The latest issue of Texas Monthly (the one with Lance Armstrong on the cover) has a great feature story by Paul Burka on Representative Anchia D - Distict 103 from the Dallas area.
TX MonthlyEl Gobernadorby Paul Burka
11.2018
The Texas governor’s race of 2018 was one for the history books—on a par with Lyndon Johnson’s disputed victory over Coke Stevenson in the 1948 U.S. Senate race and Bill Clements’s upset of John Hill in the 1978 governor’s race. These elections came at crucial moments in the state’s history that separated the old from the new. Johnson’s 87-vote margin certified the transformation of Texas from a rural state to an urban one and the accompanying transformation of its economy from agrarian to industrial. Clements’s victory, which made him our first Republican governor since Reconstruction, was seen as an aberration at the time, but it proved to be the leading edge of a surge that reshaped Texas from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state and produced two presidents of the United States.
Now, with the triumph of Dallas mayor Rafael Anchía as the first Hispanic governor, another watershed election has occurred, this one confirming that political control in Texas has shifted from Anglos to Hispanics. What made the 2018 race different from those in 1948 and 1978 was that the change it brought about was one the Texas political community had known was coming. The question was not whether Texas would elect a Hispanic as governor; it was when and whom and from which party.
Anchía and the Democrats benefited greatly from a GOP that had been convulsed over the issue of illegal immigration for a decade, rendering it blind to demographics and even its own self-interest. Two Republican governors, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, understood that the future of the party in Texas depended on attracting Hispanics. Bush’s former political guru Karl Rove believed that Hispanics, because of their patriotism, their religious and family ties, their conservative views on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and their work ethic, could be won over to the R’s. But the base of the party had an entirely different view. Even as Bush won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally in his 2004 race for reelection, Texas Republicans were adopting a platform plank on illegal immigration that read "No amnesty! No how. No way." Republican opposition to immigration—and immigrants—grew so virulent that many Hispanics, even those who had voted Republican, came to believe that the opposition was motivated by racism. The election of Anchía may have relegated the R’s to semipermanent minority status in the state they once dominated.
Hey it's pre-election crime!
No actually it's a very nice piece that's a good background on Anchia's rise in the Texas House. This is only his 2nd legislative session yet he's definitely made a name for himself. He's been our power block on the Elections Committee on voter ID.
Un aplauso para El Gobernador! :applause::applause::applause:
Sonia
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