This article may be paywalled but the gist is that even if Biden has enough battleground states to win, a win in red, non-mail-in, voter suppressed Texas would neutralize Trump’s plans to declare wholesale fraud in those purple states. The contests in Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. would be moot. Furthermore, Biden is less than 2% down in Texas polls that historically underestimate the performance of Democrats there. Two years ago, Ted Cruz only beat Beto by 2%. To my thinking, Trump only has to be 2% less popular than Texan Cruz, to create a path to a Biden victory there.
The argument for pumping Democratic resources into the state shouldn’t be that Biden needs those 38 electoral votes, but that it might just short-circuit the closet thing to a civil war that this country has seen in 150 years.
My first reaction to that column was, “Well, Beto, if you were so vested in turning Texas blue this cycle you could have run against Cornyn for Senate. . .”
But the truth is that even if the polling is right and Biden’s only down by 2%, that’s a tough, expensive 2% to make up. It is incredibly expensive to campaign statewide in Texas, with the enormous distances and dozens of media markets. The state Democratic Party is just starting to come back to life after having basically been comatose for the last 10-15 years, so there is limited infrastructure in place to support GOTV efforts. And state Republicans are doing everything they can to limit the franchise. The Governor recently announced that each county may have only one absentee ballot drop off location. This includes Harris County, home to Houston and 4.7 million people.
So, no, I don’t buy what the column is selling. And I think it’s naïve to think that a narrow Biden victory in Texas would short-circuit Trump’s attempts to delegitimize an election loss. He would just claim that thousands of illegal aliens voted in Texas.
I don’t think Biden will win Texas, but the fact Texas is enough in play for the Republican party to have spend extra time and money there is pretty amazing. It also means less money and effort for other places.
Thing is though, the only places you really have to worry about are the suburbs generally. The cities’ urban cores reliably vote blue, and the rural areas are as deep red as you can get. And they’re not likely to change much regardless.
Where there’s a lot of churn is in the suburban areas like where I live. There are a lot of both hardcore GOP people AND a lot of hardcore Democratic voters, and a lot of people who are really somewhere in between, who tend to vote one way or the other based on a combination of issues and personality.
Sure, but that’s millions of voters in suburbs around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Corpus Christi, the Valley, Lubbock, etc. Reaching them is expensive.
I don’t want to overstate the case – the Biden campaign certainly has enough money that they could make a legitimate play for Texas. But the question is whether the tens of millions spent in that endeavor would be better spent driving up margins in swing states so that it would be tougher for Trump and his ilk to discredit and disqualify enough votes to turn the tide.
And I find the fundamental argument – that Biden winning Texas would be some sort of “gotcha” on Election Day that would prevent Trump from challenging the election results – absurd. He would just challenge the results in Texas. If Biden wins the state it will be by the narrowest of margins, and Trump will cry fraud. Every statewide officeholder in Texas is Republican, and they would back him up. It’s just not the silver bullet that the column portrays.
I wonder if that’s true about Texas being one of the few states where Democrats have been outperforming the polling? If so, that forces us to look at Donald’s 1-2 point lead in a new light.
I still think we’re a cycle or two away from winning Texas but it would be unbelievably sweet to put those EVs in the win column on Election Night while Trump’s army of toady lawyers are hanging around the Pennsylvania capitol offices, waiting desperately for a chance to steal an election that just got lost 1500 miles away.
The Democrats winning Texas has been possible for the last several cycles. Unlikely, and it hasn’t happened yet, but possible. It’s still unlikely but possible.
I’d say it’s a long shot. Given President Trump’s health scare, it is possible things change a lot before November. The Democrats had a -0.7% deficit on September 20, according to:
Normally, I would think this is true; the electorate is notoriously uninformed. I think COVID has changed that dynamic, forcing people to consider what options they have if they contract the virus.
This is all crystal ball gazing, of course. We shall see, soon enough.
Well, well — Biden just made a $6.2 million ad buy in Texas. Not all-in, but enough of an investment to raise eyebrows. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. . .