The Democrats’ Texas Blues

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 12, 2020

 

Once again, Democrats got their hopes up for Texas. Once again, those hopes were crushed.

 

Joe Biden improved a bit on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 numbers in the state, securing 46.3 percent of the vote. Donald Trump won almost exactly the same share of the vote as he did in 2016, 52.2. Looked at another way, Trump added 1.2 million votes to his 2016 take in Texas, while Biden added more than 1.3 million — a relatively good showing for the Democrats, but not nearly good enough. 

 

That was true beyond the presidential race. Democrats had dared to hope that they might win a majority in the Texas state house for the first time since losing it in 2002, but they choked pretty much everywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to the High Plains, even in Democratic-leaning urban districts such as Dallas’s 108th, where Morgan Meyer, reelected by only 220 votes in 2018, won a rematch with the same Democratic opponent by a larger margin. The state house will have the same numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the next session as it did in this one, though Democrats picked up one seat in the state senate, where they currently are outnumbered 19 to 12. Texas has had a Republican “trifecta” for 18 years. The GOP swept the statewide races, from Senator John Cornyn’s ten-point reelection over M. J. Hegar to the state-supreme-court races and the Texas Railroad Commission, which has not much to do with railroads but is the main regulator of the state’s energy industry. Wendy Davis, a perennial progressive torch-bearer in Texas and a proven election-loser, failed in her high-profile bid to unseat Representative Chip Roy. Democrats not only lost, but lost in many cases by larger margins than they did in 2018.

 

That may be because the 2018 election was a little bit of a wakeup call for Republicans, who lost twelve seats in the state house. Much to the irritation of Texas party bosses, there were Republicans who lost in 2018 and — an unforgivable political sin — lost with six-figure sums in the bank, believing that their victories were assured.

 

Texas Republicans have worked to get campaigns to be smarter with their money, starting with the statewide organization: A voter-registration effort that had turned out to be more expensive and less effective than hoped was scrapped and replaced with a new program under new leadership, leading the GOP to add as many as 200,000 new Republicans to the rolls for 2020. That and a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation gave Texas Republicans a leg up that, when combined with the uncertainties of polling, left Democrats surprised on Election Day.

 

“Republicans in Texas had become complacent,” says one longtime player in Austin. “Not anymore. They know they can lose.”

 

Republicans know that they have a long-term problem in Texas: urbanization. Texas Republicans have an idea of how to reach out to Mexican-American voters, but they fare poorly in the cities and the inner-ring suburbs in Texas, just as they do in the rest of the country. And Texas is increasingly urban, already home to a half dozen of the nation’s largest cities and four metropolitan areas with populations in excess of 2 million, with DFW and the Houston metroplex coming in at 7.5 million and 7 million, respectively. Democrats believe that they can turn Texas into a big Pennsylvania, dominating the urban areas with most of the population and driving the GOP into the rural areas and small towns. That may turn out to be a winning strategy — but not yet.

 

Republicans underperform slightly in presidential races in Texas, with Texans voting much more heavily Republican in state and local elections than in presidential races. Following the pattern of 2016, Trump did far better in neighboring states than he did in Texas: He won 65 percent of the vote in Oklahoma — and won every county in that state, along with 63 percent of the vote in Arkansas and 59 percent of the vote in Louisiana. (New Mexico, which rarely goes Republican, awarded only 44 percent of its vote to Trump.) The imminent flip to a blue Texas is a will-o’-the-wisp chased by Democratic activists and donors from coast to coast, and it keeps eluding them. But if the Republican position is eroding more slowly than expected, it is still eroding.

 

Biden did no favors for Democrats in Texas in 2020. He did not campaign there, instead sending his wife and other surrogates in his place. His flippity-floppitiness about fracking and the energy industry probably hurt him critically, including among Latino voters, who, like many Texans, are frequently employed in the energy industry, from engineering and geology to refining and transportation. Natasha Altema McNeely, a political-science professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, tells the Guardian: “Democrats have just assumed and relied on this historical loyalty by people in the valley to the Democratic party. And that assumption, I think, is very dangerous for the Democrats if they expect to continue to help the valley remain blue.” Which is to say, the Democrats offered identity politics, but the oil business offers jobs.

 

When the news came out that Trump had improved his share of the vote in certain Latino communities, progressives sniffed that “Latino” is an artificial identity, too capacious of a catchall construction — and, besides, those Cubans in Florida voting for Trump are white! There is something to that. Just as Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida have their own distinct and separate interests and priorities, so, too, do Mexican Americans in Texas, many of whom object to the notion that they are in some meaningful way a part of a single cultural grouping that includes Salvadorans and Bolivians just because they all have Spanish-speaking ancestors.

 

Immigration is an important issue in Texas among Anglo and Hispanic voters alike — and not always in the way campaign consultants seem to assume. Many Mexican-Americans in Texas are legal immigrants or the children and grandchildren of legal immigrants, and they worry about illegal immigration as much as anybody else — more, in some cases: The number of illegal immigrants of Mexican origin has declined somewhat in recent years, but the number of illegal immigrants of Central American origin has increased, and some Mexican Americans associate that with crime, gangs, and trafficking. As Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times puts it in his syndicated column, “¡Ask a Mexican!”: “Guatemalans are the Mexicans of Mexico.”

 

What lessons for Republicans?

 

For years, as the affluent and college-educated in the cities and near suburbs have turned to the Democrats, Republicans have been told that they have to moderate their views on “the social issues,” meaning mostly abortion and LGBT-related issues. It’s probably a mistake to lump those together, and the overall analysis may be mistaken, too: Donald Trump was, on the policy merits, the most pro-gay Republican presidential candidate ever. It didn’t help him, for much the same reason that running as a candidate opposed to gay marriage didn’t hurt Barack Obama. There is a difference between the stance on the issues and the cultural valence of the candidate. It’s possible to be anti-abortion without being the kind of figure Trump is — for that matter, Trump was the same kind of figure he is now back when he was pro-abortion.

 

But, more important than that, Trump’s success at expanding the Republican tent — modest but not trivial — should be encouraging to conservatives, in Texas and elsewhere, in that it counsels candidates to speak to voters’ economic aspirations (and economic fears, if you like) and to engage with minority voters as they are, where they are, rather than treating them gingerly as some kind of hypersensitive abstraction. A better position with black and Latino voters will help the GOP with some of those suburban white voters, too, because many of them see the Republicans as a white man’s racial-interest group of the sort of which they want no part.

 

Doing a little better with Latinos and suburban voters helped to save the Republicans’ position in Texas. It may be enough to save the Republicans’ position in general.