By KRWG News
Texas – The first Democrat in a generation said to have a real shot at winning the Texas governor's race -- lost.
White, after conceding to GOP Gov. Rick Perry, told supporters that it was a "a very difficult election year."
Perry, in the final days of the campaign, repeatedly made the former Houston mayor and the White House one and the same.
Perry called White an "Obama style individual" while running side-by-side pictures of the two men in his campaign ads.
Jim Henson with the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas says the fundamentals -- were fundamentally stacked against White this year. Henson says it's not clear what the White campaign could have done to move enough of the Republican base away from Perry in this environment.
In the end, White was crushed in rural Texas, where Obama is all but radioactive, and elections showed Perry narrowly beat Houston's White in Harris County.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.