State Party Chair Race Recap

This time next week we will either have a new chair or knock the term interim off someone’s title.

The initial goal was to get you the lowdown and recap the whole TDP Chair race, but alas after getting started there are over 1,000 posts from around the state on the whole race. My advice is to simply go to blogsearch and type in Glen Maxey, Boyd Richie, or Charlie Urbina-Jones, and search until your heart is content and make up your own mind on the race.

Over the weekend there have been some great pieces on the large and influential PPC numbers at Burnt Orange Report. Texas Kos has a great follow up story to mine on the 30-Day reports. T-Kos hits the 8-day financial statements with a magnifying glass, and most importantly for delegates, BOR has the schedule of the caucus.

Now that we are caught up, let’s go over where the race stands right now. I will source all my points in order to limit bias. Also comments will remain un-edited as always unless there are racial slurs or if there is unneeded language.

The race for State Party Chair began formally in December of 2005 when Boyd Richie had already committed to taking on then Chairman Charles Soechting. At that time Richie loaned himself $20,000 and began lining up endorsements from long time political insiders and candidates.

The beginning of the race started as anyone but Soechting, and after the April 22nd formal resignation of Soechting and appointment of Boyd Richie as interim chair of the state party the race took on a new face.

Charlie Urbina-Jones and Glen Maxey announced their intention to challenge Richie nearly three months after Richie had filed his loan. Maxey’s announcement came around March 3rd and Jones had no formal announcement but did file his first campaign report in March.

After being elected as interim chair, Richie activated the state party e-mail to hit once or twice a week and it’s press releases have been beefed up to nearly twice that until recently. Richie has also overseen a newly launched website that looks substantially better than the last but still is leaps and bounds behind our opponents across the aisle.

While Richie has been working in Austin, Maxey and Jones have been traveling the state campaigning for the position. Jones has focused his attention in West and South Texas and it appears as though Houston, and San Antonio have been his major urban focus.
Maxey has been traveling to El Paso, the panhandle, and large parts of rural Texas with an urban focus on Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth (see financial reports).

Going into the convention it appears it is a horse race between Richie and Maxey with Urbina-Jones a distant 3rd and Lakesha Rogers not even on the radar. There is also a whisper of a 5th candidate coming in last minute this weekend, but with the massive outreach done by all of the candidiates I doubt this will materialize.

Here is the over simplification of the three major campaigns and how they have self divided themselves: Boyd wants more of the current system with a major focus on field, Maxey wants to build the infrastructure through technology and broaden the field program outside of the urban areas, and Urbina-Jones wants field to focus on minority areas and generally wants new technologies but doesn’t think they will win elections on their own.

The candidates have done interviews on South Texas Chisme, Latinos for Texas, and Burnt Orange Report (Boyd Richie and Glen Maxey). STC seems to have endorsed anyone but Maxey, LFT has endorsed Maxey, and BOR is a group blog with Karl-Thomas Musselman being a stronger Maxey supporter.

As of today, Eye On Williamson County has a comparison on the amount of victories both Maxey and Richie have had over the past 30 years.

Based on the comments of this post I will do further research on the state party race, and JAB will be live-blogging the state party convention.