Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Our Local Election Results

There is good and bad news in the local election results.

The good news is that Senator John Cornyn and Representative Joe Barton retained their seats. The Texas Railroad Commissioner is arguably the second most powerful elected official in the state, and Commissioner Williams also retains his seat. The down ticket races pretty much went straight GOP. The Libertarians had a small but noticeable impact on the elections.

Now for the bad news. Kim Brimer, State Senator for SD 10 lost. This is unsettling. SD 10 is in Tarrant County. Tarrant County is the second most Republican county in the country, and Brimer lost. Wendy Davis said that she will support our RKBA, we will soon see.

Also losing was my favorite local candidate, Representative Bill Zedler. Bill lost to a Harris County ADA who had one heck of a lot of out of town and out of state money backing him. The ground game just could not compete with the high dollar ad campaign that was full of minor deceits and outright lies. A good man was defeated and Texas is the worse for it.

3 comments:

JT said...

The Libertarians had a small but noticeable impact on the elections.

One tiny slice of that was me. Knowing TX was in the bag for McCain, and not really fearing a Cornyn loss, I went Libertarian almost all the way down the ballot. I do admit that I would have felt guilty had Cornyn lost and contributed to another pickup by the Democrats, but I'm glad he prevailed. So did my state rep (incumbent GOP), by a landslide.

The one exception was in my congresscritter, where incumbent Democrat Ciro Rodriguez appears to be pretty popular (he went against the majority of the House and voted against the bailout). I really, really wanted him out of there though, when he demonized his GOP challenger Lyle Larson for "proposing a new 23% national sales tax" as if nothing else besides that would change. His ads of course quoted the FairTax website, but how many people who saw those ads were lazy enough to just say, "Larson's a taxer! Go Ciro!" and how many had the inclination to go read about the fact that as a mandatory condition of the new national sales tax is the complete and utter elimination of the federal income tax!?!? Whether the FairTax is a good idea is a worthy debate to have, but you can't begin to even think about it if you don't possess all the information.

I voted Larson and for the first time in my life donated money to a candidate because I just can't countenance those kind of shenanigans that prey on lazy people by using easily-controvertible but nasty-sounding falsehoods. It was for naught, as Rodriguez was re-elected by a 56-42 margin.

Rabbit said...

Didn't Wendy Davis make an attempt to keep gunshows out of Will Rogers CC?

I'm ticked at the Waco voters who kept Chet Edwards in his House seat with his attack ads against the Fair Tax.

Regards,
Rabbit.

John R said...

Yes, she did try to stop the gun shows at Will Rogers. She is going to be trouble in Austin.