By Bill Burch
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas The Grass Roots Institute of Texas posted 31 wins in its first campaign season. These include 14 statewide office holders and 17 State Representatives. To get the message out GRIT sent a net of almost 50 million emails on behalf of the candidates. This endeavor took 100s of man hours & had an in-kind contribution value of almost $700000.
G.R.I.T. knew that all the statewide office holders it supported would likely win but our plan was to get the message out about each of our statewide office holder candidates along with some of the State House races.
We felt that if the voters saw how great the Republican statewide office holders are in comparison to the Democrats they would go solidly Republican.
We believe that this effort played a role in many of the wins in Texas.
As has been mentioned in the past we put forth a major effort in gaining the Hispanic vote.
We often said that one win would be an anomaly. Two or more would be a trend. How about five plus two African American & two Hispanic wins in Congressional seats?
These are the big wins in that now the Democrats are going to be forced to
defend their remaining Hispanic seats and Republicans will go after them.
This gives the Democrats far less money to spend.
Our efforts were but a part of the puzzle. We had really great candidates who ran great campaign.
Steve Munisteri as the Chairman of the revived
Republican Party of Texas was tremendous.
Comptroller Susan Combs did a great job with the Victory 2010 effort.
And were it not for the Tea Party and 9-12 Project groups educating people and holding rallys to get people energized none of this would have been possible.
So whats next for GRIT? We are not resting on our laurels.
GRIT is preparing its legislative package while working to increase and
organize our membership. Additionally we will be expanding out next year to other states.
Mr. Bill Burch is Chairman of G.R.I.T (Grass Roots Institute of Texas).
