Could Texas be in play for Democrats?
TOP ISSUES: Race is energized by future of oil industry, health care
The coronavirus pandemic threw a spotlight on health care coverage and the future of Texas’ beleaguered oil industry ahead of what is shaping up to be the closest presidential election in the state in decades.
Just a few months ago, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party were leading with a booming American economy and grim warnings about socialism as they anticipated a race against Sen. Bernie Sanders. Instead, it’s former Vice President Joe Biden who has all-but sealed the Democratic nomination, and Texans are now grappling with record unemployment and related loss of health insurance.
The early jabs show just how important both camps see those issues as they make their case to voters here.
The Trump campaign’s message is that the president is a champion of the state’s reeling oil and gas industry and that Biden is a threat. Biden hasn’t signed on to or even endorsed the Green New Deal, but he did call it a “crucial framework” and that’s enough for team Trump.
“We cannot afford to have Joe Biden and the Democrats enact these Green New Deal policies that would just destroy the Texas economy, put tens of thousands of people out of work and just reengineer our country to fit some coastal dream that would be more fit in a state like California,” Trump Victory Director of Regional Communications Rick Gorka told reporters during a conference call Tuesday.
For Biden’s camp, the very health and safety of Americans hangs in the balance as Trump continues to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, threatening
the health coverage of millions of Americans — including over 1.6 million Texans who have already lost jobs and, as a result, their employer-based health coverage, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“In a moment where health care has never been more important, the Trump administration is moving forward with its cynical, partisan push to take away access for millions of Americans,” said U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a Dallas Democrat who endorsed Biden in January and has been a featured surrogate for Biden in Texas.
But for all the policy differences, a Texas political analyst says the race could come down to one simple question that has been central when a president seeks reelection: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
Most Americans were in a good position to answer yes when the nation had historically low unemployment and a booming economy. That advantage has waned with the growing toll of the pandemic and related job losses, said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
While Biden won’t be ratified as the Democratic nominee until August, his team points to polling numbers that show a tighter race since the coronavirus outbreak.
“I think the battleground state map has gotten broader — I think there’s more opportunity for Joe Biden than there was 60 days ago,” said David Plouffe, the 2008 campaign manager for Barack Obama, who attended a May 1 fundraising event for Biden.
Both candidates are having to adjust to a new world of campaigning because of the pandemic. Trump has lost the raucous rallies that had been a voter outreach bonanza, while Biden has been stuck at home trying to raise the money and enthusiasm that is essential for any challenger to unseat a sitting U.S. president — just three incumbent presidents have lost reelection since World War II.
Trump is itching to get back to holding rallies, Trump 2020 Campaign Senior Adviser Lara Trump told reporters on Tuesday, adding that it wouldn’t feel like a real campaign season without them.
On the other hand, “just because we have switched everything to virtual, does not mean we have slowed down at all,” she said.
‘On red alert’
Don’t count Texas on that battleground list yet. But Democrats see an opportunity they haven’t had in decades.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton came within 5 percentage points of winning Texas in both 1992 and 1996, but both those races had eccentric Texas tycoon H. Ross Perot taking voters from the Republican nominees. Minus those races, Hillary Clinton coming within 9 percentage points of beating Trump in 2016 is the closest a Democrat has come to winning Texas since Jimmy Carter won the state in his first election in 1976.
The chairman of the Texas Republican Party James Dickey has been warning the party faithful that Democrats are energized and are going to put a lot more money into Texas to try to flip it and that Republicans need to be prepared. He’s been touring the state since last year outlining how the party is more aggressively fundraising, hiring field staff and registering voters than in past cycles. While he dismisses the state being a blue state, he has been emphatic that “Texas is on red alert” for 2020.
But while Republicans scoff at the idea of Texas turning blue, Trump has already spent more time and money in Texas than many past Republican presidential contenders.
Before the pandemic had even hit, Trump had made 14 trips to Texas since he was inaugurated. That is more than three times as many visits as President Barack Obama made during his first term in office. And with a big financial advantage over the Democrats, Trump has been able to do more to shore up Texas, rather than just focusing on traditional battlegrounds in Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin.
It is not hard to imagine a race that is decided by 5 percentage points or less in Texas, said Jillson. But the SMU political science professor said that if Trump struggles to hold Texas, it would be a sign of a bigger problem nationwide.
“If Texas is in play, it probably means Joe Biden has won 40 other states,” Jillson said.
The state’s increasing diversification, its growing voter registration rolls and the election results in 2016 and 2018 have Democrats convinced they have a shot at shocking the nation with Trump at the top of the ballot. Just two years ago, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost by just 2.6 percentage points to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Two recent public polls in Texas have shown Trump and Biden in a virtual dead heat in Texas. A Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll of 1,183 registered voters released on May 2 found Trump and Biden were both the choice of 43 percent.
Another poll released by Public Policy Polling showed 47 percent of 1,083 responding registered voters said they would choose Biden and 46 percent would pick Trump. Seven percent said they were not sure.
Just in late February, some Republicans in Texas were relishing the idea of having Sanders — then considered the front-runner by many — battling Trump in a good economy. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said he could hardly believe the party’s good fortune. Sanders was in San Antonio on Feb. 22 having just won Nevada and promising to move the nation off of oil and gas and touting Medicare for All.
“Then, just like that, our midsummer night’s dream was gone,” Bettencourt said.
When Biden won South Carolina and carried Texas days later on Super Tuesday, it made the battle in Texas very different, not just in the presidential race, but down-ticket as well. Bettencourt said particularly in Houston, every Democrat would have had been tied to socialized medicine and the Green New Deal.
While that could still happen, Bettencourt said the mission will definitely require more work than if Sanders were at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Texas economy
To be sure, Biden has supported climate change initiatives that reduce the nation’s reliance on fossil fuel, but his plan for a “100 percent clean energy economy” by 2050 is far from that of Sanders, who had pledged to decarbonize transportation and power generation, the two largest sources of emissions, by 2030. And Sanders had also called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing that included blocking the federal government from approving new pipelines, new natural gas and oil export terminals and other oil and gas infrastructure.
Biden has supported limiting and regulating fracking but not banning it. Still, on his website he’s called the Green New Deal “a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”
That is enough of an opening for the Trump campaign to equate Biden with the plan as they warn it could devastate the economies of Texas and Houston.
“We’re going to make him own it,” Trump spokesman Gorka said.
Biden, who has deep roots in labor unions, has countered with assurances that he will look out for energy workers. He has emphasized that he has a trillion-dollar infrastructure program that gets former fossil fuel workers into $50-an-hour plus benefits jobs as the nation transitions to more clean energy sources.
“We’re not going to leave any workers or communities behind,” Biden says on his website.
For Biden, Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and the Affordable Care Act are central to arguing that there needs to be change in the White House.
“Trump has decided he’d rather destroy President Obama’s legacy than protect the health care of millions upon millions of Americans,” Biden said, adding that if he were in office now, he would have reopened the enrollment period for people to get on ACA plans as layoffs compound.
Trump has not wavered on the ACA.
“Obamacare is a disaster, but we’ve run it very well, and we’ve made it barely acceptable,” Trump said earlier this month. “It was a disaster under President Obama, and it’s very bad health care. What we want to do is terminate it and give health care. We’ll have great health care, including preexisting conditions.”
It all sets up what Democrats say is their best chance in over 40 years to win the state in a presidential contest.
“Texas is the biggest battleground state in the country,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said. “If Donald Trump loses Texas, he cannot win the election.”