What’s Governor Perry Up To?

If Governor Rick Perry was concerned about his low visibility on the national scene, he pretty well cured that problem this month. On April 9th, the longest serving chief executive in Texas history staked out a “states’ rights” position Governor George C. Wallace would have cheered back in 1963. Six days later, the Governor joined a tax protest “tea party” and suggested Texas just might want to consider leaving the ole U.S.A. if Washington D.C. keeps messin’ with the Lone Star State. Those comments quickly circled the globe via the Internet, talk radio, and nightly comic monologues. Much of the commentary was not, let us say politely, in a positive vein.

What’s up here? Why would a governor up for reelection stir up a ruckus that makes him (and his state) a target of national ridicule? Is this a bad Aggie joke? I don’t think so.

Keep in mind the immediate problem for Governor Perry is securing the nomination in the March 2010 Republican primary. For the first time since he switched parties in the late 1980s (Perry was elected as a Democratic State Representative from a West Texas district), the Governor faces a really tough fight to get the GOP nomination. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison has made it more and more clear she is running against Perry in the March primary come hell or high water. And polls consistently show she is better liked than Rick Perry, and has led him in among likely Republican Primary voters in every published poll. If that’s the case, does not the Governor suddenly reinventing himself as George Wallace just make a bad problem worse? Not exactly.

The thing to keep in mind about the Texas Republican Primary is that few people vote in this very important election. Since 1994, the 200 or so winners of the GOP primary for all statewide offices have beaten the Democrats and all others in November General Elections. In these Republican primaries, turnout has averaged less than 900,000, in a state with 12-13 million registered voters.

Who are these Republican Primary voters? First of all, they are almost entirely “Anglos,” or persons who say they are “white” and not of Hispanic origin. A couple of days ago I looked at the voting patterns in predominately black and Latino areas of Texas or Houston. In 12 heavily Hispanic counties along the Mexico border, there were only 32,320 voters in the March 2008 Republican primary, out of 1.097,072 registered voters. And most of the GOP voters came from Anglo neighborhoods in El Paso, Harlingen, and McAllen. By contrast, the same counties had 326,057 Democratic voters. In Houston, I looked at 10 heavily Mexican American precincts in the same primary, and saw there were only 269 Republican voters, out of 20,162 registered persons. The March 2008 Democratic Primary attracted 5.307 voters in these same voting boxes. The disparity is even more pronounced in African American areas. Again using a sample of 10 local precincts that have almost no non-black residents, I found the 2008 Republican Primary attracted just 57 voters out of 26,475 registered persons, compared to 11,109 voters in the Democratic Primary.

In addition to being a nearly all-white primary, the March Republican election is dominated by voters who label themselves “conservative” or “very conservative.” We see the importance of this ideological tilt to the right when polls show just 18% of all Texas adults approved of Governor Perry’s comments about seceding from the union, but nearly half of self-identified Republicans agreed with his stance. And if one could go from identified Republicans to Republicans who regularly vote in their party’s primary, my guess is the Governor position draws strong majority support.

So what the Governor is up to, in my opinion, is very simple. If he does not change the electoral climate, he will lose the Republican Primary to Senator Hutchison. He has two options in trying to do this. He can launch a mud-fight and try to slime her personally and politically. That might work, but could easily backfire, particularly if female voters think he has crossed the line and is running a dirty campaign. The safer course is to take very far right positions on issues like federal stimulus monies and putting the secession option on the table as a way of appealing to the small primary electorate that in no way represents the broad swath of opinion in Texas. Will this work? We won’t know until March, but what we do know is that Jay Leno, Bill Mayer, Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart do not vote in Texas Republican Primaries, nor do many of their viewers. But listeners to Rush Limbaugh do, and the “Ditto Heads” seem fine with Governor Perry’s new national prominence.

- Richard Murray

Comments

[apu auchmed]

He met behind closed doors with the elite of the homophobic racist right wing christian republicans to discuss how to remove all of the non white and homosexual people from the stae of Texas

[reader]

This is such a simpleton view of Texas politics not wonder Murrays party continues to fail away a Perry. Could it be over half the republicans agree with Perry on the fed unemployment money? That over 75% of all Texans agree with voter ID and that the real question here is why only 75% of Texans would state they wanted to stay in the USA. If Murray bothered to read what the governor had said he would know that the problem with Washington is that they don’t listen. Who is listening to the 25% who have grown so frustrated they might chose to left the nation? Perry strongly stated that he saw no need was optimistic about the nation future. His wake up call for Washington is about those who don’t feel that positive about our future. Who speaks for them the unlobbied? Not Murray and his fellow elitists

[Kevin Whited]

** We won’t know until March, but what we do know is that Jay Leno, Bill Mayer, Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart do not vote in Texas Republican Primaries, nor do many of their viewers. **

Doesn't Professor Murray vote in Dem primaries most of the time?