A brief look at the campaign finance reports of three Texas House seats in Harris County. I was surprised at the number of Republicans that are now paying for block walking. That used to be a Democratic Party thing.
HD-126 Open Seat
This is another race that Empower Texans and Texas Right to Life is trying to influence in a big way. In addition to the $12,800 you see on this report from Kevin Fulton, ET has previously given him $20,000 and TRL $15,000. Harless appears to be tapping into the network that his wife, the former representative of 126 built up. And Stanart is relying on the little fella to get her into a runoff, although Fulton might have blocked that by also paying him.
HD-134 Sarah Davis (inc) vs Susanna Dokupil
This race continues to be the highest profile House race in the area. Outsiders continue to dominate the funding of challenger Dokupil. Although Davis has a significant advantage in COH, that is meaningless when Gov. Abbott can drop any amount he wants at any time. Davis continues to dominate in the number of contributions from individuals within the district. The HPOU pickup is very nice for Davis.
HD-150 Valoree Swanson (inc) vs James Wilson
I’m not sure that we should call this a contested race but the incumbent did have someone file against her, so that is the definition. Swanson’s COH advantage comes from earlier contributions from Empower Texans, Texas Right to Life, Texans for Lawsuit Reform and the Briscoe Cain campaign. She paid $28,000 to 90 Degree Agency, which to the best of my knowledge provides paid block walkers. As a perennial candidate, Wilson’s path to victory has never been clear and he has a very uphill battle to climb.
She’s gotta take that sweet sweet police union money. Because there are unfunded pensions to protect.
Dan, so let me get this straight. In your worldview, a cop union contributes a couple grand and it outweighs every other donor that contributes to a campaign? So $2k from a single local union is more concerning than 80x that from another politician or the influence bought by a handful of big dollar contributors from outside the area? LOL
on the floor of the Texas house of representatives the firefighters were chastised during then pension bill for campaign contributions to members through the years . I guess it was not enough?
I remember the wife and I block walking for Dan Patrick way back when, is he a democrat? We did it for free on the premise that we’d get property tax caps at 3%….still waiting
Bettencourt and Patrick have a good thing going talking about lowering your property taxes , i supported them all along but until appraisal districts are changed you want benefit . but both of them will and have benefited on an empty promise.
Brings the “Hillary definition” to grass roots. In the case of buying elections you can easily tell which ones aren’t the “true grass roots” The candidate who’s doing their own “block walking” is the true grass roots. When you come late to meetings, duck out early, lie to the voters and don’t get a single bill passed, one can see the Hillary playbook in action.
If one wanted to talk about outsiders like ET being involved in the race it’s kind of hard to ignore the other side of that ET coin. ART is little different in operation and goals than ET except they mostly fund the candidates ET opposes. Candidates like Straus, Davis, Villalba Faircloth etc. Most of Davis’ contributions on that report have come from ART. IN fact ART gave more to Davis than ET gave to Dokupil.