Capture The Flag
The only thing stranger than a (relatively) docile and (mostly) productive special session is a free-for-all race for governor. What does 2006 mean for 2010? What does 2008 mean for 2006? Let the battle for the future of Texas begin.
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The Strayhorn campaign’s expectation is that she and Bell will remain fairly close together until she starts running TV ads. Then Bell will drop off the radar screen and Democrats will care so much about beating Perry that they will forsake their party and … yes, it does sound a little too facile. What’s missing from this analysis is Strayhorn’s own vision for Texas. Her message cannot be exclusively negative. It has been obvious for at least two years that she was going to run against Perry, and she has attacked him relentlessly during that time. But her weapon has been a shotgun; she fires scattershot blasts at the governor’s toll road program, his “pork-barrel spending” for economic development, his new business tax, and the $40 billion growth of the state budget during his watch. At the same time, she assails him for failing to spend enough on teacher pay raises and children’s health insurance. Sometimes she’s an anti-taxer, sometimes she’s an anti-spender, sometimes she’s a spender. She needs to focus her message, to position herself as unalterably opposed to the new “income tax” (as anti-tax conservatives are describing the business tax—which it effectively is, for many professionals) but at the same time concerned about the fate of public schools. When you’re running against somebody who wants to hold office for ten years, your message ought to be what Newt Gingrich, no slouch as a bomb thrower, suggested for the national Democratic party in its fall races against the Republicans: “Had enough?”
THE END OF ONE GOVERNOR’S RACE is the beginning of the next. The Capitol crowd is already looking beyond Perry to see what the field might look like for 2010. But the more interesting question is what Texas politics—and the state Republican party—might look like four years from now.
The past twenty years have been marked by two transformative trends. One was the explosive growth in the Houston, Dallas—Fort Worth, and Austin suburbs. The six biggest suburban counties (Brazoria, Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Williamson) had a combined population of approximately 792,000 in 1980; by 2000 this figure had mushroomed to more than 2 million. The newcomers tended to be affluent, family oriented, and rootless, and those who were politically inclined were drawn to the Republican party. The shift was so pronounced by the early nineties that Karl Rove was convinced that George W. Bush could defeat Ann Richards in 1994. The other trend was the conversion of rural Texas, and particularly East Texas, from conservative Democrat (in courthouse and legislative races) to Republican. Rural Texas had previously been conservative, to be sure, but it also wanted government services—better schools, better roads—and thus tended to vote Democratic in local races. As the state Democratic party came more and more to resemble the national Democratic party (more liberal, more urban, more ethnically diverse), the conservative Democrats found themselves without a home. Today they are independents or Republicans.
The battle for rural Texas is over. The Republicans have won. The Democrats’ last stand was the redistricting fight of 2003, which ended with the Republicans picking up six seats. But a new battle has begun—for urban Texas and adjacent suburbs, as older residents move out to ever more distant points and are replaced by upwardly mobile Asian and Latino families and younger whites. This demographic shift will eventually lead to legislative gains for Democrats. The harbinger for the future came in Houston two years ago, when Democrat Hubert Vo, a political novice, defeated Republican Talmadge Heflin, the top House budget writer. The Dallas County courthouse, with its numerous offices (county judge, district- and county-court judges, district and county clerks, sheriff), has already started slipping away from Republicans and is destined to become almost entirely Democratic—maybe not this election cycle, maybe not the next, but soon—and Harris County will follow. Courthouse control is important because it offers the opportunity to build organizations, a base, and maybe even a farm team of candidates capable of running for higher office, all of which Democrats desperately need. As these trends play out, and the close-in suburbs age, Texas politics will become exactly the reverse of what it was in the conservative Democrat era, when the Republican vote was in the big cities and the Democratic vote was in the countryside.
The shift in urban counties is not the only thing that should concern Republicans. At least two other problems loom that could cause trouble for the party during the run-up to the 2010 elections, both of which involve splits within their ranks. One is the immigration issue, on which, it seems clear, the Republicans have more to lose than the Democrats. The GOP is divided between hard-liners (English only, secure the border, employer sanctions, no path to citizenship for illegals) and middle grounders (work permits, path to citizenship). The danger for the Republicans is that if the hard-liners win, their attitude may be viewed by Latinos as racist. And much of the effort in recent years to woo Latino voters, which both Bush and Perry have done with considerable success, could go down the drain. The one thing the Republicans cannot afford to do in this state is awaken the so-called sleeping giant, the Hispanic nonvoter.
The second internecine battle is over party purity—the effort by conservative activists outside the Capitol to impose their ideological views on the party’s elected representatives. Anyone who follows politics knows about the effort by school-choice advocate James Leininger to defeat five GOP lawmakers, vouchers opponents all, in the March primary election. The final tally: almost $2.5 million spent, two down, three still standing. The split between the traditional conservatives and the activists is likely to get worse following the primary victory in a Houston state Senate race by radio talk show host Dan Patrick, an outspoken fiscal conservative who could play the role of enforcer on the Senate floor. Republicans need look no further than the state Democratic party to see the risk of these purges. By making their party inhospitable to moderates, Democrats conceded the mainstream to Republicans. Don’t think that the same fate can’t eventually befall Republicans.
What all this adds up to is that, come 2010, the Democrats are likely to be in their strongest position since Bush won the governorship in 1994. Strength is relative. I’m not suggesting that Texas is going to be a Democratic state again anytime soon or that Republicans will lose their majorities in the state House and Senate. As long as the GOP retains control of the legislative redistricting process, that isn’t going to happen. But I do think that Democrats can be competitive at the top of the ticket, especially if Republicans keep driving people out of their own party.
The front-runner for the Republican nomination to succeed Perry in 2010 is Dewhurst. He’s in line for it, and conservatives, driven by some vestigial impulse from medieval Europe, seem to be more comfortable with orderly succession. But the path is far from unobstructed. Conservatives outside the Capitol (and some inside) believe that he goes too far to accommodate Democrats’ concerns. In the March primary, he was the only Republican candidate for statewide office not to reach the 500,000-vote plateau (both he and Perry had primary opponents), and it was said that his lackluster showing was the result of an organized boycott by Houston conservatives. His control of the Senate is not what it was or ought to be, in part because he still tries to lead top-down, as a CEO would; if he could only adjust to sharing power with influential senators, he would find that he is stronger, not weaker, for it. Next session he will have to contend with Patrick inside the Senate, and early signs are that the relationship is off to a poor start. No doubt Dewhurst is hoping the rumors turn out to be true that Perry, with impeccable conservative credentials, is on the short list for vice president in 2008—no, I’m not making this up—and that Dewhurst can ascend to the governorship, as Perry did, without an election.
Patrick, who has bought a Dallas radio station to carry his conservative message into North and East Texas, has to be considered as a possible 2010 candidate on Dewhurst’s right. Hutchison is said to be thinking about another race; even though she has cried wolf twice, she has to be taken seriously. If she runs, she would replace Dewhurst as the front-runner. A couple of Bush hands, Don Evans, the former secretary of commerce, and Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, have signaled an interest in running at some point, and both have the money to finance their races. For Garza, the timing could be all wrong. If the immigration debate is still simmering, the Republican party is not going to nominate a Hispanic.
And the Democrats? There are a couple of usual suspects: former comptroller John Sharp, the mastermind of Perry’s tax bill, who is back in the game following losses in the ’98 and ’02 races for lieutenant governor (to Perry and Dewhurst, respectively), although having helped Perry may not endear him to Democrats; and ambitious former Austin mayor and 2002 attorney general candidate Kirk Watson, soon to be installed in the state Senate (where he and Dewhurst can keep an eye on each other). The party’s front-runner—ultimately, maybe its only runner—is Houston’s highly regarded mayor, Bill White, the first Democrat with a realistic chance of winning since 1994. Like Dewhurst, White is said to want the job badly. He can finance his own race. And he’s a crossover candidate, with strong ties to the Houston business community. He also gives the dullest speech in town, and he’s a wonk at heart. But, hey, Rick Perry will have very likely been governor of this state for ten years. As a certain someone likes to say, how hard could it be?
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