For Greg Abbott

Attorney General Greg Abbott is the clear choice for governor for GOP primary voters.

For the first time in 12 years, the name Rick Perry will not appear on the Texas Republican primary ballot for governor. But the name that replaces Perry’s as the overwhelming primary favorite is almost as familiar to Texas voters, particularly to Texas Republicans, as the four-term incumbent’s.

Attorney General Greg Abbott is the clear choice for GOP primary voters to oppose a strong Democratic challenger, state Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, in the November general election.

Abbott would bring extensive professional and life experience to the state’s highest elective office. His understanding of Texas’ broad conservative mainstream is unquestioned. He will come through the primary with relative ease.

Abbott, 56, has run successfully for statewide office five times, serving two terms as a Texas Supreme Court justice followed by three as state attorney general. He has joked that his primary duty as attorney general is to sue Barack Obama, but actually he was only half joking, having sued the Obama administration more than two dozen times in five years. Like Perry, he is an outspoken opponent of what he considers federal intrusion on Second Amendment rights, voting issues, health regulations, the environment — he has sued the Environmental Protection Agency 17 times — and other concerns he considers within the purview of the state. “We will fight to ensure the federal government remains in check,” he says.

During what will ultimately be 14 years in the governor’s office, Rick Perry has been committed to keeping taxes low, regulation and services minimal and the business environment congenial. Abbott is likely to rely on the same playbook. No doubt he’s happy to point out that economic growth in the Lone Star State has outpaced the rest of the country by 2-to-1 in recent years.

Like his Democratic opponent, Abbott has a compelling life story to tell. On a July day in 1984, he was in Houston studying for his bar examination with a friend and later in the day went jogging through River Oaks. An oak tree collapsed and fell on him, fracturing several vertebrae and severing his spinal cord. He survived, but he would never be able to walk again. That experience, he has said, strengthened his resolve and has put other life challenges in perspective.

If Abbott faces a challenge with undecided and/or independent voters, and we think he does, it lies in differentiating himself and his policies clearly from those of Perry. Over the years, the departing incumbent shaped himself into a highly partisan lightning rod.

The GOP primary season is none too soon for Abbott to begin that work. Indeed, given his financial and name-recognition strengths, it offers the opportunity to speak not just to his party’s base, but to all Texas voters about issues that will determine whether the state’s robust economy continues. We have in mind, for example, the perennial issues of water, transportation and infrastructure.

Those issues are reminders that growth and progress bring problems of their own. We trust Abott will address them in the coming weeks and months.

We have in mind also the state’s No. 1 investment: the education of our children.