I answered the call to help get out the vote in Pearland today. OK, you’re right, I’ve been having post election withdrawal pains and needed a quick fix. I learned a lot today about our fellow Democrats to the south.Before, I was woefully ignorant.
First, this is just about as one-off a race as Nick Lampson’s.
The incumbent in HD 29 is (was) Glenda Dawson. She passed away this past summer. I imagine her state representative website is still up out of respect. Apparently she was well-liked in the district. So well liked that when it came time to re-elect her on November 7th, she won hands down. It was an issue in the election that her campaign was successful in sending out campaign flyers to households “touting her record” without mentioning the fact that she was indeed deceased.
So since the seat was won by a corpse, a well-liked corpse at that, a special election had to be called by Rick Perry.
Why not replace her on the ballot? They were chomping at the bit to replace Tom DeLay on the ballot until it became clear that in doing so, they would violate the US Constitution. But in this case it was cut and dried. They had a deceased candidate. No problem replacing her on the ballot, right? Chapter 145 of the Texas Election Code was written to cover this specific set of circumstances. Ah, but a re-read of the law reveals the dilemma: the candidate must die at least 74 days before Election Day. Representative Dawson died after a short illness, after the August 25th deadline (sorry, unintentional pun).
This presents a very uncomfortable problem to Republicans. Here we had the Democratic opponent, Dr. Anthony DiNovo, who was expected to poll in the 20% range, actually garner 40% of the vote in November. Perry called a special election to fill the HD 29 seat and not one, and not two, but three Republican opponents signed up to oppose our one Democratic candidate in the special election.
They split the Republican vote. What a colossal error.
So it’s a no-brainer here. The one who gets out the base vote, the voters who voted in November, is the one who wins the election. Dr. DiNovo has an excellent chance. The special election, being held during the holiday season, is expected to draw less than 10% of the voters to the polls. My guess is in the 4 to 5% range, the same as a hotly contested school board election.
So we have a real opportunity here. If you want to help out, they really could use your support. At this point, it’s helping to get out the vote. Calling the base and getting them to the polls. My friend muse has the details here on where you can go to help. I can personally attest that their call lists are first class. You talk to Democrats, and it’s fun to do that, especially if you can let them know that there is a special election – some don’t know – and that there is a Democrat running (and they don’t know that either).
Last and best. muse and I had a chance to talk at length with the DiNovo campaign manager, a singular young woman with very impressive skills. Her anecdotal information on Dr. Anthony Dinovo made both muse and I very happy that we had shown up to help in the campaign. Simply stated, Dr. Anthony DiNovo is a good and decent man whose life’s goal is to help people who would not otherwise be helped. This is the sort we need in Austin. I can think of no better replacement for a good and decent Republican representative, Glenda Dawson, than a good and decent Democratic state representative, Dr. Anthony DiNovo.
District 29 deserves nothing less.
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