This news broke late Friday.
Leading Democratic U.S. senatorial candidate Ricardo Sanchez announced Friday that he’s ending his campaign to replace retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
In a statement issued by his campaign to supporters, Sanchez said anemic fundraising and the loss of his house to a fire had led him to conclude that a statewide campaign was “impractical for me at this time.”
“After extensive consultation with my family … I have decided to put family first and I will therefore end my campaign for the 2012 U.S. Senate seat as of today,” he said.
Well, that answers my question. Sanchez’s campaign never really got off the ground, and a month ago his house burned down, which is a tough thing for anyone to overcome. As we know, a lot of people were unhappy with his candidacy in the first place. This isn’t really a surprise.
“Politics abhors a vacuum. Someone will step forward,” said Jeff Crosby, a longtime Democratic consultant. “Someone will step in; who, I don’t know.”
Southern Methodist University political science Professor Cal Jillson said the situation Texas Democrats find themselves in is indicative of the party’s decade of electoral futility in statewide races.
“It is another sign of what people have been talking about for a decade, a very thin bench,” Jillson said. “You have some attractive young people in the Legislature and in city government … but they don’t have statewide name recognition.”
There’s always John Sharp, isn’t there? Surely he’s tanned, rested, and ready by now. I have no idea if anyone else will run. I don’t know how much it matters at this point. As to what Professor Jillson says, this is why I have been talking about making way for new blood. I disagree with him about the need for statewide name recognition, however, because almost no one currently serving at the state level had it beforehand. Rick Perry, Susan Combs, Todd Staples, and Jerry Patterson all came from the Lege. David Dewhurst was just some rich guy with no prior electoral experience before he ran for Land Commissioner. Most of the Railroad Commissioners we have had in the past decade or more were appointed to the position by the Governor before they won an election for the office. Only Greg Abbott, who was a Supreme Court justice before he was AG, had statewide experience. The fact is that when the state is ready to elect Democrats, it won’t matter much where those Democrats come from. What might speed that up is getting some Democrats who might like to run statewide into Congress and the State Senate, where their fundraising bases can be maximized. No matter how you slice it, though, the path to a statewide office involves a really big last step.
In other primary-related news, there were a few more filings in Harris County on Friday, with two races now having third candidates in them. In HD137, the seat being vacated by State Rep. Scott Hochberg, attorney Gene Wu has made his entry into the race. I’ve met Wu but don’t know a whole lot about him. I do know that the court-drawn HD137 has an Asian CVAP of 12.0%, which is third highest in the state behind HDs 26 (23.8%) and 149 (13.8%), wihch may add an interesting wrinkle to the race. All data is taken from here. In case you’re curious, the top ten districts in Plan H302 by Asian CVAP are as follows:
Dist County Incumbent Asian CVAP
==========================================
26 Fort Bend Open 23.8%
149 Harris Vo 13.8%
137 Harris Open 12.0%
66 Collin V Taylor 9.7%
112 Dallas Chen Button 8.4%
135 Harris Elkins 8.2%
115 Dallas Open 7.9%
27 Fort Bend Reynolds 7.8%
67 Collin Open 7.8%
129 Harris J Davis 7.3%
Obviously, that is subject to change. The other race with a third candidate now in it is HCDE Board of Trustees, Precinct 1, Position 6, the post now held by Roy Morales. This is not surprising when you consider that the Democratic primary will decide the outcome. The third candidate is Dr. Reagan Flowers, who according to her press release is “Founder and CEO of CSTEM (Communications-Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics) a non-profit focused on improving education for underserved and underrepresented children.” You can read some of her writings here. I look forward to interviewing all the candidates in this race so I can figure out which one to vote for.
Otherwise in Harris County, things are pretty well covered. It looks like all of the 1st and 14th District Court of Appeals seats have challengers. The main down note is that other than Keith Hampton’s challenge to Sharon Keller, there are no Democratic candidates for Supreme Court or CCA. I suppose we could get a late filing or two tomorrow, but that’s not terribly encouraging.
Finally, here’s a list of Democratic filings in Fort Bend. I don’t know offhand if they have any races unfilled or not – I’m not sure when their District Attorney position is up, for instance. Again, the legislative seats are subject to change at the whim of the court. As, of course, is the whole unified primary itself, as it requires fairly swift SCOTUS action to not be scuttled by the calendar. For now, we’ll all just pretend that won’t happen.
UPDATE The District Attorney office in Fort Bend is not up until 2014. All offices except Tax Assessor have Democratic candidates filed for them so far.
Charles-I know you would report it is not your area of expertise or interest but honestly you should click http://www.harriscountygop.com and mention those filings also b/c all elections should be abt big picture, not one side. I read BOTH hcdp.org and harriscountygop.com for the latest filings regularly. You and your readers would be benefit from two sided comparisons and reports.
I was looking at Fort Bend earlier. They are missing Tax Assessor and 1 judge as of now. They got the rest of their county wides covered for ’12. There is of course 2 more state house seats to fill as well.
BTW, what’s with the ridiculously low number of challengers coming forward for state house districts in Harris? We got the two competitive ones covered (134 and 144) but where’s the crazy long shot challengers?
Thats a real shame, i was following Sanchez with interest, i thought i might make a real difference in local politics. But when you have a family disaster like that you can;t blame him from have to drop out.
Matt-The family disaster is the NO DEMO has won statewide office since like 1994 or it is possible Kuff will reporter after that one may have somewhere but this time is not it.