Moderate Dems fight for share of Texas votes

More polarized base shrinks key pool for center hopefuls

AUSTIN — With Bernie Sanders ascendant in the Democratic presidential primary — apparently even in Texas — the four moderates in the race are vying to be an alternative to Sanders’ brand of democratic socialism.

“I don’t think there’s any chance of the senator beating President (Donald) Trump,” Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor who has poured $25 million into ads in Texas alone, said of Sanders at Wednesday’s debate in Nevada, voicing the concerns of many moderate Democrats.

“We’ve got to wake up as a party,” said Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor who has placed second in the first two states to vote. “We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after Super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be

Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage.”

“What I want everyone out there watching to remember is that what unites us is so much bigger than what divides us and that we need a candidate that can bring people with her,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said.

The fourth moderate, former Vice President Joe Biden, led in Texas Democratic presidential polling for nearly a year until last week when a University of Texas/ Texas Tribune poll found Sanders ahead, backed by an increasingly polarized voter base and now No. 2 in total delegates after the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

That shift leaves the moderates competing for what appears to be a shrinking pool of the Democratic electorate as early voting starts in Texas.

“The number of Texas Democrats who identify as liberal has increased as the Democratic party in Texas has slowly begun to look a bit more like the Democratic party in the rest of the country,” said Jim Henson, director of Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

As of February, just 27 percent of Democratic voters in Texas identified as moderate, according to UT/TT polling dating back to 2008 when more than 50 percent considered themselves moderate.

“All things being equal, one feels like there are more moderate voters,” Henson said. “But that’s less true than it used to be.”

As the race tightens for them, here is an issue-by-issue look at where the four moderates in the presidential race stand.

Future of oil and gas

Every one of the Democratic candidates has called for a shift to clean energy in the coming years. The 230,000 Texans who work in the oil and gas industry now would have plenty of time and options in clean energy fields, or elsewhere, they argue.

How quickly they would get there is another matter.

Biden, who touted a “trilliondollar program for infrastructure … that will provide for thousands and thousands of new jobs,” has said his goal is 2050, as have several others.

Bloomberg, long a financial supporter of environmentalist groups, said during Wednesday’s debate that’s too far away.

“No scientist thinks the numbers for 2050 are 2050 anymore. They’re 2040, 2035,” he said. “The world is coming apart faster than any scientific study had predicted. We’ve just got to do something now.”

Biden has said he’d eliminate all subsidies for oil and gas — something he says would “save millions and millions — billions of dollars.” Biden also said during the debate that he would reinstate mileage standards he claims “would have saved over 12 billion barrels of oil.”

Further, Biden has vowed to go after oil and gas executives and hold them accountable for environmental damage done by the industry.

Asked during the debate whether he would go so far as to put them in jail, Biden replied: “I’m willing to go as far as we have to,” suggesting possible civil suits filed by the government, like those against tobacco companies and drug companies.

Buttigieg, meanwhile, called for “pulling in those very sectors who have been made to feel like they’re part of the problem, from farming to industry, and fund as well as urge them to do the right thing.”

None of the moderates would go so far as to ban hydraulic fracturing outright, something the progressives in the race have pushed. Such a measure would likely require an act of Congress.

But Klobuchar and Buttigieg have pledged to put an end to new federal fracking permits, at least temporarily.

“I have made it very clear that we have to review all of the permits that are out there right now for natural gas and then make decisions on each one of them and then not grant new ones until we make sure that it’s safe,” Klobuchar said.

“We’re not going to get rid of fracking for a while,” Bloomberg said.

Divide on guns

Each of the moderates has called for a slew of new gun restrictions — banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, expanding background checks for gun purchases and instituting red flag laws to remove guns from those found by a judge to be a threat to public safety.

The dividing line is set in how far they would go toward removing those weapons from their owners.

Biden and Klobuchar have said they would push a voluntary buyback program for assault weapons.

When asked in August whether a Biden administration would take away people’s guns, the former vice president responded, “Bingo! You’re right, if you have an assault weapon.”

That was after a gunman shot and killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart, one of the mass shootings in Texas last August that led former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke to declare from the presidential debate stage in Houston in September that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s.”

The moderates who have outlasted O’Rourke wouldn’t go nearly as far. Buttigieg at the time called a mandatory buyback a “shiny object” that was unrealistic.

Even Bloomberg, who has bankrolled Everytown for Gun Safety — a group set to spend $8 million in Texas this year to elect candidates willing to enact new gun laws — has spoken out against mandatory buybacks.

“You would never get them back,” Bloomberg told NBC News in January. “It would be a nightmare.”

“What we should settle for — not that I’m happy with it — but we should settle for don’t sell any more automatic weapons to anybody other than the military and the police department,” he said.

Sparring on health care

Health care has been probably the clearest dividing line in the presidential primary, with the moderate field essentially forming around opposition to Sanders’, and to a lesser extent Warren’s, calls to offer “Medicare For All.”

But there are only minor distinctions in the crowded moderate lane, where they would all offer some universal health care option — either by adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act or by opening up Medicare to more people — while preserving private insurance plans.

Despite the agreement, some used health care to take shots.

“I notice what everybody’s talking about is the plan that I first introduced,” Biden said. “It costs a lot of money. It costs $750 billion over 10 years. But I paid for it by making sure that Mike and other people pay at the same tax rate their secretary pays at.”