Yesterday, the Waco Tribune-Herald ran an interesting story about the race for Tom DeLay's old seat, Texas 22. The lead:

The national Republican Party has joined the fight to replace former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, donating more than $100,000 to the Republican candidate's write-in candidacy and sending Vice President Dick Cheney to a Houston fundraiser for her next week.

This is interesting -- and a sign that the national Republicans might not have up on Texas 22.

The story goes on to indicate that the money is going to be spent on GOTV operations -- which is consistent with the theory that internal numbers show that in a head-to-head matchup, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs runs well against Nick Lampson, and the strategy is to get her name into voters' minds so that it is effectively a head-to-head matchup.

For those of you who might not know, Texas Democrats challenged the right of Texas Republicans to put a new name on the ballot after Tom DeLay withdrew. The Democrats won in court, and so Democratic candidate and former Representative Nick Lampson is running without major party opposition. The Republicans, meanwhile, rallied around Houston city councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs as their write-in "nominee."

Despite the district's partisanship, which is heavily Republican, most analysts have written off this district. Lampson wins by default, right? However, this thesis seems inconsistent with the GOP sending money to Sekula--Gibbs -- not to mention donating the time of the the Vice President. You do not give sparse resources to a lost cause -- at least not if you are a strategic utility maximizer.

Scholars have found that the national political parties are indeed strategic in their allocation of resources. They tend not to give money to hopeless quests (although they do tend to over-donate to incumbents -- but Seuka-Gibbs is not an incumbent). You get money if the party thinks you can win with their help. What is more, scholars have found that the National Republican Campaign Committe is the most strategic of all the national committees. So, if the NRCC is chipping in $100K, then it must believe that the GOP still stands a chance in the district. How much of a chance is unclear -- $100K is just a drop in the bucket against Lampson's warchest, which by now must be at least $2 million. However, the NRCC doesn't give $100K because you have a pretty face.

Personally, this surprises me. My inference was that the seat was lost when the courts ruled against the GOP, and that the coalescing around Sekula-Gibbs was merely a way to establish a presumptive nominee for 2008. That Governor Rick Perry has scheduled a special election on November 7 to fill the rest of DeLay's seat seemed to me to be consistent with that (though certainly its intention was also to give Sekula-Gibbs a final, in the voting booth, name recognition bump for the general). However, you don't donate $100K of scarce party resources, and send Cheney down to Sugar Land, if your intention is to set yourself up for 2008.

So keep your eye on NRCC and RNC activity here in the next few months. If we see them sending more dollars and fundraisers into the district, then that is a sign that their internal polling is telling them that, even though Sekula-Gibbs is a write-in, she can still win the full seat. $100K is a sign that they think there might be a chance, and is therefore worth spending some dough to take a closer look. It is not, in itself, a sign that they believe victory is possible. If they send more money that way, that will tell you the GOP still thinks the seat is a toss-up.

Again -- this is not enough to allow us to confidently infer GOP intent. There are other red-flags about the seat's actual competitiveness that emerge from this article. Sekula-Gibbs' campaign manager had once boasted that they expected $3 million from the national GOP, which is a sign that the campaign manager might not be all that great. I doubt she heard that. There is no way the national GOP would ever contribute that much. I do not think, given the limitations imposed by BCRA, that such an allocation would be rational. Almost all of that would be bought up in advertisements, which eventually have a diminishing marginal return. Also, the article notes that Sekula-Gibbs is not one of the candidates the NRCC is supporting. An NRCC spokesman claims that this is an oversight, but she is still not up on their page yet. Interesting.

Bottom line -- it might be too soon to write off Texas 22.