Democrats have looked at Texas as a potential get for many election cycles. With 38 electoral votes (2nd only to California), the party who takes Texas gets a big start on the goal to 270.
Now that the Republicans have 3 Texas House members retiring before the 2020 election, with a good chance of one or two Democratic pick-ups, the GOP is starting to sweat a bit.
The past week brought a surge of strange news out of Texas. First, three Republican congressmen, representing suburban San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston, decided to retire. These retirements are from districts that all saw surprisingly strong showings from Democrats last year, and they collectively set up the possibility that Republicans could emerge from the 2020 election with just a four-seat advantage in the state delegation. Second, we saw polling suggesting that the presidential race in Texas is close (indeed, former Vice President Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics average).
A real contest for John Cornyn’s Senate seat could help with down-ballot races and an enthusiastic base that turns out for the presidential race could help with the Senate race. We have several Democrats running in the primary to take on Cornyn.
There’s Royce West, a sitting state senator from Dallas; MJ Hegar, who ran a viral campaign that helped her come close to ousting a Republican congressman in a conservative district near Austin; Chris Bell, a former congressman from Houston and the Democrats’ failed 2006 gubernatorial nominee; and Amanda Edwards, a Houston city council member.
I would like to see Beto O’Rourke run in the Senate race, he’s nationally known and well liked by Democrats in Texas and across the country. And he only lost to Ted Cruz by 3 points.
More specific to Cornyn, Democrats believe he’s uniquely vulnerable, pointing to early polling indicating that the longtime senator is surprisingly unknown and even more unpopular than Cruz. Playing up Cornyn’s closeness with Trump, the thinking goes, will further drive moderate suburban voters into the arms of Democrats.
And why are Texas Republicans nervous?
In 2016, the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas combined for a majority of the vote in Texas. Donald Trump very nearly lost these areas for the GOP for first time in recent memory, receiving just 48% of the vote there. Despite winning the popular vote nationally by larger margins than Clinton, Barack Obama took just 43% of the vote here in 2012, and 45% during his landslide win in 2008.
Another 17% of the vote was cast in the metro areas of large cities like San Antonio and Austin. Obama narrowly lost these areas to Mitt Romney in 2012, but Hillary Clinton won them with 55% of the vote. Small cities like McAllen and El Paso contributed another 4%. All told, the large metropolitan areas cast almost three-quarters of the vote in Texas, and Hillary Clinton won them with 51% support,a five-point improvement from Obama. Trump more than held his own in the rural areas of the state and in the towns, winning almost 70% of the vote (roughly the same vote share as Romney had four years earlier). But it was the Trump collapse in the urban areas that dominate the state that made it a single-digit race.
Our big weakness in Texas is in the rural areas, which Trump easily won with 70% of the vote in 2016. However, with changing demographics and Trump’s deepening unpopularity, a high turnout could change the map for 2020. In 2018, rural votes moved to Democrats by a 5% margin, so beating Cornyn and even Trump in Texas is certainly within the realm of reality.