November 9, 2006

Missed Opportunity

Democrats Who Gained House Seats Picked Wrong
Time to Not Have a Strong Statewide Ticket in Place

By MIKE HAILEY

The strategy seemed reasonably pragmatic - concentrate on Texas House races and a couple of congressional contests that appeared to be winnable then regroup with a strong cast for a statewide ticket four years from now when there's an opening at the Governor's Mansion. While Democrats in Texas had Tom DeLay to kick around, who would have known two years ago how much public opinion on Iraq would shift, how big scandals in Washington and other ports would grow and how a Florida congressman would fan the flames with flirtatious emails to pages? There was no way to understand then exactly why 2006 would turn out to be a bad year for Democrats to not have a strong statewide ticket in place.

From the half-full glass perspective, the Democrats' game plan was a success as their candidates unseated Republican state House incumbents in Dallas, Arlington, Houston and Corpus Christi while claiming an open Austin seat that the GOP has controlled for the past 16 years. The Democrats also kept Republicans at bay in a West Texas district that was supposed to be a slam-dunk once Pete Laney decided to step down. Nick Lampson exacted revenge by seizing the congressional seat that redistricting mastermind Tom DeLay held until he dropped out of the U.S. House under a cloud of criminal charges and folded his re-election campaign when it was too late for the GOP to replace him on the ballot.

On paper, Democrats who care about more than just the governor's race were big winners in the general election this week with impressive victories by State Reps.-elect Ellen Cohen, Juan Garcia, Paula Hightower-Pierson and Allen Vaught in battles with Republican incumbents and hard-fought wins by Valinda Bolton, Joe Heflin and Joe Farias in races for open House seats. With help from the king of Republican contributors - Houston home builder Bob Perry - a handful of rural House Democrats who have their own political action committee were re-elected by wider margins than they were in 2004. State Rep. Robby Cook was the only one of the self-styled WD-40s who had to sweat it on the election night when Republican Tim Kleinschmidt came close after running a superior campaign.

There was cause for celebration Tuesday night wherever you found folks from the House Democratic Caucus, Annie's List, the Texas 2020 PAC, the Texas Parent PAC, the League of Conservation Voters, the Texans for Insurance Reform and the offices of trial lawyers like Fred Baron and Mikal Watts.

Lampson basked in the headlines glow in the wake of a victory over Republican write-in candidate Shelley Sekula Gibbs, who will keep the Congressional District 22 seat warm for him for a couple of months until his two-year term begins as a result of her consolation victory in a special election that the Democrat chose to skip for reasons that might make sense to him. Lampson didn't just win a race for Congress. He gave new meaning to the term payback in winning the seat that had been held by the Republican who'd engineered a redistricting process that all but guaranteed Lampson's defeat two years ago.

While Lampson commanded the spotlight on a night when Democrats were taking back the U.S. House after a dozen years of Republican rule, another former Texas congressman had plenty to cheer about two years after losing a re-election bid on the new map that DeLay and the GOP had drawn to ensure his defeat. The election this week showed that Martin Frost's machine - while not as finely tuned and primed as it used to be when he led the DCCC and the House Democratic Caucus - was still capable of springing into action with the victories that Hightower-Pierson and Vaught achieved over Republican State Reps. Toby Goodman of Arlington and Bill Keffer of Dallas. The Democratic challengers' campaigns attempted to play down ties to Frost and the organization he'd put together over a long career in Congress - but from the outside it appeared that Frost associates had recruited the pair of challengers who beat incumbents in areas that he used to represent and had significant influence and input in their campaigns. Democrats who worked for Frost are running groups that are funded primarily if not exclusively by Baron and used as conduits for funds that eventually end up with the Texas Democratic Party, the HDCC or opposition research efforts.

Frost and Laney had more sway than anyone over Democratic Party operations in Texas when Democrats had majorities in the Texas House and the congressional delegation. While the DFW campaigns that Democrats won played out in Frost's long shadow, Laney proved to be a one-man wrecking crew to hopes that Republicans have harbored about taking over the seat when he was no longer on the ballot to defend it. The former House speaker reaffirmed the adage that all politics are local - at least they are in his stomping grounds - and he showed GOP prognosticators and other Austin pundits that he knows a lot more about the district he's represented for more than three decades than they do while he worked hard to get Heflin elected in his place.

On the Texas House battleground, Democrats won big this week. That's one way to look at it. But for all the gains that they achieved on the national and local levels and in the state House, the argument can also be made that Democrats might have been among the biggest losers in this year's election as a result of the golden opportunities they missed.

The "what could have been" speculation is a reflection of a debate that's been waging among Texas Democrats on whether the party should always field the best candidates it can find for races up and down the ballot or selectively pick and choose where to focus resources and where to avoid wasting them. The Democratic powers that be - another way of saying the lawyers who put up most of the money and the party officials and leaders who spent it - had put forth a statewide ticket that received national acclaim before it was crushed amid the reality of how red Texas really is. There'd been a Bush on the ballot in the Oval Office or the governor's job in every major election since 1988 - and in a state that had been undergoing a natural evolution into a two-party state with a fairly equal mix of Democrats and Republican voters - the Bush presence had been impossible to overcome.

None of the Democrats' strongest potential candidates were stepping up and offering to be sacrifices in what appeared to be another bad year shaping up. None realized in 2004 or 2005 that a perfect storm was brewing and headed for ultimate landfall by November 2006 - and when it hit - the Democrats were not in position with a viable statewide ticket to ride the tidal wave that carried Democrats into control of the U.S. House and Senate and other offices across the land. Barbara Radnofsky ran a credible U.S. Senate campaign for someone who had zero name identification and only a fraction of the cash that Republican U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had. Chris Bell was out on his own in the governor's race and way too far behind to have a chance to catch up to Perry by the time he got his hands on some real cash.

And Bell and Radnofsky were by far and away the Democrats' top two statewide candidates in 2006 - with the exception of State District Judge Bill Moody - who came a lot closer in a state Supreme Court race than other Democratic statewide nominees did in bids for other statewide posts.

It would be inaccurate to say that the Democrats' statewide ticket was a joke because it wasn't funny. It was more of an embarrassment - not because the people who ran weren't capable of being good leaders - but because they had no money, no name recognition, no organized infrastructure for support, no grassroots enthusiasm or any of the other ingredients for successful campaigns beyond worthy intentions and a filing fee.

There was no coordinated statewide effort by Democrats at a time when they could have used it to turn their fortunes around after a drought that's gone on for a decade. They didn't think they could compete on a statewide level with Republicans this year without some good luck - and they weren't in position to get lucky when the tidal wave came though. Republicans who beat state candidates who were unknown and broke are breathing collective sighs of relief as a result. The GOP won all the statewide races because it had a real ticket in place for the election. It has every year in memory - log before its candidates started winning. Democrats can only wonder what might have happened if they'd done the same.

Mike Hailey's column appears regularly in Capitol Inside