November 4, 2002	Monday	Sha’aban 28,1423

DALLAS: Texas is no longer Marlboro country. Grizzled cowboys are sparse, malls are more common than ranches and even white Republicans are in danger of being eclipsed by Democratic Hispanics and blacks.

That’s why Democrats hoped to upend politics in President George W. Bush’s native state by choosing a charismatic and centrist black former mayor, Ron Kirk, to run for the US Senate, and a wealthy Hispanic banker and oilman to run for governor.

But early indications are that the Democrats may have moved a few years too early and that Republicans will manage to hang on to the state they have dominated politically for the last decade.

Ron Kirk, a charismatic and moderate black who was mayor of Dallas, is running for the US Senate seat vacated by Republican Phil Gramm. Tony Sanchez, an immensely wealthy Hispanic oilman, is running for governor, the post until recently held by George W. Bush before he moved on to the White House.

Hispanics, mainly Mexicans, make up about 32 per cent of the Texas population and are expected to become a majority by 2026. But their political muscle is much smaller than their numbers would suggest. Blacks make up about 12 per cent of the population and they also vote in lower numbers than whites.

This year’s race was supposed to be a taste of the future. As reliably Republican Anglos make up a smaller and smaller proportion of the state, political strategists had hoped ethnic candidates would galvanize the ethnic vote.

“Texas is a Republican state but it is trending back to the Democrats,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He recalled that the South was one- party Democratic from the Civil War until the 1960s, then swung to overwhelmingly Republican by 1980, helping to elect Ronald Reagan.

“But (the) two-party balance in the American South ... has not quite got to Texas yet,” he said.

Not that the Republicans are resting on their laurels. Everyone from Bush on down has showed up to campaign for Kirk’s Republican rival, Attorney General John Cornyn, and for the incumbent Republican governor.

The campaign is working: At one point tied with Cornyn, Kirk has now fallen to 35 per cent versus Cornyn’s 44 per cent. Sanchez, who pulled within single digits of Rick Perry, who took over the governor’s job after Bush went to Washington, now trails 35 per cent to Perry’s 50 per cent.

But if Texas turned Democratic, it would hurt Republicans badly by snatching yet another of the giant states into the Democratic fold. California, the country’s largest state, is already a no-go zone for Republicans, and Florida, the fourth-largest state, is evenly divided.

Kirk has tried to smear Cornyn with links to the failed energy giant Enron, while Cornyn has hammered Kirk for attending a recent get-out-the-vote event that featured a rapper called D.O.C. whose credits include the 1980s hit “F—- tha Police” which advocated killing cops.

Cornyn is also hoping to send a reassuring message of competence in areas like foreign policy, where Kirk is very shaky. Kirk in fact had to apologize for an Iraq flub, when he remarked unwisely that there might be less war fever in Washington if “the next time we go to war the first 500,000 kids have to come from families who earn a million dollars or more.”

Those kinds of missteps have denied him a breakthrough in white support. But what is really dragging Kirk down is that Hispanics have been reluctant to climb aboard the black-brown bandwagon.

“Just because you’re a minority doesn’t mean that you have to follow in lock-step with other minorities,” said Rick Morales, the Hispanic and Democratic mayor of Donna, Texas, who is a Cornyn supporter.

If those minority voters fail to show up at the polls on Tuesday, Republicans will likely maintain their hold on Texas politics for at least a few years more.—dpa