Early Years and Election To Congress
Hance obtained his Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Texas Tech in 1965 where he was also a member of Delta Tau Delta, in which he served as president. He also served as the Student Government Association Vice-President.
He later attended the University of Texas School of Law. During his time as a law student, he was the Student Bar Association President and chosen as recipient of the Counsel Award. After law school, he was admitted to the Texas bar and in 1968 became a practicing attorney in Lubbock. During this period, he was also a law professor at Texas Tech from 1968 until 1973.
In 1972, Hance ran for the Texas Senate and defeated incumbent H.J. "Doc" Blanchard in the 1972 primary. His campaign at the beginning seemed doomed to failure, but Hance quickly made connection with voters in the sprawling West Texas district.
He served in the House from 1973 to 1979, when he ran successfully as a Democrat for the Lubbock-based 19th Congressional District. The seat, which was based in Lubbock had been held for a generation by popular Democrat George H. Mahon, long-time chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Hance's opponent in the general election was a young Republican businessman from Midland named George W. Bush (the 19th included most of the Permian Basin at the time). Bush won the Republican nomination in a hard-fought but low-turnout runoff primary against the 1976 party nominee, Jim Reese, former mayor of Odessa in Ector County.
As a Democratic member of Congress from 1979–1985, Hance was a member of the ‘boll-weevil’ conservatives. As such, he became one of President Ronald Reagan's allies and carried his tax-cut, the nation's largest tax cut in 1981.
The 19th Congressional District had long been one of the more conservative areas of Texas (it hasn't supported a Democrat for president since 1964). Although the 19th had begun voting in landslides for Republicans at the national level, conservative Democrats continued to represent much of the region at the state level until 1994. Hance claimed Bush was "not a real Texan" because of his privileged upbringing and Yale education. Hance won by seven points - the only time that the future 43rd President of the United States was ever defeated in an election.
Hance was reelected two times. His voting record was very conservative even by Texas Democratic standards; he compiled a lifetime rating of 72 from the American Conservative Union. He did not run for a fourth term in 1984, opting instead to seek the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring John Tower. Hance announced within hours of Tower's withdrawal that he would run for the Senate. He was very narrowly defeated—by only 273 votes—by State Senator Lloyd Doggett of Austin, who was later a long-term Democratic congressman. Hance had received a great deal of support from conservative Republicans who crossed party lines to vote for him in the race, since Hance had run on a conservative platform. Hance proceeded to endorse Doggett in the general election, which rankled many of the conservative Republicans who had crossed party lines to vote for him. Doggett would go on to lose to Republican nominee Phil Gramm. Geography also played a role in Hance's loss to Doggett; no one from west of San Antonio has ever represented Texas in the Senate. Hance was succeeded in the U.S. House by a young Republican, Larry Combest, a former aide to Tower.
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