Caleb Hannan is a writer in Denver.

There are many ways to run for president, even when it’s so early in the process that you don’t want to actually appear to be running for president. Yet Texas Governor Rick Perry may have found a new one.

While the men most considered to be his fellow hopefuls in the 2016 Republican race bounce between the early-primary states, Perry has charted a different course. He’s spent his fair share of time in South Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire, of course. But he’s also paid multiple visits to a handful of states that would appear to have little to do with each other, and even less to do with winning a party nomination.


Since as early as February of last year and as recently as April of this one, Perry has made eight trips to six different states, all of which have one very particular thing in common: They’re run by Democratic governors. Perry has used his visits to hammer on a consistent theme: Texas is a great state for business; the state he’s currently in is not; so wouldn’t it make sense then for all those companies that aren’t currently located in the Lone Star State to correct their error? Earlier this month, Perry made plain the politics behind his accumulated frequent-flier miles. “Blue-state governors need to be looking over their shoulder,” he told a Fox News panel.

Perry’s focused national tour is built around a message that’s tailor made for a presidential campaign whose central issue will likely be a lagging economy. The “Texas miracle,” the idea that Perry’s policies produced job growth in the worst climate since the Great Depression, first emerged in his initial failed campaign and has lived on ever since, buoyed by the fact that the state’s unemployment rate remains below the national average. But as any number of progressive-minded opponents will tell you, that “miracle” is most likely due in large part to the state’s wealth of fossil fuels. Hardly an advantage Perry can claim credit for. But tempting CEOs to relocate southward? For that he'll gladly take an attaboy.

Poaching companies is nothing new. States have been bad-mouthing and out-bidding each other for decades in the hopes of luring more business, often with little to show for it. But according to Greg Leroy, the executive director of Good Jobs First , a D.C.-based non-profit devoted to exposing what it considers the folly of government subsidies often given in the name of attracting companies, Perry’s campaign stands on its own. “I’ve been covering this for 30 years and there’s no precedent for what he’s doing,” says Leroy. “Nobody’s been as aggressive. Nobody’s done it as personally. He’s really taking it to a new low.”

Whether you believe Perry is simply doing what’s best for Texas or using partially taxpayer-funded trips to launch a national campaign mostly depends on your affiliation. A spokesperson for Perry insists, “These trips are about competition for the best ideas.” Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Manny Garcia naturally disagrees: “This is quite clearly a front to rebrand himself.” Even those stuck in the middle realize the issues are intertwined. When reached for comment, Carol Sims, the director of the Texas Business Roundtable, said that she’d be happy to comment on Perry’s attempts to lure businesses into the state but wasn’t comfortable speaking about his “national political aspirations.” When it was suggested that it might be impossible to talk about one and not the other, Sims agreed. “Yeah that’s true,” she said. Then she laughed.

Beyond how they might lay the groundwork for a future presidential campaign, though, there’s a more fundamental question raised by Perry’s trips. Are they actually doing anything for Texas? The War Between the States—the ongoing battle for businesses to relocate from one to another—has its roots in the Depression-era South, with flare-ups ever since. It usually follows a familiar pattern: A company expresses an interest in moving. States line up to offer them subsidies and tax breaks. And in the end, a politician has a press conference where they subtly, or not so subtly, take most of the credit.

The ideological fuel powering Perry’s trips out of state says that, unlike the weather, that vague term known as a “business climate” can be engineered, and that no one’s done a better job of parting the clouds than Texas. But Leroy and nearly a century’s worth of data suggest otherwise. As does the most recent pelt in Perry’s poaching tour, which also happens to be the biggest such prize in his political career.

Perry’s odyssey began last year with a radio ad that played in and around Sacramento in advance of his first trip. “Building a business is tough, but I hear building a business in California is next to impossible,” says Perry in a voiceover. “I have a message for California businesses: Come check out Texas.” The ad set the tone for Perry’s subsequent trips, which revolved around the reddest of red meat: guns and taxes.

In Illinois, his ads highlighted Texas’s lack of a state income tax. In Connecticut, six months after the shootings at Newtown claimed the lives of 25 elementary school students and their teachers, Perry told the president and CEO of Colt Manufacturing, which is based in West Hartford, that his company “would always be welcome in Texas.” The governor made a similar pitch to Beretta in Maryland. And in Missouri he told a room full of Republican legislators to override Democratic Governor Jay Nixon’s recent veto of a bill to lower taxes.

Perry’s visits have also doubled as a dare to the governors he’s attacking: Hey, want some free press? Though in private Democratic leaders have asked the office-holders not to take Perry’s bait, some of them have been unable to resist. And the degree to which they’ve engaged has depended on their own political aspirations. California Gov. Jerry Brown, who, at age 76, is unlikely to move on to a higher office, categorized Perry’s first attempts at advertising in his state as “not even a burp; it’s barely a fart.” Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, however, figured by some to be a 2016 candidate, eagerly offered more than a scatalogical soundbite when he agreed to debate Perry on CNN’s “Crossfire.” (Let’s call it a draw.)

Then, in late April, Perry got the big score that seemed to justify all his travels when Toyota announced it had selected Plano, a Dallas suburb, as the home of its new North American headquarters. “Toyota understands that Texas’ employer-friendly combination of low taxes, fair courts, smart regulations and world-class workforce can help businesses of any size succeed and thrive,” a glowing Perry said the day the announcement was made.

Toyota was a coup for two specific and related reasons. It meant 3,000 new jobs for Texas and 3,000 fewer for California, the state where Perry’s trip had begun and Exhibit A in his campaign against what he sees as business-killing taxation and regulation. It seemed the epitome of a red state offering safe harbor to a beleaguered company that had finally had enough abuse at the hands of a grubby-handed blue state. Yet just a few days after the announcement, Toyota began quietly offering a counter-narrative.

In an extended interviewwith the Los Angeles Times, Toyota’s North American chief executive Jim Lentz gave a more nuanced explanation for why the company left California. The true reason for his company’s move, Lentz explained, came down to something much simpler: not sending the wrong signal to his employees. Toyota, Lentz said, wanted to consolidate management that was spread out over three states. Choosing California was never an option because it was already the home of Toyota’s sales and marketing and Lentz said that he didn’t want to give the impression to the rest of the company that “sales was taking over.”

“It may seem like a juicy story to have this confrontation between California and Texas,” Lentz told the Times, “But that was not the case.”

That left four candidates: Plano, Charlotte, Denver and Atlanta. In an op-ed he published a week later in the Dallas Morning News, Lentz mentioned that low taxes were part of a “wide range of criteria” that led him and his company to choose Texas, but he also made a point to mention that the decision was a matter of “simple geography.” Greater Dallas is in the Central Time Zone, has a nearby airport with direct flights to Japan and sits close to the multinational’s large American base of manufacturing. In other words, Texas was not, as Perry would have it, the most desirable choice because of taxes, regulation or the $40 million in subsidies it offered as a cherry on top. Instead, Toyota picked Texas in large part because of the one enormous advantage the state has enjoyed ever since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo: It sits smack in the middle of the country.

For Leroy, a critic of Perry’s trips and the author of a history of company-poaching, the case of Toyota and Texas is nothing new. “Business basics almost always drive decisions because that’s 98.5 percent of a company’s cost structure,” he says. According to his research, the IRS has calculated that after deductions, state and local taxes make up less than 1 percent of a company’s costs. He also quotes Robert Ady, a man known as the “godfather of site selection,” the consultants who help companies choose where to relocate, as saying that “taxes are not relatively important” in the process.

Yet that didn’t stop Perry, days after Lentz’s long explanation, from again claiming that Toyota’s move was based foremost on California’s high taxes.

Perry’s office says it’s not sure when the governor’s next trip to a Democratically controlled state will be. Though judging by his upcoming itinerary, he could soon be moving towards a more traditional path for a future possible presidential candidate. At the end of this month he’ll make another trip to Iowa, his third since his disastrous 2012 campaign. (He finished a distant fifth in the Iowa caucuses, and never recovered.)Asked recently if that trip meant Perry might be running again, the governor invoked a quality that apparently bridges the blue-state red-state divide he’s sought to exploit over the past year. “I believe America is a place that believes in second chances,” he said.