Word: jillson
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Still, some longtime Texas observers are not buying into the rosy scenarios for Perry's challenger. "It is going to be uphill for White to win," says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "Texas is the largest red state in the country. It tends to vote Republican by an 8-, 9-, 10-point margin." That is in a normal year, Jillson says, not one in which the political mood is downright rebellious...
Hutchison has tried to emphasize her conservative credentials and to portray Perry as a governor flush with too much power and surrounded by cronies. But getting to the right of Perry, especially when her issues were stale, proved difficult, Jillson says, and her cause was not helped by the confusion last year over when she would quit her Senate seat to focus entirely on the governor's race. Even as the primary election approached, it was still not clear when Hutchison would step down. She had previously said she would leave Washington in October or November, no matter the outcome...
What happened? "She misread the voters and the ground shifted under her feet," says Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In a recent New York Times story, the Senator mused that she had been hoping the "November Republicans" - a reference to the moderates she has relied on for support in the past in a state with no party registration - would turn out and vote in the primary. But her campaign appears to have misjudged the tectonic political shifts of the past year...
...under half a million dollars compared to Perry's $16.7 million and Hutchison's $19.7 million - plus her comment on the Glenn Beck radio show that some of the conspiracy theorists who see the federal government's hand in the 9/11 attacks "have some good arguments" have cost her, Jillson says. Medina is insisting the polls are not picking up her strong grass-roots support, and the question on Tuesday will be just how close Medina comes to Hutchison. (See pictures of former presidential candidate Ron Paul...
Ironically, Hutchison won her Senate seat in a crowded, bruising 1993 special election to replace then U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen by running on an anti-Washington platform. Ever since, she has won handily in re-election bids and has enjoyed high approval ratings, although, as Jillson notes, she has run afoul of the Republican Party's conservative wing, which is very active in primary politics. A few years ago she was booed at an appearance at the state convention over her perceived softness on abortion issues. Now, Jillson says, this election "will write the last paragraph in her Wikipedia entry...