Hance Switches Parties
Hance switched parties from Democratic to Republican in 1985. In 1986, he unsuccessfully sought the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Instead, the Republicans called former Governor Bill Clements out of retirement for the right to challenge Democratic Governor Mark White. In 1988, Hance was a Texas delegate to his first ever Republican National Convention, which met in New Orleans.
In 1987, Clements appointed his former intraparty rival Hance to a vacancy on the Texas Railroad Commission. The next year Hance was elected as a Republican to the commission on the coattails of presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, father of the young man Hance had defeated for Congress ten years earlier. He left the Railroad Commission in 1990, once again to seek the GOP nomination for governor but was heavily defeated in the primary by another West Texan, controversial Midland businessman Clayton Williams. In the primary against Williams, Hance finished second but with only 15 percent of the ballots.
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Famous quotes containing the words switches and/or parties:
“I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.”
—Groucho Marx (1895–1977)
“she cannot understand
What she wants or why she wanders to that undiscovered land,
For the parties there are not at all the sort of thing she planned,
In the land where the dead dreams go.”
—Alfred Noyes (1880–1958)