Dwayne Stovall

Dwayne Bradley Stovall (born 1966) is a businessman and school board member from Cleveland in Liberty County in southeastern Texas, who is a Republican candidate for the United States Senate in the primary election scheduled for March 4, 2014. He and six challengers, including U.S. Representative Steve Stockman, are seeking to deny re-nomination to John Cornyn, who has held the seat since 2002 and is the Senate Minority Whip.

On his website, the conservative Stovall calls himself a "small-r republican ... who refuses to remain silent while tyranny grows and liberty is destroyed."

Background

Stovall was born in Baytown, near Houston, where his father worked in the oil fields. He spent the first decade of his life in a neighborhood built by the Humble Oil Company. The small residences in the subdivision were humorously called "Humble camps". He lived in Alaska for several years in the 1970s, when his father worked on the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. In 1984, Stovall graduated from West Rusk High School in New London in Rusk County in East Texas. He attended Kilgore Junior College in Kilgore and Texas State University in San Marcos, then the institution was known as Southwest Texas State University, also the alma mater of the late U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who from 1949 to 1961 held the Senate seat that Stovall is seeking.

While attending SWTSU, Stovall began employment in shift work at the Atlantic Richfield refinery in Pasadena, also near Houston, Texas, where he worked for thirteen years. In 1996, he launched Diamond K Equipment, Inc. , and moved to Liberty County shortly thereafter. He worked for what was then Lyondell-Citgo Refining until 2001, when he began full time in his business, which then specialized in bridge construction, primarily for the Texas Department of Transportation, in all parts of the state. In 2011, Diamond K began to branch into the testing of emissions testing in the oil fields.

He is a member of the Tarkington Independent School District trustees. He lists his religious affiliation as "Christian". He and his wife, his childhood sweetheart, Kathy Brackeen Stovall, have three children.

Senate campaign

Stovall has repeatedly won straw polls at meetings across Texas of the Tea Party movement. He carries the backing of various conservative political groups but no prominent politicians in his state. Stovall is supported by the Tea Party group, "Grassroots America - We the People" and "Houston Young Republicans". Another group, "Southern Conservative" switched its support from Steve Stockman to Stovall.On December 3, 2013, Stovall won a straw poll in Nacogdoches County in East Texas.

He received considerable attention from a television advertisement that first aired in early February 2014 in which he ridicules Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Cornyn's superior in the Senate leadership, as an ineffective "Beltway turtle".

The established media, however, had until the turtle ad largely ignored Stovall's candidacy. Stovall supporters claim the media is involved in the suppression of voices, such as Stovall, who oppose powerful well-known names in Washington, D.C.Greta Van Susteren of Fox News called Stovall a "jerk" for running the "turtle" ad against Senator McConnell: "You can be clever and funny in ads … or you can be gratuitously insulting."

Stovall, who often drives his truck alone to campaign events, considers himself as "an average Texan" who believes that the position of U.S. senator has "become grossly misused. ... A senator’s job is to look out for [his] state's respective interest, not the interests of the federal government."