gwenn Burud, who has run for this office before) and SD17 (Miguel Gonzalez), but no one yet for SDs 07 or 08.

House: Here’s the list of potentially competitive districts, for some value of the word “competitive”. Now here’s a list of districts on that list that do not yet have a filed candidate:

HD14
HD25
HD28
HD29
HD55
HD57
HD61
HD66
HD67
HD84
HD89
HD96
HD106
HD126
HD129
HD133
HD150

I’m told there’s someone lined up for HD133. We’ll see about the rest.

All of the open seats have at least one candidate in them so far except for HD22, the seat now held by Joe Deshotel. There’s a name listed on the Svitek spreadsheet, so I assume that will be sorted by the end of the day.

Reps. Ron Reynolds (HD27), Ana-Maria Ramos (HD102), and Carl Sherman (HD109) are incumbents who have not yet filed. No one else has filed yet in those districts as well. Svitek has a note saying that Rep. Ramos has confirmed she will file; there are no notes for the other two. There is the possibility of a last-minute retirement, with a possibly preferred successor coming in at the same time.

Here is a complete list of Democratic House incumbents who face a primary challenge: Rep. Richard Raymond (HD42) and Rep. Alma Allen (HD131). Both have faced and turned away such opponents in the past. If there was supposed to be a wave of primary opponents to incumbents who came back early from Washington, they have not shown up yet.

Rep. James Talarico has moved from HD52 to the open HD50 after HD52 was made into a lean-Republican district. Rep. Claudia Ordaz-Perez, the incumbent in HD76, will run in HD79 against Rep. Art Fierro after HD76 was relocated from El Paso to Fort Bend.

Harris County: Again, nothing new here. Erica Davis has not yet filed for County Judge. County Clerk Teneshia Hudpseth is the only non-judicial incumbent without a primary opponent so far.

Far as I can tell, all of the county judicial slots have at least one filing in them, except for a couple of Justice of the Peace positions. George Risner, the JP in Precinct 2, Place 2 (all JP Place 2 slots are on the ballot this year) has not yet filed, amid rumors that he is mulling a challenge to Commissioner Adrian Garcia. Incumbent Angela Rodriguez in JP precinct 6 has not yet filed. No Dem challengers yet in precincts 4 or 8.

Other judicial races: Sorry, I don’t have the bandwidth for this right now. I’ll review it after today.

And that’s all I’ve got. See you on the other side. As always, leave your hot gossip in the comments.

October 2021 campaign finance reports: Congress

Oct 26th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Another three months have passed, and so we review the Congressional finance reports again. I fear these reports are about to get a lot more boring post-redistricting, but for now we will plow onward. The July 2021 reports are here, and you can get the links to the previous cycle’s reports from there.

Dan Crenshaw – CD02
Van Taylor – CD03
Keith Self – CD03
Lance Gooden – CD05
Kathleen Bailey – CD05
Charles Gearing – CD05
Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Morgan Luttrell – CD08
Mike McCaul – CD10
Vicente Gonzalez – CD15
Monica de la Cruz – CD15
Chip Roy – CD21
Troy Nehls – CD22
Matthew Berg – CD22
Tony Gonzales – CD23
John Lira – CD23
Beth Van Duyne – CD24
Derrik Gay – CD24
John Carter – CD31
Donna Imam – CD31
Colin Allred – CD32
Rochelle Garza – CD34
Lloyd Doggett – CD37
Wesley Hunt – CD38


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
02    Crenshaw      8,166,421  5,789,903        0  4,229,232
03    Taylor        1,440,084    348,042  518,792  1,114,539
03    Self                  0          0        0          0
03    Srivastava       25,770     23,560   25,000     27,210
05    Gooden          323,801    340,897        0    435,438
05    Bailey          191,055     41,210  175,000    149,844
05    Gearing         204,350     49,993        0    154,356
07    Fletcher      2,036,541    300,422        0  1,797,215
08    Luttrell        737,201     72,489        0    664,712
10    McCaul        1,064,632    378,327        0    694,038
15    Gonzalez      1,323,008    553,704        0  2,139,796
15    De la Cruz      980,432    565,849   13,000    422,088
21    Roy             970,732    506,014        0    928,301
22    Nehls           472,116    200,570    8,700    290,751
22    Berg            125,028    107,807    5,100     17,221
23    Gonzales      1,672,722    545,202        0  1,158,878
23    Lira            209,147    138,544        0     70,602
24    Van Duyne     1,542,073    519,647   20,000  1,090,836
24    Gay             146,454     68,596        0     77,857
31    Carter          607,121    320,931        0    486,595
31    Imam            113,582     17,346        0     96,186
32    Allred        1,885,946    453,968        0  1,591,400
34    Garza           200,134     55,741        0    144,393
37    Doggett         400,081    252,958        0  5,352,597
38    Hunt          1,026,844    203,946        0  1,046,839

Some new names on the list this quarter, Sandeep Srivastava in CD03, Kathleen Bailey in CD05, and Rochelle Garza in CD34. Charlie Gearing had originally announced as a candidate in CD05 but has since switched to HD114 after the final Congressional map drew him out of CD05. Other now-former candidates for Congress include State Rep. Michelle Beckley and Manor mayor Larry Wallace, who suspended their campaigns in CDs 24 and 10 respectively after concluding those districts were too inhospitable to a challenge.

That’s why I said that these reports may be pretty boring from here on. These districts were not drawn to foster competition. A quick look at the 2018 and 2020 electoral data, which is now available, tells the story. Only CD15, in which Democratic incumbent Vicente Gonzalez may run for CD34 instead, and the ever-popular CD23 are reasonably close to even. The Republicans intended to make the last two cycles the exceptions, and at least at first glance they appear to have succeeded. We’ll get some new map optimism in 2022, and we may see that the dynamism of the state’s population plus the continued effects of the Trump debacle will change the perception of some districts, but all that remains to be seen.

In the meantime, we’re mostly looking at primary races. Rep. Van Taylor in CD03 is lousy, but because he voted for the January 6 commission, he’s drawn a pro-insurrection opponent. Keith Self is the former Collin County Judge and a longtime crony of Ken Paxton – indeed, the ongoing effort to screw the Paxton special prosecutors out of their pay was initiated by Keith Self. If Rep. Gonzalez does shift to CD34, we’ll need someone to try to hold onto CD15, which I tend to think may not be that big a deal, but will likely be uphill. Rep. Lloyd Doggett is the big dog in CD37, but former CD25 candidate Julie Oliver has filed there, and could make things interesting. There are now multiple Dems looking at CD35, and I’ll be very interested in seeing their reports in January. We still don’t know if Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson will run again in CD30. I’m sure a few more incumbents on both sides will draw a challenger or two.

And that’s where we are today. Filing season is almost upon us, and I expect we’ll see some interesting names pop up here and there. Someone in Houston is going to file for CD38 as a Democrat, if only because it’s now the shiniest prize out there for a Dem. I’m hoping we’ll find that the 2020 numbers in these districts overstate Republican strength and thus make the 2024 elections more attractive, but that’s wishing and hoping right now. We’re not going to see the kind of money raised for Congressional races in Texas that we have seen these past four years. My advice would be to spend your political donation dollars on our statewide candidates, especially for Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General. We’ve more than proven we can raise money for Democratic candidates in Texas. We just need to be strategic about it.

Ground Game Texas

Jun 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

This is good, too.

Julie Oliver

Some of Democrats’ biggest regrets about the 2020 election in Texas had to do with organizing. It was not consistent throughout the cycle — and usually isn’t in any cycle. It was supplanted by TV ads at the end. And it was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, with the backing of the state’s most prominent Democrats, two former congressional candidates are trying to turn those regrets into action.

The candidates, Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel, are launching a new nonprofit called Ground Game Texas that will focus on year-round organizing on progressive issues, aiming to fill what they see as a statewide void for their party. The group starts off with a $1 million investment from Register2Vote, a national nonprofit that the two already help lead.

“There’s no off years and there’s no off cycles, and folks need to stay engaged year-round,” Siegel said in an interview, adding there is “kind of a tendency among Democratic activists” to get involved only in presidential-election years or high-profile down-ballot contests like the 2018 U.S. Senate race. “The Republican Party doesn’t do that. They never stop.”

Ground Game Texas will organize Texans around issues rather than candidates, with a focus on what Siegel and Oliver are calling “workers, wages and weed” — issues like raising the minimum wage and legalizing marijuana that poll well but are not reflected by Republican policymakers in the state. A February University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll found that 60% of registered voters in Texas support legalizing some amount of marijuana for any use. A similar number in April expressed support for increasing the federal minimum wage.

The group expects to throw its weight behind local ballot initiatives, which often involve a lot of ground work such as collecting signatures for petitions to put the issues on a ballot. Siegel said he has already had conversations about proposals in 10 cities — places like Mission, Bedford and Elgin. The leading ideas there, he said, are decriminalizing marijuana and creating funding for climate jobs.

[…]

Ground Game Texas is launching with the support of three of the best-known Texas Democrats: Julián Castro, Wendy Davis and Beto O’Rourke, who said in a statement that the new group “is going to meet Texans where they are at to listen to them about the issues that matter most.” And it starts with an advisory board that includes Davis; rising-star state Reps. James Talarico of Round Rock and Jasmine Crockett of Dallas; and longtime party stalwarts such as former Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower and Texas AFL-CIO president Rick Levy.

The advisory board additionally features Democrats who ran in nationally targeted districts last year and suffered some of the toughest losses, like Candace Valenzuela, who narrowly lost to now-U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving.

Both Oliver and Siegel have firsthand experience with the challenges Democrats faced last election cycle. They both performed surprisingly well when they ran against Republican incumbents in 2018 — Oliver against U.S. Rep. Roger Williams of Austin and Siegel against Rep. Michael McCaul of Austin. In 2020, both ran again, only to lose by larger margins.

In 2020, both gained the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which named them to its Red to Blue program for promising challengers. But they remain skeptical of the committee’s priorities.

“[The DCCC] doesn’t really invest in this sort of infrastructure building that Mike and I did in our campaigns,” Oliver said. “That strategy is so different between the DC strategy and the Texas strategy. … The DC strategy doesn’t really work here in Texas, so we want to do year-round organizing.”

The DCCC announced Monday that it was including Texas in an initial seven-figure investment nationally in on-the-ground organizing, calling it the “earliest ever organizing investment of this scale and scope in DCCC’s history.” The committee said it would target areas in Texas such as Dallas, Houston and the Rio Grande Valley, where Democrats notably underperformed last year.

As I’m sure you can guess, I approve of the issues they are focusing on. I very much think there’s ground to be gained by pushing real marijuana reform, and by “reform” I mean decriminalization, if not legalization. People across the board want it, and the single biggest impediment to it is Dan Patrick. I’m more skeptical of raising the minimum wage as a winning issue – note that the polling question is about whether one supports raising the federal minimum wage, not whether one supports raising the minimum wage in Texas – but am happy to push the idea. I trust that the focus on local ballot initiatives is a starting point, because that’s not going to get very far and any success they have is certain to wind up in court, if not in legislative pushback.

Putting emphasis on organizing when three’s not an actual election going on is a good and long-needed idea as well. Lots of people complain that no one talks to them about issues and what’s important to them outside of a “please vote for me” context, so this addresses that gap. We may find out that a lot of these people prefer being left alone most of the time, but there’s no way to know until you try. The bigger point here is that by having this kind of campaign infrastructure be year-round, you’re not having to rebuild from scratch every other year.

We’ve certainly seen various initiatives, promising various kinds of new engagement, come and go over the years. I’m sure that no matter what happens in 2022, in two years’ time I’ll be reading about yet another new effort to organize and engage and register. That’s fine, and it doesn’t mean that what came (and possibly went) before now was wasted or useless. We’ve had to try a lot of things, and to see what works and what doesn’t, we’ve learned from past experiences, and we have made a lot of progress even if the statewide breakthrough hasn’t happened yet. It would be much more concerning to me if we weren’t seeing new efforts like this, spearheaded in part by new additions to the political team, popping up and making news. We all have options for how we want to get involved now. Find the one that works best for you and get into it.

January 2021 campaign finance reports: Congress

Mar 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
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Should have done this a long time ago, just to close the books on the 2020 election cycle, but for a variety of reasons I didn’t. With the forthcoming special election in CD06, I now have a reason to care about the April finance reports for Congress, so I may as well cross this off the list. The October 2020 finance reports can be found here, and you can get the links to all the earlier posts from there.

MJ Hegar – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Donna Imam – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar        29,597,569 29,558,486        0     86,564

07    Fletcher      6,405,639  6,386,609        0     61,096
32    Allred        5,777,600  5,721,622        0    159,422  

01    Gilbert         968,154    734,410   50,000    233,744
02    Ladjevardian  3,894,082  3,886,672   50,000      7,410
03    Seikaly       1,654,380  1,654,038    3,000        341
06    Daniel          681,820    678,976        0      2,833
08    Hernandez        17,407     15,160        0      1,985
10    Siegel        2,942,987  2,898,827  127,835     47,651
14    Bell            248,995    245,174        0      8,920
17    Kennedy         216,825    218,253        0          0
21    Davis        10,428,476 10,366,864  257,967     61,611
22    Kulkarni      5,781,704  5,772,741        0     36,731
23    Jones         6,918,062  7,005,280        0      4,300
24    Valenzuela    4,945,025  4,933,058        0     11,967
25    Oliver        2,228,218  2,214,190    2,644     14,027
26    Ianuzzi         121,500    121,500   44,361          0
31    Imam          1,242,218  1,242,218        0          0

I’m not going to spend too much time on this since all these races are over and we know what happened, but a few observations:

– I don’t know what Hank Gilbert has planned for that $233K he has left over, but I hope he intends to do something with it. We’re going to need some dough in a lot of races next year.

– I’d like to see an autopsy done on how all this money was spent. It was a weird year, and a lot of money that would have been spent on field wound up going to other uses, so maybe it will be hard to draw meaningful conclusions, but still. I have no doubt that some candidates spent their money better than others, and that some candidates had much higher overhead costs than others. We should get a better picture of what happened here.

– I say that because I think the 2020s are much more likely to have multiple competitive races throughout the decade, in a way that we didn’t in the 2010s. If so, we’re going to see a much higher baseline of campaign contributions overall than what we were used to. So again, let’s have some confidence that our candidates and their campaigns are spending it well.

– MJ Hegar got off to a slower start than Beto did in raising money for her Senate campaign, but almost $30 million is real money, enough to run a credible statewide race. We’re going to need that kind of money for at least a couple of our statewide candidates next year.

– The 2022 Congressional campaign is going to be much more compressed than the last few have been, since we won’t know until this fall what the districts look like, and that’s without taking any litigation into account. Who even knows when we’ll begin to see potential candidates make themselves known?

That’s about all I have. I’ll check the Q1 2021 reports to see who’s raised what for the May 1 CD06 special, and we’ll see what if anything is interesting after that.

October 2020 campaign finance reports: Congress

Oct 19th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
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This is it, the last quarterly finance report roundup for the cycle. It’s been quite the time, hasn’t it? Let’s do this and see where we are as voting continues. The January 2019 roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle, the April 2019 report is here, the July 2019 report is here, the October 2019 report is here, the January 2020 report is here, the April 2020 report is here, and the July 2020 report is here. For comparison, the January 2018 report is here, the April 2018 report is here, and the July 2018 report is here. The FEC summary page for Congress is here and for the Senate is here.

MJ Hegar – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Donna Imam – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar        20,579,453 12,121,009        0  8,505,926

07    Fletcher      5,673,282  4,115,705        0  1,599,643
32    Allred        5,060,556  3,477,172        0  1,686,828  

01    Gilbert         595,890    321,193   50,000    274,697
02    Ladjevardian  3,102,882  2,373,600   50,000    729,282
03    Seikaly       1,143,345    580,360    3,000    562,985
06    Daniel          558,679    396,453        0    162,225
08    Hernandez
10    Siegel        1,994,611  1,712,734        0    285,368
14    Bell            226,601    196,623        0     35,078
17    Kennedy         190,229    161,093    8,103     30,563
21    Davis         7,917,557  6,035,908        0  1,881,649
22    Kulkarni      4,663,288  2,941,745        0  1,749,310
23    Jones         5,893,413  3,877,366        0  2,107,566
24    Valenzuela    3,589,295  2,601,580        0    987,715
25    Oliver        1,599,523  1,102,297    2,644    497,225
26    Ianuzzi         129,145     91,293   53,335     37,852
31    Imam          1,000,764    620,512        0    380,251

These totals are just off the charts. Remember how in the 2018 cycle I was freaking out as one candidate after another topped $100K? Here we have nine challengers to incumbent Republicans that have topped one million, with the tenth-place challenger still exceeding $500K. For that matter, nine out of those ten outraised their opponents in the quarter, though several still trail in total raised and/or cash on hand. I’ve run out of synonyms for “unprecedented”. All this is without accounting for DCCC and other PAC money being spent. Who could have imagined this even as recently as 2016?

The one question mark is with the incumbent Dems, as both Rep. Lizzie Fletcher and Rep. Colin Allred were outraised for the quarter. Both took in over $1.2 million apiece, so it’s not like they slacked, and they both maintain a cash on hand lead while having spent more. I don’t know what to make of that, but I’m not terribly worried about it. Republican money has to go somewhere.

MJ Hegar raised $13.5 million this quarter, and there’s some late PAC money coming in on her behalf. I wish she had been able to raise more earlier, and I wish some of the excess millions that are going to (very good!) Senate candidates in much smaller and less expensive states had come to her instead, but she’s got what she needs to compete, and she’s got a competitive race at the top of the ticket helping her, too. We don’t have a Senate race in 2022, and someone will get to run against Ted Cruz in 2024. All I can say is I hope some folks are thinking about that now, and taking some initial steps to build on what Beto and MJ have done before them.

I don’t have a whole lot to say otherwise, because these numbers speak for themselves. I mean, remember when we were a little worried about the ability of candidates like Lulu Seikaly and Julie Oliver and Donna Imam to raise enough money? Seems like a long time ago now.

Let me end with a thought about the future. Will what we saw in 2018 and 2020 carry forward? 2022 is the first post-redistricting election, so with new districts and the likelihood of some open seats, there should be plenty of action. We did see a fair amount of cash being raised in 2012, after all. If there are many more Dem incumbents, it’s for sure there will be more money flowing in. We’ll have to see how many competitive races there are beyond that. What I do know is that we have definitively proven that this can be done, that quality candidates can be found and they will be supported. We had the power, and we figured out how to use it. Hard to believe that will go away.

It’s Julie Oliver week

Oct 3rd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
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Julie Oliver, the Democratic candidate in CD25, is getting a fair bit of attention this week. First, there’s this Statesman story about what her path to victory looks like.

Julie Oliver

On a recent Zoom fundraiser with Beto O’Rourke, Democratic congressional candidate Julie Oliver was asked what the campaign was doing in the vast rural stretches of a district that extends 220 miles from Hays to Tarrant counties.

“We’re doing everything we did before the pandemic except knocking on doors and having rallies, so we’re connecting with people throughout the district,” said Oliver, an Austin lawyer and former health care executive. “Y’all that live in Austin might not be able to see what is happening in rural Texas. But that’s what’s exciting. The Democrats that have been scared to be Democrats for years and years and don’t tell their neighbors are now loud and proud. And even more than that, Republicans who have lost their party are loud and proud.”

Two years ago, Oliver came within 9 points of defeating U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin.

Williams won reelection in 2016 by nearly 21 points. In 2018, Oliver won 20,000 more votes than Kathi Thomas, the 2016 Democratic nominee, while Williams drew 18,000 fewer votes than he had two years previous.

Most of Oliver’s gains came from winning 15,500 more votes in Travis County, even as Williams’ total declined by 6,500 votes.

But, beyond Travis County, there are all or part of 12 other counties in the 25th Congressional District, and, of those, Oliver only prevailed in the small slice of Bell County by Fort Hood, and only has any chance of adding to the win column this November the western portion of Hays County that lies in the district.

The other counties are mostly rural and extraordinarily hard country for Democrats.

“I do not envision Julie Oliver being in the 20s in Hamilton County,” said Lucas Robinson, the Republican chair in the county, which provided Oliver only 509 votes in 2018, the fewest of any the districts’ counties.

That’s 15.5%, a 2% improvement from 2016.

“We are very, very, very Republican county,” said Robinson, an attorney and businessman. “And I don’t get any sense that that’s changing. In fact, it’s probably improving for Roger, this time around, simply because it’s the presidential year and people are quite fired up in my estimate for Trump.”

[…]

The 25th is the most starkly polarized of the six districts that each carve a piece out of Austin, complicating Oliver’s task as she seeks to overtake Williams.

With growth in the district factored in, Oliver probably has to claim nearly half as many more votes than she received in 2018 to win.

“I think she’s a good candidate, and by running twice, she’s in a more advantageous position than someone who no one in the district has ever cast a ballot for,” said Josh Blank, research director the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, who lives in the 25th.

But he said, “Ultimately, Roger Williams’ task is much easier than Julie Oliver’s, because his success relies on mobilizing reliable voters, as much as he possibly can, while dinging her slightly along the way with voters who might be on the fence, of who they were going to be very few.”

Democrats, on the other hand, are “trying to become competitive by mobilizing groups of voters who are defined by their low propensity in most cases to vote. If you are a voter of low socio-economic status, working multiple jobs, and in need of health care, the Democrats definitely would be very attractive to you, but voting is not your No. 1 priority.”

Oliver cannot overlook any opportunity.

“We’re at a place in America where every election is a base election, every election is about mobilizing your core partisans, if not for you, at the very least, against the other guy,” Blank said. “And as we get closer or more competitive in any place, and Texas is an example of that, ultimately, it does come down to margins.”

That means trying to reduce the magnitude of Williams’ advantage even in places like Hamilton County, while assiduously courting and increasing the ranks of the more than 72,000 new voters in the 25th since the last election, and synchronizing efforts with overlapping state legislative campaigns that are more invigorated than in the past.

My interview with Julie Oliver is here in case you missed it. I generally agree with Josh Blank, in that CD25 has a much greater rural aspect than the other Democratic pickup opportunities. That said, the rural part of CD25 isn’t growing by nearly as much as the more Dem-friendly parts of the district:


County        2016      2018     2020
=====================================
Bosque       12,002   12,209   12,264
Burnet       29,587   31,072   32,208
Coryell      37,644   38,635   39,539
Erath        21,537   22,492   23,063
Hamilton      5,467    5,611    5,714
Hill         22,825   22,743   22,924
Johnson      91,725   97,157  102,458
Lampasas     13,786   14,099   14,728
Somervell     6,018    6,287    6,482

Bell        186,533  195,760  204,863
Hays        121,326  134,403  144,314
Travis      725,035  775,950  829,305

I skipped Tarrant County, as there’s just a tiny piece of it in CD25. Bell, Hays, and Travis are only partly in CD25, and I can’t say how much of their growth is in this district. I feel confident saying that Hamilton County, which had 66% turnout in 2016 and 61% in 2018, will not be the major contributor to a Roger Williams victory, if that is what is in the cards. It’s Johnson County (net 28K to Williams in 2018, followed by Burnet (+10K to Williams), Coryell and Hill (+6K each) that are Oliver’s biggest obstacles. If she can hold those margins down while building on the +42K net she got in Travis and the +3K in Bell (Hays was minus 3K for her, but that was an improvement on 2016; I’d say the goal is to break even here), she can win. A challenge to be sure, but it’s doable.

Meanwhile, the Texas Signal has a nice long profile on Oliver.

In the inevitable-looking saga of Republicans losing power in Texas, there would be no sweeter stroke of fate than Julie Oliver toppling Congressman Roger Williams.

A healthcare finance analyst turned Democratic candidate, Oliver is running one of the most progressive campaigns in Texas that include support for the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, abolishing private and for-profit prisons, and going after dark money in politics.

To prove the latter, Oliver is saying no to all political action committee money. Not just corporate PAC money, but PAC money from the major unions and agreeable political action groups that have endorsed her, such as the Texas AFL–CIO, Our Revolution, Working Families, Moms Demand Action and Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Oliver’s commitment to the no PAC money pledge goes as far as sending back checks, sometimes worth only $100 or $200, to small Democratic clubs that support her.

“You don’t have to have millions of dollars in cash to win,” Oliver told the Signal, citing the elections Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush — three progressives that defeated more moderate, well-funded incumbent Democrats in safely blue districts during their primaries due to grassroots fundraising and organizing.

Oliver held the same pledge in 2018 during her first bid for Congress against Williams. She raised an impressive $644,928, but fell 9 percentage points short on Election Day — not exactly a nailbiter, but a significant improvement from her predecessor in 2016 who lost by 20 points.

“I’ve heard from some people in the Democratic Party who are like, ‘oh that’s foolish, you’ll have to take PAC money this time,’” Oliver said. “And I’m like, mm-hmm, we’ll see about that.”

Primaries are not the same as general elections, but Oliver has done very well with this approach. She’d already outraised herself from the 2018 cycle as of Q2 and appears to be on her way to topping $1 million in total receipts. That’s pretty damn impressive, especially since the large majority of her donations have come from Texas. The main thing this money, and the level of engagement that has allowed her to get contributions from so many small donors, will allow her to do is to reach out to the new voters and the likely Democrats who were there but didn’t vote in 2018. That’s the kind of thing that a campaign that has resources can do.

And she may have some more resources coming her way.

Julie Oliver, the Democrat challenging U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin, is being named to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue program.

“Texans know tough, and Julie Oliver has always beat the odds,” DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos says in a statement. “A homeless, pregnant teenager who dropped out of high school, Julie endured to finish high school, put herself through college and law school with a young family and build a successful career.

The Red to Blue designation comes roughly a month after the DCCC expanded its Texas target list to include Williams’ 25th Congressional District and two others. The committee has now designated 10 total seats in Texas that it’s working to flip this November, and Oliver is the seventh contender in those races who’s received the Red to Blue distinction.

See here for the background. The DCCC is of course a PAC, but it does its own spending, not in conjunction with campaigns. More likely, what this means is that they will tell their donors who are looking to put their extra dollars to good use that Julie Oliver and CD25 is worth the investment. At this point in the cycle that’s going to have a fairly limited effect, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing, and a whole lot more than what anyone might have thought possible in 2018.

And just as I was finishing this draft, Texas Monthly began a series it’s calling Get To Know A Swing District, with CD25 and the Oliver/Williams rematch as its first entry. All in all, a pretty good week for Julie Oliver.

Interview with Julie Oliver

Sep 28th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Julie Oliver

If the story of the 2018 Congressional elections in Texas was the unprecedented number of serious candidates and their equally unprecedented success at fundraising, the story of 2020 is how many of those Congressional races are seen as credibly winnable by the Democratic challenger. Democratic flips of “only” two seats would be seen as mildly disappointing, while up to ten seats could go blue in a maximal year, based on the polling data available and the interest by national groups and the DCCC. Julie Oliver has been at the forefront of both stories, as the energetic newcomer in 2018 and as the more seasoned candidate with the poll numbers that show how much her CD25 has changed in that time. Oliver is a healthcare professional who has lived the themes of her campaign, as a onetime dropout and teen mother who relied on Medicaid and Pell grants to get her through school and onto a successful career, and who has a son who was born with a pre-existing heart condition. Here’s our conversation:

PREVIOUSLY:

Hank Gilbert, CD01
Rashad Lewis, CD36

CD03 poll: Taylor 44, Seikaly 43

Sep 20th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

From Nate Cohn:

All we get is Twitter for this one, any other info about the poll is behind the National Journal paywall. It’s in line with an earlier poll that had Taylor leading 43-37 and Biden up by two in the district. Seikaly’s improved performance is likely due to greater name recognition at this stage of the campaign.

I can’t analyze the poll in any meaningful way, but I can add some context to Nate Cohn’s assertion that if Biden carries CD03 he’s likely to have won Texas. Here’s a review of recent elections:

In 2012, Mitt Romney carried CD03 by a 64.2-34.1 margin, as he won the state 57.2 to 41.2.

In 2016, Donald Trump carried CD03 by a 53.8 to 39.9 margin, as he won the state 52.2 to 43.2.

In 2018, Ted Cruz carried CD03 by a 51.3 to 47.9 margin, as he won the state 50.9 to 48.3.

As you can see, CD03 was more Republican than the state as a whole, though that margin had narrowed by 2018. But if the pattern of CD03 being more Republican than the state overall holds, then it’s trivial to see that a Democrat winning in CD03 would also win statewide.

That comes with a raft of assumptions, of course. Maybe CD03 will be less Republican than the state this year. It’s been trending in that direction, and as a heavily suburban and college-educated district, that trend should continue. Perhaps this year the lines will intersect, and a Dem running in CD03 will have to win it by a certain margin in order to be able to win the state. If Biden really is winning CD03 by three points, you’d think that would be enough slack for him.

There’s one more piece of objective evidence that both this district, and by implication the state as a whole, is perhaps doing better for the Democrats than people realize:

Those are the three districts most recently added by the DCCC to their target list. You might say, the DCCC is in the business of talking up opportunities, so why should we take this as anything more than hype? Mostly because the DCCC already had its hands full in Texas – those three districts came after seven others currently held by Republicans, plus the two where Dems are playing defense. The DCCC is going to prioritize the districts where it thinks it can win, both to maximize its resources and keep its donors (and members) happy. They’re not going to go off on flights of fancy. It may be on the optimistic end of their spectrum, but if they believe there’s action there, you can expect there is.

CD25: Williams 45, Oliver 43

Sep 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

The Congressional polls, they keep coming.

Julie Oliver

Progressive Democratic candidate Julie Oliver is in a close race with her GOP incumbent opponent Rep. Roger Williams, a new internal poll finds.

The poll of 400 likely voters by EMC Research shows Oliver only two percentage points behind Williams, 45 to 43, with a 5-point margin of error.

The same poll shows Williams has higher name ID recognition compared to Oliver (53 to 42 percent) but the incumbent lawmaker suffers from favorable-unfavorable ratings that are almost equal (23-20).

[…]

Monday’s poll is the second survey this cycle showing the competitiveness of Texas’ 25th congressional district, held by Republicans since 2013.

A DCCC in-house poll in July showed the same margin between William and Oliver, 45 to 43.

See here for more on that previous poll, and here for the polling memo. The main difference between these two polls is that Biden led Trump 47-46 in the July poll, and Trump leads Biden 49-45 in this one. The latter seems like a more realistic result – as noted, Trump won this district 55-40 in 2016, and Beto got 47% in 2018. He lost by five to Ted Cruz, so I can buy Trump beating Biden by four here. That would also bode pretty well for Biden’s statewide ambitions, even if it means Julie Oliver will likely lose, albeit by a smaller margin this time. But she’s running a strong race, she’s got the DCCC on her side, and she’ll almost certainly do better with the resources to make her case to the voters than without them.

I should note that Roger Williams’ campaign released a poll of its own last week, which showed the incumbent leading 52-40. That was a rare Republican poll release for this cycle, and it’s a pretty decent result for Rep. Williams. My guess is that this understates Oliver’s level of support – we have no details about this poll, so we really are just guessing – but it’s not completely out of the question. Hugely disappointing if accurate, but not impossible. That poll, which of course came via Patrick Svitek on Twitter, did not include a Biden/Trump matchup, or at least the public information released about that poll did not include such a question. Make of it what you will.

DCCC expands the field in Texas again

Aug 28th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
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This is as wide as it goes.

Lulu Seikaly

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is adding three more districts to its Texas target list, expanding an already ambitious battlefield in the state.

The new targets of the House Democratic campaign arm are Republican Reps. Van Taylor of Plano, Roger Williams of Austin and Ron Wright of Arlington. The DCCC is now targeting 10 districts across Texas, or nearly half the GOP-held seats in the state’s congressional delegation.

“Democrats are on offense across Texas, campaigning on access to quality, affordable health care and protections for those with pre-existing conditions,” DCCC spokesperson Avery Jaffe said in a statement. “That consistent message and our 16-month long investment in Texas have put fast-changing districts like these ones in play and Democratic candidates in strong position to deliver in November.”

Julie Oliver

Taylor, Williams and Wright all won their races in 2018 by margins ranging from 8 to 10 percentage points. However, Beto O’Rourke, that year’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, came closer in each district, giving some Democrats hope that they could come into play this fall with the right candidates and environment.

Taylor is being challenged by Plano lawyer Lulu Seikaly, Wright by Waxahachie attorney Stephen Daniel and Williams by Julie Oliver, who was the 2018 nominee against him and lost by 9 points.

The DCCC’s interest in the races has not been a secret. The committee polled in at least two of them earlier this summer, finding single-digit leads for the Republican incumbents — and dramatic swings in the presidential race in favor of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.

Still, the Democrats face an uphill battle. Taylor and Williams have large cash-on-hand advantages, and Taylor has demonstrated significant self-funding capacity. And while Wright is a weak fundraiser, he has the support of the deep-pocketed Club for Growth, which backed him in 2018 and endorsed him for reelection last week, calling him the “right candidate to represent the district and beat his radical liberal challenger, Stephen Daniel.”

See here for more on the CD25 poll, here for CD03, and here for CD06. As noted before, if Joe Biden really is in position to win Texas or come very close to it, then Dems really are in position to win a bunch of Congressional seats here as well. It’s certainly possible that Biden runs a couple of points ahead of most or all of these Dem challengers, much as Beto did in 2018, with the result that Biden carries several more than are won by the Congressional candidate. The best way to minimize that, and thus maximize the number of seats Dems win, is to boost all of the viable Democratic candidates. It’s true that some of the Dem challengers aren’t in great fundraising shape, but overall the Dems are carrying the day, so maybe the DCCC can afford to spend a bit less on the Wendy Davises and Gina Ortiz Joneses and more on the Lulu Seikalyes. Just a thought. I actually don’t know what this announcement means in real terms – it may mean little more than the DCCC telling its donors who are looking for new places to park their money that these are approved by them – but it should have some positive effect. We’ll certainly know more when the next finance reports are in. In the meantime, let us all pause for a moment and marvel at the realization that the DCCC is playing offense in ten Congressional districts in Texas. Who had that on their 2020 Bingo card?

Once again with female Congressional candidates

Aug 9th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

This is another post that was drafted in the Before Times, specifically right after the March primary. I went through the runoffs and assessed all of the races that could or would contain a female candidate or incumbent against a male opponent or open seat with a retiring male incumbent, mixed in the likelihood of said female candidate winning, and presented a range of possibilities for the number of female members of Congress in Texas in 2021, a number that now stands at six. That’s six female members of Congress out of 36 total – five Democrats (out of 13 total) and one Republican (out of 23). With the lineups for November settled, let’s do a quick review, then you can click on to see what I had written originally.

First of all, the next member of Congress in CD24 will be a woman, either Democrat Candace Valenzuela or Republican Beth Van Duyne. It would be nice to say that this means the number of women in Congress from Texas will go up, but Rep. Lizzie Fletcher could lose her race to Wesley Hunt, which would leave us at six as before. I think as things stand right now Fletcher is a clear favorite to win, but we have to allow for the possibility.

Other than Van Duyne, the only Republican running in a competitive district is Genevieve Collins in CD32 against Rep. Colin Allred, who like his fellow freshman Fletcher is the favorite to win but could lose if things go poorly from here. CD24 is one of the more Dem-leaning seats that are currently held by Republicans, but since it’s Republican-held I’d say it has slightly better odds of staying red than CD07 or CD32 have of flipping to red. Republicans can add up to two women to their caucus, and they can subtract one from the Democratic caucus, but I think the single most likely outcome is that Rep. Kay Granger remains the only Republican woman in Congress, and Rep. Lizzie Fletcher gets another term.

If that’s the case, then Dems will add at least one woman to their caucus, but given the bigger picture it’s nearly impossible to imagine that it would be one and only one. I can’t envision a scenario in which Candace Valenzuela wins but Gina Ortiz Jones does not. Wendy Davis is a notch behind those two, and then a little further behind we have Sima Ladjevardian, Lulu Seikaly, Julie Oliver, and Donna Imam. A gain of two Democratic women feels like the single most likely possibility, followed very closely by a gain of three. Four or more is more remote, but not at all out of the question.

That’s the nickel summary. More recently, The 19th wrote about this from a national perspective, with a focus on Republican efforts to recruit more and better female candidates for Congress. They all pretty neatly avoid the Donald Trump-shaped elephant in the room, but that’s their problem. Read on for my original post, which included all of the candidates who are now out of the race or who are running for seats that are not competitive.

(more…)

CD25 poll: Roger Williams 45, Julie Oliver 43

Jul 30th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

This is genuinely astonishing.

Julie Oliver

To showcase just how extensively Trump’s decline has shifted the playing field, the DCCC shared with the Washington Post details of an in-house poll it conducted of Texas’ deep-red 25th Congressional District that finds Joe Biden edging Donald Trump 47-46 and puts Republican Rep. Roger Williams up just 45-43 on his Democratic challenger, attorney Julie Oliver.

That’s a huge shift from 2016, when Williams’ district went for Trump by a wide 55-40 margin. And that’s exactly what Republicans intended: The 25th is part of a careful gerrymander that cracked the Austin area six ways and allowed the GOP to win five of those seats. One of those is Williams’ district, which stretches far to the north toward Dallas-Forth Worth, combining a slice of the state capital with rural regions well outside of it.

As a result, the 25th is more rural (and whiter) than most of the suburban seats in Texas that are at the top of Democrats’ target list. As DCCC executive director Lucinda Guinn put it, the district had only been “maybe on the outer edges of our battlefield,” but that may now change. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz only carried this seat 52-47 over Beto O’Rourke, so it’s plausible that the leftward march here is continuing.

Here’s the WaPo story that originated this, which goes a lot broader but doesn’t add anything to the CD25 story. What’s most remarkable about this is that of the nine Congressional districts that Dems have some hope to be competitive in, this one is probably last in line. It’s the only one not projected to be won by Biden in the event of a Biden win in Texas. In terms of 2018 performance, CD25 was one of the two weakest for Dems overall, closely aligned with CD03 but without the rapid growth and suburban characteristic of that district. It’s been generally seen as a “likely GOP” seat, with only Rachel Bitecofer being more bullish than that.

So yeah, if Biden is truly leading in CD25, then 1) he’s also truly leading statewide, by more than just a hair, and 2) by enough that he’s also leading in eight other Republican-held Congressional districts. He’s probably leading by enough that the entire statewide Democratic slate is in position to win in November. He’s probably leading by enough that it’s not a question of whether the Dems would take the State House, but by how much. Like I said, astonishing.

Now again we have to trot out the caveats: It’s one poll, it was commissioned by the DCCC, which doesn’t make it suspect in and of itself but does mean that they could have put the result in a desk drawer if they hadn’t found it useful, and Congressional polling is always more variable than statewide polling. That said, it’s not really out of line when districts like CD03 are also polling as even for Biden. At this point, you can only wish there were more competitive districts available.

As noted by the dKos post, Julie Oliver’s main flaw is that she has little cash on hand, despite raising $681K so far, a greater sum than she raised in the entire last cycle. I don’t know what she’s been spending her cash on, but she’s going to need to make it stretch a bit more. Or maybe the DCCC will decide to come in and play, which at this point seems hard to argue against. If this is where the numbers are, maybe we should believe them.

July 2020 campaign finance reports: Congress

Jul 24th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Congratulations, everyone. Not only have we made it to the other side of another quarterly reporting period, we have also successfully navigated the primary runoffs. My next quarterly finance report post for Congress will thus be shorter, as this is the last time the folks who did not win their runoffs will be listed. So let’s get on with it already. The January 2019 roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle, the April 2019 report is here, the July 2019 report is here, the October 2019 report is here, the January 2020 report is here, and the April 2020 report is here. For comparison, the January 2018 report is here, the April 2018 report is here, and the July 2018 report is here. The FEC summary page for Congress is here and for the Senate is here.

MJ Hegar – Senate
Royce West – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Sean McCaffity – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Pritesh Gandhi – CD10
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
David Jaramillo – CD17
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Kim Olson – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Donna Imam – CD31
Christine Eady Mann – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar         6,605,966  5,751,355        0    902,092
Sen   West          1,867,804  1,689,538  258,103    178,265

07    Fletcher      4,384,162    978,573        0  3,453,656
32    Allred        3,801,649    924,378        0  2,980,715  

01    Gilbert         245,146     96,526   50,000    148,619
02    Ladjevardian  1,674,680  1,129,634   50,000    545,046
03    Seikaly         409,531    370,312    3,000     39,219
03    McCaffity       507,661    441,938        0     65,723
06    Daniel          328,097    243,191        0     84,906
08    Hernandez
10    Siegel          917,771    756,306        0    164,956
10    Gandhi        1,276,854  1,200,742        0     76,112
14    Bell            103,734     81,576        0     11,247
17    Kennedy          97,859     87,125   11,953     12,161
17    Jaramillo        21,246     17,942        0      3,303
21    Davis         4,467,270  1,536,995        0  2,930,275
22    Kulkarni      2,530,971  1,352,948        0  1,205,791
23    Jones         4,133,598  1,215,227        0  3,009,888
24    Valenzuela    1,119,403  1,008,739        0    110,664
24    Olson         1,667,400  1,417,247   20,000    250,153
25    Oliver          681,850    591,851    2,644     89,999
26    Ianuzzi          84,645     66,691   46,050     17,954
31    Mann            372,445    353,802   44,500     20,080
31    Imam            449,274    407,175        0     42,099

First things first, any worries about fundraising capacity in these brutally awful times have been assuaged. The totals speak for themselves, but let’s go into some detail anyway. Basically, the candidate in nearly every race of interest is ahead of their 2018 pace, often by a lot. Let me put this in another table to quantify:


Dist  Year     Candidate     Raised       Cash
==============================================
02    2018        Litton    843,045    407,674
02    2020  Ladjevardian  1,674,680    545,046

03    2018         Burch    153,559     19,109
03    2020       Seikaly    409,531     39,219

06    2018       Sanchez    358,960     67,772
06    2020        Daniel    328,097     84,906

10    2018        Siegel    171,955     46,852
10    2020        Siegel    917,771    164,956

21    2018        Kopser  1,594,724    364,365
21    2020         Davis  4,467,270  2,930,275

22    2018      Kulkarni    405,169     89,434
22    2020      Kulkarni  2,530,971  1,205,791

23    2018   Ortiz Jones  2,256,366  1,150,851
23    2020   Ortiz Jones  4,133,598  3,009,888

24    2018      McDowell     61,324     28,091
24    2020    Valenzuela  1,119,403    110,664

25    2018        Oliver    199,047     78,145
25    2020        Oliver    681,850     89,999

31    2020         Hegar  1,618,359    867,266
31    2020          Imam    449,274     42,099

With the exception of CD31, where no one has come close to MJ Hegar (who as the US Senate nominee may help boost turnout in this district anyway), and CD06, where Stephen Daniel is a pinch behind Jana Sanchez in fundraising (but also a pinch ahead in cash on hand), each nominee is substantially better off this time around. Todd Litton, Joe Kopser, and the original version of Gina Ortiz Jones were all strong fundraisers, and they’ve all been blown out of the water this year. Mike Siegel, Sri Kulkarni, and Julie Oliver have all greatly outpaced themselves. I will maintain that we might have won CD24 in 2018 if we’d had a candidate who could raise money; that’s very much not a problem this year. Lulu Seikaly is well ahead of Lori Burch, who was herself quite a pleasant surprise in CD03.

There are still things to address. Seikaly, Siegel, and Valenzuela all needed to spend a bunch of money in the extended runoffs, and thus need to build up cash with less time to do it. Given their records so far, I’m not too worried about it. Both Jana Sanchez and 2018 Julie Oliver had May runoffs to win, so their modest cash on hand totals were understandable, but Stephen Daniel and 2020 Julie Oliver were both March winners, so I don’t understand why they’ve been spending as much as they have at this point. I hope that isn’t a problem. Donna Imam is not going to approach Hegar’s fundraising prowess, but she alone among the crowd in CD31 seemed to have some capacity for the task, so maybe she’ll at least make up some ground.

The big difference is that there isn’t a juggernaut Senate campaign, which was a boost to downballot candidates in 2018, this time around. On the other hand, we do have a Presidential campaign, which is already airing ads, and we have the DNC airing ads, and we have the DCCC, which has added CD02 to its already-long target list (though they may have dropped CD31 by now). Point being, there will be plenty of other money invested that will help with these races, directly or indirectly.

So overall, a pretty rosy picture, and the financial resources to support the notion that a whole lot of seats are actually in play. Remember how I spent much of the 2018 cycle talking about how there never used to be any Congressional money raised in Texas, outside of CD23? The world is in flames, but that one small part of the Before Times, I don’t miss.

Last but not least, a brief shoutout to Hank Gilbert, playing the part of Dayna Steele in this cycle – a great candidate and a swell human being in an absolute no-hope district against a terrible incumbent who is raising a surprising amount of money. If doing good and being good were all it took, Hank would be in the top tier of next year’s freshman class. Maybe someday we’ll live in that world. Godspeed, Hank.

Dems could possibly win a lot of Congressional races in Texas

Jul 19th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

It started with this:

You might think wow, that’s a really optimistic take, but after the Tuesday primary runoff, we also got this:

I’d quibble with the categorization of those 2018 contests as “not serious” – all of the candidates raised a decent amount of money that year, and prognosticators had CD10 on their radar by the end of the cycle – but I take his point. And in the replies to that tweet, we got this:

A second Blue Wave in the suburbs?

Well-educated suburban districts, particularly ones that also were diverse, were a major part of the Democrats’ victory in the House in 2018. Democrats captured many formerly Republican districts where Donald Trump performed significantly worse in 2016 than Mitt Romney had in 2012. Democratic victories in and around places like Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, the Twin Cities, Atlanta, Orange County, CA, parts of New Jersey, and elsewhere came in seats that meet this broad definition.

And then there’s Texas. Democrats picked up two districts there, one in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex (TX-32) and another in suburban Houston (TX-7). But Democrats put scares into several other Republican incumbents, and the closeness of presidential polling in Texas could lead to unexpected opportunities for Democrats there this November.

Trump has generally led polls of Texas, but many have been close and Biden has on occasion led, like in a Fox News poll released last week that gave him a nominal lead of a single point.

Tellingly, of 18 Texas polls in the RealClearPolitics database matching Biden against Trump dating back to early last year, Trump has never led by more than seven points — in a state he won by nine in 2016. It seems reasonable to assume that Trump is going to do worse in Texas than four years ago, particularly if his currently gloomy numbers in national surveys and state-level polls elsewhere do not improve.

In an average of the most recent polls, Trump leads by two points in Texas. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) won reelection over then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D, TX-16) by 2.6 points. If Trump were to win Texas by a similar margin this November, the congressional district-level results probably would look a lot like the Cruz-O’Rourke race. Those results are shown in Map 1, courtesy of my colleague J. Miles Coleman.

Map 1: 2018 Texas Senate results by congressional district

Cruz carried 18 districts to O’Rourke’s 16. That includes the 11 districts the Democrats already held in Texas going into the 2018 election, as well as the two additional ones where they beat GOP incumbents (TX-7 and TX-32) and three additional districts that Republicans still hold. Those are TX-23, an open swing seat stretching from San Antonio to El Paso; Rep. Michael McCaul’s (R, TX-10) Austin-to-Houston seat; and TX-24, another open seat in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.

TX-23 is competitive primarily because it’s two-thirds Hispanic, and it already leans to the Democrats in our ratings. TX-10 and TX-24 better fit the suburban mold: Both have significantly higher levels of four-year college attainment than the national average (particularly TX-24), and Republican incumbents in both seats nearly lost to unheralded Democratic challengers in 2018.

Cruz won the remaining districts, but several of them were close: TX-2, TX-3, TX-6, TX-21, TX-22, TX-25, and TX-31 all voted for Cruz by margins ranging from 0.1 points (TX-21) to 5.1 (TX-25). These districts all have at least average and often significantly higher-than-average levels of four-year college attainment, and they all are racially diverse.

In other words, these districts share some characteristics of those that have moved toward the Democrats recently, even though they remain right of center.

This is all a long preamble to an alarming possibility for Republicans: If Biden were to actually carry Texas, he might carry many or even all of these districts in the process. In a time when ticket-splitting is less common than in previous eras of American politics (though hardly extinct), that could exert some real pressure on Republicans in these districts.

Ted Cruz carried 20 districts to Beto’s 16, a minor quibble. Remember this post in which Mike Hailey of Capitol Inside predicted Dems would flip eight Congressional seats? Not so out there any more.

Look at it this way: Since the start of June, Trump has had exactly one poll, out of eight total, in which he has led Joe Biden by more than two points. The four-point lead he had in that poll is smaller than the five-point lead Biden had in a subsequent poll. In those eight polls, Trump has led in three, Biden has led in three, and the other two were tied. The average of those eight polls is Biden 45.9, Trump 45.6, another data point to suggest that Biden has gotten stronger as we have progressed.

Insert all the usual caveats here: Polls are snapshots in time. It’s still more than 100 days to Election Day. Things can change a lot. No Texas Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994, a losing streak to rival Rice football versus UT. (As it happens, the last time Rice beat UT in football was…1994. Coincidence? I think not.) The polls all said Hillary was gonna win in 2016 and we know how that went, smartass. Fill in your own rationalization as well.

The point here is simply this: If Joe Biden actually wins Texas, it could be really, really ugly for Republicans downballot. Even if Biden falls short, it’s likely going to leave a mark on them as well.

I’ll leave where we started:

Karma, man.

Comparing the April finance reports

May 4th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

In my roundup of April finance reports for Congress, I said I’d do a comparison of the 2018 numbers to 2020. I’m a blogger of his word, so let’s have that look.


Dist  Year Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
=================================================================
02      18 Litton          546,503    304,139        0    242,363
02      20 Ladjevardian  1,133,296    930,810   50,000    202,485

03      18 Burch           104,700    116,639   25,649     14,085
03      18 Johnson          62,473     59,143    3,100      6,490
03      20 McCaffity       387,506    313,098        0     74,407
03      20 Seikaly         252,591    232,038    3,000     20,552

06      18 Sanchez         241,893    188,313        0     56,456
06      18 Woolridge        75,440     45,016   15,000     47,708
06      20 Daniel          196,861    187,942    7,500      8,918

10      18 Siegel           80,319     65,496    5,000     19,823
10      18 Cadien
10      20 Siegel          664,291    542,317   10,000    125,464
10      20 Gandhi        1,011,877    948,927        0     62,949

21      18 Kopser        1,100,451    846,895   25,000    278,556
21      18 Wilson           44,772     51,041   26,653     20,384
21      20 Davis         3,047,765  1,094,009        0  1,953,755

22      18 Kulkarni        178,925    158,369   35,510     56,067
22      18 Plummer         108,732     99,153        0      9,578
22      20 Kulkarni      1,564,263  1,226,088        0    365,942

23      18 Ortiz Jones   1,025,194    703,481        0    321,713
23      18 Trevino          16,892     20,416    3,285      3,915
23      20 Ortiz Jones   3,310,358  1,024,041    3,024  2,377,835

24      18 McDowell         33,452     16,100        0     17,470
24      20 Olson         1,231,183  1,028,804   20,000    202,378
24      20 Valenzuela      647,105    506,708        0    140,397

25      18 Oliver           78,841     37,812    3,125     40,860
25      18 Perri           139,016    133,443   24,890     30,603
25      20 Oliver          464,623    427,972    2,644     36,651

31      18 Hegar           458,085    316,854        0    141,240
31      18 Mann             56,814     58,856    2,276          0
31      20 Mann            277,815    278,885   44,500        367
31      20 Imam            363,194    223,126  100,000    140,068

I included losing candidates from primary runoffs in 2018 as well, as they were still in the race at that time. I did not include the high-dollar races in CDs 07 and 32 – Lizzie Fletcher and Laura Moser had each raised over $1M by this point, with Colin Allred and Lillian Salerno combining for close to $1.4M – because I wanted to focus only on challengers. Reps. Fletcher and Allred are doing quite well in this department now, they’re just in a different category. It’s clear there’s a lot more money now than there was in 2018, which I attribute mostly to the national Democratic focus on many of these races. Only CDs 03, 06, and 25 are not official targets, but any of them could get bumped up if the environment gets more favorable or the nominees step it up another level. Both CD03 candidates and the 2020 version of Julie Oliver are well ahead of the 2018 pace, while Stephen Daniel was a later entrant in CD06 and may catch up in the next report.

We eventually got used to the big numbers from 2018, which I repeatedly noted were completely unprecedented for Democratic Congressional challengers in Texas, and so there’s less of an “ooh, ahh” factor when we look at this year’s numbers, but let’s not totally lose our ability to be wowed. Joe Kopser raised a ton of money in 2018, and Wendy Davis has left him in the dust, taking in three times as much at this point. Sri Kulkarni has nearly matched his entire total from 2018, while Gina Ortiz Jones is doing to herself what Wendy Davis is doing to Joe Kopser. Throw in Sima Ladjevardian and both Kim Olson and Candace Valenzuela, and wow. We do need to appreciate where we are now, because there was a long time when anything like this would have been unthinkable. Hell, you can count on one hand the number of statewide candidates from 2004 to 2016 who raised as much as these Congressional candidates have done so far.

There’s also a lot more spending, as four candidates have already dropped a million bucks, with Ladjevardian and Pritesh Gandhi not far behind. Those two plus Sri Kulkarni and Kim Olson were in competitive primaries, with Olson and Gandhi in the runoffs, while Wendy Davis and Gina Ortiz Jones had much less formidable opposition. I have to assume the latter two did most of their spending with an eye towards November.

I will admit that some of the cash on hand totals from this year’s report had me nervous, but doing this comparison mostly alleviates those concerns. I am of course still worried about the environment for raising money now, but there’s only so much one can worry about it, and as we saw in the previous post there was no noticeable slowdown for the month of March. We’ll see what the July numbers look like.

If there is a cause for concern, it’s in CD31, which has been a soft spot in the lineup from the beginning. Christine Eady Mann and Donna Imam seem to have finally hit a stride in fundraising after the entire field, including several who dropped out along the way, got off to a slow start, though Mann continues a pattern from 2018 of spending every dollar she takes in. Neither has matched MJ Hegar’s pace from 2018, and I seriously doubt they’ll do any better going forward. That’s a high hurdle to clear – Hegar eventually raised over $5 million – but I’m more hopeful now that whoever emerges in that race can at least be competitive.

The next finance reports of interest will be the 30-day reports for state candidates, and then the June reports for county candidates. You know I’ll be on them when they come out. As always, let me know what you think.

April 2020 campaign finance reports: Congress

Apr 27th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Hey, remember politics? You know, races and finance reports and stuff like that? Yeah, it’s still happening, weird as that may seem right now. As we are well into April, the Q1 Congressional finance reports for 2020 are in, and thankfully for me the number of candidates whose reports I need to review is much smaller. Let’s have a look. The January 2019 roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle, the April 2019 report is here, the July 2019 report is here, the October 2019 report is here, and the January 2020 report is here. For comparison, the January 2018 report is here and the April 2018 report is here. The FEC summary page for Congress is here and for the Senate is here.

MJ Hegar – Senate
Royce West – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Sean McCaffity – CD03
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Pritesh Gandhi – CD10
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
David Jaramillo – CD17
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Kim Olson – CD24
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Christine Eady Mann – CD31
Donna Imam – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar         4,830,038  3,781,873        0  1,095,647
Sen   West          1,363,387  1,242,563  242,162    242,162

07    Fletcher      3,375,004    723,963        0  2,693,107
32    Allred        2,370,113    555,774        0  1,917,783  

01    Gilbert         190,941     44,804   50,000    146,136
02    Ladjevardian  1,133,296    930,810   50,000    202,485
03    McCaffity       387,506    313,098        0     74,407
03    Seikaly         252,591    232,038    3,000     20,552
06    Daniel          196,861    187,942    7,500      8,918
08    Hernandez
10    Siegel          664,291    542,317   10,000    125,464
10    Gandhi        1,011,877    948,927        0     62,949
14    Bell             84,724     71,740        0     16,061
17    Kennedy          65,908     59,041   11,953      8,294
17    Jaramillo        20,681     17,864        0      2,816
21    Davis         3,047,765  1,094,009        0  1,953,755
22    Kulkarni      1,564,263  1,226,088        0    365,942
23    Ortiz Jones   3,310,358  1,024,041    3,024  2,377,835
24    Olson         1,231,183  1,028,804   20,000    202,378
24    Valenzuela      647,105    506,708        0    140,397
25    Oliver          464,623    427,972    2,644     36,651
26    Ianuzzi          82,254     63,909   47,032     18,344
31    Mann            277,815    278,885   44,500        367
31    Imam            363,194    223,126  100,000    140,068

Some real separation in the Senate race, as MJ Hegar approaches five million total raised. She is in a much stronger position for the runoff than Royce West, though there’s still time for him to raise a few bucks. Hegar has a long way to go to be on par with John Cornyn, but she’s at least putting herself into “reasonably viable for a statewide candidate” range. For what it’s worth, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez and Amanda Edwards did eventually top a million dollars raised, and in the end they both spent nearly all of it. I still don’t know why Tzintzún Ramirez was unable to do better in this department, but that’s water under the bridge now.

As was the case in 2018, everyone in all of the interesting races is raising a ton of money. The two incumbents are doing what they should be doing. Six challenger candidates have now topped a million dollars raised, with Wendy Davis and Gina Ortiz Jones both over three million. Pritesh Gandhi and Kim Olson still have to make it through the July runoff, by which time their runoff opponents – Mike Siegel and Candace Valenzuela – may have also topped that mark. Of course, right now is kind of a lousy time to be raising money, so hold that thought for a minute. We’re at a point where it’s basically routine for everyone to pile up big money-raised numbers, so let me note that the thing that stands out here is the amount that some of these candidates have spent. It’s more than a little mind-boggling that four candidates so far have spent over a million bucks, and some people, even the big moneybags, have left themselves a bit bereft in the cash-on-hand department. I’m glad to see both CD31 candidates finally start to get on the board, but that’s quite the hole Christine Eady Mann left herself in cash-wise. I’m going to do a separate post with a direct comparison to April 2018 later, but let’s put a pin in that. We don’t know what the fundraising environment is going to be like over the next few months. Dems benefited from a lot of Congressional cash in 2018. We had every reason to believe the same thing would happen this year as of the last report, but that was in the Before Times. Now, who knows?

We can take a little peek at how the fundraising environment may be. Everyone had to report their totals as of February 22 as well, thanks to the March primary. So here’s a look at how the Raised totals varied from January to April:


Dist Candidate         Jan01      Feb22      Apr01
==================================================
Sen  Hegar         3,225,842  3,864,201  4,830,038
Sen  West            956,593  1,134,953  1,363,387

07   Fletcher      2,339,444  2,481,687  3,375,004
32   Allred        2,370,113  2,577,348  2,370,113

02   Ladjevardian    407,781    660,853  1,133,296
03   McCaffity       267,288    308,240    387,506
03   Seikaly         109,870    173,031    252,591
06   Daniel          148,655    179,330    196,861
10   Siegel          451,917    527,802    664,291
10   Gandhi          786,107    869,277  1,011,877
21   Davis         1,850,589  2,186,063  3,047,765
22   Kulkarni      1,149,783  1,246,943  1,564,263
23   Ortiz Jones   2,481,192  2,684,696  3,310,358
24   Olson           861,905    967,032  1,231,183
24   Valenzuela      333,007    442,351    647,105
25   Oliver          325,091    387,523    464,623
31   Mann            170,759    198,783    277,815

Donna Imam did not have a February 22 total when I went looking for these numbers, so I omitted her from this table. Honestly, it doesn’t look like there was much of a slowdown in March, which is what I had been afraid of. Hell, Wendy Davis raised nearly a million bucks just in the last five weeks of the period. With the primaries over, the federal contribution limits get reset, so I think Davis and at least a couple other candidates who emerged victorious reaped a benefit from becoming the official nominee. Certainly Sima Ladjevardian and Gina Ortiz Jones took in a decent haul in the latter half of the filing period. Julie Oliver and Stephen Daniel did not get such a boost, however. I don’t have much more to say about this, I was just curious about how this went. We’ll see what the next quarter brings. As always, let me know what you think.

2020 primary results: Senate and Congress

Mar 4th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

In the US Senate primary, MJ Heger is clearly headed to the runoff. It’s less clear who’s in second place, in part because the statewide results are so out of date on both the Trib and SOS pages. As of this draft, these pages show Royce West trailing Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez by three points, with 64,041 votes cast for him. However, as of the same time, the Dallas County election results show West with 58,873 votes, just in Dallas. Suffice it to say, the statewide results are not up to date. My guess is that West finishes second, but check back later.

For Congress:

– Sima Ladjevardian was close to 50% in CD02 after early voting, but slipped back a bit from there and will be in the runoff with Elisa Cardnell.

– Mike Siegel was leading in CD10 as far as I could tell, but it’s not clear who he’ll face in the runoff.

– Sri Kulkarni appears to be over 50% in CD22. I very much hope that race ended last night.

– Wendy Davis (CD21) and Gina Ortiz Jones (CD23) were winning easily, and Julie Oliver (CD25) was also headed to victory. Kim Olson and Candace Valenzuela were basically tied in CD24 and will face off in May, as will Sean McCaffity and Lulu Seikaly in CD03. Christine Eady Mann and Donna Imam made the cut in CD31. Elizabeth Hernandez appeared to be leading Laura Jones in CD08.

– Henry Cuellar seems to have held on in CD28, and on the Republican side Kay Granger was doing the same in CD12. So Republicans will still have at least one female member of Congress from Texas.

– Sheila Jackson Lee and Al Green won easily against their challengers.

– Pete Sessions will be in the runoff in CD17, and Troy Nehls gets to face Kathaleen Wall and her millions of dollars in CD22. I pity everyone who will have to suffer through the TV commercials.

One more of these to go.

UPDATE: The Chron says it’s Mike Siegel and Pritesh Gandhi in the CD10 runoff, with Shannon Hutcheson finishing third. That’s a rare failure for a female candidate in any Dem primary from this year.

A look at the CD25 primary

Feb 29th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

CD25 in Central Texas is a lower-tier race but after a much closer result in 2018 than before it’s on the radar this year and there’s an interesting primary to see who gets to take the shot at it.

Julie Oliver

When Julie Oliver lost to U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin, in a closer-than-expected race in November 2018 she felt a numbness that by December thawed into a deep sadness.

“I felt like I had let a lot of people down, that I had failed in my responsibility to the people of the district,” Oliver said. “By early February I started thinking, ‘I could do this again,’ by the middle of February, ‘I should do this again,’ and by the beginning of March, I was, ‘I have to do this again.’”

And so she is.

But what Oliver, 47, didn’t realize at the time is that before she can get another crack at Williams, a 70-year-old car dealer seeking his fifth term in Congress, she must get past a Democratic primary challenge from Heidi Sloan, a dynamic 34-year-old activist springing from Austin’s fertile socialist movement, inspired to electoral activism by the success of fellow democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Williams, meanwhile, is facing a primary challenge from Keith Neuendorff, 53, a software engineer and political novice from West Lake Hills, who is running a low-budget campaign — he has raised and spent less than $6,000 — talking to voters about what he finds to be Williams’ “lack of connectivity with his constituents.”

Heidi Sloan

Sloan, who had been involved in organizing campaigns with the Austin chapter of Democratic Socialists of America to pressure U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, to embrace Medicare for All (he did), for paid sick days and to decriminalize homelessness, said that last spring, allies “just kept mentioning, `We really like organizing with you, we like your leadership style, have you ever thought about running?’”

She said she had not, but Mike Nachbar, a democratic socialist organizer, now managing her congressional campaign, “sat me down and he said, `This is what 2020 is going to look like. Obviously, DSA is going to organize for Bernie as long as Bernie continues to be who he has been for the last 4 years, but it can’t just be that. We have to build a coalition to win Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. And we have to get started right now.’”

[…]

If Oliver seems an unlikely target from the left, she will be tough to beat March 3 in a race that offers a glimpse at how, even as the center of gravity of the Democratic Party has shifted left since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the battle for primacy among the party’s progressives is intensifying.

Much of the Democratic elected and progressive activist leadership and most of the Democratic clubs in Austin back Oliver, believing she has earned another shot in a tough, gerrymandered district, stretching from East Austin to Burleson, just south of Fort Worth. She sliced Williams’ 21-point margin in 2016 to 8.7 points in 2018.

There’s not much difference between the two candidates as far as issues go, so this is more of a “who do you like” situation. Julie Oliver worked hard in her 2018 run, clearly met or exceeded expectations, and has done well with fundraising this cycle (Sloan hasn’t been as strong there, but she’s done all right). That to me is enough to merit support for another run, though I can understand why someone would want to give another person the chance. This is a district that by all rights shouldn’t be competitive for Dems – it’s a lot more rural than the other targets, for one thing – and it will likely take an even better environment than what we had in 2018 to truly be winnable, but it’s in scope and we should put our best candidate forward. I like Julie Oliver, but if Heidi Sloan wins then good on her.

January 2020 campaign finance reports: Congress

Feb 7th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

The big ones for this cycle the Q4 2019 Congressional finance reports. For the last time, we have new candidates joining the list, and a couple of folks dropping out. Let’s do the thing and see where we are going into 2020. The January 2019 roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle, the April 2019 report is here, the July 2019 report is here, and the October 2020 report is here. For comparison, the October 2017 report is here. The FEC summary page for Congress is here and for the Senate is here.

MJ Hegar – Senate
Chris Bell – Senate
Amanda Edwards – Senate
Royce West – Senate
Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez – Senate
Sema Hernandez – Senate
Adrian Ocegueda – Senate
Michael Cooper – Senate
Jack Foster – Senate
Anne Garcia – Senate
John Love – Senate (did not file for the primary)

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Henry Cuellar – CD28
Jessia Cisneros – CD28

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Elisa Cardnell – CD02
Travis Olsen – CD02
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Sean McCaffity – CD03
Tanner Do – CD03
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Laura Jones – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Pritesh Gandhi – CD10
Shannon Hutcheson – CD10

Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
William Foster – CD17
David Jaramillo – CD17
Jennie Lou Leeder – CD21
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Nyanza Moore – CD22
Derrick Reed – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Rosey Ramos Abuabara – CD23
Jaime Escuder – CD23
Ricardo Madrid – CD23
Efrain Valdez – CD23

Jan McDowell – CD24
Kim Olson – CD24
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
John Biggan – CD24
Richard Fleming – CD24
Sam Vega – CD24
Crystal Lee Fletcher – CD24 (suspended campaign)
Julie Oliver – CD25
Heidi Sloan – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Mat Pruneda – CD26
Christine Eady Mann – CD31
Dan Jangigian – CD31
Eric Hanke – CD31
Donna Imam – CD31
Michael Grimes – CD31
Tammy Young – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar         3,225,842  2,269,671        0  1,003,653       
Sen   Bell            318,983    310,983        0      8,000
Sen   Edwards         807,478    476,485   30,000    330,993
Sen   West            956,593    430,887  202,162    525,706
Sen   T-Ramirez       807,023    577,782        0    229,240
Sen   Hernandez         7,551      7,295        0      3,891
Sen   Ocegueda          5,773      5,273    5,600        500
Sen   Cooper            4,716      2,598       41       -660
Sen   Foster            6,957      5,604        0      1,353
Sen   Garcia           10,000      6,058   22,844      3,941
Sen   Love             31,533     27,610        0      3,922

07    Fletcher      2,339,444    544,518        0  1,836,992
32    Allred        2,370,113    555,774        0  1,917,783  

28    Cuellar       1,530,976  1,140,095        0  2,935,884
28    Cisneros        982,031    366,588        0    615,442

01    Gilbert         107,625     21,733   50,000     85,891
02    Cardnell        284,514    193,910        0     90,603
02    Olsen            29,141     24,271   11,037      4,870 
02    Ladjevardian    407,781     30,035        0    377,746
03    McCaffity       267,288     54,939        0    212,348
03    Do               17,815     17,523        0        291
03    Seikaly         109,870     43,518    3,000     66,351
06    Daniel          148,655    128,989        0     19,665
08    Hernandez
08    Jones             4,250      2,698    1,910      1,552
10    Siegel          451,917    303,847   10,000    151,560
10    Gandhi          786,107    335,354        0    450,752
10    Hutcheson       750,981    295,404        0    455,577
14    Bell             84,724     71,740        0     16,061
17    Kennedy          48,623     38,593   11,953     11,457
17    Foster
17    Jaramillo        14,280        163        0     14,116
21    Leeder           29,112     25,444    9,475      3,662
21    Davis         1,850,589    635,794   18,493  1,214,794
22    Kulkarni      1,149,783    515,958        0    661,592
22    Moore           142,528    141,373   38,526      1,154
22    Reed            142,458    104,196        0     38,261
23    Ortiz Jones   2,481,192    544,523    3,024  2,028,187
23    Abuabara
23    Escuder           8,454      2,985        0        926
23    Madrid
23    Valdez
24    McDowell         67,351     73,140        0      7,531
24    Olson           861,905    357,238   20,000    504,667
24    Valenzuela      333,007    191,231   33,956    141,776
24    Biggan           62,887     58,333   27,084      4,554
24    Fleming          16,813     16,414      300        398
24    Vega
24    Fletcher        122,427     35,099      823     87,327
25    Oliver          325,091    195,265    2,644    129,826
25    Sloan           136,461     54,257        0     82,204
26    Ianuzzi          72,607     56,912   42,195     15,695
26    Pruneda          30,117     15,546   16,000     16,935
31    Mann            170,759    126,616        0     45,580
31    Jangigian        36,127     27,383   14,681      8,743
31    Hanke            46,390     35,111        0     11,278
31    Imam            207,531     20,461  100,000    187,070
31    Grimes           15,300          0        0     15,300
31    Young            50,939     14,430        0     36,508

In the Senate primary, there’s MJ Hegar and there’s everyone else. Her totals above understate her lead in the money race, because VoteVets will be spending on her candidacy as well. I would have thought Royce West would have raised more, and I thought Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez might have done better as well, but here we are. I do think the eventual nominee will be able to raise plenty of money, and will likely get some national help as well. For sure, we know Hegar is on the DSCC’s list; whether that transfers to someone else if she falls short remains to be seen.

I’ve expressed some skepticism about Jessica Cisneros in her primary against incumbent Henry Cuellar, but she’s proven she can raise money – in fact, she outraised him for this quarter, though obviously Cuellar still has a big cash on hand advantage. I can’t say I’ve ever been enthusiastic about her candidacy – she seemed awfully green at the beginning, and as someone who had moved back to Laredo to run this race she didn’t strike me as the kind of candidate that could give him a serious challenge. But man, Cuellar is a jackass, and I’m sure that’s helped her in the fundraising department. He’s also now got some national money coming in, which suggests at least a little case of the nerves. This is the marquee race that’s not in Harris County for me, though I will reiterate what I said before about taking out Cuellar versus taking out Eddie Lucio.

Sima Ladjevardian made a big splash in CD02, and around the same time as her announcement of her Q4 haul the DCCC put CD02 on its target list, adding it to the six other seats (CDs 10, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 31) that were already there. I assume the two are related, though Elisa Cardnell keeps chugging along.

Even though there was a long history of Democratic challengers to Republican Congressmen not raising any money, we all got used to the idea of our candidates breaking records and putting up very impressive totals in 2018. Look at the January 2019 summary that I linked to above, which adds it up for the cycle. Even candidates in completely non-competitive districts were topping $100K, even $200K or more. So maybe some of the totals you see here have you a bit jaded, like “oh, sure, we can raise money now, we’re good at that now”. If that’s what you’re thinking – and I don’t blame you, I feel that way too – I invite you to look back at the January 2018 summary, which is the point in time from that cycle that we’re in now. Look in particular at CDs 03, 10, 22, and 24, where candidates this time around have in some cases done better by an order of magnitude than their counterparts – who in some cases were themselves – did two years ago. Look at Julie Oliver in CD25 – she hadn’t even cracked $20K at this point in 2018. We are in such a different world now.

I could go down the list and look at all the race, but you can see the totals. There are no surprises here, in the sense that the candidates you’d expect to do well are indeed doing very well. Only CD31 is underperforming, at least relative to the other districts, but Christine Mann has stepped it up a bit and Donna Imam is willing to throw some of her own money in the pot. With the DCCC jumping into CD02, we’ve already expanded the field, and with the numbers so far it will be easy to expand it further. If this all still feels a little weird to you, I get it. Things were the way they were for a long time. They’re not that way any more, and I for one am glad to adjust to that.

After-deadline filing review: Congress

Dec 12th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Let’s continue our walk through the filings. I’m going to take a look at some of the interesting Congressional races, skipping over the ones we just looked at.

CD01: It’s still not remotely competitive, but I once again want to salute Hank Gilbert for fighting the good fight against the preposterous Louie Gohmert. Seriously, if you saw a character based on Gohmert in a TV show or movie, you’d be complaining about what an insulting and outdated stereotype of a Texan he was. If only. Anyway, Hank’s candidacy is a reminder that good people do exist everywhere, and that Louie Gohmert is also complicit in Trump’s Ukraine-related crimes.

CD03: In the end, Tanner Do did file, joining Sean McCaffity and Lulu Seikaly. Not a top tier race, but on the radar.

CD17: Rick Kennedy is running again. He’s joined in the primary by David Jaramillo and William Foster. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pour one out for Chet Edwards.

CD21: It’s Wendy Davis and Jennie Lou Leeder, and that’s it. I’m actually a little surprised no one else jumped in, though the way Davis has been crushing it at fundraising, as well as her name brand, it’s not that surprising.

CD23: Basically, it’s Gina Ortiz Jones and a bunch of people who have not established much of a presence in the race. I do not understand why Rosey Abuabara has not filed a finance report. Liz Wahl, the first person connected with CD23 this cycle, did not file.

CD24: We’re familiar with the main players in this group – Kim Olson, Candace Valenzuela, Crystal Fletcher, Jan McDowell, John Biggan. I still feel like we could have won this seat last year with a stronger nominee. As long as we avoid that mistake this time, we should have a great shot at it now.

CD25: Julie Oliver and Heidi Sloan, and that’s it. Another not-top-tier race, but still one to watch.

CD31: All five of the people mentioned here, plus one more, filed. I would really like to see at least one of them post a strong Q4 finance report.

Incumbents: We know about the challenges to Reps. Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee, and of course the Henry Cuellar/Jessica Cisneros matchup is the marquee attraction. Other incumbents who face primary opponents: Joaquin Castro (CD20, two opponents), Eddie Bernice Johnson (CD30, three opponents), Marc Veasey (CD33, one opponent), Filemon Vela (CD34, two opponents), and Lloyd Doggett (CD35, one opponent). I do not expect any of them to have any trouble. All other Dem incumbents are unopposed in March.

Other races: None of these outside-the-Houston-area districts are competitive, but they all have contested primaries anyway: CDs 12, 13, 14, 26, 27. They contain a mix of new and repeat candidates. Godspeed to them all.

Next up, state offices (may break that into two posts), and judicial races. Let me know what you think.

October 2019 campaign finance reports: Congress

Nov 5th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Moving on to the Q3 FEC reports, we again have new candidates making their appearance. The January roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle, the April report is here, and the July report is here. For comparison, the October 2017 report is here. The FEC summary page for Congress is here and for the Senate is here.

MJ Hegar – Senate
Chris Bell – Senate
Amanda Edwards – Senate
Royce West – Senate
Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez – Senate
Sema Hernandez – Senate
Adrian Ocegueda – Senate
Michael Cooper – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Henry Cuellar – CD28
Jessia Cisneros – CD28

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Elisa Cardnell – CD02
Sean McCaffity – CD03
Tanner Do – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Mike Siegel – CD10
Pritesh Gandhi – CD10
Shannon Hutcheson – CD10
Rick Kennedy – CD17
Jennie Lou Leeder – CD21
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Nyanza Moore – CD22
Derrick Reed – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Liz Wahl – CD23
Rosey Ramos Abuabara – CD23
Jan McDowell – CD24
Kim Olson – CD24
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Crystal Lee Fletcher – CD24
John Biggan – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Heidi Sloan – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Christine Eady Mann – CD31
Murray Holcomb – CD31
Dan Jangigian – CD31
Eric Hanke – CD31
Donna Imam – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar         2,058,080  1,211,904        0    893,657       
Sen   Bell            206,629     94,894   10,000    111,734
Sen   Edwards         557,430    219,645        0    337,785
Sen   West            347,546    172,926  202,162    376,782
Sen   T-Ramirez       459,442    233,953        0    225,489
Sen   Hernandez         7,551      7,295        0      3,891
Sen   Ocegueda          1,048        262      900        786
Sen   Cooper

07    Fletcher      1,789,359    391,448        0  1,439,978
32    Allred        1,705,723    355,711        0  1,453,457  

28    Cuellar       1,099,758    400,328        0  3,244,434
28    Cisneros        465,026    173,329        0    291,697

02    Cardnell        177,733    115,886        0     61,847
03    McCaffity       155,404      7,080        0    148,324
03    Do               16,947     15,725        0      1,221
06    Daniel          111,009     70,409        0     40,600
10    Siegel          355,691    207,532   20,000    161,650
10    Gandhi          527,967    209,989        0    317,978
10    Hutcheson       534,515    161,665    4,000    372,850
17    Kennedy          31,298     15,079   11,953     17,646
21    Leeder           15,697     14,509        0      1,188
21    Davis           940,581    336,645    8,863    603,936
22    Kulkarni        817,139    299,219        0    545,687
22    Moore           112,311    102,863   12,915      9,447
22    Reed            114,137     60,268        0     53,868
23    Ortiz Jones   1,652,739    303,861        0  1,440,396
23    Wahl              9,000      6,521    1,000      2,478
23    Abuabara
24    McDowell         57,515     52,519        0     18,316
24    Olson           567,394    241,708   20,000    325,685
24    Valenzuela      201,377     92,814        0    108,563
24    Fletcher        122,427     35,099      823     87,327
24    Biggan           45,893     35,999   13,834      9,894
25    Oliver          223,417     75,836    2,644    147,580
25    Sloan            56,043     23,125        0     32,918
26    Ianuzzi          67,828     35,539   47,604     32,288
31    Mann             95,449     58,685        0     38,200
31    Holcomb          66,610     57,770        0      8,840
31    Jangigian        23,265      2,248    1,500     21,016
31    Hanke            18,302      9,098        0      9,203
31    Imam             60,441      7,088        0     53,353

There’s a lot here – so much that it’s taken me this long to post, and so much that I thought about splitting this into two separate posts – but let’s start with the Senate candidates. MJ Hegar has been in the race the longest, and she has raised the most, matching her performance from the previous quarter. All the other candidates (save for the low-profile no-hope types, and hey isn’t it nice to finally see Sema Hernandez file a finance report?) entered during Q3 and their finance reports can be graded on a curve as a result. That said, time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, and John Cornyn keeps on raising piles of money, so everyone needs to kick it up a notch or two. It was nice that every candidate at the Texas Signal candidate forum was asked about their path to victory, but raising money is a key part of that, even if it is a tacky subject to bring up. We’re going to need to see a lot more in the January reports.

Incumbents Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred are doing what they need to do. Their potential Republican opponents are raising a bunch of money, but they’re staying ahead of them, which they need to keep doing. Jessica Cisneros has done well in her challenge to Henry Cuellar, who is made of money, and she is getting some national press for her efforts. I still don’t know how much either money or national attention will mean in this race, but I do know that if she does win, it will be a very big deal and will make a lot of Dem incumbents look over their shoulders.

There are a number of new names on this report. Hank Gilbert is not going to win in CD01 because it’s a 70%+ Trump district, but Hank is a mensch and Louie Gohmert is a death eater from a hell dimension, so the least I can do is note that Hank is taking on the thankless task of challenging Gohmert. We noted last time that Lorie Burch has ended her campaign in CD03, and now several others have stepped in. Sean McCaffity, who is off to a strong fundraising start, and Tanner Do have reports for this quarter, and they will have company next time. Chris Suprun, whom you may remember as one of the wannabe faithless electors from 2016, has entered the race. He had also run in the CD27 special election last year, and had a brush with the voter ID law before that. Plano attorney Lulu Seikaly is also in the race, and I apologize to her for making her follow that.

Elsewhere in new candidates, Heidi Sloan has entered the race in CD25. Julie Oliver, the nominee from 2018, is well ahead of her fundraising pace from that year, so we’ll see how that goes. There are now a bunch of candidates in CD31, though I can tell you now that that article from August is out of date. I’ll have more on that in a separate post. Among the newcomers here are Dan Jangigian, Eric Hanke, and Donna Imam. Jangigian may have the most interesting resume of any Congressional candidate in recent memory – he’s a onetime Olympic bobsledder, and acted in the legendary bad movie The Room. He was subsequently portrayed in the movie The Disaster Artist, the movie about the guy who made The Room, by Zac Efron. And now he’s running for Congress. What have you done with your life?

A more familiar candidate making her first appearance here is Wendy Davis, who took in nearly a million bucks for CD21. That’s one of several top target races where there’s a clear frontrunner, at least as far as fundraising goes, which is a change from 2018 when most of the hotter primaries had the money more widely dispersed. Gina Ortiz Jones did even better, topping $1.6 million already. Rosey Abubara, who I thought might give her a challenge, has not filed a report. Candace Valenzuela and Crystal Fletcher have raised a few bucks in CD24, but Kim Olson is well ahead of them both, while Sri Kulkarni is lapping the field in CD22. The exception is in CD10, where all three candidates are doing well, but 2018 nominee Mike Siegel is a step behind Pritesh Gandhi and Shannon Hutcheson.

Rounding up the rest, Elisa Cardnell stepped it up in CD02, but faces a steep challenge as Dan Crenshaw is one of the biggest fundraisers in Congress now. Stephen Daniel is doing all right in CD06. I know their totals don’t look like that much compared to some of these other folks, but remember how much time we spent in 2018 talking about how rare it was for any Democratic challenger to raise as much as $100K for an entire cycle? We’ve come a long way. And I’m still hoping for either Rick Kennedy to start doing more in CD17 or for someone else to jump in, even if that race is a big longshot. The Quorum Report made my heart flutter with a teaser about a poll testing former CD17 Rep. Chet Edwards against carpetbagger Pete Sessions. I don’t know if this is a real thing or just someone’s idea of a cool thought experiment, but I’d be all in on another run by Edwards. We’ll see if there’s anything to it.

Try, try again

Sep 8th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

A lot of women ran for office as Democrats in 2018. A lot of them won, and a lot of them who didn’t win are trying again.

[Gina Ortiz Jones isn’t] the only woman who’s back for a second round.

In April, MJ Hegar, who got within three points of defeating U.S. Representative John Carter, an eight-term incumbent in a deep-red district north of Austin, announced she would challenge U.S. Senator John Cornyn. Julie Oliver, who lost Texas’ 25th Congressional District to three-term Republican Roger Williams, despite cutting a 21-point spread down to just under nine, is also running again. So is Kim Olson, the Democratic challenger who lost to Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. This time she’s running to represent Texas’ 24th Congressional District, which spans the suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth.

At least six Democratic women who lost their bids for the Texas Legislature in 2018 are running again in 2020, says Monica Gomez, the political director at Annie’s List, a political action committee that supports progressive women running for state and local office in Texas. Two more are coming back to run for different seats. “We haven’t seen this kind of rededication to running again in Texas since Annie’s List was founded in 2003,” Gomez says. She estimates that in the organization’s history, a total of 10 candidates have run again after a loss. “So eight in one cycle is a very large increase.”

The record-breaking number of first-time female candidates who ran for office in 2018 led to a record-breaking number of first-time female officeholders: 127 women now serve in Congress, the most ever and a 23-seat increase from 2017. Despite these gains, women remain grossly underrepresented in public office at every level. Women hold 24 percent of seats in the 116th U.S. Congress and 29 percent of statewide executive positions across the country. Texas sends 38 people to Congress; in 2019, only six of them are women. In the Texas Legislature, women hold 43 of 181 seats, or 24 percent—five points lower than the national average.

Why are women persistently underrepresented in politics? Over the past decade, a body of research has established that when women run, they win elections at the same rate as men. Melanie Wasserman, an economist at UCLA who studies occupational segregation by gender, wanted to learn more. So in 2018 she analyzed the political trajectories of more than 11,000 candidates over two decades in local California elections, focusing on how candidates responded after losing an election. She found that women were 56 percent less likely than men to run again after a loss, noting what she called a “gender gap in persistence.”

“If I make the assumption that the candidates who drop out have similar chances of winning as those that run again, then the gender gap in persistence can explain quite a lot of the gender gap in officeholding,” Wasserman told the Observer. “It would increase female representation among officeholders at the local level by 17 percent.”

In other words, perhaps we should be paying more attention to the losers—the women who run, lose, and choose to run again.

I’ve discussed some repeat Congressional candidates before; several of the second-shot brigade are men as well. The candidates mentioned in this story are:

MJ Hegar (Senate, previously CD31)
Gina Ortiz Jones (CD23)
Kim Olson (CD24, previously Ag Commissioner)
Julie Oliver (CD25)
Sarah DeMerchant (HD26)
Joanna Cattanach (HD108)

Others for Congress that could have been mentioned:

Jennie Lou Leeder (CD21, previously CD11)
Adrienne Bell (CD14)
Jan McDowell (CD24)
Christine Eady Mann (CD31)

As for the other legislative candidates, I’d say Eliz Markowitz (SBOE in 2018, HD28 in 2020) counts, and it looks like Natali Hurtado is doing it again in HD126. That leaves four more, going by Monica Gomez’s math, and I have no idea who they may be. Please leave a comment if you do know.

Not all of these candidates will make it to November, of course. All except Markowitz and Hurtado have at least one primary opponent as far as I can tell. McDowell and Olson are running for the same seat (with others in the mix as well), Leeder is unlikely to make it past Wendy Davis, and of course Hegar is in a pleasantly crowded field. I’ve been idly wondering if she might do what some had been crying for Beto to do and get back into the race she’d run last time, in CD31 where no other candidates of her stature have emerged yet. I doubt it – she’s still a strong contender for the Senate nom, and if anyone else has had the same thought as I have, I’ve not seen them express it – but anything is possible up till the filing deadline. DeMerchant will face off against Suleman Lalani and Rish Oberoi, while Cattanach has Shawn Terry. Point being, there are still more chapters of this story to be written. The next one will be out in December.

UPDATE: Forgot about Sema Hernandez for the federal races. Still don’t know who the other four repeat legislative candidates are.

UPDATE: I have been informed about a couple of “try again”-ers for this year. Brandy Chambers (HD112) and Celina Montoya (HD121) are both repeat candidates from 2018. Ann Johnson (HD134) ran in 2012 and is running again.

How many Congressional seats are really in play for Texas Dems?

Aug 30th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

By one measure, more than you probably think. From Jonathan Tilove of the Statesman:

Last weekend, I read an interview in Salon with Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va.

She is also an election analyst whose forecast of big Democratic gains in the 2018 midterm election was uncannily, uniquely accurate. She is now using the same model to forecast that any Democratic presidential candidate will win a minimum of 278 electoral votes in 2020 against President Donald Trump, eight more than the 270 needed to win.

But even more interesting to me, she is predicting that, if the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the D-trip, as she and others commonly call it — applies resources generously and wisely, it could flip nine Texas House seats in 2020, half again as many as the six seats the DCCC is now targeting.

In addition to what will be open seats now held by Republicans in the 23rd Congressional District, where Will Hurd is not seeking reelection; the 22nd, where Pete Olson is retiring; and the 24th, where Kenny Marchant joined the Texodus; the DCCC is also setting its sights on the 21st, held by freshman Rep. Chip Roy; the 31st, held by veteran John Carter; and the 10th, which now belongs to Austin’s Michael McCaul.

But Bitecofer also includes three U.S. House districts on her list that are not now on the DCCC target list — the 25th Congressional District, where Democrat Julie Oliver is making a second run at incumbent Roger Williams, also of Austin; the 2nd, held by freshman Dan Crenshaw; and the 3rd, held by another freshman, Van Taylor, who I’ve never before heard mentioned as potential Democratic target of opportunity.

In fact, according to Bitecofer, nine of the Democrats’ 18 best chances for pickups in 2020 congressional races nationally are in Texas, which makes it, in her estimation, Ground Zero next year.

I interviewed Bitecofer on Monday and realized that it’s not so much that her analysis flies in the face of conventional wisdom about Texas politics, as it flies above it.

[…]

Under Bitecofer’s model, it doesn’t really matter if the Democratic congressional candidate is a fire-breathing progressive or a milquetoast moderate, as long as they remind voters that the election is all about Trump.

Bitecofer exudes confidence in her forecast.

Of McCaul, she said: “He’s a dead man walking if the DCCC drops money in that race, and then it doesn’t really matter who the Democrats nominate. Other handicappers will have it as `lean red’ when they do their races, and I will have it as ‘will flip’ if the DCCC has put it on its list.”

Bitecofer’s model is based on the number of college-educated voters in a given district, and it happens that Texas, being a mostly urban and suburban state, has a lot of them. You can read Tilove’s interview with her, or that Salon article, or listen to this interview she did on The Gist with Mike Pesca, but that’s the basic idea behind it.

Bitecofer’s model is alluring, but note the assumption of the DCCC targeting the district. That means pouring money into it, which also means that the Democratic nominee is already doing well in the fundraising department. By that reckoning, we need to dial back the enthusiasm a bit. CD03 has no candidate at this time now that Lorie Burch has ended her candidacy. CD31, which is on the DCCC list, doesn’t have a proven candidate yet. The two who filed Q2 finance reports have raised a few bucks, but the fact that freshman State Rep. James Talerico had been encouraged to run tells me this one is not at all settled. Elisa Cardnell in CD02 has raised some money and has been campaigning for months now, but Crenshaw has a national profile and a sheen from his Saturday Night Live appearance that he’s doing his best to tarnish but is still there. Julie Oliver is off to a nice start in CD25, but that’s the district of the nine with the weakest overall Dem performance from 2018. I’m still enough of a skeptic to think those numbers matter, too.

(Note also that Bitecofer does not include CD06 in her list. Beto did slightly better there than in CDs 03 and 25, and I personally would be inclined to think it’s a bit more reachable, but as of the Q2 reporting period there wasn’t a candidate yet. Minor details and all that.)

Anyway, I’d say that Dems are in a strong position in CDs 10, 21, 22, 23, and 24, and we’ll see what happens after that. For what it’s worth, just flipping those five seats – and can we take a moment to acknowledge how amazing it is that one can write such a thing and not feel ridiculous about it? – would make the Congressional caucus from Texas 18 Dems and 18 GOPers. That’s not too shabby.

July 2019 campaign finance reports: Congress

Jul 22nd, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

Let’s move over to Congress and the Senate, where there are several new candidates, with more on the way. The January roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle, and the April report is here. For comparison, the July 2017 report is here. The FEC summary page is here.

MJ Hegar – Senate
Chris Bell – Senate
Amanda Edwards – Senate
Sema Hernandez – Senate
Adrian Ocegueda – Senate
Michael Cooper – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Henry Cuellar – CD28
Jessia Cisneros – CD28

Elisa Cardnell – CD02
Lori Burch – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Mike Siegel – CD10
Pritesh Gandhi – CD10
Shannon Hutcheson – CD10
Jennie Lou Leeder – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Nyanza Moore – CD22
Derrick Reed – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Liz Wahl – CD23
Rosey Ramos Abuabara – CD23
Jan McDowell – CD24
Kim Olson – CD24
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Crystal Lee Fletcher – CD24
John Biggan – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Christine Eady Mann – CD31
Murray Holcomb – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar         1,029,038    481,087        0    595,433       
Sen   Bell
Sen   Edwards
Sen   Hernandez
Sen   Ocegueda            638         15      500        623
Sen   Cooper

07    Fletcher      1,149,351    245,963        0    945,455
32    Allred        1,122,389    250,636        0    975,198  

28    Cuellar         722,816    243,234        0  3,024,586
28    Cisneros        147,266     21,799        0    125,466

02    Cardnell         77,407     42,968        0     34,439
03    Burch            46,595     45,690   19,649          0
06    Daniel
10    Siegel          246,978    108,466   30,000    142,003
10    Gandhi          342,539     78,308        0    264,230
10    Hutcheson       324,312     47,984        0    276,327
21    Leeder           10,864      7,202        0      3,657
22    Kulkarni        420,824    103,170        0    345,421
22    Moore            73,705     68,118    5,500      5,586
22    Reed
23    Ortiz Jones     587,527     82,359        0    596,686
23    Wahl              7,399      3,473    1,000      3,926
23    Abuabara
24    McDowell         40,036     31,500        0     21,856
24    Olson           303,218    103,267   24,500    199,950
24    Valenzuela       81,728     51,557        0     30,171
24    Fletcher        105,930      5,370        0    100,560
24    Biggan           24,407     23,422    9,134        984
25    Oliver          121,508     12,966    2,664    108,542
26    Ianuzzi          57,883     26,228   40,886     31,654
31    Mann             42,305     20,648        0     23,094
31    Holcomb          36,225      6,892        0     29,332

This was drafted before Amanda Edwards and Sen. Royce West announced their entries. Edwards now has an FEC link but hasn’t done any reporting yet. She can’t transfer money from her City Council campaign account as noted before, but can refund money to her donors and ask them to redirect it to her Senate campaign. West has $1.4 million in his state campaign account. I’m pretty sure he can use that money for the federal election, which puts him into the top spot in the money race for now. MJ Hegar’s million-dollar haul would be great for another Congressional run, but it’s no great shakes for a statewide contest. She wasn’t in for the whole quarter, though, so let’s see how she does now. Chris Bell was raising some money via an exploratory committee before he made his entry official, but I can’t figure out how to find that data. Sema Hernandez, who has now been a candidate for Senate in two election cycles, still does not have an FEC report filed from either cycle. That’s despite having a a donation link that goes to ActBlue, which provides all required contribution information to candidates every reporting period. For those of you who may wonder why I never bother to mention her when I write about the Senate race, now you know why. I’ll think about taking her candidacy seriously when she does the same.

Freshman Reps. Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred are doing what they need to do, though Fletcher may need to step it up further as her opponents are more active so far than Allred’s are. I’m really curious about the primary fight in CD28. Rep. Henry Cuellar clearly knows how to raise money, and he’s already sitting on a big pile, but Jessica Cisneros took in that $147K in only four weeks’ time. I think she’ll have bigger challenges than financial ones, but at least she’ll have the resources to run a real campaign.

Including Wendy Davis in CD21, there are four Congressional candidates who are new or new to me: Derrick Reed, Pearland City Council member, running in CD22; Crystal Fletcher, attorney, in CD24; and Murray Holcomb, surgeon, in CD31. Reed entered in July, so he has no report. Fletcher posted some nice numbers in CD24, in a field with some strong candidates. Holcomb only started raising money on June 12, so that’s not bad at all for less than three weeks. Christine Mann is the experienced candidate in CD31, but keep an eye on Murray Holcomb. It’s very possible that the DCCC or other groups are still recruiting for that race, but it looks like we may have a contender.

Overall, things look pretty good from a Dem perspective. Gina Jones picked right up where she left off in CD23, raising that amount in about half of the allotted time period. Rosey Abuabara may provide a challenge to her, but so far at least the field she faces looks less fierce than it was last year. Sri Kulkarni and Kim Olson are off to roaring starts, with Candace Valenzuela and newcomer Crystal Fletcher doing all right. I don’t know how Nyanza Moore managed to spend nearly all the money she raised, but that’s not a sustainable pace. CD10 is looking a bit like CD07 did in 2018, and that’s with newcomers Pritesh Gandhi and Shannon Hutcheson outdoing holdover Mike Siegel. Julie Oliver and CD25 aren’t on any watch list, but that’s a better haul than she had in any quarter in the last cycle, so good on her. Elisa Cardnell isn’t getting the traction Todd Litton got, but I have hope that she’ll start to take off.

On the flip side, I have no idea what Lorie Burch is doing in CD03. She raised very little and spent most of what she had this period. I hope that’s a temporary situation. I was really wishing for more from Jennie Lou Leeder in CD21. I always wanted Wendy Davis to jump in, but having a strong alternate option, not to mention a reason to start working now, was appealing. We’ll have to wait and see how Stephen Daniel does in CD06, and while Murray Holcomb is off to a nice enough start I’d still like to see someone really break out in CD31. We have the targets, we need to be aiming at all of them.

The repeat Congressional candidates

Jun 3rd, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

The Trib looks at how the key 2020 Democratic Congressional campaigns are shaping up. Short answer: There are a number of repeat candidates from 2018.

Mike Siegel

The situation in the 24th District is emblematic of a broader trend across the state. As national Democrats zero in on Texas as the linchpin of their 2020 strategy, the primaries are filling up with a mix of candidates who ran last time and new entrants encouraged by the post-2018 political landscape.

In four of the six targeted districts, the Democratic nominees from last time are already running again. In a fifth district, the runner up from the Democratic primary is pursuing a rematch.

The primary fields are still taking shape, but one of the early choices they are presenting to primary voters is crystallizing: Should voters stick with the candidate who helped move the needle last cycle or go with someone new to finish the job?

The candidates who are running again seem cognizant of the dynamic. Mike Siegel is making a second bid for the 10th District after coming within 5 percentage points of U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, last year. He said it is a “fair question” for primary voters to ask whether he is ready for the higher stakes this time around.

“I hear that potential criticism, and I’m taking action to show that this campaign is going to fulfill the requirements for a campaign that is a national battleground, that will be tightly contested, where you’re going up against a very well-funded incumbent,” Siegel said.

Siegel entered the 2020 primary in January, 11 months earlier than when he got in the race last time — and he quit his job days later. He raised more in the first quarter this year than he did during the entire 2018 primary. And he said he is working to professionalize his campaign in ways that he was unable to during the last election cycle, when he could not find a campaign manager.

The newcomers in the 10th District include Austin doctor Pritesh Gandhi and Austin lawyer Shannon Hutcheson. Both quickly proved their seriousness, with Gandhi raising about $161,000 within the first month of his candidacy and Hutcheson raking in over $165,000 after just two days as a candidate.

In Marchant’s district, the Democratic field numbered at least half a dozen candidates earlier this year — one has since dropped out. Those remaining include [2018 candidate Jan] McDowell; Kim Olson, the 2018 nominee for agriculture commissioner; John Biggan, the runner-up to McDowell in the 2018 primary for the seat; and Candace Valenzuela, a Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board member.

[…]

There is one targeted primary that bucks the trend — sort of. In the 21st District, where national Democrats are hoping to knock out U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, 2018 Democratic nominee Joseph Kopser made clear early on this cycle that he would not run again. But a 2018 candidate from another congressional district, Jennie Lou Leeder, is running for the 21st District this time, and another not-so-newcomer is considering a campaign: Davis, the 2014 gubernatorial candidate.

A lot of this we already know, but there are a few new bits. My first thought in reading this was “wait, what is that fifth district and who is the candidate?” I emailed author Patrick Svitekl and was informed that it’s CD31, where primary runnerup Christine Eady Mann has officially entered the race. We didn’t get much of an impression of Dr. Mann in 2018 as MJ Hegar kind of dominated the coverage from the beginning, but she raised a few bucks in her short campaign and has a good profile for this race. As with all the other targeted districts I can’t imagine she’ll have the primary to herself, but we’ll see how she does. Assuming MJ Hegar is at the top of the statewide ticket, whoever does run in CD31 ought to get a bit of a turnout bonus, so hopefully she can capitalize on that.

I skipped over paragraphs about CDs 22 and 23, where the former is Sri Kulkarni and Nyanza Moore, and the latter is Gina Ortiz Jones and no others that I know about at this time. I’d seen an announcement on Facebook about Shannon Hutcheson but don’t know anything more about her than what you can find there. John Biggan was the runnerup in the CD24 primary, but as Jan McDowell won it without a runoff that doesn’t mean much. He raised about as much as Christine Mann in a slightly shorter period of time. The really new name for me is Jennie Lou Leeder, who had been the Democratic candidate in CD11 in 2018. The southeast end of CD11 abuts CD21, and Leeder grew up in Llano, which is one of the adjacent counties (she now lives in Austin), so this makes some sense. For sure, CD21 is a very different district, as Beto O’Rourke got all of 21.5% in the deep red CD11. That said, Leeder, a former Chair of the Llano County Democratic Party, raised $85K in this impossible district (basically what Christine Mann and John Biggan raised in their primary races), which in context is pretty amazing. Until and unless Wendy Davis jumps in, she’s the biggest name in that race. And of course, with all these races, one or (probably) more others will enter. In 2018, some topflight challengers entered during Q3. I have a feeling that will be less likely this time, but we’ll see.

This is where I pipe up and note that while they are not currently on the DCCC target list, CDs 02, 03, 06, and 25 are all worth watching and should be competitive based on 2018 results. CD03 (Lorie Burch) and CD25 (Julie Oliver) also feature return candidates; CD02 (Elisa Cardnell) and CD06 (no one that I know of yet) will have new faces. Of the four, CD06 is most likely to slip onto a target list if 2020 is going well, but that first requires a strong candidate, and the other three won’t be far behind. In a really good year, all four will be on the radar if not on an official list. I can’t wait to see what the various models will be saying.

Ortiz Jones 2.0

May 17th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Gina Ortiz Jones is back for another go at CD23.

Gina Ortiz Jones

Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democrat who narrowly lost last year to U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, is running again.

Jones, a former Air Force intelligence officer, launched her long-anticipated 2020 bid Tuesday morning, setting the stage for a rematch in Texas’ most competitive congressional district.

“Last November, I came up a little bit short in my run for Congress — 926 votes — but I’ve never been one to back down because the promise of our country is worth fighting for,” Jones said in a brief video posted to Twitter.

Jones had been expected to run again after her razor-thin loss in November, when she declined to concede for nearly two weeks while all outstanding ballots were counted. Within several weeks of accepting defeat, she informed supporters that she was “very likely” to pursue a rematch.

She is the first major candidate to enter the 2020 Democratic primary in the massive 23rd District, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso and covers hundreds of miles of Texas-Mexico border. The field already includes Liz Wahl, the former U.S. anchor for Russia Today who quit live on-air in 2014.

This was expected – she kind of never stopped running after her close loss in 2018. The main question I have is how big the primary field will be this time around. In 2018, she had two opponents with establishment backing and fundraising chops, and wound up in the runoff with a Bernie type. Ortiz Jones starts out as the frontrunner, and she was a prodigious fundraiser in the last cycle, but this is a very winnable seat and there will be plenty of support available to whoever the nominee is, so I can’t imagine that Liz Wahl, who hasn’t raised anything yet, will be her main competition. Ortiz Jones herself didn’t get into the CD23 race till Q3 of 2017, so there’s still plenty of time for someone else to emerge. I’ll be very interested to see if she gets a relatively free shot at it.

To recap for the other races of interest:

CD02 – Elisa Cardnell is in.
CD03 – 2018 candidate Lorie Burch is in.
CD06 – I’m not aware of anyone yet. Jana Sanchez hasn’t given any indication she’s running. Ruby Woolridge made an unsuccessful run for Mayor of Arlington this year, which doesn’t mean she can’t or won’t try for this seat again, but does indicate she might have moved on.
CD10 – Mike Siegel and Pritesh Gandhi are in.
CD21 – Joseph Kopser is out, Wendy Davis is thinking about it, I’m not aware of anyone else.
CD22 – Sri Kulkarni and Nyanza Moore are in. Letitia Plummer, who lost the primary runoff to Kulkarni in 2018, is running for Houston City Council this fall. As with Ruby Woolridge, this doesn’t mean she couldn’t shift gears if that doesn’t work out, but she’d be on a tighter turnaround in that case, with the filing deadline in December.
CD24 – Kim Olson, Candace Valenzuela, and Jan McDowell are in.
CD25 – 2018 nominee Julie Oliver is in.
CD31 – MJ Hegar is running for Senate, and I am not aware of anyone else running for this at this time.

If you know of a candidate that I don’t know of, please leave a comment.

April 2019 campaign finance reports: Congress

Apr 29th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s April, and that means it’s time once again to review campaign finance reports for Congressional candidates. The January roundup is here, which closed out the 2017-18 election cycle; these reports are the first ones for the 2019-20 cycle. A list of all Texas Democratic Congressional candidate campaign reports is here. A few points to note before we get started:

– FEC reports are cumulative for the cycle, so each number reported – raised, spent, on hand – is the current total for the entire cycle. Other systems – for Texas, for Harris County, for Houston, for HISD and HCC – are for that period only, though the cash on hand total will be as of that report. The point here is that for that cycle, raised + loans – spent = cash on hand for FEC reports, but not for other reports. For other reports, subtract the amount spent from the amount raised, then add or subtract as needed from the previous report’s cash on hand amount, and you should get the current cash on hand amount. Unless there are loans involved, in which case it gets more complicated. Trust me on this.

– Cash on hand carries over from 2018, however. For candidates that ran in 2018, that means that the “raised minus spent” total needs to be applied to the cash on hand amount from the previous cycle, and the same process as described above for other systems is what you need to use.

– Some of these reports are broken out by cycle, so for some candidates who were also on the ballot in 2018 you can choose to see the 2017-18 cycle or the 2019-20 period. Others, like for Mike Siegel and Sri Kulkarni, are not. This may be a function of timing, as it was originally the case that only the winners from 2018 (Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred) were done this way, but now others are as well. If so, then this will eventually be how it is for Siegal and Kulkarni.

– The report below for MJ Hegar is her Senate finance report. Her Congressional finance report from 2018 is separate. She did carry over her cash on hand from that cycle, as noted above. If Joaquin Castro does run for Senate, the linked report below will not be the one used for his Senate campaign.

– Most serious candidates from 2018 appeared during Q2 of 2017, so the short list of candidates now is to be expected. Look for this list to grow in the Q2 and Q3 roundups. Some announced candidates, like Kim Olson and Candace Valenzuela in CD24, either did not do any Q1 fundraising or were not yet officially in the race.

I think that covers everything. Here are the reports:

MJ Hegar – Senate
Joaquin Castro – CD20/Senate?

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Todd Litton – CD02
Elisa Cardnell – CD02
Lori Burch – CD03
Mike Siegel – CD10
Pritesh Gandhi – CD10
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Nyanza Moore – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Liz Wahl – CD23
Jan McDowell – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
20    Castro           36,028     77,076        0     87,572
      Hegar             2,281     12,858        0     36,904

07    Fletcher        582,918     79,831        0    545,154
32    Allred          530,399    106,816        0    527,027


02    Litton            2,346     12,221        0     11,157
02    Cardnell         19,697      3,750        0     16,046
03    Burch            41,623     16,006   20,149     24,339
10    Siegel          143,232     44,081        0    102,641
10    Gandhi          162,380      5,320        0    157,059
22    Kulkarni              0     14,539        0     13,228
22    Moore            43,561     24,932        0     18,583
23    Ortiz Jones           0     14,828        0    103,518
23    Wahl              4,581      3,304        0      1,277
24    McDowell         15,193     13,515        0     14,998
25    Oliver           
26    Ianuzzi          47,731     12,465   40,695     35,266

New names here include Elise Cardnell, Pritesh Gandhi, Nyanza Moore, Liz Wahl, and Carol Ianuzzi. Mike Siegel and Sri Kulkarni are repeat candidates from 2018 that we have already noted. For the others, Julie Oliver is back, Lorie Burch is back, Gina Ortiz Jones is reportedly back, Jan McDowell is back and appears to be raising money as she never quite did in 2018. I don’t know if Todd Litton is back or not, but I included him here just in case. It’s possible there are some other active candidates among the no-money-raised reports included on the FEC summary page, but I’m not going to sweat that now. We’ll know much more when the Q2 reports come out. For now, this is what we have.

What about Wendy?

Mar 7th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

If not Beto and not Joaquin…

Wendy Davis

Wendy Davis of Texas said Tuesday she is considering a U.S. Senate run in 2020 but is waiting to see whether another high-profile Democrat, Rep. Joaquin Castro, goes through with challenging Republican incumbent John Cornyn.

Davis hasn’t run for office since badly losing the governor’s race in 2014 following her star-making filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in the Texas Capitol, catapulting her into the national spotlight and making her a prominent voice for women’s rights.

She told The Associated Press she has urged Castro to run, calling him “uniquely poised” in Texas to give Democrats a chance at winning their first statewide office in 25 years. Castro said last week he was giving “serious” consideration to a Senate campaign but set no timetable for a decision.

Davis said she wants him to decide soon so that someone else — including her — could step up if he sits out. She said she also discussed a Senate run with MJ Hegar, an Air Force veteran who last year lost a close congressional challenge near Austin.

“I’m proud of the way that all of us are working together to decide how can we best beat John Cornyn. What’s the best approach? Who has the strongest opportunity?” Davis said. “As we answer that question, we are going to circle behind that person and do all we can to support them — whether it’s me, whether it’s MJ, whether it’s Joaquin, whether it’s someone else. You are going to see us come together cohesively.”

See here and here for the background. The pro-Davis side is easy to see: She’s run statewide before, she has some name recognition, she has demonstrated fundraising ability, this is a good time for female candidates, and in the Gorsuch/Kavanaugh era being strongly pro-choice is more of an asset than it was four years ago. The downside is just as obvious, and it all basically boils down to the disaster that was 2014. To be fair, that was a national disaster for Dems, and at the very least the turnout issue should be muted somewhat in a Presidential year, especially with Trump on the ballot. She’d still need to convince people that she’s learned from that awful experience and would run a different and better campaign this time around. I kind of think she’s positioning herself as a fallback plan, which is fine. I too would prefer Castro or Hegar, but I’ve always been a Wendy Davis fan and I’m happy to see that she’s still in the game.

One more thing:

If she doesn’t go for Senate, Davis said it was unlikely she’ll run for Congress this cycle, pointing to no obvious seats around Austin for now.

Well, Mike Siegel is running in CD10. I don’t know if Joseph Kopser is up for another shot at CD21, but I’m sure the DCCC has been in touch with him. If MJ Hegar winds up running for Senate, that would open up CD31, though as an Austin resident Davis would be quickly painted as a carpetbagger. Maybe she could talk to Julie Oliver about what it was like to run in CD25. That’s a longer shot than these other three, but I bet Davis could raise some money and put a scare into Roger Williams. Just a thought.

January 2019 campaign finance reports: Congress

Mar 4th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

We come to the last of our January finance report roundups. The next one will be in April, for Congressional candidates, which will be our first indicator of who among the repeaters and the newcomers has gotten off to a fast start and who is still biding their time. This post covers the last three months of 2018, though as always remember that unlike other systems, the FEC reports are cumulative for the cycle. You have to compare to earlier reports to see how much was raised and spent in the period in question. Given that this period covered the month before the election, you will see from the vastly diminished cash on hand totals just how much was being spent at this time. As it should have been, of course.

Here are the July 2017 finance reports, here are the October 2017 finance reports, here are the January 2018 finance reports, here are the April 2018 finance reports, here are the July 2018 finance reports, here are the October 2018 finance reports, and here’s the FEC summary page for Democratic Congressional candidates in Texas.

Todd Litton – CD02
Lori Burch – CD03
Jana Sanchez – CD06
Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Steven David – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Vanessa Adia – CD12
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
Joseph Kopser – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Jan McDowell – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Linsey Fagan – CD26
Eric Holguin – CD27
MJ Hegar – CD31
Colin Allred – CD32
Dayna Steele – CD36


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
02    Litton        1,536,148  1,515,116        0     21,032
03    Burch           292,395    322,136   25,649     -1,278
06    Sanchez         734,004    707,924        0     58,590
07    Fletcher      6,226,876  6,184,824        0     42,067
08    David            34,332     30,263        0      3,565
10    Siegel          489,172    485,681   10,000      3,490
12    Adia            208,585    198,453        0      9,987
14    Bell            211,652    211,652        0          0
17    Kennedy         132,158    130,830   11,789      1,427
21    Kopser        3,251,295  3,241,756   49,231      9,538
22    Kulkarni      1,637,103  1,609,335        0     27,767
23    Ortiz Jones   6,216,644  6,098,297        0    118,346
24    McDowell        108,709     95,507        0     13,320
25    Oliver          645,926    645,926      644          0
26    Fagan           176,157    106,139        0     53,142
27    Holguin         200,712    198,801        0     -1,460
31    Hegar         5,122,102  5,069,600        0     47,481
32    Allred        5,972,679  5,869,234        0    103,445
36    Steele          902,066    901,866        0          0

Please note that some of those report links about will not take you directly to the candidate’s summary page. At this juncture, before any 2019-2020 reports are filed, candidate who span cycles will go to a landing page asking you to pick what cycle you want. That includes first-time-candidates-who-won, like Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, for whom the link will say that nothing from this cycle has been filed yet. You can then choose the 2017-2018 cycle from the dropdown and see the data I’m reporting on here.

I don’t know how a candidate can report a negative cash on hand balance. I’m just giving you what the website gave me. I tried in some previous posts to differentiate between the cash actually raised by the candidate and money that came from loans or transfers from committees like the DCCC, but that was too much work for this effort, so what you get in the Raised column is the top line number indicated by the candidate.

Reps. Fletcher and Allred start with fairly modest balances, but I’m not at all worried about that. Both will rake it in, as the Republicans try to win those seats back. Allred is already drawing interest, and I’m sure so is Fletcher, but if so I’ve not seen any stories about who might want to take her on. I’ll be honest, no names pop into my head as obvious challengers for her.

Mike Siegel and Sri Kulkarni are known to be interested in running again – Siegel is already a declared candidate, Kulkarni may be although I can’t independently verify that. Gina Ortiz Jones is acting like someone who may take another crack at it, though I’d expect she will have company in a primary, while Siegel and Kulkarni are more likely to have either a clear path or token opposition. MJ Hegar may run again or may run for Senate. I don’t know what Todd Litton, Jana Sanchez, or Joseph Kopser are up to, nor do I know about Julie Oliver or Lorie Burch. I also don’t know about Jan McDowell, but as CD24 is now firmly on the national radar, I’m 100% sure that other potential candidates are being courted, or making themselves known. McDowell may be a candidate next March, but I’ll be more than a little surprised – and disappointed – if she’s the candidate next November.

That’s it for this round of campaign finance reports. Tune in again in April for the first look at Congress 2020, and in July for the first real indicators of who’s got it going on for Houston City Council. Let me know what you think.

There sure was a lot of money spent on Congressional races in Texas

Feb 3rd, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

If we’re lucky, it will be the start of a trend.

Never has Texas seen as much money spent on Congressional campaigns as it did in 2018.

New campaign finance data shows that the state didn’t just beat its old campaign spending records for Congress, it obliterated them. More than $97 million was poured into the November general election in 2018 for the U.S. House. The previous spending record was in 2004 when just under $60 million was spent by candidates running for Congress in Texas.

The record spending for the state’s 36 House seats was spurred by Texas suddenly having a half dozen competitive races that became a key part of the national battle for the control of Congress. Three of those races accounted for nearly one-third of all the spending.

[…]

Overall, the 36 Congressional districts averaged more than $2.6 million spent per contest.

That spending doesn’t count candidates who lost in the primaries like Republican Kathaleen Wall, who spent $6.2 million of mostly her own money in a failed attempt to win the 2nd Congressional District primary in Houston. Despite not making it to the general election, Wall still ended up spending more money on her race than any House candidate in Texas. Republican Dan Crenshaw, a retired Navy SEAL won the 2nd Congressional District primary and defeated Democrat Todd Litton in November. Crenshaw spent almost $1.7 million on his campaign.

The 2004 election was the one following the Tom DeLay re-redistricting of 2003, so that money was being spent in the five Democratic-held districts where Republican challengers were seeking to oust the Dem incumbents with the help of the new, friendly map. In other words, the same basic dynamic of multiple competitive races, which led to a crap-ton of money being raised. I know people have a lot of negative opinions – for good reasons! – about money in politics, but the fact remains that money gets spent when there are competitive elections. When there are no competitive elections, much less money gets spent. All things being equal, I’d rather have the competitive elections.

Here’s the FEC summary page for Texas Democratic Congressional campaigns from 2017-18, and here’s the last roundup of reports I did, at the end of Q3. The three biggest-money races were the ones you’d expect – CDs 07, 23, and 32 – but as we know there were four other Dem candidates who raised over a million bucks for the cycle, and a lot more big-money primaries, of which CD07 was definitely one.

To me, the big under-reported story is in how much money was raised by candidates in “non-competitive” races. Dayne Steele, God bless her, raised over $800K. Julie Oliver, who was actually in a reasonably competitive race that no one paid attention to, raised over $500K. Candidates Vanessa Adia (CD12), Adrienne Bell (CD14), Linsey Fagan (CD26), and Eric Holguin (CD27), none of whom cracked forty percent, combined to raise over $500K. The candidates in the highest profile races brought in staggering amounts of money – and note that we haven’t even mentioned the candidates whose name rhymes with “Schmeto” – but I cannot overstate how mind-bogglingly impressive what these candidates did is. They deserve more credit for helping to generate and sustain the enthusiasm that led to the massive turnout and major downballot Democratic wins than they will ever receive. We should be so lucky as to have a repeat of this performance in 2020.

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