San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Despite virus, voter registration surges to 16.4 million in Texas
Not even the worst pandemic to hit Texas in a century was enough to stem the surge in voter registrations that has remade the state’s electorate over the past four years.
Just since March, Texas has added nearly 149,000 voters even as the political parties and voter registration groups face new obstacles in signing up people in a world of social distancing and stay-at-home orders.
The state now has a record 16.4 million voters, 2.1 million more than it had just over four years ago — a 15 percent increase in registrations that is nearly equivalent to the voter rolls of the entire state of Connecticut.
“It is a totally different electorate than it was in 2016,” said Luke Warford, voter expansion director for the Texas Democratic Party.
Harris County and Bexar County have led the way in the past three months with voter registration efforts. In Harris County, voter rolls have grown by 16,000, while in Bexar they are up almost 14,000.
Combined, the two counties account for one-fifth of the increase in registrations statewide.
Warford said that for both parties and all candidates, those new voters have thrown a wild card into the 2020 elections as the parties try to get them to break their way. Texas just isn’t accustomed
to this sort of surge.
Texas voter registration rolls historically have grown very slowly. From 2002 to 2012, the rolls grew by 800,000. But now, registration is in hyperdrive. Just since November of 2018, Texas has added almost 600,000 voters.
Some of the change is coming from transplants moving from other states, while many others are coming from minority communities that voter registration advocacy groups have targeted over the last four years.
In short, Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, said 2020 is setting up as a real shootout in regions of the state that have become more competitive because of the diversification and growth of the electorate.
“It’s another step toward Texas being a true battleground,” Rottinghaus said.
That’s a big change from the last 25 years. Since 1994, Republicans have dominated Texas politics, winning every statewide office. They’ve had complete control of the Texas Legislature since 2003.
Republican Party of Texas Chairman James Dickey says his party knows the ground is changing and is making its own preparations to defend the state.
“We are on alert and not taking anything for granted,” Dickey told a group of eight party activists in May in rural Callahan County near Abilene, when he implored them to join the party’s voter registration efforts.
Dickey said up to 2018, the GOP relied mostly on organic growth while Democrats and their affiliated groups hunted for new voters. Since then, the Republicans have become “more intentional and targeted” in their approach.
A key part of that has been a program they call 10K 4 10R, where 10,000 volunteers each make phone calls to a list of 10 potential Republican voters to ask them if they want to register to vote and have forms sent to them. Dickey said that has already produced 100,000 new Republican voters over the past year.
But for progressive and Democratic
groups, optimism abounds over where the state’s big voter gains are happening.
Digital hunt
In Texas, unlike many other states, voters don’t register by party affiliation, making it unclear exactly how many Republican or Democratic voters are in the state.
But about one-third of the 1.3 million new voters since November 2018 come from three counties: Harris, Travis and Bexar — all deeply blue since 2016.
Harris and Bexar being at the top of the list doesn’t surprise Antonio Arellano, who is the leader of Jolt, a voter advocacy group focused on registering young Latino voters and getting them involved in politics.
He said his group has been on the ground in those two counties.
While the coronavirus made registration drives impossible in traditional locations such as libraries, county fairs and large events, younger voters still can be found with direct messages on social media, text messages, and digital ads.
The virus hasn’t affected those efforts at all.
“We harness culture, art and technology to get it done,” Arellano said.
Each year in Texas, 200,000 Latinos turn 18 — a population that is Jolt’s main focus.
In recent months, political unrest around the nation, particularly in minority communities since the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, also has helped Democratic registration pushes.
“The social unrest over the last couple of months has really without a doubt mobilized people for the upcoming election,” Arrellano said. “There is a growing consciousness of young people who are saying this is not right and looking for ways to change it.”
Warford said at many of the Black Lives Matters rallies, people were registering voters as they marched. And as the pandemic keeps people home, they have more time to watch the state’s rising COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, creating even more political frustration with the state’s Republican leaders.
“We are clearly in a moment that is charged emotionally and politically,” Warford said.
Suburban growth
In the past three months, the Texas voter rolls have been growing by almost 50,000 people per month. That is almost double what was happening between November 2018 and March, when Texas added about 26,000 people per month.
It’s voter registration groups like Jolt and Battleground Texas, which has been on the ground in places like Houston since 2014, that have caught the GOP’s attention.
Gov. Greg Abbott holds regular organizing sessions with Republicans he calls Abbott University, where they’re warned that Democratic registration efforts even before 2018 were changing the state’s electorate.
The results in 2018 showed just how real that was. Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke came within 219,000 votes of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, who six years earlier had won his seat with a 1.2 million-vote margin.
But it went beyond that. Democrats flipped two congressional seats that had been held by Republicans, two state senate seats, and 12 Texas House seats.
In a conference call with college Democrats in Texas in May, O’Rourke said voter registration gains, particularly with young voters, were essential to all of that.
“It was driven by young people,” O’Rourke said. “Young voter turnout in 2018 was up 500 percent in early voting.”
While Democrats might feel good about Harris and Bexar being atop the growing voter registration roles, Dickey said GOP registrations are up in those places and other major metropolitan areas, too, thanks to the party’s more aggressive approach.
Since November 2019, Bell, Williamson, Denton, Collin and Montgomery counties — suburban communities that President Donald Trump carried in 2016 — each saw their voter rolls grow by at least 4 percent, beating the statewide growth, which was 2 percent.
Rottinghaus said Republicans traditionally have had a built-in advantage in suburbs, but that’s changing as more Democratic voters relocate to those places for jobs, adding a new degree of uncertainty to their political makeup.
Rottinghaus said when the state’s population boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, the migration brought a major shift as Republicans knocked out Democrats all over the state. But now, the rush of new voters has the Democrats on the offensive.
“It is changing Texas politics.”