Free As Texas Goes... by Gail Collins

the GOP all the way. “Figure out how to tie me to those values,” he directed.
    Now, Democrats might point out that they tend to believe in hard work, faith in God, and love of family, too. Plus health care, generous aid to education, and affirmative action to make sure minorities can get into good colleges. But you work with what you’ve got.
    The relationship between the Republican Party and Texas Hispanics peaked in 1994, when George W. Bush won the governorship with 49 percent of the Hispanic vote. “He went out and asked for the vote. Nobody else has come close,” said Sosa. The relationship foundered on the shoals of Tea Party cries for border walls or, in the case of former presidential candidate Herman Cain, a border moat full of alligators. The Republican majority in Congress helped seal the deal with its opposition to the Dream Act, which would allow young people who were brought here as undocumented children to qualify for citizenship by serving in the military or attending college. It’s a variation on the bill that Rick Perry thought was so natural to sign for Texas—until he tried running for national office.
    These days in Texas, the growing Hispanic population tends Democratic, and it’s pretty much the only hope the Democrats can look to. The party is now on its back, as flat as a flounder, and yearning for the time when the majority Latino population will send it back into power. How could their star not be rising? The state is already majority minority. Its population is much younger than the national average, and young people tend to vote Democrat. The cities are growing and the conservative rural towns are shrinking. The suburbs are strongly Republican, but the newest suburban arrivals are likely to be Hispanic, too. “You got a lot of hysteria among my colleagues,” State Senator Ellis said cheerfully of the Republicans. “They know the demographics.”
    But for the Democrats, the big problem is that Hispanic Texans who are registered voters are even less likely to go to the polls than registered Anglos—who are not exactly beating a path to the ballot box. And no matter how the sponsors parse it, those voter ID bills are intended to make sure that continues to be the case.
    So far, despite its huge Hispanic population, Texas has only elected one Latino to statewide office—Dan Morales of San Antonio, who was the attorney general back in the 1990s. This is a story Democrats don’t talk about all that often. In 2002 Morales ran for governor, losing the primary to Tony Sanchez, a Laredo businessman. Then he was indicted on twelve counts of tax and mail fraud, conspiracy, and lying on the loan application for his house. He eventually pled guilty to mail fraud and filing a false tax return.
    Tony Sanchez doesn’t come up in Democratic conversations all that often either. He turned out to combine the Democrats’ fondest dreams (Mexican American/really, really rich) with the party’s worst nightmares (terrible, terrible candidate). But Henry Cisneros always does. “I believe if Henry Cisneros had run in the early nineties, the trajectory of Texas politics would have changed,” said Joaquín Castro. “We haven’t had a popular Hispanic run for governor or senator, ever. If Henry had run back then it really would have changed things.”
    Cisneros was mayor of San Antonio from 1981 to 1989, the first Hispanic to run a major American city. He was smart and issue-oriented and very rooted in his community—to this day, his principal residence is a modest house on the west side that his grandfather once owned. People believed he would be governor. Or senator. Or vice president, in which case, inevitably, the first Hispanic in the Oval Office. “Ann Richards came to me and said, ‘I won’t run for governor if you run,’ ” Cisneros says now. “But I said no, I have personal things to deal with . . . It’s yours.”
    He quit politics and went into the asset-management business, and although