Medina may be spoiler in GOP race

About 40 supporters and potential supporters waited outside, among them Mike Purdy, who, with his wife, watched her in the Jan. 14 Republican gubernatorial debate.

“We were very impressed,” said Purdy, a retired prison warden. “We had seen her at a gun show in Robstown. She seems like the real conservative of the group.”

Medina never made it inside. Nor did she deliver a speech. The neophyte candidate spent nearly three hours talking politics and policy with the people in the parking lot.

She talked about property taxes, home schooling, school vouchers, abortion, decriminalizing drugs — talked until most everyone there had spoken to her about whatever was on their minds.

“She does this every time,” said Wheeler, an unemployed oil-field worker and avid supporter. “She'll talk to anybody and everybody.”

Only lately has the Republican Party establishment — and her two opponents — begun to listen. After she more than held her own in her first-ever debate, her poll numbers jumped from 4 percent to 12 percent; they climbed to 16 percent in a Rasmussen Reports survey released Tuesday.

Although Medina, 47, a small business owner and registered nurse from Wharton, remains the longest of long shots to win the nomination, even after a solid performance in last week's second debate, she has made herself a factor in the race.

She could be a spoiler, pulling enough votes to deny Gov. Rick Perry the renomination. Or she could force Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison into an expensive runoff.

The Medina phenomenon is the outgrowth of two loosely overlapping anti-Washington political movements: the populist tea party insurgency and the Libertarian faction that rallied around the 2008 presidential bid of 11-term U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, who got 5 percent of the vote in Texas.