Governor Gives Contest to Replace DeLay a New Twist
"Just when it looked as if the Texas race to fill Tom DeLay's vacant House seat could not get any weirder, it did.
Already, there is a general election on Nov. 7 featuring a Republican Congressional candidate who must run as a write-in because Democrats successfully sued to keep their Republican nemesis Mr. DeLay in the spotlight on the ballot. That election will select a House member for the next two years.
Then on Tuesday, Gov. Rick Perry called a special election for the same day, for the same seat. That election will fill Mr. DeLay's unexpired term until January.
The two concurrent elections may or may not offer the same field of candidates; the filing deadline is Friday, and more candidates could emerge. But the Republican write-in candidate in the general election, Dr. Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, said she would run in the special election. That means she will be on the ballot in the special election, but not in the general.
Although some Republican strategists said that could leave voters hopelessly confused, Dr. Sekula-Gibbs, a dermatologist and member of the Houston City Council, said she believed that voters could cope with it.
''People already know it's an unusual race,'' she said, adding that having her name on one ballot would serve as ''a memory jog.''
The Democratic candidate, former Representative Nick Lampson, will run in both elections -- on the ballot, said his campaign manager, Mike Malaise.
Mr. Malaise said the confusion was likely to help Mr. Lampson, who has been running essentially unopposed in the mostly Republican district since Mr. DeLay, the former House majority leader, beset with legal problems, upended Texas politics after his primary victory in March by announcing he was dropping his quest for a 12th term to move to Virginia.
Dr. Sekula-Gibbs was the choice of most of the 150 Republican precinct leaders who met Aug. 17 to choose a consensus write-in candidate. The party was not allowed to list a candidate other than Mr. DeLay on the general election ballot after courts upheld a Democratic Party lawsuit claiming that efforts by the Texas Republican chairwoman, Tina J. Benkiser, to replace Mr. DeLay with a stronger candidate amounted to ballot manipulation.
An early front-runner for the Republican nomination, Mayor David G. Wallace of Sugar Land, said Tuesday that he would not run in the special election.
The Libertarian candidate in the general election, Bob Smither, said he had not made up his mind whether to file for the special election. ''It's so confusing already,'' Mr. Smither said. ''Voters don't need more distraction.''
Governor Perry, a Republican who had refused to call an emergency election after Mr. DeLay's resignation in June, said Tuesday that he was required to call a special election under the Constitution.
Boyd Richie, the Texas Democratic Party chairman, called the decision ''simply too little, too late, for a district that has been without representation in Congress longer than any other Texas district in the last 100 years.''"