When Kinky Friedman launched his independent bid for the Governor’s Mansion in the 2006 campaign, it initially sounded like the legendary Texan wit doing what he did best: having fun by playing a prank on the rest of us, the cigar clenched between his teeth as he tried to keep a straight face. The campaign utilized slogans that did nothing to persuade Texans to take Friedman seriously: they included “He Ain’t Kinky, He’s My Governor,” “How Hard Could It Be?,” and “Why the Hell Not?”
Texans took him seriously anyway. His campaign became a legitimate factor in the race; for two quarters in 2006, Friedman’s fund-raising totals surpassed those of Democratic nominee Chris Bell, whom he also polled ahead of at several points in the summer. In one poll conducted between late August and early September by Zogby and the Wall Street Journal, Friedman had pulled within single digits of incumbent governor Rick Perry, a Republican.
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Friedman’s campaign took a nosedive after he made a racist comment that the “crackheads and the thugs” had remained in Houston after Hurricane Katrina, while the “musicians and artists” had mostly moved back to New Orleans. And, in a four-way race between Bell, Friedman, Perry, and former Republican turned independent Carole Keeton Strayhorn, he finished in fourth place, with (a still impressive) 12.6 percent of the vote. Reflecting on his loss, Friedman lamented, “God probably couldn’t have won as an independent.”
That’s how things shook out in the timeline that we inhabit. But if the past few years of movies have taught us anything, it’s that the multiverse is an ever-spinning web in which every possible outcome can come true somewhere; we’ve seen a punk rock Spider-Man and a world in which all life on earth is represented by rocks with googly eyes, and we’ve glimpsed the long-rumored world in which Nicolas Cage somehow played Superman. It only stands to reason, then, that in an infinite multiverse, in at least one of the universes, Friedman actually won his 2006 campaign and was able to implement his platform as governor of Texas. As we mourn his death in our world, let’s peer into the multiverse and see what Texas looks like in the one where Friedman’s vision for the state came to pass.
In the Kinkyverse, a few key details differ from what happened in the timeline you know. Strayhorn, whose contempt for Perry brought her into the race as a potential spoiler, was successful in getting her name on the ballot as “Carole Keeton ‘Grandma’ Strayhorn,” an effort she pursued to no avail on our earth, as the secretary of state ruled that while Friedman had used his nickname for decades, Strayhorn’s was a recent appellation. That difference helped her attract voters who liked the idea of a maternal, grandmotherly figure in charge of things, snatching a few precious percentage points away from Perry. With the race competitive between the two erstwhile Republicans, Bell and Friedman opted to consolidate their support; Kinky challenged the Democratic candidate to a drinking contest, the loser of which would drop out of the race. Bell, put back on his heels, accepted the challenge, and the contest was televised on Late Night with David Letterman. With the support of musical guest Willie Nelson, Friedman won the contest, the support of Bell’s donors and voters, and thus the governorship.
Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, and Pro Football
Friedman’s abortion platform for much of his 2006 campaign declined to address the issue. Instead, he often utilized one of his famed one-liners to deflect attention: “I’m not pro-life, and I’m not pro-choice. I’m pro football.” (He later affirmed that he supported the right to choose.) What most observers didn’t imagine was that this throwaway line actually meant something. After building political capital from the landslide victory in his 2010 reelection campaign, he vowed to veto a proposed 2013 abortion law, urging lawmakers to instead pursue his Football Expansion Act, which authorized the state to negotiate directly with the NFL to bring a team to San Antonio. That achievement paid off the following year, when the San Antonio Raiders laced up their cleats for the team’s first season in the Alamo City.
“Slots for Tots”
In the first legislative session after his election, Friedman leaned on lawmakers to pass his plan to legalize casino gambling across the state in order to fund his ambitious education plans (more on those below). The program was, in some regards, an overwhelming success: casinos sprouted up across Texas almost immediately, with the Galveston Harrah’s quickly establishing itself as the state’s flagship, nearly doubling the number of visitors the island saw in 2008 over the previous year. The tax revenue generated by legalized gambling was more than sufficient to fund Friedman’s ambitious education plan, and it continued to grow, stuffing the state’s “rainy day fund” to bursting, which Friedman vowed, in his second campaign, to further direct to education spending. By the start of the 2014 school year, the idea of a Texas teacher personally paying for classroom supplies or working a summer job became downright laughable. By 2022, Texas’s tax revenue from commercial casinos reached more than $2 billion annually, leaving the state second only to Pennsylvania in reaping fiscal rewards from the gaming industry.
Friedman’s embrace of casino gambling—and the subsequent revenue windfall for the state—led lawmakers to continue chasing gaming dollars; even after Friedman retired from public life, at the end of his second term, with a seven-word farewell speech reflecting on his 2006 slogan (“Actually, it was harder than I thought”), lawmakers continued to aggressively pursue legalizing other forms of gambling. After the Supreme Court struck down a national prohibition on sports betting in 2018, Texas was among the first states to legalize online gambling.
Kinky Takes On Education
The flip side of Friedman’s expansion of gambling was that it allowed the state to fund education to an extent that might have been unimaginable otherwise. During his initial campaign, Friedman often cited the statistic that “teachers’ salaries in Texas are over $6,000 below the national average. This lack of respect for the people who do our state’s most important job must stop.” During his first term as governor, Friedman increased this figure and established a minimum salary threshold of $70,000. With inflation, that minimum number had risen to $102,000 by 2022.
In the part of the multiverse from which you’re reading this, things are grimmer for teachers. There, the minimum salary in 2022 was significantly lower, and teachers could earn as little as $33,660 a year. Even some of the most seasoned educators, with several decades of experience, earn just half of the $102,000 a starting teacher receives in the Kinkyverse. Fortunately, in the world where Kinky won, teachers are well paid and lawmakers have managed to avoid years of bickering over a contentious voucher program.
Health Care for Every Texan (i.e., TexasCare)
Under Friedman’s guidance, lawmakers also passed Friedman’s health care plan—TexasCare—that provides affordable insurance to every Texan. Republicans, long opposed to state-funded health care on ideological grounds, fought vociferously against the proposal, arguing that it would raise Texans’ taxes and amounted to socialism. Friedman, however, used his independent bona fides to bring lawmakers to his side—his immigration plan (more on that in a minute) gave the GOP’s right flank a wish list of policies that even the ultraconservative Perry hadn’t considered. “If horse-trading is good enough for Buster Welch, it’s good enough for the Texas Capitol,” Friedman quipped, and he successfully turned the remaining skeptics into believers, flipping enough nay votes to yeas late in his first term. TexasCare safeguarded health benefits for the now nearly one million uninsured children in the state—whose lack of a safety net Friedman had called “the real human tragedy”—along with low-income residents who couldn’t otherwise afford health care.
In his platform, Friedman said the money from his plan would come from three separate revenue streams: state funding, federal grants, and enrollee premiums. Due to the success of his casino gambling plan, however, over time, less money from the plan came from Texas taxpayers’ pocketbooks (at least, not directly), and more came from the revenue accumulated through the gaming industry.
The Wildest Immigration Policy This Side of Donald Trump
Friedman’s idiosyncratic 2006 campaign was fiercely progressive on some issues and deeply conservative on others. His proposal to increase the Texas Army National Guard presence on the border found immediate support in the GOP-controlled Legislature during his first session as governor, as did his proposal to divide the Texas-Mexico border into five districts and pay Mexican generals to prevent immigrants from slipping across the border. The controversial plan found additional support among Republican gubernatorial candidates in New Mexico and Arizona, inspiring 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump to rally crowds by declaring, “I’ll build a great, great wall on the border, and I’ll pay Mexico to build it!”
Letting LGBTQ Texans “Be as Miserable” as Straight Ones?
Friedman was ahead of his time when it came same-sex marriage—though his reasons for supporting it maybe weren’t all that rosy: “They have the right to be just as miserable as the rest of us!” (Friedman, as you might guess, was never married.) During his first run for governor, an idea like this was too radical for even some Democrats to embrace. (Former president Barack Obama, if you remember, opposed same-sex marriage until 2012.) Public opinion began to swing in the opposite direction come Friedman’s second term. Under his guidance, the Texas Lege legalized same-sex marriage in 2011, making it the sixth state to do so (and beating California and New York to the punch). That vote also came four years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
De-Wussifying Texas
Friedman also sought to eradicate the state of so-called wusses; during an interview, he explained that this meant no more political correctness. He feared that politicians were getting “so afraid of offending people that they never do anything at all.” Under Friedman’s administration, then, it was ordered, by law, that state government and elected officials were not allowed to act like precious snowflakes. (Friedman went so far as to require lawmakers to wish each other a “Merry Christmas” for the entire month of December.) This was another instance in which Friedman was ahead of his time: fast forward to the Lege now, where Republican lawmakers have banned any three-letter acronym—DEI, ESG, CRT—that they believe is too far left for the state’s politics.
Powering Texas
Friedman proposed an ambitious energy-transition plan that would require Texas to generate at least 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Peering into the multiverse, Friedman’s plan came to fruition in both the timeline in which he was elected and the one in which Rick Perry somehow managed to overcome the Jewish Cowboy and eke out a 2006 reelection; in that one, in fact, Texas overshot Friedman’s goal, as 25 percent of the power on the grid came from wind and solar power in 2020.
Elections Get Kinky
Among the first campaign promises Friedman pursued upon taking office was to establish an independent redistricting committee to draw the state’s legislative and congressional maps. Friedman pushed the Lege to take up reform with a commonsense argument that resonated with voters: “If I didn’t get to draw the boundaries of Texas, why the hell should these guys get to choose who votes for them?” The commission’s maps easily sailed through federal preclearance, leading to a new era of highly competitive races for control of the state legislature. That, combined with the realization of Friedman’s campaign promise to enact same-day voter registration—a pro-democracy reform that’s already in place in twenty states and Washington, D.C.—helped inspire a new era of political participation, especially among young voters, who often become interested in campaigns shortly before an election, after registration rolls are closed. The impact of these reforms culminated in a 2013 Legislature in which independents, inspired by Friedman, rode a wave of voter sentiment to office, resulting in more than a decade of legislative sessions in which neither party controlled either the House or the Senate.
