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UPDATE at 9:27PM: Kay concedes with only 23% of the precincts reporting.No runoff for Rick Perry. Next up – White vs. Perry.

The band here is playing “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. “Some people call me the space cowboy,yeah.”

Rick Perry about to speak.

UPDATE at 9:09PM: To answer the question in the blog title… Probably. With rounding, Perry has 52% to KBH’s 31% and Debra Medina’s 17%. 15% of the precincts are reporting… Here at the Salt Lick, the mood is cheery.

Back when Kinky Friedman was a candidate for Texas governor, he had a pretty good line ready whenever someone asked him about Kay and Rick: “It’s the Clash of the Plastic Titans,” he would say dismissively.

Two former cheerleaders (well, technically, Rick was a Yell Leader at Texas A&M) each armed with their own vapid talking points battling it out on the precipice of far-right politics. Kinky had it right except for two things: One, right-wing populist Debra Medina emerged as a serious contender, firing up crowds with talk of “nullification” and the pressing need to replace property taxes with a sales tax. Two, Kay proved to be a dud of a candidate.

In February 2009, Texas Monthly put Kay and Rick on the cover next to to headline: “Kay vs. Rick: It’s On And It’s Gonna Get Ugly.” The cover theme was boxing, with Kay dressed in a gray tracksuit and tape on her hands. With hindsight, the Monthly should have had Kay voluntarily holding her arms behind her back. Her campaign was that bad.

Rather than position herself as a conservative, but sane alternative to GoodHair, she tried to out-flank Rick Perry on the right. No one bought it – least of all the Republican grassroots. Meanwhile, Perry proved to be the better cheerleader.

He has relentlessly campaigned on the notion that the Texas economy is doing somewhat better than the rest of the nation.

Every time some business magazine touted Texas as a great place to do business, the Perry campaign blasts the article to every reporter and blogger in the state. Ditto for articles on how horrible California – the anti-Texas – is doing. Ditto, also, for every time some obscure trade association endorses him. (Yesterday it was the Automotive Parts and Services Association.)

Ain’t Texas great?, he asks and answers at every opportunity.

It’s the power of positive thinking – and it works, ladies and gentleman.

if the polls are any indication, Kay will be lucky to get herself into a runoff. Perry is polling perilously close to the magical 50 percent mark. Anything above that and Perry can avoid a runoff and immediately turn to bashing Democrat Bill White – the likely winner of the Democratic gubernatorial primary – as a ‘Liberal’.

Perry’s election night party is located at the Salt Lick, a BBQ restaurant about 30 minutes outside of Austin in Driftwood, a Hill Country burg that is rapidly suburbanizing. I’ll be filing reports from there this evening. Check back.

“I’ve got election day jitters,” Lieutenant Governor hopeful Linda Chavez-Thompson tells me early Tuesday. “I’m hoping there won’t be a runoff, but if there is I’m going to hit the ground running on Wednesday morning.”

While most eyes are on a hotly contested gubernatorial race today, there’s been a record turnout in early voting among Republicans, the three Democratic candidates for Lieutenant Governor are rallying voters for the state’s second in command spot.

Whichever Democrat wins will have to raise a significant war chest to challenge incumbent Republican David Dewhurst, a businessman and gadzillionaire.

Former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle is feeling jubilant about his chances. “If I was feeling any better I’d think it was a frame up,” he says.  Earle will be spending the day making calls then head to the Travis County Democrat’s “Big Tent” party at Serranos. From there he plans to make a pilgrimage to the Democratic watering hole Scholz Garten in downtown Austin. “I was practically born there,” he jokes.

Chavez-Thompson will have her election watch party at Granada Homes on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. She is buoyed by the news that early voting numbers are robust in the Rio Grande Valley. “I think this will be good for me,” says Chavez-Thompson who spent many weeks along the border gaining traction with Democratic voters.

Marc Katz, owner of Katz’s deli, will be having his election watch party at his restaurant in downtown Austin. “We are having ourselves a big election party – we are just elated,” he says in his trademark New York brasso.

Katz says he won’t be hitting the polls today. “I’m done campaigning. I’m going to rest on my laurels and I know the voters will do the right thing.”

Katz won’t cop to any jitters about his election day dominance. “I would be absolutely shocked if I got anything less than a majority of the vote,” he says.

Let’s see what voters have in store today for the uber-confident Katz and the rest of the Democratic candidates. Will there be a runoff or a clear winner? We’ll have a good idea by 7:00 p.m. Stay tuned folks.

I n New York, I often get “the look” when I talk to people I don’t know well. “Oh!” they say. “You’re from … Texas.” Their eyes sweep over me, as if they’re examining the contents of my mind and heart. “Texas,” they repeat and nod. “Well. Texas.” Yes, I’m from Texas. Being a Southern female of a certain age, I’m polite and tactful. I can’t shake those qualities. Truth is, I don’t want to shake them. So I don’t say what I’m thinking. Which is: Isn’t it odd that the last acceptable prejudice in this country is toward white Southerners? Isn’t prejudice of any kind unacceptable in the 21st century? Precisely how much time have you spent among us, the ones who talk slow, can’t drive on ice, threaten to secede, and keep our white sheets clean for late-night cross-burnings?

But wait. Now I’m sounding defensive. Nothing’s worse than being defensive. It shows how insecure you are. God forbid.

The fact is, if you’re a Texan, New Yorkers are easy to impress. All you need is a little subject-verb agreement, a smattering of knowledge about culture and current events, a wardrobe with lots of black, and most of your teeth. They’re enchanted and dazzled. They hint that you, too, could become one of them. You could, as I’ve been assured, “escape from Texas.”

How do I convince them I don’t want to escape? How do I explain my stubbornly rooted love for the place and the people—the broad horizons; the scraggly mesquite trees; the flat, familiar drawls; the sense of identity; the insanity of the politics; the color; the food; the music; the friendliness, the ridiculous pageantry of football games; even the swell of organ music playing Amazing Grace in churches when I’m a certifiable agnostic? I can’t explain it. I can only think of George Patton musing about war: “God help me, I love it so.”

You can’t choose who you are or what you love. Let’s say you’re an irreverent, educated liberal who likes to read books. For some reason, you’re in love with a conservative, religious state where people believe in Adam and Eve, original sin  and bad apples. And where people tend to be born more than once and vote Republican. If so, you and your beloved are in for a life of conflicts. Love, hate, anger, amusement, outrage, yin and yang—everything but boredom and indifference. If you want tranquility and a love object that mirrors you, you can always move to Massachusetts or the Bay Area. Good lord, that sounds dull.

Recently my husband and I went to see part-time Austinite Sandra Bullock’s movie, The Blind Side. The plot is the true story of a rich, white Memphis family that takes in a young, poor black kid and changes his life. He succeeds in school and becomes a sports phenomenon and professional football player.

It’s a nice, feel-good story that left the two of us talking about our lives and values and how we needed to be doing more work for the community we live in. Maybe it’s a little simplistic, but so what?

Then I read some of the movie’s criticisms by the New York and national media. “The Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them,” said the Village Voice, adding that “Bullock’s facile Good Christian Materialist Southern Woman is part of The Blind Side’s desperate cynicism …”

Typical, I thought. The South and Southerners and their religion can never catch a break in the national media.

Then my husband and I watched the tragic BCS Bowl, Colt McCoy’s injury and UT’s defeat. McCoy, who speaks about Jesus Christ like he was on a Longhorn scholarship too, raised his eyes to the stadium lights and said it (The game! The injury! The defeat!) was all part of God’s plan.

Oh, great. Just another good old Texas boy hand-delivering the rest of the world another reason to laugh at us, to give us “the look,” since we all seem to think God spends his days and nights planning the outcome of college football games.

I mean, doesn’t Colt know? God, in his infinite wisdom, is a college basketball guy.

When I was reporting years ago in Nicaragua and traveling with a squad of Sandinista soldiers, a weary woman in a village in the middle of a battle zone told me that I had “the face of a priest.” That didn’t necessarily mean that she liked me. After years of war, neglect and poverty, she had grown skeptical of newcomers, including priests coming to relay her impoverished reality to a higher power.

I told her I was a reporter, but that didn’t erase the look of aching resignation on her face. History, no doubt, constantly reaffirmed her suspicions—here was another liberal anthropologist, this one posing as a member of the media, who had hacked through the jungle to study her. Like another sanctimonious ghost, another false promise, he’d be gone in a few days.

It wasn’t hard to see that same resignation in the media moments emerging from this year’s Haitian nightmare. The parallels to Katrina and New Orleans are not to be ignored: A natural disaster hits a region that—because it has been designed by slavery and racism—is filled with people acutely aware of their place in the caste system.

And like Katrina and New Orleans, the media faced a crucial debate: how to convey the symptomatic, grisly, turmoil…and how to hover above it and give the long, contextual (and, yes, condemning) view of Haiti’s wretched evolution. How to connect the breaking news to the land grabs, exploitation and dictatorships that the United States had supported for decades. Haiti was vulnerable long before the earthquake struck, and its history is almost a perfect microcosm of the lingering ruin left in the wake of super-powers hell bent on cornering the market on…you name it…sugar, spices, cotton and human beings. It was almost a pet phrase in the media for years and years—“poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.”

A nonscientific view of the Texas media’s coverage of Haiti suggests plenty of symptomatic “first responder” coverage—the front-page images of bodies and snaking lines for food and water. And the usual scrambles to find “local” angles (Texans who perished in Haiti, Texans tied to the adoption of Haitian children, Texans doing relief work—often through church groups). The challenge, of course, was simply being able to hold a mirror to the immediate reality.

“I give reporters a pass,” says John Burnett, the veteran Texas-based correspondent for National Public Radio, who just returned from Haiti. “Logistically, just getting around the shattered capital, finding officials who knew something, and holding one’s emotions in check were a challenge every day.

“As in New Orleans after Katrina, it was the journalists that alerted the world that this is a bad one. Send help. And when the aid agencies and the U.S. government assured us that help was on the way, the journalists showed that it might be on the way, but it wasn’t getting to the squalid tent camps where it was desperately needed. The aid distribution was paralyzed by disorganization, violent crowds, lack of security and inadequate supplies. So I guess I feel like we did our job.”

The images on TV were especially ceaseless and grinding, and millions of Americans sent money to help. But could the media have done more to affix blame for the conditions in pre-earthquake Haiti?

“What’s largely missing…has been the analysis,” says veteran Texas journalist and author R.A. “Jake” Dyer, who has reported extensively in Haiti.

“The public has a voracious appetite for constant Web updates, and so the pressure on reporters to produce fresh copy has been enormous. Making the call to remove a reporter from the daily action … and instead allow that reporter to spend several days or a week on analysis—that’s a very difficult call for an editor.”

Now the story has moved on. In Houston, the erudite Gabrielle Cosgriff—who has written many crusading editorials in the Houston Chronicle—had a stinging indictment. She perused her regular daily newspapers on the first Friday in February—and found that they had confined almost all their coverage to the American missionaries accused of child trafficking.

“So, apart from the American connection,” she wrote to me, “we’re done with Haiti, knowing little more than that a terrible natural disaster occurred, God knows how many people died, and a poor country is now even poorer.”

Voting us underway in the party primaries across the state, and the big question will be by what margin Gov. Rick Perry beats his challengers. Will King Rick face a run-off? And if he does, will Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison finally breathe some life into her race to replace governor good hair? We’ll have Forrest Wilder at Perry’s party tonight to see what happens.

The other race that is too close to call is for the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. The party power-brokers got behind Linda Chavez-Thompson, but that didn’t keep former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle from taking a gauge of the value of his name recognition. We’ve got Melissa del Bosque covering that race.

Dave Mann has the privileged assignment of following some of the more entertaining races. He’ll be keeping up with Kinky Friedman and Hank Gilbert in their competition for agriculture commissioner. And then there is the State Board of Education.

We’ll be covering all of those races and more throughout the day and well into the evening. To see all of our coverage, go to Campaign HQ. Providing the best political analysis in Texas, editor Bob Moser will be anchoring our primary coverage and letting you know what it all means to you and the future of Texas.

So if you haven’t voted, you need to celebrate Texas Independence Day with a trip to a school, church or other public building near you and cast a ballot. It doesn’t take that much time, and it’s good for you.