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Chapter 3 A FAMILY AFFAIR: THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY WITH EACH NEW ELECTION CYCLE, the hopes of Texas Republicans soared with the eager anticipation of a breakthrough year. But with each year, these hopes crumbled under the November election totals. Since John Tower’s upset victory in the special election to the United States Senate in 1961, the party had scored few successes, save for Tower’s reelections , the occasional win of a congressional seat, or a seat in the state legislature . Somehow, 1978 seemed different to many in the party. Pres. Jimmy Carter faced increasingly bitter criticism of his policies, and at home in Texas, the Democrats presided over a lackluster administration. Reported one newspaper , “Republican chances next year are bright, but they must be measured in the context of the party’s minority status.”1 “We suspected that 1978 was going to be a breakthrough year,” recalled Republican pollster Lance Tarrance.2 To underscore the status of the party in late 1977, and despite dozens of Republican candidates running in each election by this time, Tarrance’s new polling firm had the distinction of being the only Republican polling firm in the state. A significant breakthrough victory, such as winning the governor’s mansion, would dramatically bolster the party’s clout within the state and mark the transition from what Tarrance called a “one-anda -half party state to a two-party state.”3 Since the collapse of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the Republicans had remained trapped in the position of the minority party in the state. The Republicans had almost become an afterthought in Texas politics by the early twentieth century.4 At its lowest point in the early 1900s, the party could not even manage to win second place in some elections, behind the remnants of the Populist Party or even the Socialist Party. A small core of Republican voters had remained in areas of the Hill Country and among African Americans in the early years of the century, but these voters remained hopelessly outnumbered by the Democrats. Very few Republicans even bothered to challenge the 50 Chapter 3 Democrats in many elections, often leaving Republicans to choose between the available Democratic candidates in order to have a voice in the system. The remnants of the old planter class and the upper classes controlled the politics of the state through the post-Reconstruction period, remaining firmly aligned with the Democrats. The German settlers in the Hill Country west of Austin had arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, coming to the United States with many liberal ideas and firm support for the Union.5 As a result, the German counties sided with the Republicans and against the planter Democrats during the Civil War and Reconstruction. African Americans, when they could vote, usually stayed aligned with the Republicans. The national Republican Party remained sympathetic to civil rights issues until the 1920s, when its interest in the subject began to lag. The long list of crushing defeats explained the reluctance by Republicans to mount a significant challenge to the Democrats. In the state’s gubernatorial elections between 1900 and 1966, the average Democratic gubernatorial majority was 81.0 percent, while Democratic majorities in Senate races over the same period average 78.88 percent.6 Only the existence of the Republicans on the national level allowed the state party to survive. Federal patronage provided lucrative career opportunities for the handful of the Texas Republican faithful . Patronage thus provided the chairman of the state Republican Party with considerable power to highlight the efforts of party supporters. R. B. Creager, a Republican National Committeeman and chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 1923 to 1950, looked upon the party in this way. Creager worked not so much for Republican votes but for Republican job-seekers who would have him to thank for their valuable appointments from victorious national Republicans.7 The 1928 victory of Herbert Hoover served as the only significant victory for the Texas Republican Party in the early 1900s and only the first time that the Democrats had not carried the state in a presidential election.8 The state party soon realized, however, that the victory did not come as a sudden conversion of Democrats to the Republicans, but because of dissenting factions within the Democracy and the large number of Protestant Democrats unwilling to cast a ballot for the Roman Catholic nominee for the Democrats, Al Smith.9 After 1928, the Democrats resumed their unquestioned sway over Texas politics. In...

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