Seeing votes to be had, Cruz rival will stump in Pearland
Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke will bring his statewide campaign tour to Pearland Saturday, hoping to connect with voters in a traditionally Republican area that overwhelmingly supported Ted Cruz — whose job O’Rourke covets — in the 2012 election for the U.S. Senate.
O’Rourke, a three-term Democrat from El Paso, has visited 80 counties about halfway through the 34-day trip. But even the most energetic campaigner cannot visit every town in Texas, and the venues for town halls and meet-and-greets are not chosen at random. So, why Pearland?
One clue lies in the results of Pearland’s city election in May and runoff in June. These elections are officially nonpartisan, but the Texas Democratic Party provided assistance to mayoral candidate Quentin Wiltz, who got Republicans’ attention when he forced longtime
incumbent Tom Reid into a runoff.
A late contribution of more than $30,000 from Republican Congressman Pete Olson’s campaign helped turn out thousands of additional Republican voters, and Reid, then 91, prevailed. Even in defeat, though, Wiltz and a young City Council candidate who campaigned with him, Dalia Kasseb, received far more votes in the runoff than in the general election, reversing the usual pattern.
The message: There are votes to be had for Democrats in suburbs like Pearland, even though they sit in counties that continue to be GOP strongholds. The changing mix of voters in these communities will be a key factor in Democrats’ efforts next year to win statewide office for the first time since 1994.
Strategic significance
The high turnout in the runoff election probably figured in O’Rourke’s decision to appear in Pearland, according to Wiltz, who has been active in Democratic Party politics in Pearland for years. Wiltz said this was the first time he had seen a statewide candidate campaign in the city some 15 miles south of downtown Houston.
“Prominent figures always go to Houston,” he said.
As Jeremy Wallace of the Chronicle’s Austin bureau reported in July, O’Rourke and Cruz are both visiting parts of the state where the opposing party is dominant. In this context, the suburbs of the state’s biggest cities hold a distinct strategic significance. Cruz also visited a Houston suburb this week, touring the Igloo Products Corp. plant in Katy and chatting with employees about helping businesses grow and create jobs.
“These fast-growth suburban places are some of the places where we think we can make our case to voters,” said Manny Garcia, deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party.
Growing diversity
O’Rourke made the same point in a phone interview this week.
“We’ve been to Sugar Land and Baytown and The Woodlands since our campaign started” on March 31, said O’Rourke, who will appear at the Pearland ISD administrative building at 10 a.m. Saturday. “We’re hearing from folks on all sides who are contributing to the changes in the greater Houston area.”
The opportunity that O’Rourke and his advisers see in these suburbs lies in their growing diversity — coupled, perhaps, with concerns among some Republican voters about the words and policies of those on their party’s extreme right wing.
At the national level, this concern is focused on President Donald Trump’s controversial comments about recent violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
In Austin, it’s a response to the continued push for measures like the so-called bathroom bill, which failed in the recent special session. State business leaders opposed the bill, which would have limited the public bathroom access of transgender Texans.
Cruz sees these shifting dynamics as well, said Robert Stein, a Rice University political science professor.
Stein said he was startled when he saw reports that Cruz had called for a federal civil rights investigation of the Charlottesville episode. Cruz took a far stronger stand than Trump had, denouncing the “lies, bigotry, anti-Semitism and hatred” of the white nationalists involved.
“He (Cruz) has figured out that something is happening in this state,” said Stein, adding that his recent polling shows fewer Texans identifying as strong Republicans. “He is smart enough to be where voters are before they know where they are.”
Looking forward
Stein and other analysts I spoke with agree that an O’Rourke victory is a long shot. But if the 44-year-old ex-punk rocker gets enough votes to throw a scare into the incumbent, it may boost the party’s fortunes in future campaigns.
“I don’t think he’s going to be senator,” Stein said of O’Rourke. “But nobody expected Donald Trump to be president.”