{"id":34235,"date":"2018-12-15T17:54:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-15T17:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=34235"},"modified":"2018-12-15T17:54:19","modified_gmt":"2018-12-15T17:54:19","slug":"this-guy-got-the-texas-senate-31-outcome-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=34235","title":{"rendered":"This guy got the Texas Senate 31 outcome wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Jay Leeson is a Lubbock businessman and radio personality who writes something called “The Other Side of Texas.”<\/p>\n

The Amarillo Globe-News published a column from this fellow, who said in his essay that state Sen. Kel Seliger<\/strong> squeaked by in his March 2018 Republican Party primary race for re-election to the Texas Senate 31 seat.<\/p>\n

Actually, Leeson has it dead wrong.<\/p>\n

Seliger didn’t eke out a narrow victory. He won a three-way<\/em> contest against two capable GOP primary opponents — one of whom was well-funded by a far-right political organization called Empower Texans — by avoiding a runoff.<\/p>\n

Sen. Seliger won with about 51 percent of the ballots cast. The other two men — former Midland Mayor Mike Canon and Amarillo businessman Victor Leal — each collected less than half the total that Seliger rang up. Therefore, I would submit to you, dear reader, that Seliger didn’t squeak<\/em> by; he won big<\/em>. How? Because Canon and Leal both split what I consider to be the GOP nut-job<\/em> vote between them, leaving Seliger to harvest the rest of the mainstream Republican primary voters to win the party’s nomination to another term in the Senate, which Seliger first joined in 2004.<\/p>\n

Canon did lose narrowly to Seliger in a two-man<\/em> GOP primary in 2014. Leal brought significant name familiarity that threatened to chew into Seliger’s Amarillo and Panhandle base of support; Leal, though, didn’t register much in the campaign.<\/p>\n

The way I see it, Seliger’s primary victory over more than one opponent was far from a squeaker. He won decisively<\/p>\n

Seliger was re-elected in November by crushing a Libertarian candidate.\u00a0His path to re-election was made significantly easier by his smashing win in the GOP primary against two capable and articulate spokesmen for whatever arch-conservative doctrine they were espousing.<\/p>\n

There. I’m glad to have set the record straight . . . as I see it.<\/p>\n\n

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Jay Leeson is a Lubbock businessman and radio personality who writes something called “The Other Side of Texas.” The Amarillo Globe-News published a column from this fellow, who said in his essay that state Sen. Kel Seliger squeaked by in his March 2018 Republican Party primary race for re-election to the Texas Senate 31 seat. … Continue reading This guy got the Texas Senate 31 outcome wrong<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,18],"tags":[1582,1941,2646,8215],"class_list":["post-34235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-state-news","tag-empower-texans","tag-gop","tag-kel-seliger","tag-texas-senate-district-31-victor-leal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34237,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34235\/revisions\/34237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}