Jul 08 2007
Is The GOP Losing Texas?
Apparently the immigration debacle is hurting the GOP in their strongest areas – Texas included.
There are, however, signs of trouble for the GOP. While Gov. Rick Perry won re-election in November, he achieved only a plurality in a four-way race that featured a Democrat and an independent as well as a former Republican turned independent (State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn). And Republicans lost two heartbreaking races in the past year. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a seven-term incumbent and the only Mexican-American Republican in Congress, lost to Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, who ran a haphazard campaign. George Antuna, a rising star who had worked for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Mr. Perry (when he was lieutenant governor under Mr. Bush), lost a race for an open state legislative seat.
In Dallas, moreover, Republicans imploded. Democrats ended decades of GOP dominance last fall by winning the county judge’s seat, the district attorney’s office and 41 out of 42 contested judicial races–election results the Dallas Morning News dubbed a “Democratic deluge.”
…
“We knew that if we could win 40% of the Hispanic vote,” as Mr. Bush did in 2004, “we’d control Texas until 2030.” But in 2006, the number of Texas Hispanics who voted Republican fell to between 30% and 35% (depending on the poll).
This shift alone spells trouble for Republicans. Many conservatives may not want to hear it, but Mr. Masset puts the blame on talk radio and cable TV reaction to immigration reform. He says an uncompromising attitude toward comprehensive reform and appeals to fear sometimes carry a whiff of racism that alienates Hispanics. “Houston is no more than six years behind Dallas,” he warns.
And if the demographic shift continues to gain momentum, there’s a real possibility that Democrats could achieve a majority in the Texas House by 2010.
The GOP implosion is for real folks. And the more the far right hear’s their absolutism is bad they simply say they want more absolutism. The far right is tired of having to put up with the rest of the nation which doesn’t follow them lock step. And the feeling is becoming mutual. The GOP had all this promise, now all they want is purity. It is sad. But if that is their fate then that is their fate.
And why not? A similar flip happened in California in the 1990s. What was once Reagan Country became a Democratic stronghold. GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s get-tough approach to immigration was an undeniable factor.
Yep, Reagan country is now The Governator’s country. Guiliani is the front runner in the GOP – not Newt or Tancredo or other “pure” conservatives. Sort of telling isn’t it?
As terrye has said, these BBS’s couldn’t care less about the republican party. In fact, I believe they have thinly disguised contempt for the republican party. They are the true RINO’S imho.
Now they are attacking capitalism. Thepathology of the right is rearing it’s ugly head. I believe the “misery loves miserable company” folks are trying for a power play.
They must not succeed in their mission.
Another issue is the Katrina effect. Texas now has a lot of new residents who a living there waiting to go back or maybe deciding to stay there.
Since New Orleans was fairly solid Democrat, if their numbers are sufficient they can tip the balance in close races.
What someone needs to look at real close is the issue of perhaps some trying to vote both in Texas and Louisiana.
There is really a big loophole of oversight on the whole dual registration issue. Here in Florida, some are starting to question whether there is an impact by Snow Birds running under dual registration with absentee voting in Florida and regular voting in NY and Conn. and Mass.
With local races decided by a couple of hundred votes or less and statewide races coming down to mandatory recount close all issues should be looked at for potential corruption of the voter base.
Just more proof AJ that you are not a Reagan conservative.
AJ,
I live in Texas and I can tell you this is the usual WSJ crap about immigration.
What is being referenced has little to do with Mexican immigration and everything to do with local Texas politics.
The collapse of the Dallas County Republican party was due to the usual “incumbants losing contact with the people” cycle in every long political run. After a 20+ year run, it was time.
The problems in the Texas House has been because the localities and state House have conspired to jack up property taxes 10% a year via appraisals for the last seven years state wide. The suburban vote is starting to revolt and a number of House incumbants have been taken out in the Texas Republican primary over the issue.
Speaker Craddick is part of the big government cozy pump up the property taxes clique and the fight is about breaking that cliques power base in the house.
Gov. Rick Perry and his cronies are trying to add a large number of interstate toll roads — look up “Trans-Texas corridor” — and that is pissing off the Texas public, which hates toll roads.
Add on top of that that 1/3 of New Orleans back population is now in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.
Put that all together and the Democrats become competative.
It does not mean the state is turning into California.
The author missed something important about the election last November, and that was that although Perry barely got 40% of the vote, the Democrat candidate (who was that guy again? does anyone remember) didn’t even get quite 30%.
In the current Texas political landscape, Republicans can reliably count on about 40% of the vote, Democrats can count on about 25%, and 35% of the electorate now not only is independant but actively despises both of the major parties. In any particular race, whoever can appeal to that segment can win but it’s a race-by-race and candidate-by-candidate type of thing. In the governor’s race, Kinky Friedman and Carol Keaton Rylander Foghorn Leghorn Strayhorn split that vote. (Gee Carol, do ya think the name thing was a problem?)
This isn’t a model for a democrat takeoever, but it is a model for a surge by anyone who can figure out how to take advantage of the disgust so many people have for both major parties today.
As for Dallas – Dallas has had a hopelessly corrupt and ineffective city government for years now, along with a corrupt city police force. (remember the fake cocaine convictions, or any of a dozen other local police scandals?) The voters (unfairly, in my opinion, but that’s how it goes) took out their frustration on the DA’s office and all the local judges races.
It’s yet to be seen whether the new mayor will change anything. As to Laura Miller – locals will understand why she’s called “The Best Mayor Fort Worth ever had!”
This is just crap about immigration? Yeah right, these election results are just a fantasy. Stick your head in the sand, it ain’t happening. No sir all those folks in Texas whose last names end in ez like being treated like second class citizens.
I know other people from Texas who have noted the same kind of reaction. People forget Texas was a Democrat state for years. Yep, blame it on the Katrina people…how many of those people are actually voting in Texas or anywhere else for that matter? Texas is a huge state, it has a lot of people and the hispanics are a major demographic and always have been, alienating them is going to have a lot more impact on elections than some Katrina refugees will.
You see there is a way to promote strong border security and better enforcement of the law without sounding like right wing bigots, problem is too many on the right do not do that.
They let the people on talk radio run their mouths about wetbacks etc and they think those hispanics did not hear that.
Well I heard it and I am white and it turned me off to a lot of the hardliners.
This is the problem, the right thinks they are just for enforcing the law and everyone agrees with them. Well most people do want to see better enforcement of the law, it is just that when they hear some guy make some crack about Jeb Bush and his mex wife and his brown skinned kid they are not hearing law enforcement talk, they are hearing bigotry in the guise of law enforcement.
The right needs to ease up on the rhetoric and do a better job of rebuking obvious racism in the debate. For instance when Linda Chavez gets death threats and people respond by telling her to get her ass back to Mexico, there should be people out there who will remind people that Chavez not only has a right to her opinion, she is not from Mexico.
Or when Fred Thompson starts running his mouth about Cubans being terrorists, someone should remind him that without Cuban American Republicans, the GOP can not carry Florida. Instead they pretend that threatening the life of the Cuban American Republican Martinez is just a sign of frustration, nothing to get all excited about.
But noooooo. They just keep digging that hole deeper and denying that what is happening, is happening. What election defeat they say, we don’t see no election defeat.
I have wondered if it might help in the immigration debate for Congress to spend more time talking to the Governors and getting feed back from them as well. After all, they are the ones who speak for the individual states. They should be telling the feds what their needs are. Perhaps that would make future debate on the subject more reasonable.
This is another reason why I believe the 17th amendment should be repealed and the Senate should go back to being appointed by the state legislatures. Not only would it eliminate the supreme dog and pony show that the Senate has turned into, it would result in people who don’t look pretty but have a good head on their shoulders being sent to Washington.
The 17th amendment was passed in 1911. For the first 120-some years of our constitutional government, it served us well to have the Senate appointed by the state legislatures. The amendment has turned the Senate into a circus and needs to be repealed.
Nah, I think the better amendment to repeal is the 14th. Get rid of that Birthright citizenship like Australia and Ireland recently did would go a long way to helping move the immigration debate back on track.
People do not believe them when they say they will be “guest workers” then have 10 million babies…and these so called “guests” will be here forever. OR, apply the sentence in the 14th that says “…under the jurisdiction of…” And make it so they are all under the jurisdiction their originating country , just like the French ambassadors wife. If she has a child in the US , it is NOT a citizen.
Do it like Canada does…they recruit workers for a stated time frame from Temp agencies in MEXICO City..far from the border. The workers are required to have a 2 way ticket from the Employer. They check IN and they check OUT after a stated period of time. They do NOT stay.
I am talking about on a much larger scale than simple immigration. See, the problem is that the further you get away from the Mexican border, the less tolerant people are. People in states on the border tend to have a very moderate position on immigration.
As to Laura Miller – locals will understand why she’s called “The Best Mayor Fort Worth ever had!â€
Left by WWS on July 8th, 2007
I agree with WWS’s post as a local BUT it’s … Laura Miller is the best Mayor ARLINGTON ever had! Thank you . Go Cowboys !
(Arlington resident)
P.S. I don’t see any way the Dems are going to regain control of Texas in the Statehouse or the Governors Office any time soon after the BS they pulled a few years ago running out of the state… twice! No one I know who is frustrated with the Reps or Perry has forgotten that shameful and childish escapade.
Yipster – dead on! I’m in FW, and it’s hilarious to watch Dallas residents go on about how “greedy” Jerry Jones was when he quit trying to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into their ghetto – even after they ran him out of town! Not that I’m a huge JJ fan (who is?) but he’s nice to have around – that’s a billion dollars worth of investment for Arlington, quite a coup!
reminds me of a variation on an old aggie joke – Q: Why did Dallas give up its chance to get the new stadium? A: Because they had first choice!
The other day I was reading an article about a woman in her 40’s who became a border patrol agent after leaving the military. She is hispanic and her parents had green cards, but she was an anchor baby herself. They were not citizens when she was born here. This lady was conservative and proud of her heritage. I don’t think that taking away her status as a citizen would do any of us any good.
None of us are citizens because our parents are, we are citizens because we were born here. And if you go back far enough, most of us had a anchor baby back there someplace. After all for most of our history there was no legal or illegal immigration, there was just immigration.
I just don’t know how you can take that away from people, it does not seem right to me. And I have a feeling there would be thousands of lawyers arguing the same thing.
But I do think the Canadians have an interesting guest worker program for ag labor. It seems that everyone is pretty satisfied with it. And I thought the Australian style merit system for legal immigration that was in the bill was a good idea, but it died with the bill.
I have to say that I was shocked when Democrats won here in Indiana. Bayh was not that liberal when he was Governor, but we have seen a different side of him as Senator. But when Democrats began winning other seats it was a shock to a lot of people.
I think one of the most depressing events for GOP up in this part of the country was the implosion of the Ohio Republican Party. The Republicans ran that state for so long I think they just got cocky. But when the party went down, it went down fast. It was a shame too.
re: repealing the 14th amendment, now there’s a good idea! Who wants due process, after all? Who cares about “equal protection under the laws”, we can do without that, can’t we?
I would say we might as well repeal the bill of rights while we’re at it, but the 14th amendment is the only constitutional mechanism which applies the bill of rights to the states. Without it, the bill of rights applies to the Fed Gov. only, and states and cities can do whatever they want. (That’s how it was in the century before the 14th was passed, although people forget that) So, repealing the 14th effectively repeals the bill of rights for most everyday interactions.
like I said, great idea. yep.
All the 17th amendment did was allow the political campaign machines to take over the Senate. imagine if the billions in senate campaign funds simply disappeared and Senators were forced to run campaigns in their state legislature for what they actually did and said rather than running massive TV PR campaigns to market themselves to the masses. It wouldn’t matter who had the most money, you would probably see more people with better ideas and a better understanding of issues instead of who runs the better bumper sticker campaign and who was able to sling mud the best.
The people already have a house in government … the House. It wouldn’t hurt for the states to have a say too.
crosspatch:
There was a time when I would have disagreed with that, but now I am not so sure. If the states had more of a say then the immigration debate might well have gone differently. It would have been more from the bottom up, rather than the other way around.
But I don’t guess there is any chance that will change again.
The ironic thing about the 17th is that it was the result of the first big nationwide “campaign reform” movement, a movement that was supposed to remove corruption from politics forever. Ironic that every great move to “reform” campaigns has simply resulted in the problems becoming more and more deeply ingrained and intractable. Well, ironic at first – now that we’re a century into experimentation on this, it’s pretty stupid not to figure out that this stuff never works the way it’s advertised.
People should remember the 17th whenever someone floats the idea of doing away with the electoral college and electing presidents directly.
I think one of the most depressing events for GOP up in this part of the country was the implosion of the Ohio Republican Party. The Republicans ran that state for so long I think they just got cocky. But when the party went down, it went down fast. It was a shame too.
Left by Terrye on July 8th, 2007
Thanks for making my point almost better than I could. When the Republicans got cocky and deserted their conservative principles they paid dearly…exactly how it is supposed to work.