Could Texas Go Blue?

Could Texas Go Blue?

Political figures weigh in on likelihood of Democrats winning outnumbered local, state, federal positions Story and Design by Jeneta Nwosu

Ryan Poppe, Deputy Communications Director for the Texas Democratic Party, believes 2020 is the year Democrats finally take Texas back.

The Texas Democratic Party is campaigning for Texas Democrats at the local, state and federal levels and for the Democratic Presidential nominee.

“In 2020, we are re turning Texas blue,” Poppe said.

Some are a little more skeptical. “Democrats have a long road ahead of them,” Carolyn Barta, longtime political writer at the Dallas Morning News and a retired Southern Methodist University journalism professor, said. “They are way in state

14 BAGPIPE government.”

No Democratic presidential candidate has won Texas since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

“Reagan was very, very strong in Texas in the 1980s, and a lot of people during that time switched over to the Republican party from the Democratic party,” Barta said.

In 1978, Republican and HPHS alumnus Bill Clements was elected governor and became the first Republican to hold the office in 104 years. From there, Barta said, Texas became more of a swing state.

Republicans swept all statewide offices and state Senate seats in 1998, and by 2002, they took the majority in the Texas state House.

Since then, the Texas state government has been totally controlled by Republicans.

But Poppe is optimistic. “If you look at polling that’s been done we as a party have never been closer than we are right now to winning this state,” he said.

There are a lot of figures that Democrats have pointed to as signs for victory. More than 1.5 million voters have registered since the 2016 election. The Houston Chronicle reported that it more than two times the average for the last four presidential election cycles.

“They’re all new voters, but they’re

mostly new voters that lean Democrat,” Poppe said.

Texas demographics are also potentially in the Democrats’ favor. Statisticsfocused news website FiveThirtyEight’s Galen Druke, on their show “Confidence Interval,” pointed out that Texas is a majority-minority state largely due to its sizable Latino population.

However, its electorate is majority white. Latinos only make up about a quarter of voters, and a third of them reliably vote for Republicans. Much of Texas Democratic strategy has relied on increasing Latino turnout, though Druke said this has had limited effectiveness in the past.

“We’ve always known that the shift in demographics would lean Democratic,” Poppe said. “We’ve seen it. We’ve studied it. We just have to go out and get the votes.”

White college-educated voters in Texas have voted less for Republicans in recent years, though the majority of this group is still currently pro-Trump. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Texas by 16 points. In 2016, Donald Trump won Texas by nine points, and Senator Ted Cruz won by 2.5 points in 2018. Much of the movement there, Druke said, is from college educated white voters.

National polling shows Trump actively turned off many suburban voters.

“I think that the Trump tactics are beginning to wear thin with people,” Barta said, “The bullying, the lack of concern and courtesy for other people and the language that he uses.”

She said suburban women and mothers particularly, a demographic Trump is targeting, would be concerned about political divisions, and Biden’s message of unity could be effective with this group.

SUBURBAN TRENDS

This national trend in suburbs seems to hold true in Texas. The Dallas Morning News said during the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats made gains in typically red suburban districts. In his ultimately unsuccessful Senate run, then congressman Beto O’Rourke won Tarrant County and 46 percent of the vote in Collin County, both of which have been reliably Republican for years.

“You’re seeing Texas Democrats take back areas of the state that were Republican strongholds for a long time,” Poppe said.

Williamson County, where Poppe resides, was one of those areas.

“Locally, in 2018, Democrats flipped all of it. They were able to overturn the Republican majority at the city and county level, and in some cases, at the state House level,” Poppe said.

These changes are also happening closer to home.

“Beto carried our House district, which means the larger community is much more liberal than I think people knew,” said Kate Carté, a leader of the Park Cities Democratic Women’s Association

Carté is one of the nine women on the PCDWA’s leadership team. She said she joined the group after Trump was elected in 2016, as did most other members.

“The group was just a few people — I think it was about five people, maybe 10 — before Trump was elected,” Carté said.

She said PCDWA was one of many Democratic organizations that sprang up after Trump was elected.

“This included a lot of former Republicans, and some people who still feel like at heart they are conservative and who wanted to help elect more progressive candidates,” Carté said.

Texas’s 32nd congressional district of the U.S. House of Representatives, which includes the Park Cities, is a mostly suburban district that had elected Republican Pete Sessions since 2002 until Democrat Colin Allred defeated Sessions in 2018.

Carté said she has seen Democrats are cautious in their optimism because Trump’s 2016 win was so shocking to them.

“The thing that strikes me is that Texas is the largest urban state that still votes red,” she said. “It’s kind of anomalous because the vast majority of Texans live in either cities or suburbs.”

We as a party have never been closer than we are right now to winning this state.

She said Texas looks electorally more like Ohio or Pennsylvania than Idaho or Wyoming. Ohio and Pennsylvania both went for Trump in 2016, but they’re viewed more as swing states than Idaho and Wyoming, and they are more diverse.

“I don’t think Texas is going to become blue anytime fast,” Carté said.“Our U.S. House District 32 where Colin Allred is the representative, he’s a very centrist Democrat. I think that’s appropriate.”

STATE HOUSE

While Allred is battling Republican Genevieve Collins this year to keep his U.S. congressional seat, the stakes are particularly high in the race for the Texas State House of Representatives.

“Whoever is elected this year will have the opportunity to redistrict the state after the 2020 census is completed and sent to the legislature from DC,” Will Busby, the Dallas County Republican Party Communications director, said.

He said this means legislators will redraw districts and reallocate funds. Poppe said the last redistricting in 2011 might have drifted into unconstitutional territory.

“The maps that were drawn by the Republican legislature at the time were severely flawed,” Poppe said. “They did what was called cracking and packing. They would take a concentrated area of Black and Latino voters and take it apart by continued on next page

looping sections of it into a white-majority led district.”

He said this diluted the voices of Black and Latino voters in those districts, and that was something Democrats would try to prevent in 2021.

“We are 100 percent taking back the Texas House. All it takes is nine seats at this point. We’re shooting for 22,” Poppe said.

One of the big reasons for that, he said, is the enthusiasm for Democrats in Texas. Democrats picked up 12 state House seats in 2018.

“Then you can also pivot to the huge snafus and problems that you’re still seeing among Texas House Republicans and their infighting,” Poppe said.

In particular, he points out a scandal that broke last year involving the Texas House speaker Dennis Bonnen, a Republican. Bonnen and the second-ranking House Republican, Dustin Burrows, attempted to bribe the leader of right-wing advocacy group Empower Texans with press access to the House floor, so the group would target members of his own party that he disliked. Michael Quinn Sullivan, the leader of Empower Texans, recorded the entire conversation and released it October 2019.

The recording features Bonnen saying he told his own local officials, who are Republicans, he wanted to lead “the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties,” as well as disparaging and sometimes profane comments from Bonnen and Burrows about Republican and Democratic House members.

Bonnen chose to not seek reelection this year after bipartisan calls from House members for his resignation. Burrows resigned from his post as GOP caucus chair, but he is still running for reelection.

Poppe said the Republican party in the Texas House is weak, and he’s confident that voters see this.

“They see these are people that just don’t represent our interests,” Poppe said. “It’s right there in the title of the lower chamber. It’s the House of Representatives. These folks represent special interests.

Texas State Senator Nathan Johnson speaks at a town hall organized by PCDWA. The Democratic senator spoke to constituents on Nov. 9, 2018, three days after he flipped Texas Senate District 16 blue by defeating Republican Don Huffines in Huffines’ 2018 bid for reelection. This marked the first time in decades that the district had been represented by a Democrat. Photo courtesy of Kate Carté

They represent business interests, but they don’t represent the people.”

Busby said, on the other hand, that Republicans have won and will continue to win in Texas because they represent the people better.

“Texans are very freedom-minded, very liberty-minded people. Even in the cities and out in the rural areas in the country, Texans want independence. They want freedom,” he said. “They want to be able to go out in their daily lives without high taxes, without burdensome regulations, and they want to be able to know that the government is there for their basic needs.”

These basic needs, Busby said, are things like roads, security, law enforcement and health facilities.

“But otherwise, Texans just really want to enjoy their second amendment rights and they want to enjoy less government, and that’s the Republican message,” Busby said. “The Republican message has always been less government and more freedom.”

Though Busby thinks positions at all levels in the county are important, he said voters in Dallas County should pay attention to the state House races in particular.

“Republicans are working hard to keep the seats we have and to gain back a couple of seats from the Democrats, and I feel confident that that’s going to happen,” Busby said.

He emphasized the impact of the Texas legislature, saying they affect issues from property taxes to infrastructure and health care.

The state legislature also affects education.

“The state legislature obviously was good for Highland Park last cycle with House Bill 3. HB-3 was full finance reform regarding Robin Hood,” Busby said. “Representative Morgan Meyer was for that bill, and that bill was good for Highland Park. So the legislature has an impact on your day-today life.”

House Bill 3 gave schools more funding, which reduced the amount of money

wealthy school districts like HPISD use to subsidize poorer districts. This practice is called recapture, but it’s commonly referred to as “Robin Hood.”

This bill received bipartisan support, including Texas House District 108 Representative Morgan Meyer.

Meyer, a Republican, almost fell victim to the 2018 Democratic wave during his bid for reelection that year.

“Morgan Meyer won reelection in 2018 by just a couple hundred votes and it had to go to a recount,” Carté said.

This 200 vote margin is uncommon for Meyer, who won both his 2014 and 2016 elections by the thousands.

Meyer declined to comment on whether he thought Democrats would gain power in Texas, choosing instead to highlight issues like economic and pandemic recovery, and school funding.

“Voters want representatives who will look past the noise of national politics, power struggles and hyper-partisanship to do the work of serving people in the district, and that’s what I will continue to do,” Meyer wrote in a statement sent to The Bagpipe.

TEXAS VALUES

To Busby, it’s clear that Trump will win Texas this November, he said, pointing to boat parades and overpass rallies organized by Texan Trump supporters.

“Everyday Texans [are] just coming out and showing their support for the President,” he said. “How do I think the electorate is feeling? I think the electorate is feeling like they’re going to reelect Trump for another four years and keep Texas red.”

So far, the data favors Busby’s prediction. In FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Trump is up 2.6 points as of Oct. 3, and their election forecast model gives Trump a 74 percent chance of winning.

When it comes to whether Democrats can gain ground in red communities in general, Busby is a little more ambiguous.

“I think anything is possible, and if I’ve learned anything after 12 years in politics, it’s that anything is possible,” Busby said. “But what I will say is we are working night and day to talk to voters and make ground.”

Busby said the Dallas County Republican Party is reaching voters through volunteers knocking on doors and making phone calls, as well as through running digital ads.

“If Democrats want to gain ground, we are certainly bringing the fight to them, because we would like to keep our ground and we would like to stand upon our ground,” he said.

Barta does not believe that Texas is going blue overall.

“Texas is going to remain Republican. It’s just a conservative state,” Barta said.

But she does think Biden has a shot at winning the state this year, partly due to demographic changes and evaluation of the current President’s actions.

“More important is the growing dissatisfaction with President Trump,” Barta said. “I would say many traditional Republican voters and many swing voters who took a chance on Trump four years ago are backing away from him.”

She said she believes that Republicans have gone too far right on social issues.

“I doubt the Republicans in the legislature and state government are going to become less conservative,” Barta said. “That’s why I think some went to Beto, and some of them that were traditional Republican voters are going to go to Biden.”

Barta believes most of the electorate in the state are moderates.

“When things go too far one way, either to the right or to the left, the average person is not going to like it,” she said.

Carté’s answer to the Blue Texas question is somewhere in the middle.

“I like the purple characteristic of Texas and I think that’s really what’s going to become more prominent,” Carté said.

She wants to see bipartisanship in Texas because she doesn’t think one-party rule works in any case.

“It would make me very excited to see Texas become a state where real two party governance at the state level means that better policies are enacted,” Carté said. “I really do think the best policies come from two parties working together and working for the common good.”

Carté thinks this is where Texas is headed.

“I’m actually really optimistic about politics in Texas,” she said.

“If I’ve learned anything after 12 years in politics, it’s that anything is possible.”