StateGOP facing big questions
Many ponder what Republicanism will look like in 5 years
AUSTIN — Though the Texas GOP officially is onboard for Donald Trump, some Republican officials and consultants privately speculate that a win by Democrat Hillary Clinton could be better for the party.
Having Clinton in the White House, they say, would allow Texas Republicans to continue to use Washington’s excesses and “overreach” to solidify their ranks and help fundraising, while a Trump presidency would add un-
certainty to the GOP cause.
With less than 50 days until Election Day, even as top state Republicans are solidly behind “the orangehaired guy at the top of the ticket,” bigger questions loom for a party that in recent years has turned hard right under a tea party onslaught that has pushed aside many centrists and “compassionate conservatives.”
One thing on which most Texas Republicans seem to agree: The winner in November could reshape the state party.
“If Trump loses, the Republicans will have a common enemy in Hillary Clinton, but they may find themselves divided on a number of issues that have come up during this campaign,” said Thomas Brunell, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas. “If Trump wins, the factions of the party that have come out in this campaign will have to come together to determine the future of the party. And that’s when you could see the current party break up or reformulate itself, if it comes to that.”
State GOP Chairman Tom Mechler plays down any suggestion the party will stray from its core conservative principles even as it works to reach out to the minorities and Trump advocates plans that are light years away from the wishes of Texas Republicans.
“We are behind Donald Trump 100 percent,” Mechler said.
But will Trump be behind Texas Republicans? Throughout the past year and a half, the New York real estate mogul has made it clear his adherence to party orthodoxy can be tenuous, if not outright nonexistent, from his anti-free trade stance to his frequent praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership to his recent call for paid maternity leave for working women.
Mechler himself got a taste of that, symbolically at least, at Trump’s Aug. 23 rally at an Austin rodeo arena. Arriving late, Mechler was supposed to be escorted in through the media entrance and taken to a VIP seat near the stage. Instead, he and his party were turned away.
“The Secret Service said the fire marshal had ordered the doors locked because the hall was at capacity,” the Amarillo oil and gas producer recalled. “I haven’t seen Donald Trump at a rally. We couldn’t get in. So we left.”
Turn focus to Austin
Some Texas Republicans say they also feel left out by Trump. Instead of focusing their ire at Washington, many say they intend to direct more of their political energy at Republican officials in Austin to hold them more accountable, a change that could breed future divisions within the state party.
“When you have a Republican nominee who appears to be trying to get to the left of Hillary Clinton on some issues, conservative Texans are asking themselves why they should vote for a candidate who doesn’t share their principles,” said JoAnn Fleming, a tea party activist and executive director of Grassroots America, a taxpayer-rights advocacy group. “They don’t care if the Easter Bunny is in the White House or if they have the right party initial behind their name. If they’re not going to stick to conservative principles, they won’t get the conservative vote. And that goes in Texas, too. What this process has taught us is that there are too many politicians who get elected as a conservative and then go to Austin and forget about it.”
Other grass-roots activists from League City to Plano, San Antonio to Longview, echo the sentiment, saying the state party in coming years should focus more on ensuring that state government runs more efficiently and is more accountable to taxpayers.
“That means the party is going to change — it already has — to look more like Texas,” said Gerard Parker, a GOP tea party activist in Dallas. “It has to stick by its conservative principles, period. The more it deviates with candidates like Trump, they lose their base, at least in Texas.”
In several recent roundtable gatherings of grassroots conservatives in North Texas and the Houston area, participants have voiced increasing frustration about what Republicanism will look like in five years as it works to keep its majority status in Texas while the state population trends younger and more diverse. And while no one predicts that Democrats will make significant gains any time soon, some worry that many younger voters are moving toward becoming independent conservatives rather than conservative Republicans.
“That’s already a trend that I see,” said Dina Casaverdes, a Fort Worth activist who blames Trump for that shift.
She and Sid Martino, a Houston retiree and selfstyled “movement conservative activist,” are among those who predict Texas Republicans increasingly will divide into different factions — conservative, moderate and liberal — under one umbrella as it grows. “Republicans in Texas are now the Bushes, Cruz, Trump and the tea party,” Martino said. “Either we reach consensus, accommodation on some issues, or we will have increasing divisions over what it means to be a Republican.”
Mechler disagrees, insisting that the party will remain united with a
“Republicans in Texas are now the Bushes, Cruz, Trump and the tea party. Either we reach consensus, accommodation on some issues, or we will have increasing divisions over what it means to be a Republican.” Sid Martino, self-styled “movement conservative activist”
strong constitutional and conservative bent.
“In five years, our party will reflect the face of Texas,” he said. “We will be united and we will continue to be strong.“
Voters ‘more diverse’
With recent polls showing Trump at best holding a seven-point lead over Clinton in the red state stronghold of Texas, where Mitt Romney won over Barack Obama by 16 points four years ago, a growing number of political activists and consultants are predicting that some Republican voters will skip the presidential race and cast ballots for down-ballot candidates. At the same time, polls show likely GOP voters are not much interested in ticket splitting — crossing over to vote for some Democrats.
A Texas Lyceum Poll released Thursday revealed Trump’s lead in a four-way race shrinks significantly and is a statistical dead heat, with Trump ahead of Clinton by just 1 percentage point among registered voters. In a two-way race, Clinton pulls ahead of Trump among those same voters, by a margin of 39 to 35 percent, a surprising figure in a state that has not had a Democrat elected to statewide office since 1994 and has not voted for a Democrat for president since 1976.
“Registered voters are more diverse than the pool of voters who historically show up in Texas elections, but the combination of the slow march of demographic change and Trump’s rhetoric appears to have made Texas’ registered voter pool more Democratic than we have seen in previous presidential races,” said Joshua Blank, the poll’s research director.
GOP leaders dispute that, saying they expect the upcoming election to showcase their growing GOP support among Hispanics and minorities, even with Trump at the top of the ticket. Michael Joyce, communications director for the Republican Party of Texas, said the reason is that minority Texas voters increasingly are conservative, a trend they say will benefit the state party’s current positions.
Political scientists like Rice University’s Mark Jones, who has studied political trends in Texas for years, said the state’s changing demographics could prove a challenge for some Republicans’ hard-line policies on such issues as gay marriage, voter ID and transgender restrooms, even on immigration deportations and Trump’s call for a border wall, which are not popular with younger and independent Texans, as the Lyceum Poll showed.
“But in the next five years, I think we could see the Republican Party of Texas shift further to the right,” he said. “The reason is that the moderates and the establishment Republicans have been pushed to the side already, and the state party is controlled by the movement conservatives, which at this point control the state Senate. The moderate wing is still dominant in the House.”
Gov. Greg Abbott “has successfully straddled both wings of the party,” Jones and other political scientists agree, and that likely will ensure his reelection in two years, even if the state GOP has issues.
‘We will continue to win’
And while some Republicans blame Trump for much of the current debate over what it means to be a Texas Republican, others say the issue already was there. Trump simply forced a discussion that promises to go on after the election.
“In my experience, Republican voters and activists and officeholders in Texas care most about public policy results and results of conservative leadership,” said Ray Sullivan, a prominent GOP consultant who worked for former governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry. “They will want to see Mr. Trump in the White House to achieve the free-market economic growth and public safety and border security and the reductions in federal bureaucracy and regulatory excesses that Mr. Trump is campaigning on. ... They don’t want a third Obama administration they’d get with Hillary Clinton.”
Of the record 2.5 million GOP primary voters who turned out last March, state GOP officials said, a quarter were new voters — a success for a party that officials say is drawing more minorities, especially younger Hispanic men.
“On economic opportunity, low taxes, pro-life issues, we are in line with the principles of many more Texans than the Democrats who have taken them for granted for years and not solved problems,” Mechler said. “Without the minority vote, the Democrats will never win the White House again. That’s why we’re doing the outreach we are. And that’s why we will continue to win in Texas for years to come.”