Deep in Heart of Texas, Voters Sour on Hard-Liners

Until recently, few people in Houston would have called Martha Wong conservative. She was the first Asian American elected to the city council in this blue-collar town and was a champion of immigrant workers; once in office, she fought for hiring more Chinese-speaking police officers, funding low-income housing, and preserving the bus system. Urban voters sent the Republican to the state Legislature in 2002, believing she was a political moderate. But they were in for a surprise: The next year, Wong voted to ax $1 billion in health funding for the poor -- booting 180,000 low-income children off the state's health insurance rolls -- and for a law requiring abortion providers to tell women that the procedure could cause breast cancer, a claim that has been found to have no basis in science. Now, voters' disappointment is making for one of the hardest-fought election campaigns in Texas -- and a potential bellwether for the nation.

Running the best-funded House challenge in the state, Democrat Ellen Cohen has won the backing of former GOP activists and groups such as the Houston Police Officers Union that had previously endorsed Wong. "Like the Spanish Civil War, this may be the race that people look at to see if Democrats can break through" in Texas, says Rice University political science professor Bob Stein. "At the rate Cohen is going, I think she has much better than a chance of winning." Although initial polls put Cohen neck-and-neck with Wong, earlier this month they showed Cohen pulling away with a 6 to 7 percent lead.

Wong's district, like many in Texas, clearly leans to the right -- but less as a matter of disposition than of design. Wong represents professors from two major universities, doctors from one of the nation's most important medical centers, and one of the largest Jewish and gay populations in the state. Even so, in 2001 Republicans managed to fashion a conservative majority via redistricting; 53 percent of voters in a redrawn District 134 supported Wong in the 2002 election. Republicans that year won the Texas Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, and quickly set about implementing a hardcore conservative agenda: parental consent laws on abortion, a ban on gay marriage, a one-third cut in property taxes (which the state comptroller predicted would eventually "leave a huge hole in state revenues"). Moderate Republicans who resisted the push were ousted; those, like Wong, who went with the program were rewarded with committee posts.

As Wong climbed the rungs of power at the state Capitol, however, she seemed to cast aside many groups that define her district. For example, environmentalists have been drawing attention to extraordinarily high ozone levels in the part of Houston that Wong represents, yet Wong voted against five separate clean air measures. Schools are a big issue in the highly educated district, yet Wong, a former elementary school principal, opposed a bipartisan proposal to raise teacher salaries. Wong acknowledges that voters in her district are independent-minded yet in an interview couldn't cite a single instance in which she'd voted against her party. The closest she came was on a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage: She supported defining marriage as a union "between a man and a woman" but opposed a ban on civil unions. "Since voting either for or against the bill would have put me in conflict with my beliefs," she wrote in a statement, "I abstained."

"We might as well have a mannequin in the chair," says Jeffrey Dorrell, a precinct chair in Wong's district for more than a decade. Dorrell supported Wong over a more conservative Republican in the 2002 primary and then watched with chagrin as she scrambled once in office to demonstrate GOP bona fides. Dorrell, who is gay, is so angry about Wong's stance on the marriage amendment -- which was opposed by nearly 60 percent of District 134 voters -- that he has resigned his post with the party and is organizing "Republicans for Cohen."