From Colin Allred:
Colin Allred
When Colin Allred, a 35-year-old former NFL linebacker-turned-congressional candidate, addressed two dozen student volunteers at a rooftop restaurant last week, he promised them that he knows millennials are more than avocado toast-eating social media obsessives.
“People think millennials just tweet … and complain, but you all are living proof that that’s not true,” Allred said. “You are the best part of this party.”
Allred — the newly minted Democratic nominee for a competitive House seat here— is part of a swell of young Democratic House candidates hoping to inspire higher turnout among fellow millennials in the midterm elections, when youth voting rates typically decline. At least 20 millennial Democratic candidates are running in battleground districts, a leap over previous cycles that could remake the party’s generational divide.
“I don’t recall a cycle with anything close to this number of younger candidates in recent times,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who served as the deputy executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Notably, younger candidates who actually have a good shot at winning – raising money, running professional campaigns.”
[…]
Allred’s youth and personal story appear to have made up for an initial lack of traditional campaign resources. Allred lagged behind his Democratic opponents in cash for a year and didn’t air a single TV ad before finishing ahead of them all in the first-round primary in March.
Allred — who blasted Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” in the car en route to his primary-night victory party — is a local high school football star who was raised by a single mom and made it to the pros before becoming a civil rights attorney. That makes him the “kind of candidate who has a compelling story that can meet the experience threshold” to defuse attacks on his credentials, said [consultant Zac] McCrary.
To Dan Crenshaw:
In a Republican Party in desperate need of younger, more vibrant voices, Dan Crenshaw might be exactly what the GOP is looking for.
When the 34-year-old who nearly died on a battlefield in Afghanistan six years ago surged to a stunning victory on Tuesday night, he didn’t just win the party’s nomination in a Republican Primary battle for Congress that few thought he could win. He became a potential star on the national stage because of his war-hero story and a charisma that is drawing younger voters.
“It’s so exciting to have fresh faces emerging like Dan who will lead the Republican Party forward into the next generation,” said Jack Pandol, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Wise political observers will start keeping an eye on Dan right now, because he has a bright future.”
I’ll stipulate that Crenshaw has more charisma than most Congressional candidates, but you’re going to need to do more to convince me than assert it in a news story that he will be more attractive to millennials who aren’t already Republicans than some other Republican. Millennials are more associated with Democrats than older generations, in part because millennials are a lot less white than older generations. Charisma is only worth so much; at some point, you have to speak to the issues the voters care about. I haven’t seen anything about Crenshaw to suggest he’s all that different from other Republicans on matters of substance, but the campaign is still young.
(For what it’s worth, CD02 Democratic candidate Todd Litton is 47. Older than Crenshaw, but himself also considerably younger than the average member of Congress.)
As for Allred, the issue as always is less persuasion and more engagement. If millennials turn out, he’ll get plenty of their votes. How well he, and every other Democrat, does on that score is the big question.
CD-32 has changed a lot since 2004 when Sessions and Frost dueled it out and Pete won by 10pts. Lot of new housing put in the inner Dallas part of the district. If Colin can get these voters out of their lofts and apartments and to the polls he has a good chance. Same with the Village apartments corridor area east of SMU. Colin has a pretty strong ground game.
Sessions will count on running Colin is a liberal Pelosi clone ads. He can still count on the GOP strongholds of the Park Cities, Preston Hollow, and most of Far North Dallas and west side of Richardson. He will likely dictate whatever the Dallas GOP does in the field.
Has changed enough to defeat Pete? We’ll see.
Don’t let the door hit the baby boomers on their way out.
They lack ideas and balls
Joe besides Joe who else is smart and full of ideas?
Who else besides Joe lacks balls ?
Hopefully city council will do something besides finger painting and neutering animals.
I could make Houston leadership look stupid and lazy in 2019 just like I did in 2015.
It’s not that hard to do.