Rick Perry's big win in Texas!

First time I voted for Rick Perry was for Agriculture Commissioner in 1990 after we were transferred into the State of Texas -- been a supporter of Rick Perry's ever since. From the time he took office to fill out the term of Governor George W Bush until now, I think he has been one of if not the best Governor we have in the Country.

Anyone watching Governor Perry and how he handled the Galveston Hurricane will tell you he was putting up with no nonsense. If you decided to stay, you were on your own.

Some so-called conservatives love to criticize Rick and will take one or two sentences out of what he says and make a whole story which doesn't tell the actual truth. I can guarantee you that most states would love to have Rick Perry. One of the reasons I hated to leave Texas with the closure of Kelly AFB was because their State Government worked.

While Texas was flourishing, we were stuck in Oklahoma with a Democrat Governor who this last time was a big Obama supporter. Pretty strange in a state where only 34% of the voters voted for Obama. Shows how far out of touch the Governor is with the State. He is term limited this year. We are going to end the eight years of Democrat rule in the Governor's office with electing Congresswoman Mary Fallin, the former Republican Lt Governor, to be our next Governor in January 2011. Then next year Governor Perry will be betting Governor Fallin on the winner of the Red River Rivalry in Octber 2011!

Congratulations Governor Perry on your big win yesterday -- we will be rooting for you to send White back to Houston on November 2nd.

Rick Perry's big win in Texas
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
03/03/10 1:12 AM EST

The conventional wisdom had it that the Republican gubernatorial primary in Texas would be a battle between challenger Kay Bailey Hutchison’s sophisticated urban base versus incumbent Rick Perry’s yahooing rural base. The election results—incomplete as I write past midnight Eastern time—tell a different story. Perry has won the Republican nomination without a runoff, with (as I write) 51% of the votes to 30% for Hutchison and 18% for Debra Medina (the candidate who got scrubbed from serious contention when she told Glenn Beck that she wasn’t sure the U.S. government wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks). That’s with 6,341 of 8,236 precincts reporting. Perry's margin is likely to increase as the final numbers come in.

The Texas secretary of state’s exemplary website shows separately the early voting results and the total results for each county. As the returns were coming in, it was apparent to me as I looked at counties with all precincts reporting that there wasn’t much difference between the early voting percentages and the total percentages when all the precincts were counted. So to get a sense of where the candidates were getting their strongest support, I added up the early voting totals for the four major metro areas as most recently defined, the 12-county Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the 10-county Houston metro area, the 8-county San Antonion metro area (in which Medina County reported no votes cast in the Republican primary) and the 5-county Austin metro area. Subtracting from that left the 219 counties in the rest of the state. I didn’t separate out the heavily Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande Valley, because they cast relatively few (in some cases zero) votes in the Republican primary. I’ll round off the numbers to the nearest thousand in the following table, showing the number of votes and percentages for Hutchison, Medina and Perry and the total number of votes cast.

Hutchison Medina Perry Total

TEXAS 183 31 97 16 313 53 593

DFW 46 30 21 20 74 49 151

Houston 32 27 14 12 72 61 118

San Ant. 17 34 7 14 26 51 52

Austin 11 27 8 19 22 54 41

Remainder 77 33 37 16 118 51 231

Conclusions: (1) Perry won this not in rural and small town Texas but in metro Houston. This bodes well for him in the general election, since it indicates strength in the home base of the well regarded Democratic nominee, former Houston Mayor Bill White, who was nominated by an overwhelming margin. (2) Medina, the candidate who wouldn’t disrespect the truthers, did best in the supposedly most sophisticated part of Texas, the Metroplex. Go figure. (3) Hutchison, supposedly the candidate of urban sophisticates, did best in metro San Antonio and rural Texas. She held Perry below the 50% level needed to avoid a runoff in approximately half of Texas’s 254 counties; unfortunately for her, those counties didn’t give her nearly a big enough margin to offset Perry’s advantage in metro Houston.

Excerpt: Read more at the Washington Examiner: Washington Examiner