Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D) Elected 1994, 5th term
Born:	Oct. 6, 1946, Austin
Home:	Austin
Education:	U. of TX, B.B.A. 1967, J.D. 1970
Religion:	Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Libby)
Elected  Office:	TX Senate, 1973-85; TX Supreme Ct. Justice, 1989-94.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1970-89; Adjunct Prof., U. of TX Law Schl., 1989-94.
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Austin, the capital of the second largest state in the U.S. and site of its largest Capitol building, is also the southernmost capital in the continental 48 states. It is one of many capitals with a first-rate university, but one of the few (Nashville is the other) with its own musical tradition. Not long ago, Austin seemed as laid-back and countrified. There had never been much commerce here, and for much of the year the Capitol basked in a sun that seemed to ban gainful employment. Its skies were untainted with the smoke of industry, its ground unpocked with pumping oil rigs, its downtown streets lined not with business offices but with buildings holding a few lobbyists and the antique Driskill Hotel. Its biggest industry was the University of Texas--with 50,000 students and endowed with thousands of west Texas acres that turned out to sit on top of oil. The university has long had a distinguished faculty and some of the world's great scholarly collections; it houses the LBJ Presidential Library with its 35 million documents, has spawned a community of liberal intellectuals since the 1940s and helped spark Austin's high-tech boom in the 1980s and 1990s.

Half a century ago, in Lyndon Johnson's time, Austin had a metropolitan population of 132,000. The compact Austin that was Johnson's headquarters in 1948 when the Duval County returns came in and gave him the 87-vote victory that made his national career is a very different Austin from the town that waited up in the rain, alternatively enthused and downcast, hoping to celebrate the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Today's high-tech Austin has grown out miles from the comfortable precincts of the old downtown and university, up and down the vast sloping hills to the west and north and south, bringing together subdivisions on dozens of square miles that were empty land in 1980, not to speak of 1948. Today's Austin is no longer just a creation of the public sector, of state government and the University, though they are still prominent; it is also the home of Dell Computer, of the fourth largest number of high-tech employees in the nation. In the 1990s, the Austin metro area had some of the nation's fastest population growth, up 48% to 1,250,000, and 60% job growth in the 1990s. Austin has a new airport, the converted Bergstrom Air Force Base, handsome and conveniently located--one of the few closed military bases put to this obvious use. One of America's most charming and idiosyncratic small cities has become one of America's fastest-growing and creative metropolitan areas.

Growth has also brought political change. For many years Austin was the central focus of Texas's hardy but almost always outnumbered liberals, based in the university, state government and the Texas Observer. Confident that the future was theirs, that Texas would follow America into the New Deal and the welfare state, they mocked the conservative business lobbyists who called the shots when the "lege" was in session and celebrated Texas zaniness with the verve of a Sixth Street band. But history--or at least Austin--has not moved in the direction Texas liberals expected. As the Austin area has grown, it has become more conservative; as its private sector has led the local economy, the techies who settled in the Silicon Hills going from Austin's Travis County to once-rural Williamson County have tended to vote Republican. The city core and the University area are still Democratic, Texas liberals still are potent in the media, and 31% of the population is Latino--with 10% black and 5% Asian. But this is a state capital, with an Hispanic mayor, in which George W. Bush could feel more at home than he would have 30 years before (when his application for admission was rejected by the UT Law School). Bush lost Austin and Travis County 59%-41% when he first ran for governor in 1994, but he carried Travis 60%-38% in 1998 for re-election and 47%-42% in 2000 for president (with 10% for Ralph Nader).

The 10th Congressional District, which once spread over the Hill Country to the west and south, is now entirely contained within Travis County. It contains the city of Austin east of a line that runs, at various points, along the Capital of Texas ring road and the MoPac Freeway. It includes downtown, the Capitol, the University area and most of the Austin that was settled before the 1980s. The district also includes eastern Travis County. The 10th District takes in all the more Democratic parts of metro Austin; the new Republican areas of western Travis County and Williamson County are in the heavily Republican 21st and 31st Districts. Even so, the 10th is not as heavily Democratic as it once was; it cast 47% of its votes for George W. Bush in 2000. This is the descendant of the district represented in the House by Lyndon Johnson from 1937 until he was elected to the Senate in 1948. Johnson was succeeded by his friend Homer Thornberry, who held the seat until he became a federal judge in December 1963; another LBJ backer, Jake Pickle, was elected that month and served until he retired in 1994--57 years of representation by three political allies, all born between 1908 and 1913.

The congressman from the 10th District is Lloyd Doggett, first elected in 1994. He is a liberal Democrat with a dream resume and an up-and-down political career. Doggett grew up in Austin, finished first in his class and was president of UT's student body in 1967. In 1972, he was elected to the state Senate at 26, and as part of a surprisingly large liberal bloc in the 1970s, he pushed laws against job discrimination and cop-killer bullets and for generic drugs; he has always been a close ally of trial lawyers, the one strong institutional force supporting liberal Democrats in Texas. In the "lege," he was one of the "killer bees" who hid out to prevent a quorum on changing the rules in the Democratic primary and filibustered--wearing sneakers--against what he called anti-consumer bills. In 1984 he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly edging two congressmen to win the Democratic nomination. Then, despite the campaign help of James Carville and Paul Begala, Doggett lost the general 59%-41% to party-switching Congressman Phil Gramm, who sharply attacked him for holding a fundraiser at a San Antonio gay strip bar. Doggett came back and, with strong support from trial lawyers, was elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988. When Pickle retired, Doggett left the bench and ran for Congress. He won the Democratic primary with token opposition and in the general won by the solid, but not quite overwhelming, margin of 56%-40%.

In the House, Doggett's voting record has placed him among the most liberal Texans. He was a vocal critic of Newt Gingrich, and a close ally of Minority Whip David Bonior and Nancy Pelosi, and backed her against Texan Martin Frost in her race for minority leader. With Judy Biggert of Illinois, he co-chairs the Information Technology Working Group, which he helped to form. In 1999, he outmaneuvered other aspirants to become the first Texas Democrat assigned to the Ways and Means Committee since Pickle retired. Along with other Ways and Means Democrats, he sought to restrict the use of offshore tax havens. He voted with Bill Clinton on most key votes, and has voted against most of George W. Bush's major proposals. Three days after September 11, his parliamentary objections stymied late-night action on a $15 billion airline aid bill and forced more thorough debate. He was a leader in opposing the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq; even Doggett was surprised that 126 House Democrats voted to oppose it. Still, he is not everyone's cup of tea. Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, said that while he often agrees with Doggett, he has gained "a reputation for rhetoric with the subtlety of a stevedore's punch."

Doggett was re-elected 56%-41% in 1996 over Teresa Doggett (no relation) and has won easily since. In 2002, he had no Republican opponent. The 2002 redistricting made the district more Democratic by removing west Austin neighborhoods and western Travis County. Party leaders have privately criticized him as one of several House Democrats sitting on a huge campaign account (more than $2 million) that could have been profitably shared with other candidates; perhaps Doggett is keeping his options open to run for statewide office. But if a new congressional map is passed for the 2004 election, Doggett may need every penny to win reelection. Under a May 2003 proposal, western Harris County would be added to Doggett's district and the seat would become considerably more Republican.

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DC Office
201 CHOB 20515, 202-225-4865; Fax: 202-225-3073; Web site: www.house.gov/doggett

State Offices
Austin, 512-916-5921.

Committees

• Ways & Means (14th of 17 D): Health; Select Revenue Measures.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	100	87	100	100	94	50	32	30	4	19	0
2001	85	--	100	93	--	--	21	35	4	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	76%	--	25%		88%	--	10%
Social	90%	--	0%		72%	--	27%
Foreign	91%	--	8%		94%	--	0%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts * 2. Limit Patients' Bill of Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Ban ANWR Development Y 5. Faith-Based Charities N 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts N		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion N  8. Arm Commercial Pilots N  9. Trade Promotion Authority N 10. Bar Funds for Intl. Court N 11. Authorize Force in Iraq N 12. Deny Home. Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Lloyd Doggett (D)	114,428	84%	$190,484
	Michele Messina (Lib)	21,196	16%
2002 primary	Lloyd Doggett (D)	33,083	90%
	Jennifer Gale (D)	3,554	10%
2000 general	Lloyd Doggett (D)	203,628	85%	$232,268
	Michael Davis (Lib)	37,203	15%
Prior winning percentages: 1998 (85%); 1996 (56%); 1994 (56%)

2000 presidential
	Gore (D)	101,534	53%
	Bush (R)	89,738	47%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Tenth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: D + 3
• District Size: 555 square miles
• Population in 2000: 651,619; 95.6% urban; 4.4% rural
• Median Household Income: $41,374; 14.8% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 19.6% blue collar; 66.2% white collar; 14.2% gray collar; 9.5% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 49.7% White, 10.9% Black, 4.3% Asian, 0.3% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 1.6% Two+ races, 0.2% Other, 33.0% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 10.1% German, 6.6% Irish, 6.5% English
• Click here for statewide demographic data.