BLUE TEXAS?
Kamala Harris stumps in the Lone Star State days before the election as Democrats see flipping a GOP stronghold as a real possibility
FORT WORTH » It seemed unthinkable only months ago.
But here she was, Democratic vice presidential nominee and Bay Area native Kamala Harris, four days before Tuesday’s presidential election, stirring up last-minute votes for Joe Biden deep in the heart of Republican Texas.
From a field next to a Baptist church on the eastern edge of Fort Worth, California’s firstterm U.S. senator and daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father strode onto the stage in her white Converse hightops, a Texas-size Lone Star State flag draped behind her.
“It’s so good to see you, Texas!” she said to a standing ovation from the mostly Black audience socially distanced on the grass.
With three Texas stops, in Fort Worth, McAllen and Houston, Harris was on a mission Friday to do what neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton
could do: help turn this stubbornly red state blue.
It seemed like an audacious ask. No Democrat has been elected to statewide office in
Texas since 1994. Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to take Texas — and that was 44 years ago by the narrowest margin in five decades.
But with tremendous growth and demographic shifts — including scores of Californians moving here — plus the near upset in 2018 of Republican U. S. Sen. Ted Cruz by Democratic darling Beto O’Rourke, Democrats are hoping that 2020 is finally their year to flip the state.
It’s a possibility arising across the Republican South — in Florida, North Carolina, and even Georgia — that underscores a new political calculus in 2020, as younger voters and nonWhite voters gain numbers and enthusiasm.
“This is surreal. It really is,” said Clara Faulkner, 77, mayor pro-tem of the nearby town of
Forest Hills, watching Harris while sitting on a folding chair and wearing a fur hat.
She has lived in Texas long enough to remember being relegated to the back of the bus and watching her mother dare to drink at a “whites only” water fountain to see if it tasted different from the “colored” ones.
“I have seen what has changed,” Faulkner said. Having a Black woman like Harris as a vice presidential nominee, stumping on a stage in a Texas field, left her almost speechless.
How tight is Texas? The closely watched Cook Political Report newsletter changed the state from “Leans Republican” to “Toss Up” on Wednesday. An aggregate of polls by Real Clear Politics finds Trump ahead by just 2.3 points. Trump’s path to victory is almost non- existent without the Lone Star State’s 38 electoral votes.
Ha r r is ba r n st ormed here on the last day of early voting, after more than 9 million people had already cast ballots — surpassing the total number of Texas votes cast in the entire 2016 election, when Donald Trump won the state by 9 points.
“It’s absolutely unheard of for a Democratic candidate to be going to Texas four days before a presidential election,” said Dan Schnur, a veteran political analyst at the University of Southern California. “If
she can turn out enough voters in Texas’ big cities to offset the rural parts of the state, it’s a longshot, but they have a chance to make history.”
It’s a daunting prospect that Texas Republicans say is only wishful thinking. Fort Worth’s Tarrant County is the last remaining urban red county in Texas — Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin have all gone blue. Tarrant has been called one of 10 “must-win” counties for Trump and is now considered a bellwether for the entire state.
Rick Barnes, chairman of the Tarrant County GOP, says that O’Rourke’s surge here two years ago woke up Republicans, who had rested on their status as the “reddest county in America.”
But O’Rourke is “yesterday’s news,” Barnes said, and sending Harris to Fort Worth won’t work.
“Frankly, it tells me they’re grasping for straws,” Barnes said. The Biden/ Harris pro-choice and antioil industry messages, he said, “don’t sit well here.”
And all those Californians moving to Texas?
“They’re coming to get away from what we call socialism, from what Biden and Harris represent,” he said, “Our conversation is, don’t come here and make this California.”
Indeed, Tim Bero, 58, who grew up in San Jose and delivered papers for the Mercury News in the 1970s, is one of them. He moved from California to Oregon and, several years ago, to the Fort Worth suburb of Saginaw, as much for a better business climate for his firearms company, he said, as for finding political brethren. On Friday, he tried to track down the Harris motorcade in his “Texas convertible” — a restored 1962 U.S. Army Jeep
with a fake machine gun mounted high in the back and Trump flags waving. He arrived too late.
“I’ve heard the news that Texas is a toss-up, but I haven’t seen it,” Bero said. “I drove this to the polls the other day and everyone was happy to see it, all thumbs up, all yelling ‘ yay!’”
Biden himself hasn’t campaigned in the state, despite pleas from O’Rourke who believes Texas is at a tipping point and just needs a little nudge. Trump, perhaps confident that Texas will remain red, hasn’t been to the state since mid-summer nor held a campaignstyle rally. The president and former vice president have been spending their final days campaigning in Florida, where Harris went Saturday, and the Northern battleground states that flipped the election to Trump in 2016.
Harris made her second Texas stop in the border town of McAllen, a heavily Democratic city with historically low voter turnout.
The proportion of Latinos is growing in Texas, and is an important voting group that includes both liberals and evangelical conservatives. Over the past decade, while the proportion of whites shrunk to 42 percent of Texans from 45 percent in 2010, the proportion of Hispanics grew from 38 percent to 40 percent, according to 2018 U.S. Census estimates. But polls show more Latinos are leaning Trump this year than in 2016. That could be a difference maker in who wins the state.
In Fort Worth on Friday,
Harris was introduced by the Biden campaign’s Texas director, Rebecca Acuna, a Mexican immigrant who cast her first ballot for president as an American citizen Friday morning and said that Harris “embodies the hopes, the dreams and aspirations of all of us.”
“They’re going to ask us what it was like to elect the first woman of color as vice president of the United States,” Acuna told the crowd. “And we will say, ‘ Yes, I was there, I stood up and I was counted.’”
As Harris took the stage, she thanked Acuna for her leadership and for sharing her story.
“Yes, sister, sometimes we might be the only ones who look like us walking in that room, having had the experiences that we’ve had, but the thing we all know is we never walk in those rooms alone,” Harris said. “We are all in that room together.”
Whether Harris’ Texas trip will have a dramatic effect on the state’s political future remains to be seen. Democrats are hoping that a strong showing at the polls will also oust Republican U. S. Sen. John Cornyn in favor of Mar y “MJ” Hager, and even flip the state Legislature, where 22 seats are in play and the Democrats need just nine to capture the majority.
But with Texans so split, both sides are claiming to be the “silent majority” that will show up in surprising force by Election Day.
Chris Knowles, manager of the famous Fort Worth honky-tonk Billy Bob’s that
had to cancel its bull-riding rodeos because of COVID, says he’s certain the Republicans are the silent force.
“There is no chance it’s going blue,” Knowles said of his home state.
But 26- year- old Colter Leep, 26, standing in a long line Thursday to cast his early ballot at the county elections office in Fort Worth, believes that if anyone is being overlooked, it’s the Democrats.
“There’s a lot of unheard voices in red states,” Leep said. He can’t even talk to his father, a dogged Trump supporter, about his support for Biden.
At the same elections office, Nydia Cardenas, 34, was working as a Democratic poll watcher alongside Republicans doing the same. She was surprised how many times the polling official called out “first-time voter here!” and everyone applauded. Those weren’t just 18-year- olds, she said, but older transplants from other states, voting for the first time in Texas. She had no way of knowing which way they voted, she said, but she’s hopeful that most were Democrats.
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Cardenas studied at Stanford and lived in Los Angeles before returning home to a much more diverse Texas. If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris carry Texas come Tuesday, she’ll be as surprised as Texas Republicans.
“It’s crazy,” Cardenas said. “We’re saying, ‘ Wait a sec, is this possible?’.”