So where are we today in the Governor’s race? Two weeks to go and most polls have Governor Perry , the Republican, at about 35% with either Chris Bell the Democrat or Carole Strayhorn one of the Independents in second place. As more polling is done Bell should be in second place as Democrats start to come home to their nominee and as Bell gets more name identification. Kinky Freidman is still the spoiler. As a friend said recently “I really wanted to vote for Kinky but he is just too weird”. But weird Kinky is taking about 10-12% of the vote and he is hurting the Chris Bell campaign by staying in the race. He could well be the Ralph Nader of the Texas Governor’s race by getting just enough votes to re-elect Rick Perry.

Bell does have money problems and has apparently cut back on his TV advertising in the Dallas/ Fort Worth media market. He did pick up the Fort Worth Star Telegram endorsement which has got to be a surprise to the Bell campaign. Strayhorn got the Houston Chronicle and Perry the Dallas, Austin, El Paso and San Antonio endorsements. Austin must be a surprise to the Perry campaign.

So how does Perry lose this election? It is difficult to see a scenario where he loses. He has the power of the incumbent and the money to stay on TV. His campaign has decided that Chris Bell is his opponent and will probably start more negative ads on Bell. And the GOP in Texas does have the ability to get its voters to the polls. It has been said that Republicans get up every morning and drive by the voting locations just to make sure that there is not an election going on. But…..

If Bell can get Democrats to understand that they could elect a Democrat if they all went to the polls and voted then Chris would have very close to 38-42% of the vote and he would be elected Governor. That could happen but it would take a big get out the vote effort and the funds to run it that at this time looks very doubtful.

Or Strayhorn or Kinky could look at the polls and decide that the best thing for Texas is a new Governor and endorse Bell and urge all their supporters to vote for Bell. If that happened Bell would win. But the odds of the two of them doing that are very long.

So, we may be stuck with a Governor that has very low approval ratings, that we have an election where if “none of the above” was on the ballot it would win and we have just seen millions of dollars spent on campaigns to elect a Governor who 65% of the voters do not like.

And we wonder why folks do not vote and have little faith in government. .