Texas is key turf for ‘blue wave’
Democrats’ bid to retake House gets start here
WASHINGTON – Support for the president was down, polls favored the opposition party, and a record number of challengers were running for office across the nation.
That was the story of 2010 midterm elections, halfway through President Barack Obama’s first term in office, when Republicans rode a tea party wave to a majority in the House of Representatives.
As Texas voters go to the polls on Tuesday in the first primaries of 2018, Democrats hope to return the favor with a “blue wave” that takes back the House — a feat that would qualify as a seismic setback for President Donald Trump. Also on the ballot are races for U.S. Senate, governor, the Texas House and Senate and a long list of state and county offices.
For the blue wave to be more than a ripple, it likely will have to start somewhere in the Lone Star State, now emerging as a ground zero in the battle
for Congress.
To acquire majority control, the Democrats need a net gain of 24 seats. With only 20 seats nationwide ranked as toss-ups, they have little room for error. They must make incursions into GOP turf – and in Texas, the most promising turf is in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and their suburbs.
The Democrats’ latest hopes for Texas — still a Republican redoubt — emerged the day after the 2016 elections. Though Trump won the state by 9 percentage points – a narrow margin by Texas GOP standards – he lost in three congressional districts held by Republicans: Pete Sessions in Dallas, Will Hurd in San Antonio and points west, and John Culberson in Houston.
Not surprisingly, all three are now top Democratic targets. All three likely will face well-financed and well-organized challengers in November.
Democrats also have their eyes on the U.S. Senate seat held by conservative Texas icon Ted Cruz. But they also have 10 incumbents of their own to protect in states Trump won in 2016. Accordingly, some analysts say Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke is unlikely to figure prominently in his party’s national strategy, even as he’s running hard and raising enough money to turn heads across the nation.
“The challenge he has is he’s going to be in what I think you can charitably call the 13th most competitive U.S. Senate race in 2018,” said Texas GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak.
Most outside analysts give the Democrats a slim chance of flipping the Senate this year – even if O’Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, could pull off an upset and become the first Texas Democrat to win statewide office since 1994.
The House, however, could be up for grabs, following the historic pattern of midterm election setbacks for the incumbent president’s party. Trump’s low public approval ratings and a surge of energy on the left also are expected to play a part.
The contrary wind has been evident in record numbers of Democratic candidates and an outsized turnout in early primary voting.
The trend appears to be carrying into Culberson’s 7th Congressional District on the west side of Houston, a traditionally Republican district that has seen an influx of younger, diverse and more urban voters – often fertile field for Democrats.
“What we’re seeing is some pretty significant dissatisfaction with Republican leadership,” said longtime Texas strategist Matt Angle, head of the Democratic-aligned Lone Star Project. “It’s profound dissatisfaction at the national level. It’s more than they dislike Trump. They’re very unhappy that he is their president.”
Democratic divisions
Seven Democrats are vying in Tuesday’s primary for a general election shot at Culberson, a nine-term Republican who has struggled to keep up with their prodigious fundraising. All have sought to tie him to Trump, whose upset victory in 2016 mobilized Democrats and antiTrump Republicans.
Races like the 7th District, which Hillary Clinton won by little more than a percentage point in 2016, could be a marker for how big a wave, if any, envelops House Republicans. Some analysts say Clinton’s slight victory was less a testament to Democratic strength in the district than to the preponderance of old-line Republicans turned off by Trumpism.
One of the leading citizens in the city’s most affluent congressional district is former President George H.W. Bush, who once called Trump a “blowhard” and voted for Clinton.
“It’s an anti-Trump district; it’s not a latent, progressive district,” Angle said. “It’s a Republicanleaning district that Democrats have a chance to capture.”
The Democratic primary has been marked by a skirmish between the establishment Clinton wing of the party and the insurgent Bernie Sanders-aligned progressives.
The intraparty fight became a national story in last month as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democrats, attacked a leading progressive candidate, Laura Moser, on the grounds that she might not be the most viable Democrat for the 7th District come November.
The same divisions could play out nationally as Democrats look to make gains in other upscale urban or suburban districts across the country.
Democratic victories in special elections in New Jersey and Virginia since Trump took office have added momentum and buoyed Democrats’ hopes outside their traditional big-city enclaves.
But a big obstacle for Democrats in Texas is a history of low voter turnout – particularly among Latinos – and the configuration of congressional districts allegedly drawn for partisan advantage by the Republican-controlled state legislature.
Of the three Republican congressional seats most vulnerable to a blue wave in Texas, only Hurd’s heavily Latino 23rd District seems to have a built-in advantage for Democrats.
The districts represented by Culberson and Sessions are the mirror opposite in favor of Republicans. “The districts are so tightly drawn that it’s hard to find good opportunities,” said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus.
A national wave of GOP retirements in Congress has opened some opportunities for Democrats. But of six retirements in Texas, only two are in districts that could be remotely competitive: One, represented by Lamar Smith, is in San Antonio; another, represented by Ted Poe, is in the Houston suburbs.
But Republicans have cards to play there and elsewhere. Facing an evident enthusiasm gap, they believe they might have turned a corner with passage of a $1.5 trillion tax cut bill in December.
Some polling suggests that the deficit-funded tax bill, which Democrats bitterly opposed in Congress, has gained in popularity since January when workers started seeing bumps in their paychecks. Trump’s approval rating also has ticked up a notch, though it remains in the low 40s.
Republican leaders like Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, the party’s point man on tax reform, have continued to champion the bill at every opportunity, even as Congress has pivoted to new battles over immigration and gun legislation.
“I’m really, really encouraged by the optimism from Main Street businesses,” said Brady, one of the architects of the GOP’s biggest House majority since the 1920s. “We have real support among working families for this as well as, especially in Texas, businesses who see tax reform as an opportunity to dramatically increase their investments in new facilities, new technologies and their workforce.”
The Trump factor
But as Republicans run on tax cuts, low unemployment and the economy, they also face the downside of Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which rattled the market.
For Democrats, even those who welcome Trump’s protectionist trade policy, any sign of unpredictability and volatility in the White House can still serve as a potent point of attack.
“Trump is going to be a factor,” Mackowiak said. “The big question is going to be, ‘Does Trump motivate only Democrats in the midterms? Or does he motivate Republicans too?’”
The lasting political impact of the recent mass shooting at a high school in Florida also remains to be seen.
Democrats have been reluctant to run on gun control in recent elections, fearful of alienating voters in rural areas where guns are part of the fabric of life. But many analysts see the real battleground this year in the suburbs, especially among suburban women who might be more amenable to gun safety arguments.
The gun issue, though it has energized the left, has not taken hold in the primaries, where intraparty differences may be minor. But in the November general election, Rottinghaus said, “it might be different.”
Republicans say they can almost count on Democrats to overplay their hand, pushing to the left, much as some far-right tea party candidates may have cost Republicans control of the Senate in 2010.
But from the president down, they’re taking nothing for granted.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington two weeks ago, Trump warned against complacency. “You know, you’re sitting back, you’re watching television… Maybe I don’t have to vote… we just won the presidency, and then we get clobbered and we can’t let that happen.”