Decked out in red, white, and blue bunting and a hodgepodge of brightly colored super-sized political posters, the sun-drenched lobby of the University of North Texas Health Science Center on Camp Bowie Boulevard seemed awash with nothing but good cheer on a recent Saturday morning. More than 100 local Republicans, including about two-thirds of the party's 60 primary candidates, mingled in polite chitchat over coffee and Krispy Kremes. Then the group convened in one of the college's lecture halls -- and took off the gloves.

Those running in the party's primary election on March 12 faced their toughest and most influential audience that morning: the party executive committee made up of precinct chairs, headed by Republican county chairwoman Pat Carlson. While the committee doesn't endorse, its members hold great sway in elections, Carlson said. "These are the grassroots workers, the ones who get out the vote, and each one is free to endorse individually," she said. "Most of our precinct chairs have been around for many, many years. A lot of people in their precincts look to them for advice on who to vote for." This is the one group, she said, that every candidate wants in his or her corner.

With so much at stake, and the primary election just a little more than three weeks away, any semblance of polite discourse was left back in the lobby with the crumbs from the Krispy Kremes.

Words like "scurrilous," "rude," "impure," "mean," "vicious," "liar," "disgrace to the party," and "bearer of false witness" were lobbed like ping-pong balls between incumbents and challengers. Judicial candidates for the county's highest benches, as it turned out, were less civil than those running for justice-of-the-peace courts.

And purity became the watchword for the day, as in lifetime allegiance to the party versus those Johnny-come-lately Republicans reared in that not-so-long-ago time when Texas was Democrat to the bone.

No one is making more of that issue than Jack Byno, 35, the Haltom City municipal court judge who is challenging incumbent Billy Mills for the bench of County Criminal Court 3. Byno, a registered Republican since his first vote as an 18-year-old, as he told the assemblage, has been hammering the 71-year-old Mills for his switch to the Republican Party a little more than a decade ago after spending about 40 years as a Democrat. NEXT »

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