With Illinois’s primaries settled – well, sort of – the next big one on the calendar is less than a month away, March 2, in Texas.

Oh, how I dread covering this primary, and how I look forward to its completion. For the better part of a year now, I’ve gotten daily e-mails from the campaigns of Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, each one laying out some new outrage perpetrated by the other. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the amount of hyperbole used in press releases.

Most politicians are happy to govern a state for eight years, but Rick Perry has governed Texas since December 2000 and is aiming for another four years. In Perry’s favor at the moment is that Texas’s economy has performed significantly better than the national average during this recession. The cover of The Economist portrayed the state as the anti-California, economically resilient where the Golden State has cracked and weakened in recent years. Still, Perry has made his share of vexing decisions. Back in 2007, Perry issued an executive order to require schoolgirls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that cause most cases of cervical cancer and genital warts. Regardless of the vaccine’s value, quite a few Texas parents found the mandate to be a troubling overreach of government authority, and three months later, he accepted a law that reversed his mandate.

Kay Bailey Hutchison earned quite a bit of Republican respect during her years in the Senate, and her bid for the governor’s mansion is endorsed by a slew of big GOP names: former president George H. W. Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, and former House majority leader Dick Armey. But the mood in the state, mirroring that in many other parts of the nation, has forced her to run a different campaign than planned. As the Houston Chronicle put it:

Allies say Hutchison sees her long-planned race for governor – postponed for four years to allow Perry to run unopposed in the 2006 primary – as the culmination of a distinguished political career. Instead, amid a national anti-Washington frenzy, the senator so skilled at bringing home the bacon has become mired in a tit-for-tat among three conservative Republicans in a contentious primary.

Finally, there’s a third candidate on the Republican side, Debra Medina, former Wharton County Republican party chair. She’s emphasizing that she’s not a politician, not rich, and that the state needs a governor who will ensure “the average Texan is represented.”

There hasn’t been a ton of polling of this race, but in the polls that have been conducted, Perry leads fairly comfortably, but not by enough so that we could say he’s got this race in the bag. Intriguingly, in a race with two of the biggest names in Texas politics, Medina is inching up to the low to mid teens.

(There’s an interesting wrinkle that if no candidate gets a majority, there’s a runoff. So the first round might just be the elimination round for Medina, with the runoff being the expected “clash of the titans.”)

The winner will almost certainly take on Houston mayor Bill White on the Democratic side. Democrats think that if the GOP primary is bloody enough, they have a shot at winning a governorship that has eluded them since some obscure baseball-team owner beat Ann Richards in 1994. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll showed both Hutchison and Perry defeating White; Perry led 50 percent to White’s 40 percent; Hutchison led 52 percent to 37 percent.

At some point, Hutchison is expected to resign her Senate seat; despite the occasional speculation to the contrary, the official line is that she “intends to leave the Senate once the fights over federal health care and cap-and-trade environmental policy are settled.” Secretary of State Roger Williams is aiming to be her replacement, as are Railroad Commissioners Elizabeth Ames Jones and Michael Williams and state senator Florence Shapiro. (I foresee confusion over bumper stickers that say, “Vote for Williams.”)

The likely Democratic opponent is former state comptroller John Sharp.