Political Parlor: Dewhurst a No-Show at Early Senate Forums
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst entered the GOP race for U.S. Senator a month ago, but he's not making the rounds at early candidate forums. Photo by Christopher Kosho for KUT News.Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Not all the political news in Texas concerns Rick Perry. There’s also a race for the U.S. Senate on next year’s ballot.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst officially announced that he was running for the GOP nomination to fill Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s seat about a month ago. The announcement could be described as “below the radar,” making the first announcement in a video on his website. Since then, the Dewhurst bandwagon has been rolling along almost in “stealth” mode, with the Lieutenant Governor choosing not to participate in some early candidate forums.
In this week’s “Texas Political Parlor,” KUT’s Ian Crawford and Jason Embry of the Austin American-Statesman discuss Dewhurst’s decision not to participate in some of the early Senate forums.
Ian Crawford: Jason, you wrote this week that Mr. Dewhurst has been absent virtually all of the candidate forums early on. How’s that going down with some of the GOP faithful?
Jason Embry: Not too well. Of course you know, I mean the people who come out to these forums, a lot of them have been held on the weekend, Saturday nights. This is a very small percentage, even of the primary electorate. But these are people who actively engaged. They spend a lot of time on social media and that sort of thing — not all of them, but some of them do. So these are people who can certainly create buzz, one way or another. And the buzz so far is, “Where is David Dewhurst?”
Crawford: Does he even really have to do anything in the early going? I mean, he is the one with the big name recognition right now.
Embry: Well, he is. But how many times have we seen candidates who lose because of complacency? He does have to get out there and earn this nomination, and I think he will…sort of on his schedule, which is often how we see Dewhurst do things at the Capitol. Right now, you’re just not seeing publicly a lot of work on his part, in terms of going out and being in front of voters, and certainly not with his opponents. He may be spending a lot of time raising money behind the scenes and that sort of thing. We will know that soon enough. But he is not spending a lot of time out there, just directly interacting with voters that we can tell.
You can here more of the discussion by clicking on the audio player at the top of this post.
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