Texas Senate Race: Ron Kirk v. John Cornyn

A U S T I N, Texas, Oct. 21 -- Under Gov. George Bush, Republicans owned Texas politics, winning nearly every statewide office each year during the future president's six-year tenure as governor. This year, that dominance is being threatened.

Bush's candidate in the race to replace GOP Sen. Phil Gramm is John Cornyn, a Republican in a state where being a Republican during the Bush years meant being a winner. Cornyn is the state's attorney general.

Cornyn's opponent is Ron Kirk, the former Democratic mayor of Dallas who wants to be the first African-American elected to the Senate from Dallas.

This race is closer than anyone expected. An important reason is the changing demographics of Texas, where the minority population, particularly Latinos, is exploding.

Politicians of both parties like to play down racial patterns in politics. But Texans, like the rest of the nation, still vote largely along racial lines, with Republicans dominating the white vote, and Democrats doing better with minority voters.

Kirk: Friend or Foe to Bush?

In the future, Republicans will have a tougher time winning elections if they can't attract a larger share of the minority vote, particularly from Hispanics. And Kirk is threatening to make that happen this year.

When Kirk was the mayor of Dallas, and George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, they were friends. In the good old days, when Bush was running for the White House, he even once jokingly referred to the mayor as "Vice President Kirk."

But now that Kirk has become the Democrat's high-profile and high-potential candidate for the Senate, the president sounds anything but friendly.

"He's not the right man for the United State Senate as far as I'm concerned," Bush has said of Kirk. "I don't need an obstructionist I need a positive influence."

Changing Face of Texas

Democrats have a tough, but not impossible, task of turning out more minority voters than ever before on election day. It helps that Kirk is running in the company of a Democratic Latino candidate for governor.