Jill Biden to campaign in Texas as the polls narrow
When early voting starts Tuesday, Jill Biden will be in Texas hoping to boost turnout for the Democratic presidential ticket led by her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Democratic sources say Jill Biden will make stops in Houston, Dallas and El Paso, although exact times and locations have not been released.
The Joe Biden campaign has begun to invest more heavily in Texas as polls show a closer-than-usual race in the Lone Star State.
Earlier this week, the campaign launched a TV ad blitz aimed at voters in San Antonio and El Paso. On Monday and Tuesday, Doug Emhoff, husband of Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, campaigned along the Texas border and in San Antonio and Dallas.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter early Friday morning to assert that his campaign is in great shape in Texas.
“Biden is against Oil, Guns and Religion, a very bad combination to be fighting in the Great State of Texas,” Trump wrote. “We are Winning Big, in the Real Polls, all over the Country!!! NOVEMBER 3rd. VOTE!!!”
The Trump campaign sent prominent surrogates to Texas this week ahead of the start of early voting, an indication of the
state's overriding importance to the president's reelection effort. On Wednesday, Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development, was in Houston.
Donald Trump Jr. had been scheduled to be in Texas this week for get-outthe-vote events. He postponed the trip after his father tested positive for the coronavirus.
No Democrat has carried Texas in a presidential race since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Trump won the state over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 9 percentage points. It was the closest presidential contest in Texas since 1996, when Bob Dole carried the state by 5 points over then-President Bill Clinton.
Since August, every one of the nine public polls of Texas voters has showed Trump leading Biden by a margin smaller than 9 points. His lead has ranged from 2 points to 7 points, Trump's margin in a poll released Friday by Rasmussen Reports, a Republican-owned firm.
The University of Texas and Texas Tribune released a poll on Friday showing Trump ahead by 5 points.
Because of a surge of voter registration in Texas since 2016 and Democrat Beto O'Rourke's strong showing in the 2018 U.S. Senate race, which he narrowly lost to incumbent Ted Cruz, Democrats are convinced that Biden could carry the state this year. O'Rourke said last week that Texas “is Joe Biden's to lose.”
Biden's campaign manager is Jen O'Malley Dillon, who served as O'Rourke's presidential campaign manager until he dropped out of that race nearly a year ago. O'Rourke has been lobbying the Biden campaign to put more resources into Texas.
If Biden were to win the state's 38 electoral votes, it would be all but impossible for Trump to win a second term based on Electoral College math.
Republicans laugh off that possibility.
“It's too little too late for Joe Biden in Texas as his campaign parachutes in at the 11th hour,” said Samantha Cotten, a Trump campaign spokeswoman in Texas.
She said the Trump campaign has a strong get-outthe-vote operation here. The campaign has been cultivating and training a volunteer network for more than a year in preparation for the 2020 home stretch.