POLITICS Dallas Democrats: Dead and Deader?

john F. kennedy, talking about Economic growth, used to say that a rising tide lifts all boats. Given President Bill Clinton’s double-digit lead over Republican Bob Dole, Democrats around the country arc looking out to sea and daring to hope that the tide will run their way this November, lifting their candidates into office from California to Virginia.

In Dallas County, however, hope comes hard if you’re a Democrat. It’s not news that the county party is gravely ill; it’s been limping and wheezing for at least three decades.

“That’s a pretty fair assessment of the situation,” says Richard Dougherty, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas in Irving. “If it’s any consolation, the problem with the Dallas County party is just part of what’s going on nationwide with the polarization of political parties. There aren’t any more conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans anywhere, and that really hurts the party in a place like Dallas.”

The county party’s failures over the past couple of years were highlighted in 1994, when Gov. Ann Richards lost Dallas County by 15,000 votes after winning it by 19,000 in 1990; Lori Palmer, a popular member of the Dallas City Council, managed just 42 percent of the vote against Republican Lee Jackson in her race for county judge; and incumbent Democrat Chris Semos was ousted after 12 years on the Commissioners’ Court.

To add insult to injury, state District Judge John Creuzot, one of the Democrats few remaining judges, took one look at the results and joined the Republicans three months later. Says Creuzot: “Talking to my friends who are still in the party, they feel there isn’t a lot of energy and life there anymore.”

But what happened in ’94, and throughout the 1990s, was not a post-Reagan phenomenon. It was really a post-]ohnson phenomenon, just the latest in a seemingly endless succession of setbacks since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson carried Dallas County against Barry Goldwater-and became the last Democratic presidential candidate to do so. (Goldwater, while losing in a landslide, still ran nearly 10 points better in Dallas County than he did nationwide.)

Consider that:

In 1968, Democratic presidential contender Hubert Humphrey carried Texas against Richard Nixon, and Democrat Preston Smith handily beat Paul Eggers for governor. Yet both Democrats lost Dallas County, where Humphrey barely got one-third of the vote.

In 1978, the Democratic candidates for U.S. senator, governor, and attorney general all lost the county. Republican Tom Pauken came within 900 votes of unseating Democrat Jim Mattox in the Fifth Congressional District.

Between 1978 and 1986, Dallas County went from having one elected Republican judge to one elected Democratic judge, a reversal hastened by the mid-1980s defections of dozens of Democratic judges. Twenty switched parties in 1980 alone.

These wholesale desertions have fed a losers’ mentality, which in turn has caused more desertions. In 1984, Republicans took 12 local judgeships, and there were eight contested races. In 1994,34 Republicans ran unopposed. This fall, county Democrats aren’t even trying to field judicial candidates.

“This is a difficult place for the Democratic Party to be in, ” says Carol Reed, a Republican political consultant.

According to Reed, the Democrats’ plight mirrors that of the local GOP as late as the 1970s, when, the joke went, the party could meet in a phone booth. “It’s tough to find enough troops to lead into battle when they keep getting killed,” says Reed.

Bleak-but not bleak enough to discourage Lisa Payne, a Duncanville data processing consultant who became the county party’s chair in 1995. She points out that many down-ballot Democrats, like Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and Comptroller John Sharp, have been big winners in the county despite the other reverses.

Payne, the first woman to be elected county chair and the first chair in more than a decade who wasn’t a lawyer from north of the Trinity River, attacked the party’s problems on two fronts when she succeeded Ken Molberg last year. She cleaned house, trimming the party staff to one paid position, started a newsletter, and stepped up volunteer recruitment. It’s a beginning that has made a favorable impression on many observers.

“We’ve certainly gone through our ups and downs,” says Sandy Kress, former president of the DISD board of trustees and county Democratic chairman from 1986 to 1989, when the party had to rebuild after the debacle of die Reagan years. “One thing Lisa has going for her is that there is usually an upsurge after a bad period like the Reagan landslides. “

In fact, says Payne, she is optimistic about the re-election chances of state Sen. David Cain, state Rep. Harryette Ehrhardt, and Congressman Martin Frost, and she holds out high hopes for John Pouland, who is trying to succeed longtime Congressman John Bryant in the Fifth Congressional District.

“In the past, we’ve done a poor job of getting our message across,”says Payne. “We’ve let the Republicans define our message for us, and they’ve done it stridently and loudly. They tagged us as the tax-and-spend party, and we sat on our hands. Well, we’re not sitting on our hands any longer.”

The message in November, she says, will focus on what the party believes in: creating jobs, helping small business, and guaranteeing minimum standards of health care-not just for special interests, but for a broad spectrum of Americans. It’s a message that tries to get around the national party’s reputation as too liberal, which local party officials say has hurt them badly over the past decade. This is, after all, a state where most Democrats, says state Appeals Court Judge Ron Chapman, are “only as liberal as a Connecticut Republican”-i.e., not very.

Still, the party’s message may not get delivered. President Bill Clinton did not carry Texas in 1992, and he is especially unpopular in Dallas County, where he received a little more than one-third of the vote four years ago. In this spring’s runoff election to choose a Democratic senatorial candidate, John Bryant lost a shocker to unknown Mesquite schoolteacher Victor Morales, who will face the formidable Phil Gramm in November. Morales will energize Hispanic voters, but remember that money is the mother’s milk of politics. “None of the Democrats can raise money the way Gramm can raise money, ” says UD’s professor Dougherty.

Yet even if Clinton was LBJ and Morales was the legendary Lloyd Bentsen, whose campaign prowess still makes county Democratic leaders swoon, there’s no guarantee it would make any difference. The county party not only faces the same problems as its national counterpart-among them the perception of being too liberal and the distrust voters have lor political parties in general-but a host of problems unique to Dallas County.

The first is demographics. Today, there are more voters in Dallas County’s suburbs than in the city, and they vote Republican-by a 5-4 margin, according to one count. Kathryn Cain lost the county judge election to Lee Jackson in 1986 by one percentage point, and the difference came in the suburbs. Typical was what happened in Seagoville, where she was the first Democrat in memory not to carry the town. Ken Benson, the Democratic political consultant who ran Cain’s campaign, recalls asking the party to send over all of its suburban volunteers. Three people showed up.

The demographic problem also works against candidates like David Cain, a 17-year veteran of the Texas House and now a state senator. Cain’s district stretches from Dallas and its southeastern suburbs to Ellis County, Tyler, and the Oklahoma border. Although the mostly Democratic, urban portions of the district make up 40 percent of the population, such voters produce only one-quarter of the vote in each election. Rural and suburban voters, who trend Republican, vote in higher numbers.

The second crippling problem is infrastructure. The county party has been down for so long that its system of educating voters and recruiting volunteers is almost non-existent. Organizations like the Progressive Voters League, the Democratic Forum, and Democratic Women have withered. There is certainly nothing like the county’s Young Republicans or numerous GOP women’s clubs. Says Benson: “We need to make it easier for people to get to us. We have to find a way to become as accessible as the Republicans.”

Payne plugs the fledgling 21st Century Democrats, a statewide organization that hopes to reinvigorate the party by emphasizing the Democrats’ economic and populist roots. Says Gary Fitzimmons, who co-chairs the Dallas County chapter: “When Democrats win elections, we do it by focusing on pocketbook issues. We have to reach out to people, to ordinary working men and women, and emphasize that before you can have anything else, you have to have a decent standard of living.”

The third is race. Most county party leaders talk around the subject, but all acknowledge that the tangled web of race relations in Dallas County has not helped the Democratic Party, which relies heavily on minority voters to patch together a victory coalition. The party itself felt the strain when Payne was elected chair last April. One of her opponents. Terri Hodge, who is black, charged that the balloting date was manipulated to ensure the election of a white candidate.

“There’s baggage there, no doubt about it,” says Chapman, who is the only Democratic judge who hasn’t switched parties or been defeated. “Every time someone walks into a voting booth and sees that party label next to someone like John Wiley Price, it hurts us.’’’

Yet some Democrats, especially in the minority community, see this not as a problem but as the natural state of affairs in a county that is increasingly black and Hispanic.

“We have new leaders, especially in the urban parts of the county, and we have different ways of doing things,” says state Rep. Jesse Jones, an African-American who represents District 110 in southwestern Dallas. “The electorate now recognizes individual personalities. If a person is looking for an excuse not to vote for someone, they’ll find an excuse, whether it’s an excuse not to vote for John Wiley Price or for Jesse Jones.”

No matter how badly the county Democrats do this November-or in any November to come-hardly anyone expects them to go the way of the Whigs. Their saving grace may well be the city’s nonpartisan election system, which allows Democrats to hold office without being labeled as Democrats. Democrat Ron Kirk benefited from GOP votes and money when he was elected mayor in 1995, and Democrats- among them Chris Luna, Larry Duncan, and Al Lipscomb-hold a half dozen or so seats on the city council.

“What we have to do is find our niche,” says Chapman. “There’s no reason why we have to allow the Republicans to get all of the young college graduates who move to Dallas. You know, to listen to the Republicans talk, you’d think we were all Darth Vader. We have to remind people that’s not true.”