Okay, okay, so we failed to predict that the Presidency of the United States would be decided by a smaller margin than most races for the Texas House of Representatives. Whodathunkit? The initial Florida margin of 1,784 votes would make for a nail-biter in a major county commissioner’s race.

Got political heartburn? It’s because the dining has been so rich around here for two years. Though it was never much of a race in Texas, the state has been ground zero for the GOP half of the presidential race for two years. Texas politicos have never been particularly bashful, or even polite, about trying to win promotion to higher offices, but George W. Bush’s run for the White House has opened a line of speculation that would make Jim Mattox blush.

Turns out the Republicans aren’t the only folks fighting at the dinner table in Senate District 3. The Democrats are at it, too. The general consultants and media folks for David Fisher, the Silsbee attorney trying to wrest that seat from the Republicans, bailed with just a few weeks to go, and Fisher had to come back and hire someone to take over media buys for the rest of the race.

Rep. Todd Staples got a Sunday visit at home last week from Lt. Gov. Rick Perry, pollster Mike Baselice and former Rep. Mike Toomey, now a lobbyist for Texans for Lawsuit Reform. They wanted to talk about his campaign for state Senate, and apparently wanted to have that conversation outside the presence of his main political consultant, Bryan Eppstein of Fort Worth.

The quiet race for lieutenant governor got a little louder with a letter from Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, knocking a proposal from Sen. David Sibley, R-Waco. The two are probably the most active candidates for the job. Sibley has proposed stripping away some of the powers of the office and putting them in the hands of the senators. Wentworth, in a letter to his fellow senators and to Lt. Gov. Rick Perry, says that’s a rotten idea that would increase partisan rivalries in the upper chamber.

Somebody come up with a title and a pilot script so we can sell the voting saga of the Polk County Escapees to some fool in Hollywood and make a load of money. If the first episode is a hit, there is plenty of material here for sequels. Some of the lawyers and others involved now think they’ll be involved in this through at least January. That’s when election contests are decided.

It is possible to draw a political map of Texas, according to some of the wise owls in the Legislature, that would preserve the legislative districts of just about every rural representative in the statehouse. Many of those folks are Democrats, but most rural Democrats are closer in philosophy to Republicans than are urban Democrats. And if Anglo Democrats are on the chopping block next year, as many Republicans and even some Democrats believe, the rural-urban difference could be grounds for a civil war inside the party that has dominated Texas politics for the last century.