Eyes of Democratic candidates are upon Texas
AUSTIN — With Beto O’Rourke out and Julián Castro struggling to stay afloat, other Democrats running for the White House are swooping into Texas in a wideopen battle for the state’s massive delegate haul that could prove decisive in who ultimately will face President Donald Trump in 2020.
On Friday, former Vice President Joe Biden made his first foray into San Antonio for a community event in La Villita and a bigdollar fundraiser in a wealthy Terrell Hills neighborhood.
Then on Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign opened its first Texas office in San Antonio and another in Austin.
Earlier this month, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in Dallas speaking to Democratic party officials amid his $6.2 million statewide television ad campaign that has made Houston its top target. And in Dallas, New York entrepreneur Andrew Yang held what his campaign said was his biggest rally yet.
The activity all comes less than 70 days before early voting begins Feb. 18 for the Texas presidential primary, which is on March 3.
In short, Texas and its 228 delegates are up for grabs now and the candidates are acting like it, said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University. Those are more delegates than all four of the early primary voting states combined. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina all vote in February and can award a total of 155 delegates.
Even if a candidate stumbles in the first four states, Texas and California — which will also vote on March 3 — could catapult a candidate back into the lead.
O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman who came within 3 percentage points of winning the 2018 Senate race, represented a big problem for the other candidates until he dropped out of the race in early November. Though O’Rourke was struggling nationally, he was still polling well enough in Texas and was a threat to take 20 to 30 percent of the vote, which would have awarded him a big share of the state’s delegate haul. That would have made Texas less valuable for the firstplace winner and harder for other candidates to get at least 15 percent — a threshold that is required to get a proportion of Texas’s 228 delegates.
Democrats have a rule that instead of awarding all delegates to the winner of the primary, other candidates get a proportion in each state as long as they hit at least 15 percent on primary day. If O’Rourke won 20 to 30 percent of the vote, he could have taken 70 to 80 delegates off the table.
Jones said having O’Rourke in the race provided a huge disincentive for other Democrats to sink resources into a state where it was going to be harder to win delegates — especially given the cost of competing in Texas, with its population of 28.7 million.
“With Beto out, it provides a lot more incentive for candidates to invest in
Texas,” Jones said.
Warren is doing just that. Already she has hired veteran San Antonio Democratic activist Jenn Longoria to be her Texas state director and has brought on two dozen senior staffers and organizers. After opening offices in San Antonio and Austin this weekend, Warren has plans to open offices later in Dallas and Houston.
Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders hired Houston’s Chris Chu de León, a former political adviser on O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, to be his Texas field director. Sanders’ campaign has also trained up more than 1,000 volunteers who are already phone-banking and canvassing voters ahead of the primary.
Also last month, Biden announced he hired Dallas-based Democratic strategist Jane Hamilton to be his Texas state director. Early polling shows Biden has a major advantage in Texas heading into 2020. In a CNN poll released on Wednesday, Biden led Sanders by 20 percentage points and Warren by 22 points.
Biden may be leading in Texas and nationally in early polling, but veteran national presidential consultant James Carville said he’s not sure what any of that means right now. Speaking at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Carville said he’s heartened that Democratic voters are really pondering who has the best chance against Trump, but he said he has no clue who that favors ultimately.
“I have no idea who it’s going to be,” Carville said. “And I’m scared to death.”
But Carville said he’s also confident that Texas is legitimately in play in 2020 for the Democratic nominee. He said the 2018 election results show that with the right candidate Texas could go blue for the first time since 1976 when Jimmy Carter carried Texas.
“Democrats have a really good chance in Texas,” Carville said.
Longtime Texas GOP political strategist Karl Rove isn’t buying it: “They don’t have a shot as long as the Republicans use this as an opportunity to get their act together,” he said.
Rove said the GOP has to do more to get activists fired up and more involved in helping get voters to the polls, something he said he’s helping the party with.