Dr. Murray sells out!

Dr. Richard Murray, from whom I took Constitutional Law at the University of 
Houston in 1970 and who is now the political consultant to the Houston Chronicle, 
continues on with the Tony Sanchez "Hispanic vote magnet" insanity.

In the below article, Dr. Murray says regarding the Houston Mayor's Race,

"Republicans would have earned real points if they'd won. (Orlando Sanchez was a 
Republican) By not winning, they gained very little of anything. Next year, you've got 
another Sanchez running," says Murray, referring to Laredo multimillionaire Tony 
Sanchez, who is seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. "But guess what? 
He's the wrong kind of Hispanic (as for as the Republicans are concerned), he has 
got a D (Democrat) behind his name, and that Sanchez will get 85 to 88 percent of 
the Hispanic vote." 

Well this is stupid because the Scripps Howard poll yesterday showed that Perry 
had 25% of the Hispanics to Sanchez 31%. In the September Scripps Howard poll, 
Perry got 37% to Sanchez 41%. 

So the Hispanic lead of Sanchez over Perry with respect to Hispanic votes is not that 
much when the choice is White Republican and Hispanic Democrat. 

In Houston, it was a Hispanic Republican and a Black Democrat. Only the hard 
core Hispanic Democrats are going to vote for a Black Democrat. In Houston, the 
moderate Hispanic Democrats voted race over Party. (This is a something to be 
looked at by Ron Kirk in the Democratic Senate Primary. He's not going to get the 
Hispanic vote. Here is where the Hispanic Democrats will get 90% of the Hispanic 
vote.) 

(And in the statewide governor's race if the match up is Perry v. Sanchez as 
opposed to a local Mayor's race, the moderate White Democrats are going 
to cross Party lines and vote for the White Perry the way the moderate 
Hispanic Democrats crossed Party lines to vote for the Hispanic Sanchez. 
Racial prejudice is still very much alive in Texas. If Sanchez is the 
Democratic candidate for governor, the Democrats will lose more White 
Democrats to Perry than gain Hispanic Republicans who cross Party lines to 
vote for Sanchez. That is the reality of the current political landscape in 
Texas. The Democrats are in peril and running a Hispanic Sanchez for 
governor as opposed to a White WorldPeace is suicide. If both candidates 
for governor are White, the race issue disappears and people will tend vote 
along Party lines.) 

The most significant and unreported factor is that the Hispanic vote moved from 
78% and 22% allegedly undecided in September to 56% and 44% allegedly 
undecided in December. Now what has happened in three months to cause Perry to 
lose 12% of the Hispanic vote and Sanchez to simultaneously lose 10% of the 
Hispanic vote?

The reality is that there is an unreported candidate in the Scripps Howard poll, John 
WorldPeace. The reality is that another 30% of the Hispanic voters went to 
WorldPeace and did not become undecided. So if Scripps Howard had asked 
about WorldPeace it would have been Perry 25%, Sanchez 31% and WorldPeace 
30% with 14% undecided. 

The other question regarding yesterday's poll is what if the poll had not had a 36/25 
Republican Democrat voter skewing? In other words, there were more identifiable 
Republicans in the sample. It may be that the truth statewide is Perry at 15% and 
WorldPeace and Sanchez are at 35%. Who knows? The pollsters were so 
interested in ignoring WorldPeace they generated a poll that created more questions 
than it answered.

The Houston Chronicle has never stopped touting Tony Sanchez over WorldPeace 
in the Democratic Party primary. Now they have their political analysts, Dr. 
Murphy, talking pure nonsense and contrary to the reality of two Scripps Howard 
polls regarding a Perry Sanchez match up next November.

And none of this speaks to the issue of the Sanchez mafia connections and lack of a 
military record in these terroristic times. Sanchez is poison for the Democrats.

John WorldPeace
The next governor of Texas

December 9, 2001

_____________________

Dec. 8, 2001, 8:04PM

Latinos win in mayoral election 
Hispanic turnout at polls is hailed as a benchmark 
By LORI RODRIGUEZ 
Copyright 2001 Houston ChronicleMinority Affairs Writer 

Councilman Orlando Sanchez lost his bid to become Houston's first Hispanic mayor, 
but in the race to empower the city's largest and most booming ethnic group, his 
fellow Latinos won the day. 

Notoriously weak at the ballot box, Hispanic voters streamed to the polls in record 
numbers in the Nov. 6 general election and cast most of their votes for a man many 
saw as a brother. In the runoff, they managed the historically unthinkable and turned 
out in even greater numbers. 

When the dust settled, Latino voters, according to exit polls and analysis by the 
University of Houston Center for Mexican-American Studies, accounted for 18 
percent of the electorate, double their turnout when Rob Mosbacher squared off 
against Mayor Lee Brown four years ago. 

"That's a very phenomenal increase," says political scientist Tatcho Mindiola, director 
of the center. "We haven't had that many wins. We haven't had that many 
opportunities to elect one of our own. When that chance comes, we take it. 

"It's a benchmark election and would have been even more so if Sanchez had won. 
But still, it showed that we've become major players and a force to be reckoned 
with." 

The faceoff between Sanchez and Brown, Houston's first black mayor, came on the 
heels of the New York municipal election in which Republican Michael Bloomberg 
was boosted over the top by the defection of usually Democratic Hispanics. 

Both races drew the national spotlight. But it was Sanchez's quixotic quest to topple 
Brown, a four-year incumbent, that became a major battleground for the hearts and 
souls of the country's fastest-growing electorate. 

President Bush's endorsement of Sanchez was featured in full-page newspaper ads 
and splashy campaign mailers; former President Bush and former first lady Barbara 
Bush cut a warm-and-fuzzy TV spot, as did outgoing New York Mayor Rudolph 
Giuliani. 

The Republican Party poured resources into Sanchez's fight even as the Democratic 
Party dispatched its prime-time strategists to shore up Brown's flagging effort. 

Targeted Hispanic voters were bombarded daily with bilingual mailers, Spanish radio 
spots and TV commercials by both campaigns. 

It all worked. In the Dec. 1 runoff, the hard-fought contest drew countless new or 
infrequent voters to the polls. A full 10 percent of all voters were naturalized citizens, 
according to the UH exit poll, the bulk of them Hispanic. More than 70 percent of all 
Hispanic voters had voted fewer than 10 times in their lives; more than 15 percent 
had voted fewer than five times. 

"Although the Hispanic candidate didn't win, the Hispanic community won overall," 
concludes Hector de Leon, regional director of the National Association of Latino 
Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO. "Our message has always been that 
the more Hispanics vote, regardless of who they vote for, the more influence and 
power they'll have." 

Bolstered by staff from its Los Angeles headquarters, NALEO conducted a massive 
voter mobilization drive that targeted 50,000 Hispanics who rarely or never had 
voted. In Los Angeles, where former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa last 
summer tried to become that city's first Hispanic mayor, a similar drive helped boost 
Latino turnout from 24 percent of registered voters to 38 percent; the overall city 
turnout was 37 percent. 

NALEO has not yet completed its analysis of the local effort. But on the campaign 
trail, Sanchez repeatedly strove to mobilize his fellow Latinos, calling it a key 
mission. Councilman Gabriel Vasquez, a Democratic Mexican-American who 
endorsed Brown, believes Sanchez succeeded. 

"This was the very first time that a candidate spent so much effort and money to 
educate and turn out Latinos," says Vasquez. "The community responded by turning 
out and by voting as a bloc, because anything over 60 percent is a bloc. 

"Latinos also came back to the polls in the runoff, but it was because attention was 
given to the community, resources were poured into it and there was a concerted 
effort to engage them. 

"The community will respond." 

Nearly three of every four Hispanics, or 72 percent, voted for Sanchez in the runoff, 
a stunning showing for a Republican first-generation immigrant from Cuba who is 
unabashedly conservative. 

"Obviously, Sanchez was the major factor driving Hispanics," says Mindiola. "He 
was a well-financed, charismatic and attractive candidate who managed to galvanize 
our community. 

"The norm turnout for us is 8 to 9 percent; a good turnout is 10 to 11 percent. In the 
general election we were close to 13 percent of the electorate, and in the runoff that 
jumped to 18 percent. 

"That's a significant jump and signals in a very dramatic way our entree as major 
players in this community." 

Demographers had predicted for two decades that Hispanics would become the 
city's largest ethnic group in 2005; it happened by the 2000 Census. Hispanics are 
now 37.4 percent of the population. Many are too young to vote, and close to half 
are new immigrants who lack the franchise that citizenship someday will bring. 

But between the general and runoff elections, as the disciplined African-American 
electorate increased its turnout by 30 percent in support of a black mayor in political 
trouble, Hispanic turnout also jumped, says University of Houston political scientist 
Richard Murray. 

"I'd estimate Latinos were 36,000 voters in the first round and more than 40,000 in 
the second round, and that's getting to be a pretty sizable bloc of voters," says 
Murray. "If there had been the same degree of cohesion for Sanchez among 
Hispanics as there was for Brown among blacks, Sanchez would have won. Brown 
did get about 28 percent of the Hispanic vote." 

Threatened with the loss of the city's first black mayor to a candidate who 
personified the emerging and growingly competitive Latino community, almost every 
black voter closed ranks behind Brown in a monolithic showing. 

That will never happen with Latinos, who are increasingly diverse, politically 
ambivalent and rife with internecine rivalries. 

"No way," says Murray. "Even in Florida with the Cuban-Americans, a very highly 
motivated group with a unique set of shared experiences, 40 percent voted for Bill 
Clinton in 1996. Bush picked up more in 2000, but there are just too many diverse 
strains in the Latino population. 

"Also, as Hispanics move up the socioeconomic ladder, middle- and upper-class 
Hispanics vote more like middle- and upper-class whites. We don't see much of that 
in the black community. The wealthiest black precinct votes like the poorest black 
precinct." 

The Republicans' extravagant embrace of Sanchez was a gamble they had to take. 
Hispanics edged past blacks and then whites to become the largest ethnic group in 
Houston; in the 2000 national head count, they also drew neck and neck with 
blacks, until now the country's largest minority group. 

"It was well worth the shot because they would have had a national star they could 
have promoted," says Murray. 

But Brown, a Democratic Party stalwart who has campaigned alongside former Vice 
President Al Gore, blunted Sanchez's potent Hispanic-white coalition with the 
support of the mainly Democratic, traditional Mexican-American elected leadership. 

"Republicans would have earned real points if they'd won. By not winning, they 
gained very little of anything. Next year, you've got another Sanchez running," says 
Murray, referring to Laredo multimillionaire Tony Sanchez, who is seeking the 
Democratic gubernatorial nomination. "But guess what? He's the wrong kind of 
Hispanic, has got a D behind his name, and that Sanchez will get 85 to 88 percent of 
the Hispanic vote." 

Hispanics, innately conservative on some issues and politically ambivalent, segue 
easily between both major parties; Orlando Sanchez and Tony Sanchez, who are not 
related, both benefit from the growing Hispanic vote. Because 60 percent to 70 
percent of Hispanics historically are Democratic, says Murray, the shift is more 
profound in a nonpartisan race like Sanchez's mayoral run. 

"But it gets a lot closer to that bloc vote when the Sanchez is a Democrat, because 
you get the two-fer going," Murray says. "He's a Mexican-American and a 
Democrat." 

Racial appeals and charges from both the Brown and Sanchez camps swirled on the 
airwaves and on the ground. Ultimately, Brown's credible share of support from 
hard-core Hispanic Democrats prevented an overt black-brown war. 

But the history is there. 

Sheila Jackson Lee, now a congresswoman, beat longtime Hispanic leader Leonel 
Castillo in a 1989 City Council race. Two years later, attorney Gracie Saenz 
defeated incumbent Councilwoman Beverley Clark. Clark and Jackson Lee are 
black. 

Both elections left some hard feelings. 

"But it's unavoidable," Mindiola says, "especially now that Latinos have overtaken 
blacks as the largest ethnic group in the city. 

"It's just a harbinger of things to come."