Beto bump is sustainable, Dems say

Official results show Cruz victory was tighter than first thought, buoying party across state

As newly updated election results showed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory was even tighter than first realized, Democratic-led voter registration groups are saying they’ve never felt closer to turning Texas into a true battleground.

Cruz’s margin of victory fell to just 214,921 votes, according to official results certified by Gov. Greg Abbott this week. That is about 5,000 votes closer than unofficial results showed last month.

Cruz won the race 50.9 to 48.3 percent — the closet U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1978.

While O’Rourke lost, groups such as Battleground Texas say that margin of defeat is nearly four times closer than they thought was even possible, and it has them itching to get to work on 2020.

“We can register that gap,” said Oscar Silva, executive director of Battleground Texas, a group that runs an aggressive registration program targeting potential Democratic voters.

The state saw twice that number of voters just registered between March and October, and Silva noted that every year 300,000 more Texas high school students come of age to register.

He said while many people suggest that 2018 was a one-year blip because of O’Rourke’s campaign, groups like Battleground Texas have been on the ground building an infrastructure that has lasting implications.

“That is sustainable,” he told the American Association of Political Consultants at a conference in Austin on Wednesday.

Battleground Texas said its data shows that, during early voting, nearly one out of every 25 voters under age 35 was registered by the group. Silva added that 69 percent of the people the group registered this year were voters of color, helping the electorate to begin to look more like the state’s overall minority-majority population.

Republicans have noticed their work too. In the summer, Gov. Greg Abbott’s campaign team used training sessions for volunteers to warn that Harris County and other big metro areas in Texas have been trending toward Democrats, thanks in part to the work of