 Welcome everybody. If everyone could go ahead and kind of move to their seats that would be great. I want to welcome everyone. I'm David Smith. I'm the chair of the LBJ future foreman on behalf of me and our honorary founding chair, Catherine Robb. I'd like to thank you. I'd like to welcome you all to the LBJ library. I am particularly excited about the event we have tonight and thank you all very much for joining us. Because we're in for a real treat. We have collectively over a, because I counted it up, over a century of history and reporting on Texas politics on the stage. And most of that's Erica, ironically enough. From left to right, we have Erica Greeter. Erica is senior editor at Texas Monthly. She was formerly a correspondent with The Economist. And it's the author of the recently published book, Big Hot, Cheap and Right, which is a terrific book. One thing I will say about Erica is I have a lot of friends on the far right, a lot of friends on the far left, and they are all convinced that Erica is a sympathizer with the other side. Which is an indication to me that I think she does it right and does a really good job. And if any of y'all are on Twitter, follow her on Twitter because she is a hoot. Next we have Harvey Krumberg. Harvey is the owner and editor of the CORE report, which is probably about the longest running capital inside politics newsletter out there. And is one of those guys where I've been reading and following since I was a much younger staffer at the Texas Capitol. Next we have Paul Burka, who probably needs an introduction. Paul is the dean, I think, of the Texas political correspondent and reporter community. He has been covering the Texas Capitol, Texas politics for Texas Monthly for 40 years and has done an outstanding job of it. And finally we have, I'm sorry to say a friend of mine, Ross Ramsey, who is editor and co-founder of the always terrific Texas Tribune. Formerly was the editor of the Texas Weekly, and I will tell a quick story. When Ross was editor of Texas Weekly and Harvey was editor of the CORE report, they were both, they're both weeklies or semi-weeklies during the session. And as a young capital staffer, we would go back when it was printed and we delivered to your office, we would all go to see if either us or any of our friends were mentioned by name in either the Texas Weekly or in the CORE report because you knew if you were mentioned by name in either one of those publications, you actually made it in Texas politics. And then I got to know Ross quite well after and the last thing in the world I wanted to have him was to be mentioned by name. Having said that, I want to hand it over to Erica, who is going to very capably moderate. I want to encourage you guys to stick around. After we will have a reception with everyone at the bar for an hour, I've asked each one of these folks and they have agreed to stick around after for as long as they possibly can to visit and entertain more questions and enjoy some good future forum discussion and camaraderie. So thank you all for being here. Erica, I'm going to hand it over to you. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thanks for that introduction. Thank you, my guests, for being here. Guys, brace yourselves. We've got a lot to cover in the next 45 minutes because I'm not going to go past 7.30. I want us all to take a break. I thought I would start by just setting the stage a bit. I'm sure in this kind of crowd, the OJ Future Forum, most of you have been following the political news and so you might already know all this. But when we were putting this panel together, we thought, well, is this panel, is this election this year, are we going to see a lot of change in Texas politics? On the one hand, I don't want to ruin any suspense, but it's probable that after this election, we'll still have Republicans in every top office in the state. There are some Democrats contesting pretty hard right now, but we haven't sent a Democrat to statewide executive office for 20 years, 94s last time. So that seems like at the moment still a fair bet. In that sense, we'll see not very much political change in Texas after these elections. However, we are seeing what, for this state, for modern Texas politics has a ton of change because we have at least five, possibly all six of the top statewide executive offices changing hands. The reason for that is that Governor Perry, who you all know, a governor of Texas, the longest serving governor in the state history, is not running for reelection. Greg Abbott, the Attorney General, is not running for reelection as AG because he's running to replace Perry's governor. Susan Combs, the Comptroller, not running for reelection. Todd Staples, the Ag Commissioner, not running for reelection because he's running for the Lieutenant Governor. Jerry Patterson, Lang Commissioner, also running for the Lieutenant Governor in the primary. David Dewhurst, the Lieutenant Governor, is running for reelection. He's the only one running for reelection through his current job, and he might prevail. I think I would guess that he probably will in the end, probably after a runoff, but we'll see five new faces in those top jobs. In addition to all that, so I was kind of a marathon rundown of these races. We have a kind of visible Senate primary with John Cornyn being challenged by the Tea Party type congressman Steve Stockman from Houston. And we have a lot of down ballot races in turmoil, partly because of all the people who are reviving for higher office now. There's vacancies created at a legislative level. Partly it's because of this trend where Tea Partyers primary challenge incumbent Republicans. But it adds up to quite a bit of excitement and drama and intrigue and really just some excellent, worthy policy debates that we've seen so far. So with that said, I'm going to start by asking all three of these guys, my esteemed colleagues, for their kind of big picture take. I've covered a few Texas primaries, but you've all covered more than I have. So looking at the Republican primary, what's going on here? What's going on with these guys? Let me start. Yes, please do. We haven't seen any contest at the top of the ticket, and frankly neither party for a long time. I was thinking that the melodrama and the governor's race, the last time we saw anything, this exciting was Jim Maddox and Anne Richards. Jim Maddox accused her of using cocaine. She called him a junkyard dog and we went off from there. So it was, when we think it's a race to the bottom now, we should remember that we're actually probably a professional race to the bottom. But the macro picture has been, for the last three or four elections, has been Tea Party versus Chamber of Countries. And what has mystified me to some degree while watching all this is that the Tea Party has not been particularly successful, but it has been persistent and it has been passionate. The small legislative district or the smaller the jurisdiction, house races, for instance, the more successful Chamber of Countries candidates seem to be. The bigger the jurisdiction, i.e. the Senate or the Congress, the more successful the Tea Party types seem to be. And when you look at these races, these statewide races, they must all see the same polling that makes them believe that you can't win without satisfying the Tea Party. I'm not sure that that's been approved to be true. Ultimately, Erica has made the assumption that this will continue to be a Republican state, or at least the statewide will continue to be Republican. But if Wendy Davis gets up into 47, 48, 49 percent and we see Hillary parachute into South Texas and galvanize the Hispanic vote, it will be a game changer and they don't have to win to succeed. Well, I think the other notion of what's going on here is the so-called Republican Civil War, which is being led by conservatives and trying to drive out the moderates from the Republican Party. And a lot of this has to do with the perpetual speakers' race, races that we've had over the last few years, and it will continue as long as there's trust in speaker. Because the conservatives or the things that they are up to in this election is to try to defeat the strong supporters of Strauss and weaken his position in the House of Representatives. So I know I'm going over tomorrow to tomorrow morning to talk to one of Strauss's lieutenants to try to find out what's happening in these little races around the state. There's very hard to tell, in almost every case, there's not a lot of polling out there. There's not a lot of, I would say, actually in terms of big fights shaping up, but the way it's going, we could very well have this Republican Civil War. There's a group called in power Texans that is a very conservative group and they are, in particular, motivated to defeat the Strauss supporters and weaken him so that they can have a speaker who is more of their liking ideologically. I think that's the big fight, that was the big fight last session, and I think as I said, as long as it's not the speaker, it will be the big fight. You know, kind of putting this together, you know, one of the things that you notice watching the Republican candidates is that it's clear watching them that they don't have a governing effect like you do in a national election. So if you watch a presidential election, the candidates on the left will run as far left as they think they can run, knowing that they're going to have to go back toward the middle for the November election. The candidates on the right will do the same thing, going as far toward the right as they think they can, knowing they're going to amend it later. So they govern their behavior a little bit and keep them inside the fences. In Texas it's clear that the Republicans don't think the Democrats are competitive yet and are running elections in a way that tells you they don't think that there's any need to run back toward the moderates and the left. There's nothing governing their, you know, or throttling their ideology in this election. So if you watched any of the, if you've seen any of the forums televised or not among the four candidates for lieutenant governor, for example, you know, they're running a race that is too, a little bit to the right of, you know, Dan Patrick's sort of in his home zone. Jerry Patterson is sort of in his home zone. David Dewhurst is running as a more conservative candidate than I think he's run in other races. And Todd Staples is running somewhat as a more conservative candidate than he has in past races. And they're taking some positions that if they thought that they were in genuine trouble from Letitia Vandicute, the only Democrat in the race in November, I think they would be minding their positions in a little bit different way. You know, to the change question I would say, you know, there's 34 candidates at the top of the ballot in the top seven races if you include the U.S. Senate. And that's just on the Republican side. And Republican voters right now are in this kind of conundrum. If you don't know the candidates, this isn't the kind of election where you can walk into the polling place and say, red flag, blue flag, I'm a red flag. You have to kind of suss out, you know, what's going on with the candidates, what's going on with the groups. I think a lot of the affinity cards, the slate cards, the endorsements are going to be meaningful in a way in this election in the Republican side that they're not in ordinary elections because people are trying to figure out, you know, we did a story the other day on the Lieutenant Governor's race and had a piece of art with it that was four soup cans, each with a face on it. It all looked like the same kind of soup. If you're a Republican voter going to polls, you've got a discernment problem. Nobody knows who these people are, really except the people who follow it, you know, crazy close like we do. People with no lives. Speak for yourself, Harvey. They're just not known. Most of them are, you know, their biggest position might be state signature. So it's going to be very difficult to discern who people are going to be voting for. Attorney General's race with three or four people in it. And, you know, I think it would be very hard to say who the favor is. We know that Dan Branch has the most money, but whether he will be able to turn that into a winning strategy, I don't know. He does have the Dallas establishment money behind him. But I think that you can go to the controller's race. You know, Glenn Hagar is one of the strangest race that I've ever seen, really, for a major position. He's waiting for a controller and he doesn't make any attempt to talk about what, you know, what he would do if you were a controller. Except Dan Abortion. So it's strange people that they don't know the people. And it's going to be, I think, very, very wide open to get through these down ballot races. I think this all raises a lot of interesting themes that we could go into in a lot of different directions. But I wanted to start by pushing back on a point Harvey made. You pointed out that the Tea Party seems to do better. The Tea Party-type candidates do better than the bigger the jurisdiction. And the establishment chamber of commerce-type Republicans do better than local jurisdictions. And that's an interesting way to look at it, which actually I don't think I've heard put that way before. So I was thinking at this, it occurs to me, though, that the big jurisdictions, the Senate race in 2012 with Ted Cruz prevailing over David Dewhurst, maybe the 2010 gubernatorial re-elect campaign with Perry prevailing over Kay Bailey Hutchison. I think you could see those in that framework with Perry being far the right than Kay Bailey and Cruz being far the right than Dewhurst. But it's a pretty small sample set. And in that kind of context, I also think about the fact that Kay Bailey had a fairly listless campaign. And Perry was the incumbent at a time when the state's doing well. And so how could we, why would we extrapolate the Tea Party is strong based on that kind of result? Actually, in the case of Cruz, that was the biggest trophy, I think, that obviously they got that you could actually attribute to the Tea Party type. I think the failure of Kay Bailey Hutchison, David Dewhurst and Rick Perry in their respective races actually had more to do with the fact that they walked on stage communicating mostly a sense of entitlement. You know, it was their turn. Of course, you know, Kay Bailey Hutchison was the most popular politician before she became Kay Bailey Hutchison and got rebranded. And I think that the sense of entitlement is, if you're watching Dewhurst right now is actually one of the most fascinating things because he has really lost that sense of entitlement. And he is out there at rodeo shaking hands. He's doing, it's not a rose garden strategy anymore. He's actually interacting with voters showing up at forums and things like that. He voted today at the South Austin HUB. The terrible one on Old Tor. Right. Which after midnight is actually moving. Most interesting costume places in Austin. He voted in daylight. But I think the organizing, the theme of those elections was a sense of entitlement versus they turned off voters. And undermine their campaigns from the get go. But the only kind of insurgency that really worked was one where the primary was delayed where the candidate was running a rose garden campaign. He was disengaged and thought he could do it all on TV. Running against a guy who'd been out shaking hands and eating rubber chicken now for two years at anything that had a Republican name in front of him. And I was actually thinking more in terms of the Texas Senate and congressional races where Tea Party types have seemed to have been more successful. Louis Gommert by the way was in town today looking to create a pact because he may run for speaker. So this is kind of interesting. I mean this is a conundrum I always wrestle with. I mean Louis Gommert is in Congress. His district I think he shares about 70% of the voters with state Senator Kevin Altife who's considered a conservative but thoughtful, balanced, effective conservative legislator. He's been operating along the best and worst list that Paul's been working on for decades. So you think about this district that's got the Gommert voters and the Altife voters and they're the same voters. It's the Republican primary. I guess to your intuition that this is perhaps a problem we can attribute to Ted Cruz. I think it's been funny seeing some of these campaigns because if Ted Cruz comes to one of these events for a primary candidate like the next day that's just the photo on the website. It's like Cruz is bigger than the candidate on the homepage of the people running now to be the next Ted Cruz. Ross do you think they're right? Is this logic correct? Will the Tea Party prevail this time around? Well I think this is the discernment problem. You know the candidates are trying to attach themselves to something the voters know about. The best example of this right now the Attorney General's race is Dan Brandt who you mentioned has the most money in the race. Dallas Lawyer, chairman in the house, old friend of Joe Strauss's, classic Dallas George Bush Republican. Barry Smenderman is from Houston. He's kind of an engineer. He's an Aggie railroad commissioner. And then Ken Paxton is a social conservative from Collin County which is one of the hotbeds of social conservative movement conservatives. And we sent a reporter up there I guess four years ago, a young reporter who had never done this before and said be sure to check with the Tea Parties. And he called me back from Collin County in a cold panic and said there's four Tea Parties up here. So Paxton is expressing that in this election you know in an election where nobody knows him outside of the Senate District with an ad that has Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz isn't actually endorsing anybody except for some judges but there's no way you can watch this ad and come away with any impression other than that Ted Cruz is endorsing Ken Paxton. And for everybody who likes Ted Cruz that's the association they're going to make. This is kind of what I'm getting at with associations. And I think that's who can do that, you know, have the better chance of being successful. And maybe that by the time you get down to the railroad commission race and you're trying to figure out, you know, let me see Malachi Boils and Becky Berger and Wayne Christian and Ryan Sitton. This may or may not mean anything to you and you don't necessarily know which one is the Tea Party candidate, which one has the association that you're looking for. Maybe if you knew all the way down the ballot, TT, TT or movement, movement, movement, movement, they had labels on them. It's a red flag blue flag problem. They don't have labels on them and if you don't know the candidates it's kind of a crapshoot. Well, the bigger sort of big picture is do we think the Tea Party is stronger than it was in let's say 2010 which was the last election or do we think it's underlined? The Tea Party weaker. Nationally, I don't think there's any question that it's weaker but in Texas Republican politics apparently all the statewide candidates believe that you may be able to win with maybe the most motivated the highest intensity voters. I guess that's the best way to say it. So you can't afford to offend the Tea Party even if they're only going to be 35 or 37% of the vote. I think Ted Cruz scared the hell out of everybody. The 2010 election was the first midterm in the Obama administration. One thing you've got to say in analyzing this year's election is that the Democrats, even if they were on even ground with Republicans in a competitive party and had spectacular candidates all the way up and down the ballot, they've got a headwind. Obama is very unpopular in Texas right now and that's a problem. But Ted Cruz, so that was the problem in 2010. The Republicans in Texas and all over the country had a spectacular. And then you come back in 2012 and for the most part the Tea Party didn't do all that well on the ballot but they did really well in that one race that everybody in the country was talking about and that got all of the coverage. Everybody talked about the Wendy Davis bottle rocket. The first bottle rocket was the Ted Cruz bottle rocket. Just sort of instant fame, instant everybody looking at it. And in this election cycle, I know you guys have run into this reporting. Cruz is a verb. You want to go out in a Republican primary and make sure you don't get Cruz. But this is, I mean, seriously, that's how they talk about it. This may lead us to part two of Paul's question about is the Tea Party stronger or weaker. I mean that was 2012, it was less than two years ago. So this is really the first big test we've had. I mean, you could argue the last legislative session was a test in the sort of Tea Party versus establishment Republicans strength in the state. But what will happen if the Tea Party type candidates are set back in the selection, if Paxton loses, which I think you will, if, in the conflict, I'm not sure, which is, if Dewhurst was returned to office, if Cornyn, who I think clearly will prevail in the Senate race, goes back to the Senate, will the Tea Party take that as a, as a genuine setback? Will they be subdued next time around or will they be further aggravated? I continue to think that they, that they are the most intense but not the majority of the Republican Party. I think that there was, with the government shutdown and people, the entire business community went through a convulsion essentially as, as they realized the implications of this melodrama that one senator essentially was imposing on the rest of the country. But there is no organizing principle, big statewide organizing principle for moderates. Well that's sort of the civil war. You know, you raise the speaker's race as kind of the metric, but so you look at the people who would be self-identified as Tea Party candidates in the house this last session, they ran as Tea Party candidates. The sophomore, the freshmen arrive essentially, let's tear the place down, by the time they're sophomores they're having to go back on their school boards and their hospital districts and their big employers and their small employers and they start, become, start a house broken, institutionalized, more institutionally sensitive. Institutionalized is a good word. And the speaker's office did a fabulous job this last session of mentoring all these new freshmen who thought they were Tea Party folks and showing them how voting with the Tea Party was against the interests of their districts. So people walked in to the process thinking they were Tea Party candidates and finished on sign and die or whenever we finished being much more comfortable with the institutional role, the role of the institution. The question about... I don't know, it didn't look that way to me when they were trying to pass the, you know, Prop 6. I mean, they had a hard time. But they did pass it. They got two-thirds. They got it, but it was hard. They had to go through three different budgets. The, actually the only... The argument was not about whether we should do it there or whether we should access the rainy day fund. There was a mechanism... It was a process for them. It was how we were going to access the rainy day fund. And that was several steps beyond where we had started the session where the rainy day fund was supposed... Or the last session where the rainy day fund was untouchable. And very few of them went home and ran against the constitutional amendment. You know, once this was passed, I mean, there were some skirmishes. But for the most part, most of the members went home and either worked for the passage of that constitutional amendment in November or just kept it in fact shut. It's hard to have your golf tournament to raise money and argue against water when you've got the greens out there. Well, and at certain points, the Tea Party type members were actually just persuaded by our arguments about things. And you think about Senator Donna Campbell from New Braunfels who voted for the road funding measure because she is from New Braunfels, which if any of you are from San Antonio as I am, you will fully appreciate why a Tea Party type senator would still support that measure in a state growing so much. Well, she said, I voted for this because Interstate 35 is a parking lot. Right. And as a Tea Party, I think she went home and she's defending that now. So, Ross, the point about associations, it's interesting because in some ways the Republican Party brand in the state as strong as it seems to be is really just incredibly weak, right? I mean, one thing that has been, I guess to me, the dog that didn't bark in the night during this campaign is that there has been almost nobody on the Republican side just playing for the middle or articulating the middle and kind of creating a message about jobs and the economy and growth and success. Despite the fact that that message is so readily available to a Texas Republican, the past 20 years when they've controlled everything, the state's done really well. We've been growing, every city is growing, the economy is doing well, all industries are growing. We're seeing genuinely better outcomes on those metrics. That's a really strong suit for them. They have suits that are not that strong, but that is a strong suit and they're not invoking that. And I guess maybe from your point of view. I'm sorry. No, so I mean, maybe I'm not, I guess on the ballot, everyone who's running as Republicans denominated as such, but there's not even anybody kind of casting and saying, I want to continue this legacy, this Texas miracle they've been talking about. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for, you know, further immigration restrictions or further abortion restrictions and so on. The only person who's doing that is Strauss. Yes. The only person he neither has. Right. And he will win reelection in his primaries. He's been reelected before. You know, the politicians tend to emulate their stars. The star of the party in Texas right now is Ted Cruz. And so the guy you emulate in order to succeed in a Republican primary in particular, and less pointedly, but in a general election in Texas is Ted Cruz. This was the best model going forward. The model you're talking about when you ask a lot of Republicans about that, they don't say Joe Strauss, they say Mitt Romney. And they say, you know, that may be where I'm most comfortable and that may be where some of my voters are the most comfortable. But as Harvey said, the most, you know, innovative, the most energized voters are the ones that are, you know, cheering Ted Cruz. And so that's where you go. I mean, if you can't say anything else about politicians, they're market oriented in their response. And they're looking at what works and that's what works right now. I tend to think that up until now, I just presumed that Davis was going to get close to, could get close to 50%. Not necessarily pass it. And then I saw how inept and ham-fisted Greg Abbott was on the Ted Nugent story this week and realize that there was more opening here than any of us thought. I was not covering Texas politics when Bill Clements won the governorship. But I don't think anybody presumed that Bill Clements was viable. I think Democrats were essentially taken by surprise. Paul's shaking his head. No, no, no. I remember sitting there by the radio listening and thinking, Bill Clements carried Cameron County? John Howard's going to be the senator. But the takeaway is that the erosion inside the Republican Party is creating opportunities for Democrats that we don't know if they can execute on or if they can. If they can capitalize on. But there are tectonic moments and Bill Clements was a tectonic moment. There was a popular Republican president at the time. But there was also a civil war inside the Democratic Party. They created an opportunity. And so the parallels are suddenly I'm rethinking, we have two not ready for prime time top of the ticket candidates, at least as the message of the last month. And that creates, it's very destabilizing, which is wonderful for us. It is wonderful for political journalists. I was going to say briefly that we're going to do a Q&A. So we'll start that after the next question. So if you guys want to start getting ready to pounce questions, just be ready. We're almost there. Russ, are you going to add on that? No. Well, the main one kind of last question is that what do you expect? Is there anything that you think will happen this year? That will create a lot of impact in the state that we're not really thinking about right now. I think about things like getting a new governor when Perry has been there so long that he's had so much time to wield the power of appointments and to mass executive power through executive orders. Abbott, who's been a very strong AG. We will not have an AG who's that strong, probably certainly not that well established as Abbott has been these past 10 years. What are you guys looking at as kind of? It's classically a weak governor state, right? We used to write about how the legislature sort of main handles whoever the governor is and doesn't pay much attention to them when they don't absolutely have to. And Rick Perry's turned that on its head. He's been governor for 14 years. I think he's two years, by the time he's finished, he'll have been governor for two years longer than FDR or president. And in that time, if you go through the executive agencies, he's been through the cycle of appointments a couple of times now. And so all of those people, you know, he doesn't have to deal with any vestiges of Bush administration and hasn't had to for a long time. And then if you look at the top of the org charts in all of the agencies, the executive director and the general counsel and the head of the communications and all the way down I needed agencies that are marbled with Perry people in a way that we haven't seen in Texas politics since those agencies were marbled with Bob Bullock people. And I think, you know, for the incoming office holders, I think they're going to be dealing with this for a long time. David Dewhurst has been the lieutenant governor since 2002. Greg Abbott's the longest serving attorney general in Texas history. And I think their successors are going to take a little bit of time to unwind this. And the next governor is going to be either proof that we've changed the role of the governor in Texas forever because of Rick Perry or that we really haven't and that he was an anomaly and it really is a weak governor system. Well, Perry has effectively established a cabinet form of government in Texas. That's what he's done. And, you know, it's a remarkable feat to have done that. But it's like when you're in the legislature or in the government, it's like a monopoly board. You can't find a place to land on the board that's safe. And from Rick Perry, there is no boardwalk, no park place, no vintner garden. No chancellor, no president. I actually think the most interesting change right now is that because of Perry's domination, it has empowered what I've, you know, sarcastically referred to as the oligarchs, the billionaires, the ones who've been financing the Republican campaigns. Three up mark and the rest are getting old. But the trade associations used to essentially the trade associations and to a lesser degree the contract lobbyists used to be the ones who kind of affected the levers of power. Now it's two dozen oligarchs in the Republican side and a handful of trial lawyers on the Democratic side where they're needed. With this whole new cast of characters, I wonder, trade associations bring grassroots to the table, oligarchs bring $100,000 checks to the table. And I tend to think that there's a target of opportunity there for trade associations and the non-oligarchs to actually reassert themselves in the process and regain some of the levers of power. And it's the change that you don't see, but it actually may prove to be the most important change. Let me ask you something, because I hear this from people all the time, that the people who are ruining politics are not the oligarchs and they're not the trade associations, it's the consultants. That's what I hear. And consultants are hired agents of oligarchs and trade associations, but they're also independent entrepreneurs. So if you're a consultant, you're a lobbyist, a public relations firm, you only have to disclose your lobby fees, you don't have to disclose your public relations stuff. So I guess they are the hidden agents of the process, but that's kind of like blaming the mainstream media for what's happening under the dome. They're really the messengers more than the true agents. So let's just blame the candidates maybe. Yeah, there you go. Should we take some questions, sir? Yeah, Mr. Conver will ask. Absolutely. Other than due to the sharp, diverse race and then the four-way governor's race in 2006, which I think you can explain as anomalies in the coming back. With the Democratic State of Canada as in every example, it's not like Dallas County where you saw the Republican margins in the county coming closer and closer and then it flipped. What is the quantitative evidence, other than maybe just a hunch that there's some opening? Is there any quantitative evidence to suggest that it really has the chance to get close to 50%? Well, we certainly haven't seen any evidence of execution, of creating a plan and executing a plan, but we do see the raw material there. And that is that the organizing principles for Democrats have been unmassaged now. I guess that's a bad term. But it have been, sorry, have been underutilized. The organizing principle of women was critical. You forget that in 2007, the Texas House Democrats fought the Texas House to a functional tie of 76 Republican, 74 Democrats, which led to ultimately the overthrow of Tom Craddick and created some hope for Democrats that they had a bench team that ultimately was undermined by the Barack Obama. I think the organizing principle of women and minorities, essentially, well, this is really a tortured comparison. But the only place that the Obama coalition was tested in the last election was in Wendy Davis' Senate District. And that was women, minorities and millennials with a little help from the downtown business community. Yeah, it allowed the minorities to have a bigger impact. Is there a quantitative evidence yet? I don't think so, but we haven't seen Hillary come down or any other, but I think the Ted Nugent thing ironically broke through. Certainly, the two things that have broken through in the last month have been Wendy Davis abandoned her children, which is not true, or there's no evidence of it. And Ted Nugent, that Second Amendment probably doesn't trump child molesting. So I think the deck is pretty well shuffled here in that the Republicans are doing what the Democrats did in the days of Yarborough and Connolly and fractionalizing and marginalizing themselves and creating an opportunity for a bigger voice. She's going to have $25 million. She's going to have a boatload of volunteers. Republicans are speaking to a smaller and smaller audience constantly. And I don't know when the inflection point is, but it may be... I said earlier tonight to somebody that it feels like the Republicans have their foot on the accelerator as they go over the cliff. It may be four years away, but this primary is not... The first sign of this, I think I'm more on your side of this. The first sign of this is going to be when the Republicans look in the rearview mirror. Remember the T-Rex in the rearview mirror in Jurassic Park? Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear. When you see Republicans debating in a way that tells you that they've got an eye on November and tells you that they've got something in their own numbers, in their own metrics, in their own... They're catching some vibe that there's some reason to be afraid of this other thing. Democrats will tell you... The things that they're hopeful about are... They got 2.9 million people out for a very competitive race in 2008. 2.2 million of those people have never come back to the Democratic primaries. But a lot of them still vote in November elections. And so one aim of the Democrats is maybe we can get some of those people to vote. Some of the people who vote Democratic in presidential years to vote Democratic in a gubernatorial year. Maybe that'll change the map. The other thing is anecdotal but interesting. That was quite a bit of noise that the Democrats raised that one night in June. Is that a one offer? Is that something that they can sustain and turn into an energetic force going forward? And some Democrats will tell you, not a lot of them, but some of them... This is the wrong time to ask them this. Some of them will tell you, this isn't really about 2014. We were building a thing for maybe Hillary Run, maybe somebody else in 2016, maybe 2018. I think three of those Democrats are named Castro and Park. And looked at this situation this year and said, I want to run statewide but not yet. I know you guys will be shocked to find out that we do this with each other. We're on panels with someone regularly. So I recently heard Ross make allusion to the Jurassic Park in the rear view mirror. And I got to thinking about that afterwards because I think it really is apt. But if you watch Jurassic Park, there's no sign of the dinosaur until suddenly. That's true. It's in the mirror. The Dallas County went like that. Harris County is in the same place. You know, the big counties have all done this. Right. If you look at the voting patterns and the suburbs, you're seeing the bleeding of the Democratic trend into the Republican suburbs. So the areas in Williamson County most juxtaposed to Austin are increasingly becoming Democratic. There's an implication here that this trend is irreversible. Whenever it takes effect, it's nonetheless a trajectory. Do you think if we see Abbott, for example, when is he going to govern as a far-right person, even if he has campaigned to the right? Or does he just get through a primary or get through a general election, take office and stop this kind of stuff? It's a really good question. And I think the most important issue right now in the campaign for the Republicans is, can Greg Abbott regain his footing? Or is this going to be repeated? In other words, partly because he is an unyielding person. He's not, I'm going to work with everybody kind of guy. And I think that if Abbott does not regain his footing, the Republicans are going to be on very dangerous ground. That what happened this week with Ted Dugetian is very, very dangerous for Republicans. Because, more than anything else, it's women who are going to be the ones that are turned off by what happened. I'm going to work with you. Let's do Bakker and then JJ after. Where does the gupatorial stand on the Renny Day Fund? Perry put it off limits. Gee, that's a policy question. I'm not sure about that. Anybody's talked about policy. We want to know who's winning the race in Portland County. Right. State legislature. I don't know that it makes much difference because as a freshman governor, they'll both be freshman governors and the legislative leaders, Strauss is going to be speaker again barring something truly extraordinary. And Patrick will probably make noises to keep it off the table. But Abbott has lousy relations with the legislature and the Democratic, the legislature is still going to be Republican. So if Davis wins, it's going to be great for us, but it's going to be hard to imagine what the dynamic is at this stage. It'll depend what they spend it on. If the legislature comes in and says, we're going to have to use the Renny Day Fund for X, school finance, whatever it is. And X is dear enough that it's dangerous politically to veto that move. This is how they overwhelmed governors before. I think, and this kind of goes back to this organizational thing. Perry's got really deep control of the government right now in a way that I don't think the next governor, at least initially will, and that's a power shift toward the legislature. So it's really sort of a feel for what the legislature is going to do. Paul's right that the House fought like crazy about using Renny Day Fund and any mechanism around it for water. The question is going to be this balance of the price sensitive members of the legislature who are worried about taxes and fees and Renny Day Fund and things like that and the product sensitive ones who are worried about things like roads, schools, water, and that. I mean that's kind of the essential tension here. And if you get to a point where, you know, I really don't want to spend more money on schools but that judge is telling me I have to. And I don't want to raise taxes and fees but I do have this pot of money over here that I said I wouldn't get into. That pot's easier than those if they decided to do this. And that's the balance that they'll be balanced. And that was yesterday's battle frankly. We'll find out if Michael, there was one voice that was driving that train essentially and if that one voice is Michael Quinn Sullivan, Tim Dunn, Empower Texts and Texas Prophysical Responsibility, they're all the same voice, the same entity. And if they are successful in this election it'll make a difference. But if they're, by the end of the last session, their capacity to move votes on the House and Senate floor were fairly limited. I'll just do it day to day and then you back there after day to day. So March 5th, what do you think the biggest surprise? How relieved John Cornyn is. He's liberated from Ted Cruz. That already happened. No, he's liberated from Ted Cruz. On March 5th, Ted Cruz no longer wields any power over John Cornyn. If Dewarce goes back, is he also liberated from Ted Cruz? I think he's liberated from Rick Perry. He was so fearful of Rick Perry that Perry's office could intimidate. He was always caught in a crossfire between his Senators and the Governor's office. And the Senators were going to generally have it away. But it kind of kneecapped him and he had very, very rocky relations inside the Senate. I don't think that Greg Abbott intimidates him. I'll say outside chance, Deborah Medina for Comptroller. Based on how he's running this race, do we expect to see the same as it was last session? Or do we expect to see the old Dewarce back? I think we know Dewarce. I think we'll get the same Dewarce. As he was last session? Yeah, one of the things he said, you can judge for yourself whether this was a smart thing to say during the campaign, was if I win this election, I'm not going to run again. So that tells you first that it's a valedictory and it also tells you that he's not going to feel the pressure of another election behind him. So I think we've watched him since 2002 and he's essentially been the same guy. There were moments when the Senate changed and he's kind of, you know, Dewarce is, I'll say this gently, but I think it's true. In some ways he's a weather bane for the Senate. And, you know, the Senate changed and got more conservative this time and Dewarce went with the weather bane. I think if he's elected again, the next Senate promises to be a notch or two more conservative than this one. You know, a lot of the Senators are being replaced, who are leaving are being replaced by people who are at least or more conservative than they are. I think, you know, I think Dewarce is kind of a known fondness. I just think the Republicans, you know, demographics plays a huge part in all of this. And the Republicans are living in a fool's paradise or rather dying in a fool's paradise because they're getting old. And they're running out of Republicans. The factory that makes Republicans is kind of shut down. And so that's the problem for Republicans. I did a column a couple of years ago, I talked to Steve Ministeri, who was the chairman of the Republican Party. And he told me that the average age of Republican donors at that time was 72. And the average age of convention delegates was 68. So that's the future of this thing. Can we change? Any time for one more quick question? I was curious about Judge Strauss, Harvey said he thought that he was going to be speaker. Does there anything that he doesn't need to worry about all these efforts this evening? Yeah, I think Strauss is basically like the median voter in the state, of all statewide, he's probably closest to that. I think he's in a very strong position because he's well in line with Texan norms, his district norms, state norms. What infuriates the Tim Dunn's and the Michael Quinn Sullivan's of the world is that he's got the rock solid support of 50 Democrats. And so if you're going to give away chairmanship and power, every speaker has 25 revolutionaries that are trying to unseat them one way or the other. And that's essentially what Strauss has got. They've incorporated the entire rest of the house into the leadership structure. And even if we have 15 or 20 new members, he's still got 76. So there's no bet unless there's something that is so apocryphal, we can't see it coming. But unless the Democrats go off the reservation, he's completely safe. Correct. And that's what infuriates the Republicans. They want the Republican caucus to pick, which they did last time actually. They did have a vote inside the Republican caucus and Strauss got 76. Well guys, I want to thank you all so much for being here and thank my panelists for being here too. We're going to stick around so if you all want to ask more questions, I'm sure you can approach any of these friendly gentlemen to do so. But yeah, thank you for being here. Thank you guys.