Posted on 12/13/2006 4:43:43 AM PST by Froufrou
Former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez completed a stunning political turnaround Tuesday with an upset win over incumbent Republican Henry Bonilla that topped off the Democratic takeover of Congress. Rodriguez overcame a huge financial disadvantage with the help of national party officials, who overhauled his campaign and spent aggressively on his behalf.
Bonilla, a 14-year incumbent, phoned Rodriguez to concede at about 9 p.m.
Rodriguez arrived shortly after that at the Harlandale Civic Center, which was packed with more than 300 screaming supporters.
After slowly working his way through the crowd to the stage, he declared victory — which came on the heels of two Democratic primary defeats in 2004 and earlier this year in the neighboring District 28.
"I think we have a real mandate," he said. "We needed to make sure we worked on raising the minimum wage. We're also going to take care of prescription drug costs. And, by God, we're going to do the right thing by our veterans."
The election sends Rodriguez back to Congress after a two-year hiatus prompted by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature redrawing of the state's congressional districts in 2003.
His victory leaves Democrats with 234 seats in the U.S. House, Republicans with 200. A seat in Florida remains contested with the Republican candidate ahead and expected to win.
Tuesday's runoff stemmed from the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last June that Texas Republican leaders breached the Voting Rights Act by slicing 100,000 Hispanics from the district in their 2003 remap. A three-judge panel answered by removing several largely Anglo Hill Country counties and pulling heavily Hispanic South Bexar County into the district.
The move put Democrats on equal footing with Republicans and increased the Hispanic population to 61 percent.
Bonilla blamed his defeat partly on the court-ordered changes in a speech Tuesday night to about 75 supporters in the lobby of the building housing his North Side campaign headquarters.
"They moved the goal post on us further down the field, and we couldn't score again and again," he said.
After his concession speech at 9:30 p.m., he mingled with supporters and thanked them for their efforts.
Early Tuesday night, it became clear that the San Antonio Republican lost Bexar County for the first time in his political career, and the news didn't get much better.
Bonilla also lost ground in what had been his West Texas stronghold. Only five weeks ago, he carried Dimmit, Culberson, Presidio and Brewster counties in the seven-way special election, but he lost all four to Rodriguez on Tuesday.
Phil Ricks, Bonilla's spokesman, conceded early in the evening that the campaign had lost the ground war, at least as far as early voting.
"I think the other side was much more organized in getting the early vote out, and that's why they sought extra days of early voting," he said.
Soon after Gov. Rick Perry set the runoff date, the League of United Latin American Citizens sued and eventually wrangled three extra days of early voting before dropping the complaint.
Vanessa Gonzalez, spokeswoman for Rodriguez, said the former four-term congressman's campaign had placed heavy emphasis on coaxing voters to the polls early.
She also said the early results Tuesday indicated District 23 would join the Democratic trend that hit Nov. 7.
"People realized the only way to change things was to go out and vote," Gonzalez said.
Andy Hernandez, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a former Democratic National Committee staffer, said Rodriguez's victory was in step with last month's Democratic upheaval.
"You have to see this as part of the national trend where Republicans lost in swing districts," he said. "This anti-Republican trend, which Hispanics had a big part in, played out here."
But Democrats almost didn't have a shot at the seat. On Nov. 7, Bonilla came within a single percentage point of an outright majority, which would've allowed him to avoid a runoff.
Bonilla came into the runoff with $1.6 million in the bank and the advantages of incumbency — a familiar name across the sprawling district and list of projects for which he'd secured federal funding.
Rodriguez hobbled out of the special election nearly broke and with a reputation as a less than savvy campaigner.
But he had a name that registered in Bexar County and South Texas, and soon he had the interest of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. After testing the water with polls, the organization wound up spending more than $900,000 on mail-outs and television ads.
When national Democrats came on the scene, Rodriguez's campaign was transformed from a largely all-volunteer effort to a more professionalized operation.
The race quickly turned bitter.
Rodriguez accused Bonilla of slashing veterans' health benefits and voting against a $1,500 bonus for troops active in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For his part, Bonilla questioned Rodriguez's judgment over his support for repealing a law allowing the use of secret evidence in deportation cases, saying it would have led to the freeing of suspected terrorists, and for accepting a $250 contribution in 1998 from a man later convicted of illegal business transactions with Libya.
Andy Hernandez said Bonilla's accusation and the TV ad that followed might have hurt Bonilla, not Rodriguez. "It just wasn't credible."
Richard Langlois, chairman of the Bexar County Republican Party, blamed Bonilla's fall in Bexar County on his supporters staying home Tuesday.
"Obviously, it was voter apathy," Langlois said. "Obviously, something happened."
You put your finger on the real question: "Where did Bonilla's voters go?"
Thanks for posting the numbers -- quite startling.
Seven-term Republican incumbent Henry Bonilla lost to former U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez in a race that had angered some as it was held on December 12, which marks Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of the most important dates in the Mexican calendar.
That was seen by some as a Republican ploy to depress the Hispanic vote in a bid to benefit the conservative Bonilla, a strong supporter of President George W. Bush. (from today's NYT report of the Rodriguez victory over Bonilla)
Republicns would be best advised to cooperate with Democratic efforts in the Congress next year to improve the voting process and to provide more polling places so that voters don't have to wait in line for 45 minutes or more to choose candidates. Voters will remember again and again if the R's attempt to pull similar voter suppression stunts when the Congress reconvenes.
South Texas is the Democrat stronghold in Texas. Now, tell me again why they have always voted Democrat? Most of them are actually kind of funny. They laugh when they add mamasita to their Income Tax as a deduction even though mamasita lives in Mexico, as they claim that the IRS will not look for them. They're right. All they have to do is bring mamsita across the border and claim she is living with them. They know more about which laws to break than you can even throw a stick at. They could care less about what Americans want. Read their "whine" stories as they are all about Me,me,me.
South Texas is the Democrat stronghold in Texas. Now, tell me again why they have always voted Democrat? Most of them are actually kind of funny. They laugh when they add mamasita to their Income Tax as a deduction even though mamasita lives in Mexico, as they claim that the IRS will not look for them. They're right. All they have to do is bring mamsita across the border and claim she is living with them. They know more about which laws to break than you can even throw a stick at. They could care less about what Americans want. Read their "whine" stories as they are all about Me,me,me.
" every time he complained, another batch of voters got tired of it. "
This could be where Bonilla failed. He ran a pretty hot spot about Ciro 'aiding and abetting terrorists.'
I've know plenty of Hispanics who would cheat their own family, but you'd better not question their integrity.
Well, I don't know, I guess it depends on how much you care and the value you place on voting. I stood in line for about 2 hours in 2004 and didn't whisper a complaint. I didn't feel suppressed. Depressed, maybe a little, but suppressed, I'd say not. I didn't like it, but I still did it because I thought it was important and I learned a long time ago that sometimes something worthwhile isn't always easy. So, to be honest, based on my experience, 45 minutes isn't really too bad.
I remembered that experience in 2006, but it didn't stop me from voting the straight 'R' ticket, because those candidates best lined up with my views on the various issues.
Bonilla had never won more than 30% of the Hispanic vote. I'm not sure what the numbers are this year, but I'd be surprised if he got 10% in the runoff.
" Hispanics voted much more like African Americans. "
I think there may be more AA Republicans than you realize. NAACP has had some nasty puclicity in recent years and it's a known fact that the med school has racial preferential treatment guides.
Many AA's here frown on what they themselves call n*****s. I was at the Cosby live show when he first delivered his stunning challenge to the Black community to stop blaming white people, etc. He got many, many standing ovations.
I take it that you want the R's to continue their voter suppression stunts by limiting the number of polling places available for ballots to be cast on election day?
Jeb Bradley, Charlie Bass, Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons, Lincoln Chafee, Mike DeWine and many others that I wouldn't call conservatives lost too.
It's not a left shift. It's an anti-Republican shift.
Everyone, right/left/middle is sick of the GOP for their own unique reasons.
The GOP overestimated the power of pork and incumbency combined with what's going on in Iraq.
Just be honest with us and most of all yourself. What you really want is for it to be "easy". If there is even a hint at there being any amount of "work" involved (like taking a little time), can't have that. You're defending laziness, nothing more.
Hispanics voted 69% Democratic (most of the 30% who voted Republican are Cuban), when only 55% voted Democrat in 2004. That's a 14 point shift in two years towards the Dems in the fastest growing demographic in the country. My guess is that if you exclude Cubans (a demographic that isn't growing), Dem performance is growing much faster than that.
Then again, we lost many "true conservatives", people like Rick Santorum, George Allen, Conrad Burns, John Hostettler, Jim Talent, J. D. Hayworth, and now Henry Bonilla. We're not doing ourselves any favors if we live in denial, writing ourselves notes that we didn't really "lose" anything, just like we did before the election when the polls were telling us what was going on but we all "knew" they "just had" to be wrong. If we're going to bounce back from this disaster we're going to have to start with seeing like it is and telling it like it is, and get focused on coming up with a winning strategy for '08, or we'll be writing posts to each other then about how it isn't so bad that we're looking at inaugurating President Hillary or President Obama in a few months.
You make my point well. There is an across the board disgust with the GOP right now.
The liberals and 'Rats are going to be energized for '08 in a manner that hasn't been seen for awhile. They're going to take this momentum they've built and use it to dump more conservatives and/or Republicans the next time around simply because they'll be reading the message that we're overlooking. I know this is a message we don't want to hear, especially on FR, and the natural, understandable tendency will be to blow it off and try to spin it away (as well as kill the messenger with name-calling and taunts like "Defeatist!", or "Go back to DU!"). But, I'm telling you, if we insist on trying to fool ourselves yet again, we're going to be going down the same path, or worse, in '08.
We also passed some nanny-state non-conservative issues that brought out the liberal voters, things like the anti-smoking issue and the minimum wage constitutional amendment (the latter being the absolute worst way to do it).
Some conservative ballot issues passed nationwide, but others failed badly. The defeat of the SD abortion law, and the parental notification shoot-down in CA, were real shockers.
Sherrod Brown's commercials lamenting the loss of jobs standing in front of boarded-up factories and businesses were powerful and effective. He tapped a simmering unease and discontent that conservatives/Republicans didn't (couldn't?) effectively blunt. The 'Rats played it very smart this last cycle. They correctly identified the things people were unhappy about or wanted to change, and cast themselves in the role of the party to do the things people wanted. They painted the Reps/conservatives as the people who had caused the state of affairs that gave rise to the discontent. We need to learn our lesson from this. We ignore it at our peril.
"I think there may be more AA Republicans than you realize. NAACP has had some nasty puclicity in recent years and it's a known fact that the med school has racial preferential treatment guides.
Many AA's here frown on what they themselves call n*****s. I was at the Cosby live show when he first delivered his stunning challenge to the Black community to stop blaming white people, etc. He got many, many standing ovations."
You ARE aware that the percentage of African Americans who voted for Democrats increased in this election? Also of black candidates running for statewide or national offices, 13 black Democrats ran and 7 won while 3 black Republicans ran and zero won.
Not a good trend.
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