House District 47 Run-Off: Workman vs. Turner

One of the hot runoff elections that will be decided on April 13^th is in House District 47 which follows golf courses throughout South & Southwest Austin (Onion Creek all the way up to Lakeway and the Western reaches of Travis County.) The race pits 25-year Travis County native Paul Workman with recent migrant Holly Turner.   Workman is the former president of the Austin Rotary the founder of a commercial construction company that has created hundreds of local jobs and a stalwart Republican who has voted in a dozen Republican primaries in Travis County. An intial review shows Wormans website to be informative & full of issue content at  WorkmanforTexas.com. Turner seems to be running more of a surface-level campaign appealing to voters with her photogenic picture on billboards and very broad content on her site HollyforTexas.com. While Turner has attacked Workmans Republicanism emerging to the surface in this race is the fact that Turner herself skipped five straight primary elections 1998 2000 2002 2004 and 2006. This means that prior to becoming a candidate she had voted in the sum total of one primary. It would appear that her recent conversion to political activism and her recent move to Travis County makes her open to the charge of opportunism. During the early March Primary Election Turner was attacked for changing her voter address from Tarrant County to Travis County at the end of 2009.  (To read the article including her showing off a downtown Ft. Worth condo in the September 2009 issue of Ft. Worth Magazine click here.) Austinites are watching this race carefully because the winner will challenge for a seat  held by what many prognosticators believe to be a vulnerable incumbent Democratic Representative Valinda Bolton. Bolton was re-elected in 2008 with the 2nd closest margin of all incumbent Democrats. The Democrat who won by the closest margin? Well suffice to say hes had the sense to already have switched parties. Bolton could be very vulnerable.