Texas Republicans ready to tout Trump
Campaign seeks army of volunteers, vows not to leave a single voter behind in 2020
As in any sports bar in Texas when the Dallas Cowboys are playing on Monday night, most of the TVs at a British pub in northwest San Antonio were tuned to the game.
But on one side of The Lion and
Rose, the sights and sounds were just a little off. None of the fans wore silver or blue. Instead, about 50 people, predominately wearing red, gathered around a bank of big-screen TVs playing C-SPAN as they ate bar food and cheered with each applause line that President Donald Trump delivered on a stage in Kentucky.
Trump’s reelection campaign organized the watch party to connect with more potential volunteers as it seeks an army of campaign workers to help extract more votes, even out of Democratic-leaning areas like San Antonio. The event was part of the Trump campaign’s National Week of Action, essentially a dry run to “activate” thousands of volunteers needed next November to get out the vote.
It was the second San Antonio event in just three weeks — on Oct. 15 the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., headlined a rally downtown aimed at firing up the party faithful as well as collecting names, emails and phone numbers of volunteers who can be deployed next fall. And President Trump himself was in San Antonio seven months earlier meeting with business leaders and holding a fundraiser.
“We’re not giving up on one single voter,” said Toni Anne
Dashiell, the Texas Republican National Committeewoman from nearby Kerr County who was at the watch party last week.
Dashiell said the strategy is to mobilize while the Democrats are locked in a potentially long primary battle to determine their nominee. While the opposition is working on Iowa and New Hampshire, the Trump campaign is pouring resources into states such as Texas to shore up support.
The Democrats are convinced Texas is more in play than it has been in a generation, but by the time they get their presidential nominee, Dashiell said Trump will be way ahead in building the kind of ground game needed to hold the state.
For Republican activists like Marian Stanko of San Antonio, the attention is a relief and a needed morale boost. She said living among so many Democrats, it’s easy to forget there are a lot more Republicans and potential Trump voters in the city than many realize. She said it wasn’t long ago that Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn easily carried Bexar County — which has swung heavily Democratic in the last two election cycles in 2016 and 2018.
“There are Republicans here,” said Stanko, adding that they just need to reach out to them more and keep them engaged.
Still, GOP optimism can be a tall order in Bexar County, which wasn’t kind to Trump in 2016. While Trump won Texas by 9 percentage points, his defeat in Bexar County wasn’t just bad — it was historically bad.
In winning just 40.7 percent of the vote, Trump did worse in the San Antonio area than any Republican Party candidate in nearly 50 years. Hillary Clinton won Bexar County by more than 79,000 votes — the biggest vote margin of victory for a Democrat in the county’s history.
Recruiting volunteers
Trump campaign officials say the 2016 returns are a symptom of
“having left votes on the table.” They are convinced that if they can begin working now in Republican pockets in San Antonio, Houston and Dallas, they can far exceed their 2016 showing.
The backbone of that effort is recruiting volunteers in neighborhoods across the state and the nation, said Brad Parscale, the former San Antonio resident who is Trump’s campaign manager for 2020.
At the mid-October rally with Donald Trump Jr., Parscale told supporters that the campaign’s mission is to double its number of volunteers from four years ago with an emphasis on neighborhood team leaders who can be more influential in 2020 than television ads or mailers.
“This fight is fought neighborhood by neighborhood,” Parscale said.
He said data from 2018 shows that turnout for Trump was 15 percent higher in neighborhoods with designated team leaders. In 2016, the Trump campaign had about 3,000 neighborhood team leaders nationwide. In 2020, Parscale said he wants 90,000 of them.
Parscale said that is why Trump is frequently having rallies all around the nation. At each rally, including the one in Dallas just last month, the campaign collects data on tens of thousands of people to help understand Trump voters and identify potential volunteers.
The emphasis on San Antonio comes as Trump holds events in other Democratic-leaning places in New Mexico and Minnesota, states the Trump campaign strategists are convinced they can flip in their favor if they work harder than they did in 2016.
The Texas Democratic Party says all these Trump initiatives miss one key detail: The president
is still unpopular with urban/suburban voters in Texas. They point to a September poll of Texans by Quinnipiac University as evidence. In that poll, 48 percent of the 1,410 respondents said they “definitely will not” vote for Trump in 2020. The survey showed 35 percent “definitely will” vote for Trump in 2020. Another 14 percent said they would “consider” voting for him.
Democrats say 2018 election returns prove that Texas is a battleground. It’s not just that U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke came within 3 points of defeating U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for re-election. The Democrats also flipped two congressional seats and picked up seats in both the Texas House and Texas Senate, while turning a number of suburban counties blue.
“While the Democratic voters sort our primary out, the Texas Democratic Party and national partners are making the investments every day necessary to counter the Trump campaign and ensure that we have a top-tier field operation ready to go from day one,” said Manny Garcia, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “The Texas Democratic Party has already committed to placing 1,000 field organizers on the ground by the end of the election cycle and is gearing up to run the biggest coordinated campaign in Texas history.”
On the other hand, Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is predicting that Trump wins Texas by an even bigger margin than in 2016.
Patrick’s prediction
Patrick, who serves as the Texas
chairman for Trump’s re-election, told a Dallas radio program on Thursday he’s convinced Texas is going to perform much better for Trump in 2020. He said in 2016 there were still fractures in the Republican Party from the tough primary with many Republicans taking a wait-and-see approach on Trump and his policies.
But this time, he said evangelicals, conservatives and the business community like what they have seen from Trump over the past three years and are going to be behind the president in 2020.
“I think Trump will win by more than 9 points,” Patrick said on the Rick Roberts Show on WBAP NewsTalk 820 in Dallas.
Trump’s actions over the last two months show the campaign is taking the threat from Democrats seriously. In September, the Trump campaign held a volunteer recruitment and Latino outreach event in Houston’s heavily Democratic East End. Last month, Trump held his rally in heavily Democratic Dallas. Coupled with the recent focus on San Antonio, the events show the campaign is far more active in Texas a year out from the election than many would have predicted.
Trump’s campaign is convinced Democrats are helping the president’s re-election by seeking to impeach him. Since the impeachment efforts began, the campaign says it has added more than 75,000 new volunteers nationwide, as well as more than 50,000 new donors.
Trump himself has scoffed at the idea of Texas flipping to Democrats in 2020.
“Donald Trump isn’t going to lose Texas,” he said during his Dallas rally last month.