Gusher!

You’ll hear Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst mentioned if you start a conversation about the next governor’s race, but the stars are aligning to send him to Washington, if he’s interested.

Gov. Rick Perry, talking to reporters from The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, became the first candidate to say — without reservations — that he’ll be on the gubernatorial ballot in 2010.

In the only statewide runoff race — the Democratic battle for Railroad Commission — political novice Mark Thompson outran Dale Henry, who was making a third run for a job on that regulatory panel. Thompson got 59.2 percent of the vote, and will challenge Republican incumbent Michael Williams.

We take you now to Runoff Land, where a handful of candidates are still smacking each other for a chance at their party’s nomination.

Early voting in the April runoff elections runs Monday through Friday of next week (that’s March 31-April 4). The pickings are slim, and you’re loopy if you think turnout will look like it did in the first week of March.

Nothing like a proposal to cut $262.8 million from a state program to get negotiations going.

State election officials have asked for an investigation of voting in a Republican House race that was decided by just 38 votes.

Texas Republicans have never had a primary like this one. They got a quarter of a million more voters to the polls this year than they did in the presidential primaries four years ago.

The early voting tsunami is great for political scientists, but it sure makes elected and wanna-be-elected officials nervous. It’s big, but it’s impossible right now to know who’s voting and how, whether the voters are new, whether Republicans are voting in the Democratic primary, whatever. It’s a big, fat question mark. For incumbents, that sort of uncertainty is maddening.