John Joseph Carona (born 14 December 1955) is a former Republican member of the Texas Senate from District 16 in Dallas County, Texas.
Born in Texas City, Texas, Carona has been a resident of East Dallas since early childhood. He was educated in the Dallas Independent School District and graduated from Bryan Adams High School. In 1978, he received two Bachelor of Business Administration degrees in insurance and real estate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1978.
First elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1990, Carona thereafter won a special election to the state Senate held on May 4, 1996 to succeed the Republican John N. Leedom, who resigned early in his last term. Carona remains a senator until January 2015.
News reports suggested that the feud was partly motivated by positioning in 2012 to succeed David Dewhurst as lieutenant governor, should Dewhurst have been elected to the United States Senate. Instead Dewhurst lost the Senate runoff election to fellow Republican Ted Cruz. Had Dewhurst left the lieutenant governorship early in 2013, the state senators themselves would have chosen one of their own as the acting lieutenant governor to serve through January 2015.
Carona, along with colleagues Bob Deuell of Greenville, Robert L. Duncan of Lubbock, Kevin Eltife of Tyler, and Kel Seliger of Amarillo, is considered one of the most liberal of the nineteen (as of 2013) Texas Senate Republicans, according to an analysis by Mark P. Jones of the Political Science Department at Rice University in Houston. Jones also found that these Republicans saw passage of 90 percent of the bills for which they had voted. In addition to Carona's narrow primary defeat, Deuell was forced into runoff contest with another Republican, Bob Hall.
In 2014, Patrick was himself a runoff candidate against Dewhurst, who after losing to Cruz was seeking a fourth term as lieutenant governor. While Patrick led a four-candidate field for lieutenant governor, with Dewhurst a distant second, in the primary election held on March 4, 2014, Carona was himself very narrowly unseated for his state Senate seat by Dallas businessman Don Huffines (born c. 1958), 25,136 (50.6 percent) to 24,501 (49.4 percent). (Patrick defeated Dewhurst in a runoff election on May 27, 2014.)
