Annie’s List announced their first endorsed candidate for 2010 over the weekend. Now they have a second, and she’s in Houston. From their email:
Annie’s List is proud to announce our endorsement of Kendra Yarbrough Camarena for State House District 138 in Houston. Kendra is a life-long resident of the district that includes Spring Branch, Garden Oaks and the Oak Forest areas of Northwest Houston outside of Loop 610.
She is also a mother of two beautiful children, a highly regarded middle school teacher, a volunteer little league coach for her son’s team (Go Cardinals!), a life member of the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, a former member of the SDEC and certainly no stranger to the rough and tumble world of politics. Her father, Ken Yarbrough, held this seat in the 90’s, and while earning her degree at the University of Texas, she worked in the Capitol for an East Texas Democrat.
In recent elections, Democratic candidates have won increased support in HD-138 and Sheriff Adrian Garcia carried the district last year with 52.8% of the vote. And, hometown Democrats like Senator John Whitmire and J.P. David Patronella typically run well ahead of the Democratic ticket in the middle class swing precincts. It is also worth mentioning that Democrats actually perform better in non-presidential elections here where Republican straight ticket voting advantage is nullified.
Additionally, tremendous demographic changes are occurring in this portion of Houston (now a combined minority Voting Age Population over 50%), and mobile young professionals and GLBT families (getting priced out of the Heights and Montrose) are revitalizing older neighborhoods just outside Loop 610. All of that combined with the fact that the Republican incumbent, Dwayne Bohac, has never been forced to defend his extremist record against a well funded, hometown Democratic challenger, and it is pretty clear this race can be won.
Bohac has had challengers in the last two elections, Mark McDavid in 2006 and Ginny McDavid last year, but neither had any real funding. He also ran better than the average Republican in his district in each of those years, and he’s got strong ties to the district as well. And as for the assertion about straight ticket voting, I took a look at the 2008 and 2006 numbers, and this is what I got:
Year Straight R Straight D R Pct Bohac McDavid Bohac % ============================================================= 2006 5,412 3,975 57.7 7,087 4,308 62.2 2008 11,699 9,521 55.1 9,929 5,497 64.4
Those are the straight-ticket vote numbers in HD138, and the Bohac/McDavid numbers with the straight-ticket tallies subtracted. Dems actually closed the straight ticket gap somewhat last year, which I think is a tribute to the overall HCDP county coordinated effort. But by the same token, Bohac won a higher percentage of the ticket splitters in 2008 than he did in 2006. Convincing those voters to switch will need to be as big a part of this effort as getting out the base Democratic vote.
There’s an ActBlue page for Camarena, and Annie’s List will be matching contributions through June 30. They’re definitely out of the gate early, so we’ll see how successful the effort is to get a jump on fundraising.