Texas Democrats’ Hopes for Revival Rest With Sanchez, Latinos

If demography is destiny, Latino businessman Tony Sanchez represents the inevitable future of Democratic politics in Texas. The question for Democrats is whether the future is now.

Sanchez, the clear front-runner in Tuesday’s primary for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, is the key figure in the party’s strategy to restore its competitiveness in a state that has been dominated by Republicans.

Over the last 15 years, a relentless realignment of white voters in rural and suburban areas toward the GOP has allowed Republicans to sweep all of the major statewide offices and easily capture the state in presidential elections. Pushed to the wall, Democrats have been hoping that the inexorable increase in the state’s Democratic-leaning Latino population will slowly carry them back within reach of the GOP in the nation’s second largest state.

Sanchez’s bid to become Texas’ first Latino gubernatorial nominee is a bold effort to fast-forward that trajectory--an attempt to inspire a quantum leap in Latino turnout that would bolster the party’s prospects up and down the ballot.

The Latino population growth means that “Texas is moving back toward being a swing state over the next four to six years,” said veteran Texas political consultant Matthew Dowd, director of polling at the Republican National Committee. “The question for Democrats is whether they can move up six years into six months.”

Sanchez is likely to cross his first hurdle Tuesday; he’s a heavy favorite to win an unexpectedly bitter primary over former state Atty. Gen. Dan Morales, who Sanchez has outspent by more than 30 to 1.

The winner will face off against Republican Gov. Rick Perry, the lieutenant governor who ascended to the top job when George W. Bush left Texas to become president.

Before Sanchez was a candidate, he was a concept in the mind of Democratic strategists, particularly former comptroller John Sharp. In 1998, Sharp narrowly lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Perry; he concluded that his GOP opponent had prevailed largely because Latino turnout sagged without a Mexican American candidate on the Democratic ticket.

As a result, Sharp encouraged Sanchez to seek the gubernatorial nomination this year. Sanchez was familiar enough in Democratic circles as a multimillionaire businessman from the Rio Grande Valley whose family had made its money in energy, banking and a shrewd early investment in the Blockbuster Inc. home video chain.

But in some respects, Sanchez was an unusual choice. He’s neither a dynamic public presence nor a compelling speaker. At 59, he had no experience in public office except for a stint on the University of Texas Board of Regents. And he had been appointed to that job by Bush, who Sanchez supported in both of his governor’s races as well as his 2000 presidential bid.

Sharp and other Democratic insiders were willing to look past those issues because in other ways Sanchez seemed exactly what the beleaguered party needed: a Latino who might excite Mexican American turnout; a businessman who might reassure fiscally conservative voters; and perhaps most important, a candidate wealthy enough to fund not only his own campaign but also get-out-the-vote efforts.

Almost all of the party’s leadership unified behind Sanchez. Then Morales unexpectedly upset the coronation by jumping into the race just hours before the filing deadline closed in January.

A former state legislator from San Antonio and a two-term attorney general, Morales had always been a maverick who operated without much regard for the state Democratic hierarchy--particularly the Mexican American leadership. In the primary campaign, Morales has progressed from maverick to kamikaze. He’s launched a withering assault on Sanchez that’s converted an unprecedented gubernatorial primary between two viable Latino candidates into something very familiar here--a campaign that looks like a bar fight.

“I don’t think they have understood the historical opportunity that this race provides them,” said Andrew Hernandez, a lecturer at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

Morales has pounded Sanchez over the failure of a family-owned savings and loan during the 1980s and a federal investigation that found Mexican drug dealers had laundered $25 million through the institution. Sanchez says he had no knowledge of the drug money deposits--though in at least one case the S&L; sent an armored car to collect more than $5 million from a plane landing at a private airfield--and no one from the institution was ever charged with any wrongdoing.

Sanchez has fired back with ads noting that Morales is under federal investigation for his role in steering a generous slice of the settlement money from the state’s lawsuit against the major tobacco companies toward an old friend who served as his legal advisor.

In the campaign’s final days, the struggle between the two has veered into even more explosive and unanticipated terrain: the role of the Spanish language, and Latinos more generally, in Texas life. Just before the pair were scheduled to debate in English and then Spanish this month, Morales announced he would translate his answers into English, because English deserved to be treated as the state’s dominant language.

Since then, Morales has daily accused Sanchez of trying to “divide [Texas] by race, by ethnicity and by language.”

At an Austin appearance last week, Morales used language that might have inspired protest marches if uttered by a white candidate, suggesting that Sanchez had forgotten “this is a campaign for governor of Texas . . . not . . . for governor of Mexico.”

Most analysts believe Morales’ strategy is unlikely to succeed. And Sanchez is burying his opponent under television ads: Figures released last week showed he had spent more than $18 million, almost all of it in personal contributions or loans. Morales had spent $561,000.

“Morales has thrown out some good material, but unless you can get it on television, it’s not going to penetrate,” said Michael Baselice, the pollster for Perry. “People just don’t know the other side of Tony Sanchez--yet.”

Responding to that inevitable advertising assault on his business record will be one of the principal challenges for Sanchez if he wins the nomination. The other will be increasing Latino turnout enough to get within range of Perry.

It was clear his candidacy is generating genuine pride among Latino voters. When Sanchez visited a firehouse last week in San Antonio, firefighter Juan Herrera--who once was forbidden from speaking Spanish on the job--almost choked up imagining the prospect of a Latino governor. “We’ve come a long ways,” he said as several Latino colleagues nodded. “To me a Hispanic governor . . . it would be like Martin Luther King said: a dream.”

Even so, it will be daunting to turn out enough Latino voters to erase the GOP advantage among whites. In the last two gubernatorial races, Latinos have cast from 10% to 13% of the vote. Sanchez’s strategists want 20%--which they believe, with strong African American support and about one-third of the white vote, would allow them to beat Perry.

On paper, the math works. But meeting that goal would require nearly half of all Latino registered voters to participate in the election, said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a Los Angeles-based group that studies Latino politics.

To increase Latino turnout that much, Gonzalez said, “would require a change in culture.”

Or a campaign that can successfully fast-forward history.