GOP’s the Loser When It Comes to Partisan Politics

Call it the great overreaching. In politics, one often has to look backward to figure out the present. Such is the case when it comes to the Houston City Council and the Harris County Republican Party.

Next week, voters head to the polls in Houston and when all is said and done, Democrats are likely to increase their advantage at the council table. As a result of decisions made by local Republicans years ago, it has become next to impossible for a member of the GOP to win a citywide race. It wasn’t always this way.

Until the 1990s, no one gave much thought to a city candidate’s party affiliation. Local parties stayed out of municipal races and treated the nonpartisan elections as just that, nonpartisan.

But the Republican Party was riding high in the 1990s, and after term limits started creating regular openings, former Harris County Republican Party Chairman Gary Polland and others saw it as a great opportunity to increase their local strength.

With the same great strategic acumen that went into this year’s decision to oppose the statewide cancer initiative, the local GOP, along with other Republican organizations, started publishing scorecards rating the candidates on their “conservative principles” and getting involved like never before.

At first, since the Democratic Party was slow to react in-kind, the strategy was rather effective, especially in more Republican-leaning council districts. Failure to get the seal of approval from the party stalwarts could be the death blow for an aspiring politico in a heavily Republican district such as A or G.

However, when it came to citywide races, there was a miscalculation and since five council seats, the controller and mayor are all elected citywide, it was a significant miscalculation, to say the least.

If local Republicans were going to treat city elections as partisan affairs, Democrats would be forced to do the same.

By 1997, the game was on. In the runoff for mayor that year, when Rob Mosbacher, well known for his involvement in the Republican Party, faced Lee Brown, a former Clinton cabinet appointee, it wasn’t much different from a partisan general election.

Brown won and was then followed into the mayor’s office by Bill White, the former chair of the Texas Democratic Party.

The city races have become highly partisan, and now just about everyone knows the candidates’ party affiliation. Since 1999, only four Republicans have succeeded in citywide elections while 12 Democrats have.

Winning 25 percent of the time isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s easy to explain the Republicans’ sorry won-loss record. Democrats outnumber Republicans within the city limits of Houston by at least 10 percentage points.

What’s interesting is that Democrats outnumbered Republicans back when the local GOP made the decision to get involved in the first place. If they had continued to stay out, party affiliation might not have ever become such a critical factor; it still isn’t in Dallas, where an overwhelmingly Democratic city just elected a Republican mayor last spring.

But in Houston, Republicans couldn’t leave well enough alone and now, as a result, they have to be content with a strong Democratic majority on City Council n a majority likely to grow even stronger after next week.

Keep those scorecards coming!

(Originally published by Examiner Newspaper Group)