Revisiting the Republican Contest for Governor: Thoughts on Senator Hutchison's Decision to Resign from the Senate Before the March Primary

Texas senior United States Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison has been in the news the last couple of days.  Yesterday she announced her intention to vote No when Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination is presented to the full Senate next week.  Today, she is quoted by Mark Davis in Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report saying she expects to formally announce her run for governor in August and to resign from the Senate in October or November so to give full time and attention to the gubernatorial race.  

Opposing Judge Sotomayor was expected - voting for the "wise Latina" nominee would have likely killed any chance Senator Hutchison has of winning the Republican nomination for governor.  But her comments today do have some news value, at least to me.

I have long thought that Senator Hutchison painted herself into a corner more than two years ago by saying that she was going to resign the senate seat that she was reelected to in November 2006, for a term that runs until January 2013, to pursue a race for governor.  Why make such an early commitment to both challenge a sitting governor, if he chooses to run for reelection, and to give up the balance of a six-year senate term?

I thought the wiser course would have been to emulate Texas Senator Price Daniel, who ran for governor back in 1956.  Senator Daniel did not give up his senate seat before the Democratic Primary, nor did he resign after he was the party's nominee and virtually assured of election in those one-party days.  That seemed the wiser course for several reasons, not the least of which is the Texas rule that if a U.S. senator resigns, the sitting governor gets to call the election to fill the vacancy and to name an interim replacement to represent the state in Washington, D.C..  Now if the governor happens to be the person the resigned senator is running against, you can bet your bottom dollar they will use their control of the timing of the new senate election and the nomination of an interim replacement to improve their chances of beating back a primary challenger.  Why would Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison hand this sword to Governor Rick Perry?

Senator Hutchison's comments to Mark Davis today shed light on her thinking.  "I had hoped that he wouldn't run.  You know, no one expected him to run again.  And, I thought, you know I stepped back last time, Mark.  I tried to give him a really free ride with no primary because I thought it was right for Texas.  But for him to stay on for 15 years is too long."

As I parse these statements, my conclusions are:

While Senator Hutchison's number one priority was to return to Texas as governor, her number two priority was to avoid a messy primary fight at all costs.  Her one election defeat came in a bitter Republican congressional primary in Dallas in the 1980s and I expect unpleasant memories  of that lose led the Senator to gamble that she could force Governor out of the race by making it widely known that she was running for real this time, and to show that she truly meant it, she would resign her seat and come back to Texas for the primary.

That was, as Ms. Hutchison put it, a "hope."  Hope ain't a good political strategy in my book.  Nor is gratitude.  The fact that she stepped back and gave Governor Perry "a really free ride with no primary"  in 2006 did not leave the incumbent with any sense that he owned Senator Hutchison for her late decision to pass on a primary race in 2006.   Rather than gratitude, I expect what Governor Perry feels is resentment that the Senator talked about running against him for a year and a half before finally pulling back in 2005.

So, the Senator's gambit did not work.  Perry is very much running for reelection, and she is stuck with a promise to resign that works against her in multiple ways.  There are several reasons why Ms. Hutchison's campaign has stalled lately, as the Governor has moved ahead in recent published polls, but this "I'm resigning, but not yet" posture has surely helped him and hurt her.

There is time to recover, but we will now find out if the soon to be former senator has a Plan B - how to win a bitter, expensive Republican Primary.   

Dr. Richard Murray