Jim Granberry

Granberry was opposed for the Republican gubernatorial nomination by Odell McBrayer, the candidate of what later became known as the "Religious Right". Granberry handily defeated McBrayer, an attorney, 53,617 votes (77.6 percent) to 15,489 ballots (22.4 percent) in a low-turnout primary.

Granberry was the choice of Republican U.S. Senator John G. Tower, the nominal head of the Texas GOP at the time. He would carry his party's tattered banner in the year in which the national party was dragged down by the Watergate scandal, which had forced the resignation of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.

Dolph Briscoe hence defeated Granberry in the strongly Democratic year nationwide. Briscoe polled 1,016,334 votes (61.4 percent), compared to 514,725 (31.1 percent) for Granberry, and 93,295 for the Hispanic Raza Unida Party nominee, Ramsey Muñiz, who had also been the La Raza candidate in 1972. Another approximately thirty thousand ballots were cast for other candidates. Briscoe, who had served the last two-year gubernatorial term in Texas, therefore became the first Texas governor to win a four-year term since the establishment of the Texas Constitution of 1876. Yet, Briscoe polled 617,159 fewer votes against Granberry than he had with his initial election in 1972 against the conservative Republican Henry Cushing Grover of Houston, because of a much lower turnout in 1974.

In 1978, Granberry advised congressional candidate George W. Bush, who was seeking to succeed the retiring veteran Democrat George Mahon of Lubbock. Bush said that Granberry urged him to "expose Hance's ownership" of a Lubbock bar across the street from Texas Tech that sold beer to Tech students. But Bush declined to do so. An advertisement appeared in the Texas Tech University newspaper in Lubbock which invited students to a "beer bash" at Granberry's home to drum up support for Bush. Hance, the Democratic candidate who defeated Bush in that election, attributed his victory more to the endorsement by Mahon than from public outrage over the "beer bash".

In 1989, William Perry "Bill" Clements, Jr., the first Texas Republican governor since Reconstruction, appointed Granberry as chairman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole. He resigned in the summer of 1991.

In his later years, Granberry, an orthodontist, returned to his native Smith County. He was born in Lindale, Texas and resides in Hideaway, Texas.

• http://www.lubbockonline.com/tornado/stories/May13/002.shtml
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-rv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bushtext072999.htm
• https://web.archive.org/web/20030827112550/http://www3.baylor.edu/Library/BCPM/Guttery/guttery_posters.html
• http://www.adopteeconnect.com/d/a/62657
• https://web.archive.org/web/20061208080947/http://council.ci.lubbock.tx.us/history.htm
• https://web.archive.org/web/20070826214412/http://library.tamu.edu/cushing/collectn/modpol/clements/ap2/2_3.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20070626162327/http://pafgbmfi.org/officers.php

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