In case you missed it last night on Houston PBS’ Red, White, and Blue, the two candidates for Harris County District Attorney made a joint appearance. And while it wasn’t officially a “debate”, it was as good as one and better than most. If you are interested in this race, I encourage you to watch it and form your own opinions about it. It is only 29 minutes long and is chock full of information.
I thought that overall, Gary Polland and David Jones did a good job of bringing out relevant information. Obviously, Polland is a Lykos supporter and asked a very irrelevant question about “judicial bypass”, trying to get that issue on the table for Republican voters. But beyond that, it was informative. If you ask me who “won” it, I’d give the edge to Lykos because she came armed with facts and was able to refute most of the charges that are leveled against her. But Anderson held his own and wasn’t embarrassed, although I was surprised to learn that he sat in on a presentation from DA Lykos about the “trace evidence” or “crack pipe residue” program that is controversial and didn’t object to it at the time. Interesting.
On to campaign finance. Here are the bottom line numbers from the reports:
What I find more interesting in these reports are (a) the large contributors and (b) the total number of contributors. Here are the large contributors:
I have asked the Anderson campaign if Richard Anderson is related to Mike Anderson and will update this if I get a response (UPDATE: not related, friends from law school). Prolific GOP contributors Bob and Doylene Perry have donated $55,000 to DA Lykos. And while Mr. Anderson has raised a considerable amount of money in a short time, most of it is from large donors. DA Lykos has far more individual, small contributions – her report lists 25 pages of contributions to Mr. Anderson’s 13. Which prompts me to ask: where are the contributions from the angry ex-ADA’s (or current ones)? You’d think from reading comments on blogs and at Chron.com there would be thousands of small donations to Mr. Anderson – but it isn’t so.
Here are the reports so that you can read them yourself:
Mr. Anderson:
Mike Anderson Campaign Finance 12-31-2011
DA Lykos: