As noted in the update and comments to Wednesday’s post about our first Democratic candidate for Governor, we now have a second such candidate, Tom Wakely. PDiddie brings word of Wakely’s announcement, which he made on Down with Tyranny, a more nationally-oriented blog. Wakely ran against Rep. Lamar Smith in 2016, and had been running against him again this year – he filed a Q2 FEC report, and the title of his website, which you can see via Google search for “Tom Wakely”, is “Tom Wakely to run against Lamar Smith in 2018”. The site is now just a placeholder, presumably awaiting a redesign for the change in focus of the campaign, so you’ll have to wait a bit to see what it looks like. For now, if you want to know more about him, go read his announcement or this Gilbert Garcia column from last year about his initial campaign against the odious Smith:
Tom Wakely
How else to describe a Bernie Sanders devotee who helped César Chávez organize grape boycotts in the 1970s, became a Unitarian Universalist pastor in the 1980s, ran a jazz club in Mexico in the 2000s and now uses his white-brick North Side home as a veterans hospice?
Wakely, 62, kicks off his general-election campaign Saturday afternoon at Tilo Mexican Restaurant (two blocks from his campaign headquarters), marking the white-bearded activist’s graduation from a self-described role on the political fringes to a spot closer to the center of the arena.
The only political office he ever sought prior to this year was a Wisconsin school board post he won 25 years ago. That probably would have been the end of his political career if not for the encouragement of Lucy Coffey, a World War II veteran who died last March in San Antonio at the age of 108. Coffey, the country’s oldest living female veteran at the time of her passing, befriended Wakely near the end of her life.
One day, Smith visited Coffey at the hospice run by Wakely and his wife, Lety, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico. After Smith concluded his visit, Coffey realized who he was, and remembered that he had voted against a 2010 bill designed to provide billions of dollars for medical treatment to 9/11 first responders.
“She was so upset with this guy,” Wakely said. “She said, ‘Someone needs to run against him.’”
Wakely decided to be that someone.
His primary victory over businessman Tejas Vakil provides Wakely the honor of being political roadkill for Smith, who has been mowing down Democratic rivals since Donald Trump was on his first marriage. Over a span of 30 years, Smith has never won a general election by a margin of less than 25 percent.
Wakely, it should be noted, did better than losing by 25 points to Smith – he lost by a bit more than 20 in 2016. Wakely notes in his announcement post that he “received more votes than any Democrat in the State of Texas running against a incumbent Republican member of Congress”. True, but that’s at least partly because he ran in the district that had more total votes cast than any other. The flip side of his statement is that Smith received more votes than all his fellow incumbent Republicans except for Kevin Brady (who was unopposed) and Michael Burgess, who was in the district with the second-highest overall turnout. If one wants to play the vote comparison game I prefer to do it by looking at how many votes each candidate from the same party received in a given district. Here’s how that looks in CD21:
Candidate Votes Pct
==========================
Clinton 152,515 42.1%
Garza 135,365 38.3%
Burns 133,428 38.1%
Johnson 131,683 37.5%
Wakely 129,765 36.5%
Robinson 129,520 36.8%
Meyers 129,412 36.8%
Westergren 126,623 35.8%
Yarbrough 122,144 34.6%
Right in the middle, literally the median Democrat. No obvious reason based on this to think he’d draw votes away from an opponent, but no reason to think he’d lose them, either. I admire his reason for running last year, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say for himself.
One more point to add, and that’s to correct something in PDiddie’s post, where he refers to the new law to ban straight ticket voting, which was HB25. There may or may not be a lawsuit against this, but none of it matters for 2018 because the law won’t take effect before then. Here’s the key passage in the text of the bill: “As soon as practicable after September 1, 2020, the Secretary of state shall distribute electronically to each county election administrator and the county chair of each political party notice that straight ticket voting has been eliminated”. In other words, we will still be able to vote a straight ticket next year. Possibly for the last time, but we will get at least one more go-round.
He sounds like a good person, but I seriously doubt he helped Cesar Chavez organize the grape boycott, 1966-1970. In 1970 he would have been 15 years old and 11 years old when the boycott begin.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-pawel-chavez-delano-grape-strike-20150916-story.html
Correction noted and post updated shortly with it.
I detect no enthusiasm for the two declared Democrats, Wakely and Jeffrey Payne, to this point. I certainly don’t blame anyone for being a little stand-offish about Mr International Leather — tolerance only extends so far on the center-left, as we all know — and I will gamble that Wakely, as a Berniecrat likely to draw withering attacks from corporate Clintonite Donkeys who despise both that caucus and the scorching criticisms Wakely makes of the party, has a 50% chance of running as an independent.
PDiddie one also has to wonder how some people label their involvement. I was very active with the farm strike and the grape boycott, but I would never say that I helped Cesar Chavez organize it. From what I gathered he was involved in San Antonio, which is possible as he could have participated in boycott of stores, or could have just refrained from eating grapes, even at a young age.