(Note: these learning modules encompass the
actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss class
through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students. Bold
print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)
LEARNING MODULE: WEEK 11, Texas- GOP Routs Liberal
Democrats
Democrats used
to be the dominant party in Texas, as they were so ideologically inclusive that
nearly everyone could think of themselves as Democrats, plus authentic liberals
kept losing the party’s nomination so the Democratic more moderate and
conservative candidates were able to knock off the even more conservative
Republicans. When an officeholder became too liberal like Senator Ralph
Yarborough did in 1970, he was knocked off in the Democratic primary by a more
moderate or conservative candidate like Lloyd Bentsen. Democrat Bentsen
accused the incumbent Democrat of being anti-school prayer, anti-Vietnam War,
and sympathetic to rioters. Bentsen then went on to beat Republican George Herbert
Walker Bush in the general election, as he blasted Nixon’s recession that
produced high unemployment, and won with a coalition of labor, African
Americans, and Hispanics. Lloyd Bentsen served for 23 years as a U.S. Senator,
and his voting record was pretty middle-of-the-road. (The respected and courtly Bentsen was the 1988 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, who mocked V.P. Quayle's comparison of himself with Kennedy; Bentsen was President Clinton's Treasury Secretary.) Another example of a
successful Democrat was governor Dolph Briscoe, who beat a feminist in the primary,
and while generally moderate conservative nevertheless made many Hispanic
appointments to state offices and appointed a labor union leader as Labor
Commissioner.
Republicans
made their first gain with John Tower as Senator. Tower, the son of a
Methodist minister, was a 35-year old professor who had studied at the London
School of Economics. He had won an impressive 41% against Senator Lyndon
Johnson in 1960, when the Democratic state legislature had passed a special
bill permitting Johnson to be on the ballot for both the Senate and the Vice
Presidency. A special election had to be held when Johnson resigned to assume
the Vice Presidency, and liberals were so angry that their Interim U.S. Senator
was so conservative that he even made the Republican Tower look acceptable that
many liberals ended up helping to elect the Republican. Tower’s voting record in the Senate, though,
was in the most conservative one-fifth of members, just like other southern
Republicans soon to come. Tower was followed as Senator by Republican Phil
Gramm due to a couple of unforced errors by Democrats. Gramm used to be a
conservative Democratic U.S. House member, but House Democrats were upset that
he supported President Reagan’s budget and tax plan, so they kicked him off of
the prestigious Budget Committee. Angered, he resigned his seat, ran as a
Republican in the special election, and won. When Senator Tower’s seat came
open in 1984, Democrats chose as their nominee a liberal state senator over a
moderate conservative congressmember, and Reagan’s 64% landslide reelection in
Texas helped Gramm to victory.
That
kind of symbolizes the increasingly liberal nature of the Texas Democratic Party,
and how Republicans took advantage of that situation to become the dominant
party (Republicans have held both U.S. Senate seats and the governorship since 1994.) is the saga of one Democratic governor (Ann Richards) and one Republican
governor (George Walker Bush). This topic is so informative that it is likely
to be on the test.
Ann Richards was a long-time partisan Democrat in Texas circles. She overcame alcoholism and a painful divorce, and was an outspoken feminist. She broke into the good-ole-boy
political system and became the state Treasurer for two terms. A hard-core partisan, she had mocked
Republican presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush’s verbal gaffes in
her speech at the national Democratic convention by saying, “Poor George, he
was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Not really smart, since Bush ended up winning Texas with 56% of the
vote. She won the governorship in 1990 by a 3% edge over her Republican
opponent, as she won 61% of the women’s vote, after her GOP opponent had made light of rape and had joked about
visiting a brothel when a youth.
The real kiss of death for Ann
Richards and the Democrats was her liberal actions as governor. She opposed parental consent for minors getting abortion, and vetoed a concealed
weapons bill backed by the NRA. Richards and the
Democratic legislature enacted a Robin Hood law that sought to help poor school districts by taking money from the rich
school districts. She dealt with a budget shortfall by raising the corporate income tax and enacting a lottery. Richards also appointed more African Americans and women to state boards and
commissions than any previous governor.
Now we turn to the sage of George Walker Bush, the son of a former President. Personally and
as a campaigner, he was very affable, well-mannered, and non-threatening. Bush even spoke a little Spanish before
Mexican-American audiences. He projected a frat boy image as part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Billing himself as a “compassionate conservative” on popular issues such
as education, he blasted the Robin
Hood law as hurting some school districts and argued that all of the lottery revenue
should go to education. Bush took conservative positions
on crime and welfare issues, as he attacked juvenile crime, and wanted
to cut off additional benefits of welfare recipients who had more kids. The
Republican Bush beat Governor Richards in 1994 with a respectable 54% of the vote, thus
starting an unbroken GOP monopoly of the Texas governorship.
Bush as governor was pretty conservative. He was tough on crime, increasing penalties for possessing even a
small amount of cocaine and for possessing drugs near a school or school bus. He cracked down on juvenile crime and tripled the juvenile prison population. Bush’s pro-business policies included tort reform, which capped punitive damages, and loosening environmental regulations. He fought for accountability in education by promoting charter schools and by testing students. Bush also got two tax cuts through the legislature. Bush did appoint Mexican-Americans to government
positions, including Alberto Gonzales to the state Supreme Court (Gonzales became White House Counsel and
Attorney General when Bush became President.).
Bush won re-election in 1998 with a landslide 68% vote total. A key to his success as governor and in this campaign
was that he worked well with politicians. Bush had a very amiable, up close and personal style. He met with every state legislator either personally or by inviting them to dinner at the governor’s mansion. Bush worked effectively
across party lines in the state legislature, he reached out to the Democratic lieutenant governor and the Democratic house speaker, and
he shared credit for policy
accomplishments. He even visited a Democratic legislative leader in the hospital,
and took him on the state plane. Bush spent heavily in Spanish-language media in the 1998 campaign,
and his campaign slogan was Together We Can. His landslide re-election garnered him 49% of the Hispanic vote and 27%
of African Americans. Republicans also won all five other statewide elective offices for the first time, a monopoly
situation that the GOP has continued since then. Bush’s successes in Texas put him in the
driver’s seat for the GOP presidential nomination two years later.
Republicans
won later gubernatorial elections partly because their Democratic opponents
were viewed as pretty liberal or partisan. Rick Perry (the guy losing the
GOP presidential nomination after not being able to name all three of the
federal departments that he wanted to abolish; woops!) had a good resume,
elected as state agriculture commissioner and then as lieutenant governor.
Assuming the governorship after Bush was elected President, Perry won in 2002
after Democrats nominated a Mexican-American millionaire who lacked political
experience and was backed by the Houston Gay and Lesbian Political Action PAC.
Perry suffered in popularity and won after fending off three challengers in
2006. One was a GOP gal and statewide comptroller who wanted to improve
education funding and the children’s health program. The other Independent in
the race was a comedian who joked that ticks in the word politics stood for
blood-sucking parasites. Democrats offered a three-time loser whose one claim
to fame was filing an ethics complaint against a U.S. House leader. So Perry
won, based on Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the exit polls. Perry had so
many problems as governor that even his own party’s U.S. Senator Kay Bailey
Hutchison challenged him for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2010, but
Perry got renominated with the support of McCain’s VP choice conservative Sarah
Palin and Perry’s ranting against everything that Washington does. Perry won
re-election against a respected Democratic mayor thanks to the Republican 11%-point
advantage in party identification. Democrats finally had a real shot in 2014
since there was no incumbent. Republicans nominated the state attorney general Greg
Abbott, confined to a wheelchair after a tree limb had fallen on him while
jogging. Abbott had an impressive outreach to Hispanics, touted his wife
Cecilia who would become the first Hispanic first lady of Texas, and won 44% of
the Hispanic vote. Democrats nominated Wendy Davis, a twice divorced state
legislator who was a hero to feminists by filibustering an anti-abortion bill
for 11 hours. Abbott won with 60% of the vote, and won re-election in 2018 with
57%. In this last gubernatorial election, Democrats offered a former sheriff
with a campaign budget so low that she ran no television ads; she would have
become the first openly gay and Latina governor. Abbott is running for reelection this year, and his Democratic opponent is Beto O'Rourke, the former congressman who lost a close Senate race to Ted Cruz in 2018, and polls in June showed Abbott with a 6% lead.
Well,
so the Democrats have lost the Texas governorship repeatedly. Were they able to
regain Phil Gramm’s Senate seat when he retired? Uh, no. Republicans nominated John
Cornyn in 2002, who had many pluses. He had a strong resume, being state attorney
general and previously a district court judge and then state supreme court
justice. He was also a conservative, and an ally of Bush. Cornyn defeated a
charismatic and centrist African American former Dallas mayor by a 12% margin. With
a conservative voting record, he won re-election in 2008 by a 3-1 margin as
national Democrats financially abandoned their party’s candidate. Democrats
lost again in 2014 with a wealthy dentist who had lost a party primary two
years earlier. Cornyn (like Abbott) skillfully courted the Hispanic vote, translating
his campaign material and ads into Spanish and granting interviews to Spanish
language media, and he won 48% of the Latino vote. The 2020 Senate contest continued the recent trend of more competitive races in Texas, as Republican incumbent John Cornyn won 55% of the vote against Air Force veteran and Purple Heart awardee Democrat M.J. Hegar, who touted three Afghanistan combat tours. Both candidates were associated with their party's major themes, as Mrs. Hegar campaigned with Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris and blasted Cornyn for not taking the pandemic seriously enough and for trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Cornyn meanwhile campaigned with Senator Ted Cruz, and blasted Hegar as a liberal who would hurt the state's oil and gas industry and defund the police. The expensive campaign may not have changed many minds, as Cornyn's 10% margin of error was almost identical to the 11% margin that Republicans had over Democrats among CNN exit poll voters.
Well,
what about Lloyd Bentsen’s Senate seat, after he retired to become President
Clinton’s Treasury Secretary? Republicans won that seat with an impressive
woman, Kay Bailey Hutchison. A conservative, Hutchison nevertheless
championed many women’s issues. She herself had suffered discrimination by
large law firms who didn’t want to hire her because they thought she might
start a family. As a state legislator, she passed a law providing greater
privacy in the trial process to rape victims. She won a landslide 67% in the
special election. In the Senate, Hutchison got improved IRAs for homemakers,
passed a federal anti-stalking law, improved health care benefits for veterans,
and as a GOP leader held summits on issues affecting women and Hispanics. She
served until 2012, when we got very conservative Republican Ted
Cruz. Cruz is a bright guy, graduate
of Princeton with a law degree from Harvard. As Texas Solicitor General, he
filed numerous briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court fighting for conservative
issues. Backed by the Tea Party, this son of a Cuban immigrant beat the Republican
lieutenant governor in the party primary, and then used his 20-1 spending
advantage to knock off the Democrat (a lawyer and former state legislator).
Cruz won a 2018 re-election in a cliff-hanger 51% vote against Democratic
Congressman Beto O’Rourke. This was a strong Democrat- a fourth generation
Irishman, he campaigned aggressively with numerous town hall meetings even in
small towns and an aggressive grassroots campaign using both phones and door
knocking. Only the GOP 4% advantage in party identification saved Cruz’s
political life.