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Last Updated June 22, 2005
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 B. 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 metropolitan center of 1.2 million that waited up in the rain, alternatively enthused and downcast, hoping to celebrate the election of George W. Bush in 2000. 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. Adding to the cultural scene is the mania surrounding Lance Armstrong, the champion international cyclist who has adopted Austin as his hometown. But history--or at least Austin--has not moved in the direction Texas liberals expected. As the Austin area grew, it became 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, 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). But in 2004 Austin's liberal community rallied and registered large numbers of new voters, and Bush lost Travis County 56%-42%, even as he increased his margin statewide; Kerry got 57% more votes in the county than Al Gore had. The 25th Congressional District of Texas, a new seat created by the 2003 redistricting, includes most of the east side of Austin and Travis County, including most of the city's heavily black and Latino neighborhoods. The Capitol and the UT campus are just outside, in the 21st District, while the 10th District includes most of the Republican northern part of the city and county. It was part of Tom DeLay's redistricting strategy to split Travis County among three districts, two of them safely Republican and the other a new heavily Hispanic district. This was accomplished by extending the 25th District south to the Mexican border on the Rio Grande. As a result, the district's two main population centers are some 300 miles apart: the Travis County portion, 49% Hispanic, and the Hidalgo County portion, 89% Hispanic, each account for just under 40% of the district's residents. The district includes one-third of Austin and three-quarters of McAllen, just north of the Rio Grande. This is the slowest-growing part of Austin, but McAllen and other towns in the Lower Rio Grande Valley have been growing rapidly, spurred by NAFTA, though pockets of deep poverty remain. "Where once there were orange groves, now there are new homes and schools," wrote the San Antonio Express-News. The seven rural counties in the thin 300-mile fajita strip between Travis and Hidalgo are rural and lightly populated. They include Starr County, the poorest in Texas and home of many blatant and wealthy drug smugglers, and Duval County, sometimes the most Democratic county in the United States, whose boss George Parr provided the key votes Lyndon Johnson needed for his 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic Senate runoff (conveniently, many people voted in alphabetical order). The district is 69% Hispanic and strongly Democratic. John Kerry defeated Bush here 63%-37%, his best showing in Texas outside of the three urban districts with black pluralities. But with only 39% of the district now in Travis County (and 38% in Hidalgo), many Austin liberals feared that they would lose their seat in Congress to the Hispanics on the border. Republican redistricters contended that they were merely seeking to assure a safely Democratic district. Both groups underestimated the resilience of a veteran Democratic incumbent. The congressman from the 25th District is Lloyd Doggett, first elected in 1994 in the old 10th. He is a liberal Democrat with a dream resume and a political career with some notable twists. 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. Doggett came back and, with strong support from trial lawyers, was elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988. When Jake Pickle retired after 31 years, Doggett ran for Congress after his judgeship had expired. 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, and he has never served in the majority. 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. In 1999, he became 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 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 a 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." When gleeful Republicans hoped that redistricting would put a stake through his heart, Doggett took up the challenge. As some other dislocated Texas Democrats took their fight to the courts, Doggett took his case to the voters of his new district. He started by working hard to get the support of elected officials and party activists along the border. "I chose to spend not a few hours here in the Valley in the month of December [2003], but a few weeks, to resume old friendship," he said in introducing supporters in McAllen. Meanwhile, the best-known Hispanic challengers for a Democratic primary were outmaneuvered. State representative Kino Flores of Mission cited a lack of money when he withdrew six weeks after declaring his candidacy. Veteran state Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, a long-time Doggett rival, made bold claims but never declared his candidacy. Instead, Barrientos endorsed Leticia Hinojosa, a former district court judge from McAllen who worked for Legal Aid before becoming the first female judge in the Valley. She called herself a "pragmatist," in contrast to the outspoken Doggett, and she claimed a closer identification with voters. "I'm Leticia Hinojosa, and I grew up poor in the Valley," she said in her radio ad. But Doggett's strong local base and relentless pursuit of new voters prevailed. He campaigned less against Hinojosa than against the redistricters. If he lost, Doggett told voters, "Tom DeLay will have won." He won the primary, 64%-36%. He led 88%-12% in Travis County, which cast 33% of the primary vote and where 49% of the county's population in the 25th was Hispanic. Of his 18,000 vote margin, almost 16,000 came from Travis. Just as impressively, Doggett held Hinojosa to a standoff in Hidalgo County. She carried only two of the other seven counties. Although the primary effectively sealed his reelection, Doggett faced a spirited challenge in the general from Becky Armendariz Klein. She called herself a conservative "new voice with new ideas," and cited her experience working at the Pentagon, as policy director for then-Governor George W. Bush and, most recently, as chairwoman of the Texas Public Utility Commission. Klein raised more than $800,000 and jabbed repeatedly at Doggett. She contended that she could deliver more as a member of the majority in Washington, and she criticized his inability to work across party lines. "I am a candidate that has access to the president and the leadership in Congress," she said. But her challenge never got seriously off the ground. Doggett tweaked her bid for ethnicity by pulling out her "long forgotten maiden name" and cited his many local endorsements. He won 68%-31%. Klein carried Gonzales and Live Oak Counties, both heavily Republican. Doggett won Travis County 79%-19% and Hidalgo County 60%-40%. The Austin political cognoscenti had wrung their hands that redistricting might leave them without a local congressman. But now they have two, Doggett and Republican Michael McCaul, who won in the Austin-to-Houston 10th District.
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