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The battle to be the Texas GOP Senate nominee is this year’s most important Senate election. Tea Party backed Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz overcame long odds on Tuesday, and forced establishment favorite Lt. Governor David Dewhurst into a runoff in the race for the open Texas U.S. Senate seat. "Dewhurst failed to get a majority because he failed to fight for conservative principles. His false attacks backfired," Senator Jim DeMint, a Cruz supporter, tweeted Tuesday night. According to The Dallas Morning News, Dewhurst, who spent more than $20 million of personal funds to get elected lieutenant governor in 2002,...

The Texas Republican Senate primary is headed for a runoff, after Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst fell just shy of 50 percent of the vote Tuesday. Dewhurst will face former state solicitor general Ted Cruz, a favorite of the tea party, in the July 31 runoff. The winner of that runoff will be a heavy favorite to succeed retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), after Democrats failed to land a top-tier recruit. With 43 percent of precincts reporting, Dewhurst led Cruz 46 percent to 32 percent. Seven other candidates split the vote enough, though, to push the two into a runoff.

With the Texas state primary just days away, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst is in the lead to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the U.S. Senate, and according to some observers, one of the factors he has working in his favor is fear. In Texas, the lieutenant governorship is a hugely powerful position. Its occupant is the leader of the state senate, meaning he appoints committee chairmen and members, determines the order in which bills are taken up, and decides which committees get to handle specific pieces of legislation. At the very least, everyone has to be aware of the sway...

A new poll of the Texas Republican Senate primary race shows conservative candidate Ted Cruz surging to nearly within the margin of error against moderate establishment front-runner David Dewhurst.  The University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll shows Dewhurst at 40 percent and Cruz at 31 percent. Cruz had been trailing the self-financed Dewhurst by over 20 percent, so this poll shows him closing strong.  Early voting started last week in Texas, and the primary is on Tuesday, May 29. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, the top-two vote getters will be in a run-off...

Ted Cruz won’t go to the U.S. Senate to get along in the U.S. Senate, the candidate told Gregg County Republicans on Wednesday in Longview. “We need to draw a line in the sand,” the Republican told some 40 party members, after recalling a Dallas Morning News editorial panel asking about the need for compromise in Washington, D.C. “At this point, I literally laughed out loud,” Cruz said. “If you’re looking for an established moderate who will go to Washington and work across the aisle and compromise, and continue this spending and building the debt deeper ... I’m not the...

In the Republican primary, the competition for the U.S. Senate nomination is a race to the right and a crowded one at that. Though there are nine candidates in the race, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is the best known and certainly the best financed. Dewhurst acts like the chosen one, but GOP voters looking for a no pretense, no apologies conservative found one in challenger Ted Cruz. [Snip] Cruz has a big intellect and doesn't mind taking it for a spin around the room. He's smart; he knows it and you know it within minutes of talking to him. Yet,...

A super PAC supporting Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst's Senate campaign has released an internal poll showing him at 57 percent in the GOP race with less than three weeks left until the primary. The poll shows Dewhurst at 57 percent, followed by Ted Cruz at 16 percent, Tom Leppert at 12 percent, and Craig James at 4 percent. Eleven percent were undecided. If Dewhurst finishes with over 50 percent of the vote on May 29, he wins the nomination outright. If not, the top two finishers will advance to a July 31 runoff. The Perception Insight poll of 800...

Texas’s Ted Cruz has come a long way in his quest to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the United States Senate. He has spent the better part of the last year slowly closing the polling gap with his principal rival, the better-known lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, to the point that a runoff between the two now seems the likeliest of outcomes in the May 29 primary. But finishing a strong second isn’t an outcome worthy of an articulate, principled conservative such as Cruz. He can and should win a runoff with Dewhurst, become the Republican nominee, and be elected the...

Gov. Rick Perry left no doubt this time. In Plano on Wednesday, Perry told KTVT-TV (Channel 11) reporter Jack Fink that he's backing Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for Texas' open seat in the U.S. Senate. "The fact is I'm a loyal individual, if I'm nothing else, and David's been a loyal supporter of mine," Perry said. "And I in turn am a loyal supporter of him and his task to become the next U.S. senator from Texas." On Jan. 2, while campaigning in Iowa on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, then-presidential candidate Perry gave Dewhurst, who was standing behind...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry this morning endorsed David Dewhurst for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison... In a tweet this morning, Dewhurst (@DavidHDewhurst) declared, “I’m honored that veteran and conservative champion @GovernorPerry is endorsing our campaign for U.S. Senate"... Perry praised Dewhurst’s loyalty and said he was glad to return the favor.

Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, a Republican, went rogue this morning on Houston's KTRH 740 radio. "I'm supporting Rick Perry for president. We agree on so, so many things. But on the case of in-state tuition, where folks are here illegally, I have a real problem," Dewhurst said. Dewhurst is running for the U.S. Senate to replace outgoing Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. This is a case of Dewhurst wanting to distance himself from the issue that has plagued Texas Governor Rick Perry with the conservative base of the G.O.P. Dewhurst is in a five-way race to win the Senate nomination...

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is breaking with Gov. Rick Perry by opposing in-state college tuition rates for illegal immigrants. Dewhurst, running for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Kay Bailey Hutchison, says he understands Perry's arguments but says his stance is all about fairness.

"He (Sen. Ogden) had been considered a possible candidate for lieutenant governor if incumbent David Dewhurst wins his race for the U.S. Senate in 2012. By law, Dewhurst's replacement would be a sitting senator voted on by his colleagues. The chosen person could then immediately be promoted to governor if Gov. Rick Perry is successful in his race for the White House. If that happened, the Senate would choose another of its members to be lieutenant governor. But Ogden said that he doesn't think that he can be that choice now that he isn't running for re-election."

The movement to draft Tommy Lee Jones to run as a Democrat to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison is most likely doomed to failure, but a new poll shows Jones might be a viable candidate. Public Policy Polling released its survey today on the 2012 Senate race, and it shows Jones with the best favorable/unfavorable combo among possible candidates. It also shows he is within range of two Republican candidates, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst and former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert, in head-to-head matchups. Dewhurst beats him 43-39 percent, and Leppert by only 38-37. "A Jones candidacy is probably a pipe dream...

Texas lawmakers may reconsider a bill to outlaw controversial airport pat-downs, the sponsor of legislation that was shelved recently said this week. Texas state Rep. David Simpson (R) said that Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst asked Gov. Rick Perry to include the measure in a special session of the Texas legislature. Dewhurst reported asked lawmakers to withdraw the bill when federal officials threatened to cancel flights to Texas if it passed. But he has since had a change of heart, Simpson told fans on his Facebook page. "The Lt. Gov. sent a letter to Gov. Perry asking him to include...

A boisterous group of protesters angry over the Texas Senate’s failure to vote on the airport groping bill tried to enter the public gallery this afternoon and were blocked by state troopers. Shouting “treason” and “cowards” and carrying signs and placards, and led by radio talk show host Alex Jones, the group of perhaps as many as 100 people entered the State Capitol shortly after 3 p.m. and first went to the House chamber. There, House members quickly informed the shouting group that it was the Senate that had failed to take action late Tuesday on House Bill 1937, which...

A threat from the federal government to shut down Texas airports or cancel flights may have killed legislation by Tea Party conservatives in the Texas Capitol to prohibit federal Transportation Security Agents from conducting "invasive searches." “I don’t cave in to heavy handed threats by the federal government,” said an angry Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the Senate sponsor of the bill, who ultimately withdrew the bill. House Bill 1937, which was passed by the House earlier this month, would make it a misdemeanor offense for a federal security agent to “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly [touch] the anus, sexual organ, buttocks,...

Next year’s U.S. Senate primary in Texas offers a wide range of choices. RedState has previously noted our strong preference for either former Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz or former railroad commissioner Michael Williams – both of whom have proven themselves as articulate and reliable champions of conservative principles. On the next tier are former Texas secretary of state Roger Williams and current railroad commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones, whose commitment to conservative principles may be somewhat shakier but at least are mouthing the right words so far in this campaign. And then there is Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, or as...

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R), whose Senate Conservatives Fund is a major Tea Party fundraising force, chimed in Friday morning on which candidates he may endorse in the open seat Texas Senate race. In an e-mail to supporters less than 24 hours after Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) announced she won't seek re-election, DeMint poured cold water on the potential candidacy of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R) and touted potential contenders Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams (R) and former solicitor general Ted Cruz (R).

WASHINGTON – Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst warned this morning that the new federal health care legislation will bust Texas’ budget – saddling state taxpayers with $27 billion in extra costs over the next decade. “That’s an astounding number for us,” Dewhurst told the Texas State Society over breakfast, including a half-dozen members of Congress. “We’re on the hook for all those folks we’ve been trying to get to sign up for Medicaid.” Doubling the state’s Medicaid rolls, he said, will mean that health care claims an ever-bigger share of the state budget. And that segment has already grown from one-quarter...