Sanchez Wins Democrat Nomination for Texas Governor in a Latino First

Businessman Tony Sanchez won the Democratic primary for governor in Texas on Tuesday, making history as the first Latino nominated for the state’s highest office by a major party.

Sanchez, who spent heavily from his personal fortune, easily defeated his main opponent, former state Atty. Gen. Dan Morales, and two non-Latino candidates.

With 65% of precincts reporting, Sanchez had 429,382 votes, or 59%. Morales had 247,594, or 34%.

Sanchez now will face Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who succeeded to the governorship when George W. Bush left Texas to become president.

“It is a great privilege to be entrusted with your hopes and dreams as we chart a new course for the new century,” Sanchez told jubilant supporters at an Austin hotel. The father of four added: “If my boys wouldn’t tease me, I might start crying.”

Texas experts generally give Perry a slight edge in the November election. But with Sanchez on the ballot, most expect a competitive general election campaign, given his ability to bankroll an aggressive campaign and his strong appeal to Latinos.

“I would make Perry the favorite in this race, but not by much,” said Richard Murray, a political scientist and pollster at the University of Houston.

Texas Democrats also voted on their nominee to face Republican state Atty. Gen. John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Phil Gramm. Cornyn faced only token opposition in the GOP primary.

The Democratic race was a nail-biter, and it appeared no outright winner would emerge. The top three contenders were Ron Kirk, the African American former mayor of Dallas; Latino schoolteacher Victor Morales, the party’s low-budget 1996 nominee against Gramm; and Rep. Ken Bentsen, the nephew of former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas).

With about half the state’s precincts reporting, Victor Morales and Kirk each had 32%, while Bentsen had 28%. With none of the trio likely to end up with more than 50% of the vote, the two top finishers are to meet in a runoff April 9.

Kirk was the favorite of many party leaders before the race began. But some believe he failed to perform up to expectations during the campaign, while Bentsen ran better than expected.

Cornyn is favored against whoever wins, in part because his Democratic foe won’t have as much money to spend as Sanchez, who is funding his gubernatorial campaign largely from a family fortune estimated at $600 million.

In the primary, Sanchez spent more than $2 million a week, mostly on television ads. It’s likely his total for the contest exceeded $20 million and approached the most ever spent in a Texas gubernatorial race here through the general election and primary combined. Dan Morales had spent only $561,000 through March 1, the latest date for which figures are available.

The contest between two viable Latino candidates symbolized the growing importance of Mexican American voters in Texas, particularly to the Democratic Party. Despite inroads by Bush as governor, most Texas Latinos still vote Democratic.

Latinos constitute about one-third of the population in both Texas and California. But Texas Democrats are much more dependent on Latino votes than their California counterparts because white voters in the Lone Star State vote more heavily Republican. As a result, to win statewide races in Texas, Democrats usually need Latinos to constitute a larger share of the overall electorate than in California.

“In Texas, you don’t have the labor presence and environmental [issues] that make white people vote Democrat [as in California],” says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a think tank that studies Latino politics. “So in Texas you have to rely more on Latino votes to win.”

In California, Gonzalez said, Democrats can routinely win if Latinos constitute 15% of the statewide vote. In Texas, he calculates, Democrats need to push the Latino share of the vote to as high as 20%--the goal the party has established for this fall. That would require the highest Latino turnout ever in a Texas gubernatorial election.

The race between Sanchez and Dan Morales was unexpectedly bitter. Morales relentlessly attacked Sanchez over his business dealings, particularly the failure of a family-owned savings and loan in the 1980s. Sanchez fired back with ads noting that a federal grand jury was investigating Morales for his role in steering to a friend several hundred million dollars in consulting fees from the settlement of a state lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

In the campaign’s final days, the candidates clashed sharply over the proper role of the Spanish language in Texas life. After agreeing to debate Sanchez once in Spanish and once in English, Morales denounced the Spanish-only debate and accused his rival of trying to divide the state “by race, by ethnicity and by language.” Sanchez said that debating in Spanish was an appropriate way to bring “more people into the [political] process.”

A final round of accusations surfaced Tuesday. Morales’ campaign reacted angrily when party officials abruptly closed about 50 of 325 polling places in the San Antonio area after a number of election judges informed the party Monday night they could not monitor the sites.

Jim Moore, Morales’ communications director, complained that most of the closed sites were on the west side of San Antonio, where Morales was born. He said many voters directed to new sites were unable to vote because voting lists from their original precinct had not been transferred. “It just reeks of typical South Texas politics,” he said.

Morales won a court order Tuesday afternoon to extend the voting hours in the San Antonio area by three hours.

Gabe Quintanilla, the local Democratic chairman, acknowledged that the closings had created substantial confusion. But Quintanilla, who is neutral in the race, said he didn’t believe the last-minute withdrawal of so many election judges was intended to favor Sanchez. “I don’t know why the stars were all aligned this way, but there was nothing sinister about this,” he said.

Even with Sanchez as the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, the general election is certain to be a stiff challenge for the the party.

Sanchez is a work in progress as a campaigner; he’s a modest presence on stage, and he’s offered few details on his policy agenda.

And though Morales raised pointed accusations against Sanchez, the former attorney general lacked the funds to air the charges on television--a problem Perry won’t have.

Still, analysts note, Sanchez emerged from the race with a relatively centrist image (he has said taxes will be a last resort for closing the state’s impending budget deficit) and a demonstrated willingness to spend whatever it may take to be competitive.

Florida, Arizona and New Mexico have previously elected Latino governors.