GOP incumbent John Cornyn is a dud candidate and only won in 2002 because his opponent, former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, ran a "Bush Lite" campaign and it was a difficult year for Democrats anyway. Some polls show Cornyn consistently under 50% approval and that his challenger, Rick Noriega, a veteran of Afghanistan and opponent of the Iraq war, behind by single digits, only four in some polls. Yet according to my sources--local Democratic fundraisers and local candidates who are expecting to win because Obama will bring out African-American votes in Dallas and Houston--Noriega has a money problem. So maybe if the Noriega campaign is not getting funding from national sources, he could use some help from grassroots.
This is a winnable race. Ron Kirk only lost by about eight percentage points and many thought he could win. That was in a year when the Texas Democratic party fielded what they thought was a "trifecta", a Hispanic candidate for governor, a black candidate for U.S. Senator, and a popular white guy for Lieutenant Governor (the most powerful state office).
It did not work for reasons that Scott McClellan has recently explained and some of us noticed at the time.
But Texas U.S. Senate races, in my opinion, need to be intense.
Cornyn stood with John McCain and Pastor Hagee recently when Hagee endorsed McCain. It's on YouTube.
Cornyn was once a Texas Supreme Court justice, around the time the Court started siding with business and insurance interests. Ron Kirk never exploited that angle. Noriega should. It started with a case that revolutionized insurance law in this state. By removing the possibility of punitive damages for denying claims except in cases where the plaintiff could show intentional malicious conduct, the law changed such that insurance companies in effect faced no risk for denying claims. The worst that could happen was that they would have to pay the claim. Cornyn led the charge in changing what we once had--some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the nation. He is a stooge of big corporations and insurance companies. Most of the leading newspapers in this state have noticed this. But the Democratic party seems not to have noticed this as an issue. But even without that, the GOP is in trouble here.
As I have mentioned here before, we would likely have elected a Democratic governor here in 2006 if Kinky Friedman had not been in the race. And I think we can elect a Democratic U.S. Senator if the party and grassroots will get behind Noriega.
Note: This could be the biggest upset of 2008. And one of the biggest upsets of 2006 was one I predicted, that of Nancy Boyda over Jim Ryun in Kansas, another race that deserves attention in a red state.
Here is the website:
http://www.ricknoriega.com/