The Thrilla in Vanilla
Straitlaced Rick Perry and demure Kay Bailey Hutchison going toe-to-toe in a Republican primary doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping. Ali-Frazier it ain’t. But it’s the heavyweight title bout every political junkie has been waiting for.
Photo Illustration by Randal Ford
At 3:01 p.m. on Friday, December 19, 2008, exactly eight years and one minute after taking the oath of office as governor, succeeding George W. Bush, Rick Perry became the longest-serving chief executive in the state’s history. With two years left in his current term and his announced intention to run for reelection in 2010, Perry could end up serving for fourteen years, a figure few governors of any state have surpassed.
Standing between Perry and history is the state’s most popular political figure: U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. First elected to the Senate in a 1993 special election to serve the remainder of Lloyd Bentsen’s unexpired term, she has won reelection three times, always getting more than 60 percent of the vote. But the office she has always coveted is governor. Twice before—in 2002 and 2006—Hutchison has talked openly of challenging Perry. On each occasion, she demurred. She has thus placed on her own shoulders a heavy burden of proving to major donors and party activists that she’s really in the race for keeps. Her December 4 announcement that she had launched an exploratory committee and transferred $1 million from her Senate war chest into a campaign bank account—she has since put around $8 million into that account—underscored the apparent seriousness of her intentions. But skeptics duly noted that the news release included the statement “I am not yet a candidate . . . ”
Unless one of them blinks, Perry and Hutchison are on a collision course to meet in the 2010 Republican primary, with the GOP nomination awaiting the winner. For the next thirteen months, the impending confrontation will be the hottest political story going. A clash of major officeholders belonging to the same party is rare in politics; the natural instinct of most politicians is to look for the safest route to advancement. For Perry and Hutchison, there is no safe route. They must settle their differences between the ropes.
This promises to be the biggest ballot box brawl since George W. Bush wrested the governorship from Ann Richards, in 1994. It’s the heavyweight fight that everyone around the Capitol and the state has been waiting for: the “Thrilla in Manila” of Texas politics. The Marquis of Queensbury rules do not apply. Ten rounds for the title, and the loser is carried out of the ring.
ROUND 1: THE RACE FOR THE BASE
The 2010 race for governor will take place entirely within a Republican primary election. The prominent Democrats who might have entered the race, Houston mayor Bill White and former state comptroller John Sharp, have chosen to run for Hutchison’s Senate seat if she resigns prior to 2012, the end of her term. The Democratic party lacks the fund-raising base to underwrite a $30 million race for governor, so unless a self-funding candidate emerges (and the last one to try, Tony Sanchez, in 2002, got clobbered), the Democrats are likely to field token opposition and continue their strategy of focusing on less-expensive down-ballot races. No leading Democratic figure has indicated any interest in running for governor.
Who votes in a Republican primary? Texas does not require registration by party, so anyone can vote in either party’s primary. In practice, however, primary voters tend to be the party faithful—the ideologues and the activists who seldom miss an election. From the fifties through the seventies, when the Democratic party dominated Texas and the Republican party was small and ineffective, Republicans frequently voted in the Democratic primary rather than their own to ensure that the state’s leaders would be conservative. In a Perry-Hutchison primary, without a serious Democratic race for governor, both Perry and Hutchison would likely reach out to Democrats to cross party lines: rural conservatives for Perry and urban and suburban moderates for Hutchison.
The preeminence of their own primary must be startling for longtime Republicans to contemplate. For two decades—ten gubernatorial elections—after Democrats held the first statewide primary election, in 1906, the GOP did not bother to hold a primary. When they finally had one in 1926, they could have rented a phone booth for the occasion. Only 15,289 voters showed up statewide to nominate as their gubernatorial candidate one H. H. Haines, who managed 11.9 percent of the vote against Democrat Dan Moody. Four years later the Republicans tried again. This time the turnout was only 9,777. Another unimpressive showing in 1934 must have been quite discouraging, for the GOP did not attempt to hold a primary election for 28 years.
By 1962 the Goldwater insurgency was gaining momentum, and Republicans decided to reactivate their primary. Turnout topped 100,000 for the first time, and Jack Cox, the party’s nominee for governor, ran a respectable race against Democrat John Connally. Thereafter, Republicans have held primaries in every gubernatorial election year, some more successful than others. In 1966 an obscure candidate named T. E. Kennerly ran unopposed, drawing only 49,568 votes. Eight years later, just 69,101 turned out to nominate Jim Granberry. It would be the last time the total vote failed to break through the 100,000 ceiling.
The first meaningful GOP primary took place in 1978. Bill Clements, the crusty founder of an offshore oil well service company, won the party’s nomination that year and went on to become the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. The man he defeated was state party chairman Ray Hutchison, who married Kay Bailey shortly before Election Day. The turnout of 158,403 set a record—but the Democratic primary drew more than 1.8 million voters. By the late eighties, heavily contested GOP primaries with turnouts in excess of half a million votes were the norm. In 1986 Clements, who had lost his bid for reelection in 1982 to Democrat Mark White, launched a successful comeback by defeating two high-profile Republicans who had served in Congress, Kent Hance and Tom Loeffler, and went on to defeat White in their rematch. The 1990 primary shaped up as a four-way battle involving Hance, Secretary of State Jack Rains, attorney Tom Luce, and oilman Clayton Williams, but Williams’s clever TV spot, vowing to teach drug offenders “the joy of busting rocks,” propelled him to an early lead he never surrendered. Williams went on to lose the general election to Ann Richards after a series of gaffes.
Today a typical Republican primary turnout is around 600,000 voters—roughly the population of El Paso. This is still minuscule compared with the more than 8 million Texans who voted in the 2008 general election. In the 2006 primary, Hutchison, running unopposed, garnered 627,163 votes. Perry and three unknown opponents collected a total of 655,919 votes. With Democrats’ not having won a statewide office since 1994, the small slice of the electorate that votes in the Republican primary has had a monopoly on determining who governs a state with a population of 23 million.
Perry’s campaign regards the primary as its home turf—and as foreign soil for Hutchison. He is ideologically in tune with the hard-core conservative electorate; the governor spends a lot of his political capital on shoring up his right flank. His endorsement of “Choose Life” license plates is one example; another is a recent edict by the Department of Public Safety, which is overseen by Perry appointees, requiring non—U.S. citizens to prove that they are in this country legally before they can receive a Texas driver’s license or identification card. It is no coincidence that abortion and illegal immigration are two of the issues that are most important to primary voters. Hutchison last ran in a hotly contested Republican primary in 1982, in a race for a Dallas congressional seat; she led going into the runoff but lost when pro-life forces attacked her savagely.
The last primary race for governor whose impact can still be seen today was the 1978 Democratic battle between incumbent Dolph Briscoe and Attorney General John Hill. That race settled the future of the Democratic party, although the significance was not immediately evident. Hill beat Briscoe, who had served six years in office and was seeking another four. A Uvalde banker and rancher—in fact, the state’s largest individual landowner, to this day—Briscoe was rural to the core. Hill was a plaintiff’s lawyer from Houston. His issues were those of the modern Democratic party; he was the first attorney general to establish offices for consumer protection and environmental protection. Briscoe’s main action during his tenure was to oppose a revision of the Texas Constitution, effectively killing it. Hill’s victory in the primary started the evolution of the Democratic party from a rural party to an urban one. He lost the general election when rural Democrats supported his GOP opponent, Bill Clements. The election result was clear. Conservatives had no future in the Democratic party, and the Republican party had become a force to be reckoned with.
The Briscoe-Hill race has eerie similarities to the Perry-Hutchison race. The incumbent may be the last rural governor of Texas for quite a while, and a victory by the challenger could trigger an evolution of the Republican party.
TALE OF THE TAPE
The essential fact of life about Texas politics is this: If 600,000 to 650,000 Republicans turn out to vote in the primary, then half of these voters plus 1 determine the political destiny of 23 million Texans. Until the Democratic party can compete for statewide offices in the general election, nothing will change. If the Republican turnout continues to hover around 600,000, Perry has the edge, because the primary will be dominated by the conservative base. Hutchison’s popularity can be the equalizer in this race. There are more November Republicans than there are March Republicans; the more excitement that is generated by a Perry-Hutchison primary, the higher the turnout and the better Hutchison’s chances of winning the primary.
ROUND 2: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
The stakes are high not only for Perry and Hutchison. The race occurs at a time when the Republican brand has lost its cachet. Texas R’s have no immunity from national trends; indeed, one of the reasons they’ve been losing ground in urban and suburban Texas is because of the unpopularity of a president who is a Texas Republican. Is the party too conservative or not conservative enough? The Perry-Hutchison smackdown brings this question to the forefront; it is a proxy fight for the future of the GOP.
Two members of the same party could hardly have more divergent views. Perry began his political career as a Democratic state legislator and became a Republican in 1989 to run for agriculture commissioner. He is the kind of convert who, as the saying goes, is more Catholic than the pope. His support for a bill that would authorize “Choose Life” license plates will help him amass political capital during the current legislative session. Hutchison supports a woman’s right to choose in select circumstances, but she doesn’t call herself pro-choice.
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Glenda Hawthorne says: Great article. Thanks. (January 16th, 2009 at 7:45am)
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