Big Un-Bombshell: KBH to hold on Senate Seat

Hutchison to keep Senate seat in bid for governor, aide says: "She will announce tomorrow at the Texas Federation of Republican Women's Convention in Galveston that she will not be resigning her seat before the primary,"

You heard it here first, probably even before Sen Hutchison came to that conclusion -My fearless prediction back in July was: "Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison will see the writing on the wall by December so she will NOT decide to vacate her senate seat, but play it safe. Lose the primary means she will ride it out until 2012, and no Senate race after all and a more boring 2010 election cycle."

The 'play it safe' route wasn't her game plan, and my own update blogged a retraction based on her own comments. But Senator Hutchison has been caught in the vice of a delayed ObamaCare vote, where it is vital for her to be there to help stop the ObamaCare train wreck, and polling that shows Perry with an 11 point lead, enough lead, especially among the conservative part of the base, to indicate that he will likely be the nominee. Conservatives prefer Perry, who's been more out front and forceful in jumping on populist Tea Party sentiment, and has tagged KBH as "Senator Bailout". So the likely scenario now is that Perry wins the primary.

If Sen Hutchison wins the primary, she'd resign then. This was always the smarter thing to do, given the stack of important issues facing the U.S. Senate right now.

This is an UN-bombshell because so many of the potential dominoes will STOP falling. It means the GOP statewide slate is a stack of incumbents - Lt Gov David Dewhurst, Combs, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, AG Greg Abbott, Railroad Commissioner Victor Carillo, etc. It also mean ambitions deferred for folks like Ted Cruz and Michael Williams. Never fear, both men are the future of the Texas Republican party, and they both deserve a promotion; they''ll just have to get the other folks out of the way next time.

The real losers here are the Democrats, who might have gleaned some advantage from additional GOP fratricide and were angling for a US Senate race. The Democrats could try to flood the GOP primary and vote for KBH just to get another Senate race going. Will it happen? Not in my crystal ball. Perry ekes out a victory, faces a second-tier Democrat (perhaps even ... KINKY?!?) and wins another term to become Texas' longest-serving Governor.

... and KBH stays in DC until 2012.

UPDATE: KBH says she will definitely will resign after the primary, win or lose hmmmm, I'll believe it when I see it. But if she does - Michael Williams for U.S. Senate!