Maxey Congratulates, Endorses Spears

Statement from Glen Maxey after his failed challenge to unseat Nelda Spears as Travis County tax assessor-collector:

Congratulations to Nelda Spears

Tuesday night Nelda Spears won a resounding victory. I congratulate her on her race and on her campaign.

Although we have a very different vision of what this office could be, her experience and steady hand clearly resonate strongly with the voters of Travis County. I look forward to her continued service to our County.

And I also wish to complement Ms. Spears' staff at the Tax Office. Although they, as County employees, appropriately did not take sides in a race like this one, they were always not only professional but also friendly in all dealings with me and my campaign staff. Class acts.

I Endorse and Pledge my Full Support to Nelda Spears

Ms. Spears now faces Republican Don Zimmerman. I hereby pledge by full support to Ms. Spears and have this race as my number one priority in Travis County. Don Zimmerman has a long history of political work that few of us could even charitably say has been constructive. If you don't remember him, he's the local Ron Paul leader. He opposed creation of our Travis County Hospital District. On just about every issue where I've seen Don Zimmerman take a position, he's been wrong. I intend to help Ms. Spears in every way possible to send him packing.

What I'll Be Doing Now

First, I'm not the kind of guy to ever take off and go on a vacation. So I'm already moving on to new adventures. I'm working with the Obama campaign to help him win the maximum number of delegates at the Texas Democratic State Convention.

The most amusing thing for me on Wednesday was the emails that started "Glad you lost." While nobody likes reading that on the day after getting crushed in an election, I was heartened by their reasons. "We were so upset that if you won, we'd lose you as a partisan Democratic activist." "I'm happy you're going to still be able to organize for the good guys."

And that's my goal: organizing for the good guys. Yesterday I started discussions with organizers from several groups about how to complement our groups efforts.

We now have thousands of trained precinct organizers in Travis County and across Texas. Our Democratic Party volunteers and Precinct Chairs and those Obama and Clinton precinct captains are a huge resource for November.

I'm going to go full tilt training candidates and volunteers to use the phonebank and blockwalk tools at TrueBlueAction.com and voter registration stuff at RegisterTravis.com. We have an army now that can do door-to-door voter registration in Travis and statewide. We have online phonebankers trained. By end of summer we have the ability to call and ID most of this state where we have contested races for Congress, the Legislature and critical local races.

Lots to be done. You'll all be hearing from me.

Thanks for your support if you helped me.

If you supported Ms. Spears, congratulations!