Monday, March 2, 2020

Cuellar probably wins big (if the results are close, however....)


"Do not remove the ancient landmark,
Nor enter the fields of the fatherless;"
Proverbs 23:10

The Texas Observer has a write up on the Democrat primary in CD-28.  Interesting read, but mostly what you'd expect.  This nugget about Henry Cuellar's 2006 race...however...stands out (rather significantly):
While Cuellar may have been viewed as a turncoat by plenty of Democrats, many in Laredo were eager to have their first hometown congressman in 20 years. Laredo was becoming a verifiable boomtown thanks to its lucrative trade and energy industries, and business leaders wanted a champion in Congress.

Cuellar, who had nurtured relationships with the region’s power brokers and business elite for nearly 20 years, was the perfect fit. As he ramped up his primary campaign, he tapped into a ready-made coalition of Webb County’s bankers, ranchers, oil and gas barons, and trading moguls who eagerly pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into his coffers. Cuellar said he was better equipped to represent the new district and often quipped on the trail that “Ciro has done zero.”

Rodriguez won by a razor-thin margin of 145 votes, but Cuellar demanded a recount. Election officials found nearly 500 new votes in Webb County and neighboring Zapataenough to swing the election in Cuellar’s favor. The batch of new votes immediately prompted suspicions of vote tampering, evoking comparisons to the infamous “Box 13” ballot-stuffing scandal in South Texas that helped Lyndon Johnson win his 1948 Senate race. “There is no way on God’s green earth that 177 ballots showed up for Cuellar [in Webb County] and zero for Rodriguez,” Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, said at the time. “You have to look at this as one that will go down in Texas lore as a stolen election.”

Cuellar’s campaign declared victory. Rodriguez filed a lawsuit alleging voter fraud, which the courts eventually shot down. When all was said and done, Cuellar had eked his way into Congress by a margin of 58 votes.

Laredo had itself a congressman.

[Note: Emphasis added.]
Wow.

We said our piece about this race back in August.   We stand by it.  The TL,DR version is that we suspect, in a district that contains 70% of the Eagle Ford shale, Jessica Cisneros' support for the Green New Deal will play very poorly.

Thus, we suspect Cuellar wins fairly easily.

That being said, "we suspect" is not the same thing as "guaranteed outcome."

In the event this race does end up closer than expected, would anybody put...shenanigans...past the vote counters in Laredo?!?

We certainly wouldn't.

Bottom Line:  Keep an eye on this race tomorrow night.

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