Not everybody got the memo telling them to slow down for the summer. State Sen. Kim Brimer, R-Fort Worth, suddenly has all kinds of stuff messing up his vacation.
Most importantly, he's got an opponent. Fort Worth City Councilwoman Wendy Davis resigned from that job Thursday night and said she intends to run as a Democrat against Brimer. She's won five city council elections and her entire district is within the borders of the Senate district, according to her campaign. She'll make a formal announcement later on, but told her fellow council members in her farewell what she's up to.
Her announcement followed a skirmish over numbers.
First came a poll from the Lone Star Project — a pack of Washington, D.C., and Texas Democrats idled, temporarily, by congressional redistricting. They organized last year and started playing in Texas legislative races and claimed some of last year's wins in the House. Now they've released a poll saying Brimer — a senator since 2003 and a House member for 14 years before that — is relatively unknown in his own district. And they contend he's vulnerable to "an adequately funded mainstream challenger."
Their poll in SD-10 was done by Opinion Analysts of Austin; the firm interviewed 400 people in the district during the last week of May, and the margin of error is +/- 4.9 percent. They found 50 percent of the people in Brimer's district didn't know enough about him to rate him at all, and that fewer than 20 percent gave him a "favorable" rating. The numbers: 18.3 percent favorable; 25.1 percent Neutral; 7 percent Unfavorable, and 49.7 percent "Haven't Heard Of."
They also put stock in numbers that showed 27.4 percent of the voters would reelect Brimer, 25 percent preferred an unnamed Democrat, and 47.7 percent said "it depends."
That's where Brimer's consultants interrupt, saying the district is strongly Republican even when Democrats are doing well. In 2006, according to the Fort Worth-based Eppstein Group, Republican congressional candidates in the district got 58 percent of the vote against Democrats; statehouse candidates got 55 percent against Democrats, and the average statewide Republican candidate got 55 percent, even with Gov. Rick Perry's 39 percent showing included.
The district isn't as Republican as the rest of the state, but Republicans did pretty well, if you look at last November's numbers. Perry got 38.7 percent in Brimer's district and 39.3 percent statewide. Democrat Chris Bell did four percentage points better there than in the rest of the state, coming in with 34.4 percent of the vote, compared to 30 percent statewide.
• It's Déjà vu time. There's a substantial rumor that U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is going to come home and run for governor. And there's a UPS guy at the door delivering a book on women in public life by, erm, Kay Bailey Hutchison. Leading Ladies: American Trailblazers is a collection of stories about women who made history from different vantage points: in th e military, as First Ladies, journalists and writers, as activists, and so on. This is Hutchison's third book, and the second without a named co-author (she credits Howard Cohn as research and draft writer). The book's release is set for October. Hutchison toured some with her last book, when speculation about her running for governor (the last time) was high.
• Freshman Rep. Thomas Latham, R-Mesquite, wants another term in HD-101. Latham, who beat Rep. Elvira Reyna — a fellow Republican — to get to Austin, is a former cop and Vietnam vet. He'll likely have competition; the Mesquite Police Association withdrew its support for him earlier this summer — a result of what he called a dispute between rival police trade groups.
• Jim McGrody is officially in the race for Congress now; the San Antonio Republican wants a crack at U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-San Antonio. On his website, McGrody is keeping a tally of votes taken by Rodriguez and comparing how he himself would have voted. So far, the retired businessman reports, they disagree about 68 percent of the time. He's been talking about the race for some time and recently filed the necessary papers. Another Republican — Bexar County Commissioner Lyle Larson — has also been considering that race.
• Nelda Wells Spears picked up an endorsement from tax consultant and former state Comptroller John Sharp. Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton has also weighed in — he's with Spears.
She's the Tax Assessor-Collector in Travis County, a contest that usually wouldn't get our attention. But she's being challenged in the primary by former state Rep. Glen Maxey, an Austin Democrat who came up short in the race for state party chair last year. And, well, former statewide Democrats are playing. There's a tie to Sharp; Kelly Fero, a longtime Sharp confederate, is running Spears' campaign. Spears is touting her tax collection rate as the highest among the state's big counties. Maxey has said elsewhere that he thinks it's time for a change.