He’s Sisyphus, and He Approves This Message
Does Chris Bell have a chance in hell to be governor?
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If all that wasn’t enough to brighten Bell’s horizons, a February Dallas Morning News poll showed that, contrary to the Strayhorn campaign’s flat insistence that this was really a two-way race between Republican thoroughbreds, Bell was in fact running second. The numbers—Perry, 36 percent; Bell, 19 percent; Strayhorn, 16 percent; and Friedman, 10 percent—suggested a potential opening for the right challenger to the governor; 72 percent of voters could not name even one of his accomplishments in office.
And yet there is one very large, very intractable, and possibly insuperable obstacle to Bell’s chances of being that right challenger: money. He is desperately short of it. It may seem a shame to reduce political discourse to dollars and cents, but there is no avoiding it. In a state like Massachusetts, where 4 million of the 6.3 million residents live within reach of Boston’s TV stations, statewide campaigning is relatively cheap and easily accomplished. In Texas, with 21 million people scattered over an area bigger than France—where it costs more than $1 million a week to run ads simultaneously in the major cities—you need large piles of money to run a successful campaign, even if your name is Bush.
Why should the nominee of a major party be so starved for cash? The obvious answer is that people simply don’t believe he can win. But the reality is more finely calibrated than that. Of note are the specific people who don’t believe he can win, which leads us into the world of the traditional financial wheelhorses of the Democratic party, many of whom have deserted Bell for Strayhorn.
To find out why, I visited some of them, starting with former lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, a wealthy man and an old-fashioned power broker. “I don’t know anyone who I respect more than Chris Bell,” said Barnes. “He is a fine young man. But I am supporting Carole Strayhorn because she is the most qualified candidate. I am supporting her because she has the best vision for Texas and has the best chance of winning the race.” For Barnes, there was one clear, overweening objective that outweighed even his party loyalty: Beat Rick Perry.
That was the same thing I heard from Bernard Rapoport, a rock-ribbed liberal and longtime principal patron of the Texas Observer who also has contributed to Strayhorn. “The problem is that we don’t have the options we would like to have,” he said. “Chris Bell is a hell of a fine guy. On the other hand, you have to have a certain amount of pragmatism. Carole Strayhorn is the most viable candidate.”
Texas’s wealthy trial lawyers, too, have begun to contribute money to Strayhorn—a potentially disastrous development for Bell, since the plaintiffs’ bar has been the biggest single source of money for statewide Democratic candidates in recent years. John Eddie Williams Jr., the managing partner of the Williams Bailey law firm, in Houston, recites the now-familiar rationale: “Chris Bell is a fine public servant, but the overriding issue is not Chris Bell. It’s Rick Perry’s ideological, exclusionary approach to governing. That’s why so many traditional Democratic attorneys are now looking closely at Carole Strayhorn.”
That such party heavyweights have deserted Bell is widely known and widely discussed in the hothouse of Austin’s power corridors. After a while, it begins to sound like a death knell for his campaign, and it is made worse by the media’s preoccupation with the precise details of his financial woes. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for example, could not resist reporting, on February 28, that Perry had one hundred times as much money in the bank as Bell ($9.4 million to $90,869). Strayhorn’s $8.1 million war chest, by contrast, is frequently cited as a reason to take her candidacy seriously.
Predictably, Bell bridles at the notion that a few Democratic bigwigs can shut him down. “We filed our first financial report in June 2005,” he says. “We had only raised $160,000, and that started the rap that I can’t raise money. I obviously have to make a good enough showing so that the media says I have enough money to compete.” Bell believes he needs $10 million to win, in part so he can finance three to four weeks of statewide television ads. “This race is not about money,” he says, “but we will do what we need to do.”
His fund-raising has indeed improved in the past few months, starting with his primary victory and accelerating in the month of April. He has recruited some wealthy contributors, including Houston car dealer Ricardo Weitz and Austin homebuilder Robert Turner, and is confident he can raise $1 million between the primary and June 30, the end of the current financial reporting period for campaigns. That is a significant improvement. Still, his resources are nowhere near the size of Perry’s or Strayhorn’s. And the unfortunate fact remains that, without the ability to run a significant number of television ads, he will simply be unknown throughout large swaths of Texas.
ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU HE KNOWS what is going to happen is nuts,” says Glenn Smith, a Democratic operative who ran Tony Sanchez’s ill-fated 2002 campaign. Smith is referring to the fact that Texas has never had four well-known, relatively well-funded candidates pitted against one another in the general election; the last successful independent candidate on the ballot was Sam Houston, in 1859. “There are no real barometers. The problem is that it is hard to learn from recent elections because they were all unique for one reason or another. You had a Bush on the ballot twice. You had a black and a Hispanic at the top of the ticket in 2002. So you can’t really say, ‘Here’s the baseline.’”
That hasn’t prevented the state’s highest-paid political talent from trying. In 2002 the most accurate pollster—by far—was Mike Baselice, who works for Perry and correctly predicted the outcomes of the state’s major races within fractions of a percentage point. Baselice believes that the race can be understood in terms of the built-in votes that Perry and Bell are likely to get as major-party nominees. “The lowest Republican vote this decade was David Dewhurst’s 51.8 percent in the 2002 lieutenant governor’s race against John Sharp,” he says. “So 52 percent is the base. The Democrats went as low as 32 percent, when Marty Akins got stomped for comptroller by Strayhorn. Let’s be generous and say the Republican base is only 50, the Democratic base is as much as 35, and the ticket splitters are the remaining 15.”
But how much of those base percentages can realistically be expected to hold? “Perry got 92 percent of the Republican vote in 2002,” says Baselice. “If he only gets 80 percent of his base, that puts him at 40 percent right away. But then you have to remember that he also got 15 percent of the Democratic vote against Sanchez.” Of the roughly 50 percent Republican vote, Baselice sees 80 percent going to Perry, 10 percent to Strayhorn, 5 percent to Bell, and 5 percent to Friedman. Of the Democrats’ 35 percent, he sees 75 percent going to Bell, 10 percent to Perry, 10 percent to Strayhorn, and 5 percent to Friedman. He assumes that the 15 percent independent vote will be split 30-30-30 among Perry, Strayhorn, and Bell, followed by Friedman with 10. The net result: Perry wins with 48 percent, followed by Bell at 33.25 percent, Strayhorn at 13 percent, and Friedman at 5.75 percent.
Baselice’s analysis depends on one critical assumption: The Republican and Democratic candidates will hold a high percentage of their base votes in spite of Strayhorn’s proven electoral appeal. This is the classic, and perhaps predictable, Perry victory math. But it is an interesting point of departure for the larger discussion about what could happen. For Strayhorn to win, she must pull huge quantities of the Republican vote—in the 40 to 50 percent range—from Perry, and she must also bite significantly into Bell’s base, winning up to one third of it. Bell wins if Strayhorn whacks 50 percent from Perry but, miraculously, hardly touches Bell, who must also remain largely unaffected by Friedman. (This is the theory advanced by the Lone Star Project, a pro-Democrat, Washington-based political research firm that has Bell winning in that scenario with 32.58 percent to Perry’s 32.24 percent, Strayhorn’s 27.18 percent, and Friedman’s 8 percent.) Recent polls all show Perry in the same leading, though not quite convincing, position: An April 2 Zogby poll had the governor at 36.3, Bell at 20.7, Strayhorn at 19, and Friedman at 16.7, while an April 20 Rasmussen poll showed Perry at 40, Strayhorn at 19 (down 12 from a similar poll in February), Bell at 17 (up 4 percent), and Friedman with 15. (Most analysts assume that if Friedman gets more than 10 percent, he could well guarantee a Perry victory, since those votes are probably coming from Bell or Strayhorn rather than from the governor.)
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