By 11 o'clock on a recent Saturday, Ron McLain had the “Texans for Liberty” hot dogs boiling and John Wheeler was helping haul folding chairs to the parking lot of Debra Medina's campaign headquarters in Corpus Christi.

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.

She was born Debra Carolyn Parker, the oldest of four children, on a farm near Beeville.

She met her husband, Noe, in 1980, the year she graduated from high school. They married two years later. Noe Medina now works for his wife's medical billing company, Prudentia Inc., a three-person venture based in Wharton.

They have two grown children — Janise Cookston of Houston, 25, an interior designer, and Jacob Medina, 20, an agriculture economics major at Texas A&M University.

Medina thought she wanted to be a doctor, but after a physics course “ate my lunch,” a college counselor suggested nursing. She took a diploma from Southwest Baptist Hospital School of Nursing in San Antonio and later received a business degree from the Houston campus of LeTourneau University.

She and her husband moved to Wharton in 1989, when Medina became director of a nursing home. She changed jobs a few years later and began commuting 120 miles round-trip to Houston as a medical consultant while home-schooling her two children.

She opened Prudentia in 2002. The business is pretty much bare-bones as Medina campaigns full-time.

“The ethics law and the election commission law in Texas really make it difficult for average Joes to run for public office,” she said. “Who can afford to take off of work for a year to run for office? So, it's been really hard, really hard.”

Her political career had its origins in her church. She was raised a Catholic, but when she and her husband moved to Wharton, they joined the Baptist church.

In 1992, the church deacons helped defeat an anti-abortion resolution at the Republican county convention, and, in Medina's words, “it just shook me to the core.”

She began attending political conventions at the county and state levels. In 2004, she ran for county chair and won with support from Libertarian-leaning Paul supporters.

The man she defeated, Phil Stephenson, 64, still fumes about it and charges that Medina didn't support the Republican presidential ticket in 2008; that John McCain campaign signs were nowhere to be found.

“She's into Ron Paul, that's it,” he said.

Medina has said she voted for Republican George W. Bush for president, but not McCain. On her Web site, she has a letter of support from the candidate she hoped would be president.

“She has stood up to the big government establishment and fought to hold our party accountable to our platform and our conservative Texas values” Paul wrote.

She challenged Tina Benkiser for the state party chair in 2008, pushing for a platform that resembled Paul's. Benkiser defeated Medina, who later sued the Texas Republican Party over how the state convention was run. The suit was dismissed.

Nueces County Republican Chairman Mike Bertuzzi is as exasperated as Stephenson.

“If she doesn't win, she won't support either candidate out of the primary,” he said. “That's kind of a problem there, a real problem.”

Medina campaign manager Penny Langford-Freeman said, “That's because we have our eye on the ball, which is winning the primary.”

Bertuzzi contends Medina and her Libertarian cohorts are attempting to take over the state GOP apparatus so they can use it in the service of another Ron Paul presidential run in 2012.

After Medina spoke at a November 2008 rally in Houston in support of abolishing the Federal Reserve System, she began fielding calls and e-mails urging her to run for governor. Others rallied to her signature issue, replacing property taxes with an expanded sales tax, and for her support of “nullification,” the idea that states have a right to ignore federal laws they deem unconstitutional.

A fierce opponent of federal gun laws, Medina packs a Springfield 9 mm handgun in a zippered case in her car. She believes landowners along the Texas-Mexico border have the right to arm themselves against unauthorized immigrants and wants to post the Texas National Guard there.

Despite the encouragement from disaffected Republicans, Medina was reluctant to enter the race — until she had a heart-to-heart with her daughter.

“She said, ‘We've seen something happening. You aren't saying anything today you haven't been saying for 15 years, and, yet, last year people started asking you to travel from Beaumont to College Station to San Antonio to Corpus Christi and all over Southeast Texas, talking about these ideas.

Medina has been running hard ever since.

“I expect we're going to win,” she said. “Call me crazy if you want, but I think that's where we're headed.”