Texas as seen by National Review Online

The Next Big Primary Matches Two Big Stars in the Lone Star State
With Illinois’s primaries settled — well, sort of — the next big one on the calendar is less than a month away, March 2, in Texas.

Oh, how I dread covering this primary, and how I look forward to its completion. For the better part of a year now, I’ve gotten daily e-mails from the campaigns of Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, each one laying out some new outrage perpetrated by the other. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the amount of hyperbole used in press releases....

....Kay Bailey Hutchison earned quite a bit of Republican respect during her years in the Senate, and her bid for the governor’s mansion is endorsed by a slew of big GOP names: former president George H. W. Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, and former House majority leader Dick Armey. But the mood in the state, mirroring that in many other parts of the nation, has forced her to run a different campaign than planned. ...

....Finally, there’s a third candidate on the Republican side, Debra Medina, former Wharton County Republican party chair. She’s emphasizing that she’s not a politician, not rich, and that the state needs a governor who will ensure “the average Texan is represented.”

There hasn’t been a ton of polling of this race, but in the polls that have been conducted, Perry leads fairly comfortably, but not by enough so that we could say he’s got this race in the bag. Intriguingly, in a race with two of the biggest names in Texas politics, Medina is inching up to the low to mid teens....

....The winner will almost certainly take on Houston mayor Bill White on the Democratic side. Democrats think that if the GOP primary is bloody enough, they have a shot at winning a governorship that has eluded them since some obscure baseball-team owner beat Ann Richards in 1994. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll showed both Hutchison and Perry defeating White; Perry led 50 percent to White's 40 percent; Hutchison led 52 percent to 37 percent.

Read it all here.