Trump confident he’ll carry Texas over Biden with ease
AUSTIN — As the Republican National Convention gets underway this week, President Donald Trump is facing a question that hasn’t been seriously asked of a Republican presidential candidate in decades.
Can he win Texas? Trump has continually laughed off the prospect during stops in the state dating back to last year.
“Donald Trump isn’t going to lose Texas,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in Dallas.
While Trump has scoffed at early polls that show a close race between himself and Democrat Joe Biden, it’s more than just his trademark bravado. His campaign — despite all the Democratic fanfare in Texas — says it is far more organized and structured going into 2020, which has his supporters convinced that they will increase his margin of victory in the state from four years ago.
Heading into the fall, Trump’s Texas campaign has already held more than 1,100 events around the state, made more than 3.2 million calls to supporters and knocked on nearly 400,000 doors despite the additional safety precautions called for by the pandemic.
“We have been very active and on the ground nonstop almost since 2016,” said Toni Anne Dashiell, the Texas Republicans’ national committeewoman and former chair of the Kendall County Republicans.
Particularly over the past year, Trump’s campaign has routinely
held “day of action” sessions where volunteers reach out to voters, help more people get registered and train more volunteer activists to prepare for the massive get-out-the-vote operation that will shift into high gear over the next 71 days. While COVID-19 has limited the ability to gather, the campaign says those day-ofaction sessions have shifted online.
It is a big change from 2016 when Trump wasn’t able to lock up the GOP nomination until May, leaving most of the on-theground organizing in Texas to the Republican National Committee. Trump’s team didn’t fully take control until well into the summer.
Into the neighborhoods
Trump won Texas in 2016 by 9 percentage points. While a comfortable margin, it was the smallest margin of victory in Texas for a Republican presidential candidate since 1996 when former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole won the state by 5 percentage points.
Trump campaign officials say they left votes on the table in 2016. Last fall, Donald Trump Jr. and then-Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said their plan for Texas was to cultivate legions of neighborhood volunteers to buttress the campaign.
“This fight is fought neighborhood by neighborhood,” Parscale said.
Parscale 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. Going into 2020, Trump’s campaign was banking on growing that network. Now they say they have more than 177,000 trained team leaders nationwide.
That, they say, is the key to mobilizing voters over the next three months.
“There is so much excitement out there for the president,” Dashiell said. “We have a real
“We have been very active and on the ground nonstop almost since 2016.”
Toni Anne Dashiell, the Texas Republicans’ national committeewoman
plan of action and we have more volunteers.”
After the conventions, both parties will enter a new phase in the campaign as they start activating get-out-the-vote programs that have been months in the making.
“We’ve got to own the ground,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, told Democratic Party activists on a Zoom call earlier this week.
Texas Democratic Party officials say they’ve already reached out to more than 3.5 million potential Democratic voters over the last two weeks and have sent vote-by-mail applications to 1.7 million more Texans in preparation for the final stretch of the campaign.
‘We’re ready’
Republicans have carried Texas in 10 consecutive presidential elections.
But U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who narrowly won reelection in 2018, has been warning the party faithful that they are facing a different Democratic opposition than many have seen in decades. He told state Republican activists last month that the battle for the White House in Texas is “a real race.”
“Let me tell you right now, every one of those crazed leftists that showed up in 2018 are showing up in 2020,” Cruz said. “And they are even angrier.”
Public polling over the summer has supported Cruz’s contention. Four polls in July in Texas showed Biden, the former vice president, and Trump in a virtual tie in three — Biden was up 5 percentage points in the fourth poll.
While Trump has boasted about being able to hold onto Texas, his reelection team says it has never taken victory for granted. Dashiell said that is why every weekend has been a buzz of training volunteers and prepping for the fall get-out-the-vote operation.
“This didn’t just happen overnight,” Dashiell said. “We have been building and preparing for a longtime. We’re ready.”