You can't say that Texas House District 149 candidate Jack O'Connor isn't putting his money where his mouth is. A review of campaign finance reports shows that he is outspending his opponent 8-1, almost all of it self-funded. Nothing wrong with that unless you are a Republican and hoping for a serious challenger to incumbent Democrat Hubert Vo.

There has been very little excitement in the 149th runoff, with neither candidate able to raise substantial funds. I mentioned that Mr. O'Connor has outspent his opponent 8-1, which seems very strange considering she has out-raised him 12-1. What the heck? Well, we are talking about very, very little money on the contribution side:

See, I told you, 12-1! But that isn't the whole story because more than half of Ms. Williams' contributions have been "In-Kind" from Austin consultant Ryan Hutchison: $4,250. In terms of cash, she has only taken in $4,132, giving her only a 6-1 advantage.

But that doesn't mean much in this race because Mr. O'Connor has forked over some serious change in his effort to "clean up" the Legislature:

That's a lot of money for most folks. You'd think that he could have avoided a runoff, and he almost did, garnering 45% of the vote but a young Vietnamese guy by the name of Bryan Le took 21%, and Ms. Williams 34%.

It will be interesting to see the results Tuesday night but one thing is clear: the Republican frontrunner has only been able to raise $700. Mr. Vo took in over $300,000 in 2008.

Not good.