Here’s how O’Rourke could make Texas a two-party state again
To turn it blue, Democratic candidates must start winning over voters from divided GOP
Beto O’Rourke is fond of saying, “Texas is not a red state. We’re a nonvoting state.” That’s more than a catchy line; it’s the organizing theory of the El Paso congressman’s campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
As political theories go, it isn’t without merit. Texas has long been among the worst states for voter turnout. In the 2014 midterms, we were dead last. If O’Rourke can boost turnout, it will certainly help his chances.
For O’Rourke, the theory has an additional perk: He doesn’t have to tack to the center or appeal to conservatives and independents. All he has to do is out-muscle Republicans at the polls.
That’s why he’s has called for things like higher taxes, gun control and abortion rights, all deeply unpopular among Texas Republicans. He even said he would vote to impeach President Donald Trump.
In other words, the voter turnout theory frees O’Rourke to run as an unrepentant, truebelieving progressive in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988.
But the theory must contend with the hard facts of Texas history, and that’s where O’Rourke and his $61 million campaign — the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history — has a huge blind spot. If O’Rourke and the Democrats want to win statewide in Texas, let alone turn Texas blue, they need to understand how Texas turned red in the first place and make an effort to persuade Republicans to vote for a Democrat.
As most Texans know, our state was run almost entirely by Democrats from the end of Reconstruction until the 1990s, when everything changed. George W. Bush won the governorship in 1994, Republicans took over the Texas Senate in 1996 and the House in 2002, and the GOP has been in control of state government ever
since.
But the shift in Texas politics began decades earlier, when deep fissures were opening up in the Democratic Party — over civil rights, the Cold War, welfare and a host of other issues. The first sign that Democratic hegemony in Texas was wavering was the election of Republican John Tower to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
Tower narrowly won a special election to become the first Republican elected statewide in Texas since Reconstruction, and he did it by appealing to conservatives on both sides of the aisle, emphasizing issues like rightto-work, welfare spending and his opposition to “socialism.”
Tower’s opponent, William A. Blakely of Dallas, was a conservative Democrat whom many liberal Democrats adamantly opposed. In the end, many of them simply didn’t show up to the polls, and Tower was able to win by splitting the conservative vote.
The Texas GOP would go on to make modest gains throughout the 1960s and ’70s, mostly at the local level but also in the state Legislature, where the Republican lawmakers increased in number from two in 1961 to 21 in 1975.
Then Texas shocked the country by delivering the state to Ronald Reagan in the 1976 GOP primary, depriving incumbent President Gerald Ford of even a single delegate. This was a sea change in Texas politics, not least because the state’s Republican Party establishment firmly supported Ford.
Reagan’s support came from relatively unknown Republicans like Midland Mayor Ernie Angelo and Harris County Republican Party Chairman Ray Barnhart, who along with a handful of other conservative activists had been working behind the scenes for years to push the Texas GOP further to the right. A key part of their achievement in the ’76 primary was to persuade significant numbers of Democrats that their party had drifted too far to the left and that they should support Reagan — even if they came from communities and families that had never voted for a Republican.
Once Texas Democrats felt free to switch parties, they started doing it more often. Two years after Reagan’s primary sweep, Bill Clements became the first Republican to be elected governor in Texas since 1870. Throughout the eighties, the Texas GOP gained seats in the Legislature and influence in Washington. Prominent Democrats (and key Reagan allies) Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Kent Hance switched parties in the mid-1980s, and of course one of Texas’ most prominent Republicans, former governor and current Energy Secretary Rick Perry, left the Democratic Party in 1989.
The lesson in all this for O’Rourke is that Texas Republicans took over the state by taking advantage of divisions among Democrats and persuading disaffected voters to come over to their side.
Today, Republicans are deeply divided over Trump and the future of the GOP. If O’Rourke were willing to compromise on a few key issues or simply refrain from broadcasting his desire to impose gun control and defend abortion, he might be able to peel off significant numbers of Republicans. As a centrist Texas Democrat in 2018, he might be able to do what conservative Texas Republicans were able to do in the 1980s and ’90s, or what Reagan did in ’76.
Alas, O’Rourke shows no sign of moderating or even feigning moderation for the sake of winning Republican voters. His strategy is to divide and conquer, hoping in the end that the numbers are on his side. O’Rourke is a talented and likable politician who obviously works hard. Maybe he’ll boost turnout enough to pull off an upset.
But history is not on his side. If O’Rourke and the Democrats want to turn Texas blue, they’ll need to shed some of their progressive idealism, exploit the divisions in the GOP and convince Texas Republicans that it’s OK, after all these years, to vote for a Democrat.