By: Paul Koring – ipolitics.ca – September 9, 2018

It’s hard to imagine, but the party of Lincoln has a bigger problem than the man in the Oval Office.

Texas, staunchly Republican since Ronald Reagan won it in 1980, is changing. And the Lone Star State, with 38 electoral college votes — the second most in the nation after California — is crucial to any Republican’s march to the presidency.

Just as California and New York are reliably Democratic blue, Texas has been reliably Republican red for four decades.

No Democrat has won a state-wide race in Texas since Ann Richards was elected governor in 1990. No Democrat has been elected to the Senate from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. And no Democratic president has carried the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

But, ominously for Republicans, Texas is turning purple.

Only a few months ago, Beto O’Rourke, was barely known outside of his hometown of El Paso.

Now, with fewer than 60 days before November’s midterm elections, O’Rourke is within striking distance of beating Canadian-born Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican.

And if O’Rourke takes Texas, it will be the biggest upset of the election.

The fact that Republicans are seriously worried about a Senate seat in Texas reflects big changes in the state.

In 2012, Mitt Romney won Texas by 16 percentage points over Barack Obama. In 2016, Trump won Texas but with a drastically reduced margin of nine percentage points.

Once genuinely as rural as the rugged imagery of ranchers and wildcatters would suggest, Texas is now increasingly urban, educated and ethnically diverse.

Four of the nation’s biggest 11 cities are in Texas and Austin is — by far — the coolest, most liberal state capital in the nation. Houston, the fourth biggest city in America is, by most measures, its most diverse. Houston’s last two mayors were an African-American and a lesbian. Most Texans are no longer at home on the range; 83 per cent live in cities. And the ethnic shift is equally stunning. By 2020, Hispanics will eclipse whites as the largest single group in Texas, according to census projections. Texas added nearly 1.5 million Hispanics in the last seven years, while the number of whites in the fast-growing state increased by less than half a million.

That’s good news for Democrats in general and O’Rourke in particular.

The Republican Party’s already miserable reputation among Hispanic voters has been made far worse by Trump’s vile and baseless claim that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murders, his vow to erect a wall along the southern border and his ruthless crackdown on undocumented migrants — many of whom have family members who are voting citizens in Texas.

“There’s a very real possibility … we lose a race in Texas for Senate,” Mick Mulvaney, a senior White House official warned at what was supposed to be a closed gathering of well-heeled Republican donors last weekend. But a tape of his comments leaked. His not-so-subtle reference to Cruz’s stiff style and lack of likability is reflected in recent polls which show O’Rourke has made huge gains and is now running close behind the Republican incumbent.

The two men are a study in contrasts. Cruz, the son of Cuban refugees, has an impeccable resume: Princeton and the debate team, Harvard law, a Supreme Court clerkship and runner-up to Trump for the 2016 Republican nomination. He has anglified his given name of Rafael to Ted and speaks passable Spanish with a Cuban accent.

O’Rourke, a fourth generation Irish-American, was on the rowing team at Columbia University but played in a punk band and did menial jobs in Brooklyn after graduation, including a stint with a moving company. His wild youth featured a several run-ins with police, including an arrest for drunk driving. His given name, Robert, was Latinized to Beto before he went to kindergarten and he speaks fluent Spanish with a Tex-Mex accent.

After returning to El Paso, he launched a tech company, was elected to city council and to Congress in 2012. His current bid for the Senate has attracted lots of national media attention as he relentlessly tours Texas by pick-up while constantly streaming video of himself. His defense of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem went viral and drew 44 million views as well as an invitation to “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

O’Rourke has turned what was expected to be a Senate seat for an incumbent Republican into a bellwether for the changes transforming Texas.
Trump has waded in, although Cruz didn’t ask for his help and it’s not clear the president’s promise of a massive rally in the state will help. It may energize Trump-hating Democrats to get out and vote for O’Rourke more than it shores up Cruz’s support, given the bad blood between the two.

During the 2016 campaign Trump questioned, “Why would the people of Texas support Ted Cruz when he has accomplished absolutely nothing for them?” Trump also publicly disparaged Cruz’s wife as ugly compared to Melania and claimed Cruz’s father had consorted with Lee Harvey Oswald in the hours before the assassination of John Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

In turn, Cruz called Trump “a sniveling coward” and “a serial philanderer,” and refused to endorse him during the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Cruz claims all he needs to “win in November is for Texans to show up and vote.”

And as long as it’s mainly white voters who vote, Cruz may be safe.

Hispanics comprise about 40 per cent of voters in both California and Texas. But in California, Hispanic turnout is far higher and because Hispanics tend to vote Democrats by significant margins, Democrats dominate.

Turnout among Hispanics is typically far lower in Texas. Although political scientists quarrel about the reasons, many believe the lack of union organizing activity in Texas, which tends to make minorities more politically active, plays a role.

But the sharp increase in Texan Hispanics — even at depressed voter turnout rates — may have a profound impact on election outcomes.

If O’Rourke wins in November it will instantly vault him into the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination discussion. Even a narrow loss would make him a national figure.

But the stakes are far bigger than the outcome of the Cruz-O’Rourke contest. If Texas ceases to be reliably red, then Republicans have a huge problem.

The problem isn’t new, but Trump’s improbable victory with narrow wins in white, Rust Belt states masked it.

After Romney lost to Obama in 2012, the Republican Party published an astonishingly frank post-mortem that identified its failure to win support among women and minorities. Republicans “have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections” it said (now six of the last seven because Trump also lost the popular vote). The report urged a sweeping effort by Republicans to refashion the party so it could attract support from “Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans.”

Instead, Republicans doubled down on Trump’s nativist appeal to whites.

It worked once — but the outcome of the suddenly close Senate race in Texas may expose the fundamental flaw in that strategy.

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Source: Texas is turning purple