Henry Grover - 1972 Gubernatorial Run

1972 Gubernatorial Run

Grover was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1960, 1962, and 1964 as a Democrat. In 1966, he switched parties and was elected to the District 15 of the Texas State Senate. In the 1972 Republican gubernatorial primary, Grover led a field of five with 37,118 votes (32.6 percent). Houston businessman Albert Bel Fay ran second with 24,329 ballots (21.3 percent). Three other largely unknown candidates shared a surprisingly large 41.8 percent of the vote. Grover carried the backing of prominent Houston developer and Republican activist James E. Lyon, who discouraged a potential gubernatorial primary bid by Jim Reese, then the mayor of Odessa in West Texas.

In an even lower turnout runoff primary, Grover defeated Fay (1913–1992), the Republican national committeeman from Texas (1960–1969). Grover received 37,842 votes (66.4 percent), some 700 more votes than he received in the first primary, to Fay's 19,166 (33.6 percent), or 5,000 fewer votes than he obtained in the primary. The Sharpstown bank scandal, which had damaged many of the state's Democratic leaders, worked to Grover's advantage, for he could depict himself as an untainted Republican nominee for governor. His uncompromising conservative, constitutionalist views may have hurt him among moderate voters in both parties.

Grover lost the general election by almost exactly 100,000 votes to the Democratic nominee, former state Representative Dolph Briscoe, Jr., of Uvalde. Grover carried almost all of the state's urban centers. The final tally was 1,633,493 (47.9 percent) for Briscoe and 1,533,986 (45 percent) for Grover. Briscoe was a "minority governor" because he failed to garner a simple majority of the votes. The Hispanic La Raza candidate, then 29-year-old Ramsey Muñiz, received 214,118 votes (6 percent), nearly all believed to have been at Briscoe's expense. (Two other minor candidates shared 27,994 votes, or 0.8 percent.) Muñiz's support was insufficient to deny victory to Briscoe, but political analysts contend that Briscoe's margin was largely dependent on Hispanic voters in rural areas of south Texas who traditionally stuck with their Democratic nominees.

Grover's Catholicism was apparently not an issue with Texas voters. Had he been elected, he would have become the first Catholic governor of the State of Texas. Many believed that Texas had supported Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928 because opponent Alfred E. Smith was Catholic. Texas, however, had voted in 1960 for John F. Kennedy, the nation's first Catholic president.