*Data obtained from the Texas secretary of State's website
The long awaited showdown in the Republican Party to become Texas's next Governor has come and gone. A few months ago, the safest bet you could of made was betting on a runoff after the March 2 results came in. The conventional wisdom had it that the Republican gubernatorial primary in Texas would be a battle between challenger Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's sophisticated urban base versus incumbent Rick Perry's yahooing, secession drumming, rural base. However, after the results came in last night, it was clear that this was not the case. Rick Perry ended up winning the Republican nomination without needing a runoff, capturing 51% of the votes to 30% and 18% for Hutchison and Medina respectively.
If you're just waking up from a cave or haven't kept up with Texas Politics in a while, you might be asking yourself who is Debra Medina and why wasn't she referenced in the previous paragraph as a front runner? Well, sometime in between the back and forth bickering of the two front runners emerged Debra Medina, a grass roots candidate who ran on basic conservative principles of limited government and minimal taxes. After two televised debates the Libertarian-minded Medina was soaring in the polls and looking more and more likely to be the candidate to challenge Perry for a runoff. Nevertheless, just as quickly as she emerged onto the scene, Medina exited stage left. During an interview with Glenn Beck, Medina refused to rebuke a question of whether or not she was a 9/11 truther -someone who believes the government was involved in the terrorist attacks- and just like that her momentum came to a halt and the race refocused on Perry vs Hutchison.
After Medina's blowup on Glen Beck's show, it was not at all surprising to see Rick Perry win last night. However, it was interesting to see the manner in which Perry won. Perry won this election not in rural and small town Texas like the pundits thought would be the case, but in metro Houston. (One would have to think this bodes well for him in the general election, since it indicates strength in the home base of the well regarded Democratic nominee, former Houston Mayor Bill White). As you can see in the chart above, Perry won 58% of the vote in Fort Bend County, 61% in Harris County and 65% in Montgomery County. These counties were by far Perry's stronghold last night and can be attributed to his outright victory over Sen. Hutchison. Without these huge gains in suburban Houston, it is highly probably that Perry does not reach the 50% threshold he needed to avoid a runoff. (Note: I did not include Hidalgo County's 64% advantage for Perry because of the low Republican turnout).
As for Hutchison's results, she was able to perform fairly well in urban Bexar, Dallas and Travis counties (all above 30%) and did win 28 rural counties; unfortunately for her though, those counties didn't give her nearly a big enough margin to offset Perry's advantage in Houston. For example, the most populous county Hutchison won yesterday was Tom Green County, where her margin of victory over Perry was only 4,560 to 4,112. The map below shows the county by county results and as you can clearly see the counties Sen. Hutchison won are predominately rural.
*It should also be noted that Medina's gaffe clearly hurt her all over the state. She didn't even win in her own backyard of Wharton County(Hutchison did) where she served as the GOP chairwoman in 2004.
In the end, Rick Perry was once again the benefactor of an exquisite sense of good timing and a little bit of luck. Most people who follow Texas Politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental Governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became President; that he is "Governor Goodhair" or "39 percent" or some similar mild, slightly disrespectful humor; that he doesn't really do anything well except win elections, which he once again proved last night that he does that very well. Ultimately, Perry was successfully in capitalizing on the political mood that has set in across the country; that of anything and everything anti-Washington, which made it almost impossible for Sen. Hutchison to generate any sort of excitement for her campaign from the beginning and eventually opened the door for a grassroots candidate to playfully pretend to be a formidable challenger to Rick Perry. Nevertheless, just like that of his entire political career, Perry benefited from an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time and ran a professional campaign —unlike Medina —and once again, proved his luck is still running strong.
As for November, the biggest question that remains is will enough of the anti-Perry Republicans hold their nose and fall in line in? It would be hard to imagine otherwise...
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