Texas Gov. Perry wins GOP primary

Reporting from Washington — 

Texas Gov. Rick Perry cruised to an easy victory Tuesday night in a bitterly fought GOP primary that pitted him against the state’s popular U.S. senator and an insurgent running as a favorite of the tea party movement.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison conceded less than an hour after polls closed, bringing an abrupt finish to one of the most highly anticipated contests of the 2010 primary season. The victory gives Perry plenty of time before November to unify Republicans.

With nearly 92% of precincts reporting, Perry held 51% of the vote to Hutchison’s 30%, enough to avoid an April 13 runoff. Debra Medina, an activist making her first bid for office, had 19%.

On the Democratic side, former Houston Mayor Bill White easily swept past half a dozen lesser-known candidates, giving the party its strongest gubernatorial contender in years. Still, most analysts consider White, 55, a decided underdog in the fall campaign.

“It’s always uphill for Democrats in Texas,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The fact this is going to be a tough year for Democrats makes it even a steeper climb.”

The battle between Hutchison, 66, and Perry, 59, had been shaping up for years, driven in no small part by their personal animus. Polls showed that Hutchison, a three-term senator, was highly regarded by fellow Republicans. Perry, a tenacious campaigner, had never lost an election in more than two decades in public office.

But the titanic clash many expected never materialized. By the closing weeks of the race, the only question was whether Perry could win the primary -- and a shot at an unprecedented third full term -- outright.

The contest was nasty. Hutchison portrayed Perry, governor since December 2000, as lazy and corrupt. Perry painted her as a reckless pork-barreler out of touch with her home state.

“This election was about Texans sending a message to Washington: Stop spending our money,” Perry told supporters at an election night celebration in Driftwood, Texas.

But the race was not the ideological referendum that had been predicted, with the conservative purity of Perry tested against Hutchison’s relatively moderate stance on issues such as abortion and stem cell research.

That partly reflected the change in political climate over the last year. The visceral anger against Washington was a gift to Perry, who relentlessly assailed Hutchison as a Beltway insider representing everything -- bailouts, government mandates, red ink -- that Texas conservatives despise.

“It definitely has made it more difficult for me,” Hutchison said in the waning days of the contest. “I didn’t think that anyone could turn my success in producing results for Texas into a negative.”

She compounded her problems by dithering over whether to surrender her Senate seat to run for governor full time. Hutchison chose to stay put, saying she wanted to fight the Democratic healthcare bill. That seemed to suit many Texas Republicans just fine; surveys suggested they were perfectly happy to keep Perry in Austin, the state capital, and Hutchison in Washington.

The third GOP hopeful, Medina, briefly surged in polls after two strong debate showings. It seemed that the businesswoman and first-time candidate might even slip past Hutchison and face Perry in a runoff. But her support plummeted after she said on Glenn Beck’s radio show that there were “some very good arguments” the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Medina quickly backed off the statement, but politically the damage was done.

mark.barabak@

latimes.com