There is growing consensus that Perry is likely to declare for the race. He has been Governor of Texas since 2001, when, as lieutenant governor, he took over after George W. Bush became president, and has since won three elections, including facing down a fearsome primary challenge last year.
Perry is a danger to both Bachmann and Romney. His credentials with the Tea Party are strong indeed; he has essentially spent the last 12 years railing against Washington, DC (even when his own party was in power), once suggesting off-hand that Texas should consider seceding from the union. He is well with the Christian Right. Poaching portions of the Tea Party and the religious right would leave Bachmann without a base of support.
Perry has also pushed a rigidly low-tax, low-regulation agenda in Texas, and proudly touts that his state has gained jobs during the recession and has a healthy budget. The latter is nonsense – Texas faces a massive budget shortfall and its legislature, partly at Perry’s insistence and with his administration’s guidance, has employed a series of accounting tricks to give the impression that the state’s condition is better than it is. Texans are already paying for this in the form of staggering cuts to health provisions for poor people and in education.
Still, Perry will tout his economic conservatism by way of parking his tank on Romney’s lawn, and his low-tax message is unsullied by the history of healthcare reform that could still dog Romney. He is also a danger to Romney in that he, too, does a good line in plausibility; Perry looks, sounds, and comports himself like an authoritative executive.
He is also reportedly a hard-working campaigner, having been through a genuine scrap as recently as 2010. He has never had to raise money under federal restrictions, but he generated $40m for his last governor’s race, and it seems likely that he could fundraise well enough to keep up with Romney.
Perry inherits one further advantage – he has a staff of highly-qualified people on standby, courtesy of the implosion of Newt Gingrich’s campaign. Early in June, 16 of Gingrich’s staffers resigned at once, and many have some connection with Perry. Most have been quiet or politely vague about the reasons for their departure, but it seems that Gingrich believed he could campaign and raise money from behind a podium or online, while they believed he should meet voters and make fundraising calls. When he wouldn’t, they left. Perry could inherit most if not all of them.
A word on Gingrich: having lost most of his staff early in June, he lost both his top fundraisers this week. If his campaign was a zombie since the mass-defection, this must surely be the crowbar-blow to its head. Would-be top-tier candidates take note: if you think you can campaign without the hard graft of shaking hands or making fundraising calls, you’ll find that firings work both ways.
If Perry were to declare, he would become the odds-on favourite to win Iowa, which tends to favour southerners and would certainly respond to his social conservatism. Romney appears fairly unassailable in New Hampshire, but Perry could well have the advantage after that. In South Carolina, Florida, and beyond, his southern roots and social conservatism would be an advantage over Romney, while his fiscal-conservative brand would negate Romney’s edge in that area.
Perry’s final advantage down the line would be his faith – or, rather, Romney’s. Romney is a Mormon, a sect not entirely liked or trusted by many evangelical Christians. It is possible that Christian right voters in early primary states could overlook this issue if Romney were the only candidate able to speak authoritatively on jobs and the economy and who appeared a plausible general election candidate, but faced with an alternative who ticks all those boxes, appeals to social conservatives, and shares a similar faith, and he seems a much less appealing figure. This is a potent combination, one that could easily carry Perry to the nomination.
Perry has two disadvantages, which he shares with Bachmann. One is history – again, Republicans tend to pick faces familiar from previous presidential politics. Romney has been there, Perry has not. The other is electability. For all his appeal to Republican primary voters, Perry may be too socially conservative for the general election, and his record as Texas governor, with its budgetary shambles and drastic cuts, is not unassailable. More than that, though, it is three years since America watched Perry’s predecessor as Texas governor leave the White House, and his departure is not widely lamented. If Republicans do, indeed, vote tactically, they may decide that it’s simply too soon for another Texas governor.