Blow Texas?

Could Trump blow it in Texas?

Republicans get queasy about 'the Trump factor.' 

By Kyle Cheney and Katie Glueck

Texas Republicans are slowly coming to grips with the unthinkable: Hillary Clinton has a shot at winning the nation’s most iconic red state.

The odds are long, they say, in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic for president in 40 years. But in recent polling data and early voting results, they are also seeing signs of the perfect storm of demographic and political forces it would take to turn Texas blue.

According to some Republican and nonpartisan pollsters, Donald Trump is turning off enough core GOP constituencies and motivating Hispanic voters in ways that could pump up Clinton’s performance to higher levels than a Democratic nominee has seen in decades. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state in a 16-point blowout. The current spread is just five points, according to the the RealClearPolitics polling average.

“I think that Texas is competitive this year,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based GOP operative. “I think it’ll be much closer than usual. I think it’s because of the Trump factor.”

Steinhauser still expects Trump to end up on top. But the very idea that Texas — which gave Romney a nearly 1.3 million-vote winning margin — might be in play is an affront to some Republicans, a notion that would have seemed preposterous at the beginning of the election year. Texas is the beating heart of the modern Republican Party, and the cornerstone of any GOP nominee’s electoral strategy. It’s also home to the last Republican president, George W. Bush, and to two serious recent GOP contenders for the White House, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry.

And Texas is where the party’s most prominent donor base is clustered. That’s why two recent state polls placing Clinton within three points of topping Trump have alarmed party leaders and activists.

“There's an outside chance,” said one veteran Texas Republican operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the state of play. Clinton would need to show more seriousness about the state to truly compete, this operative said, and even then it would be a long-shot. “But it’s not impossible…The Clinton team would have to come and spend a million and a half, two million a week on television to have a one-in-four, one-in-three shot of doing it.”

Trump’s potential effect on Hispanic turnout is at the heart of Republican worries. Polls show the GOP nominee has repelled Latino voters nationally, and they make up an increasingly large share of the Texas voting population. Results from the first two days of in-person early voting suggest there have been turnout surges in populous, Democratic-leaning areas like Austin’s Travis County and also in the Dallas/Fort Worth area — places with sizable Hispanic populations.

Richard Murray, a University of Houston pollster, said children of Latino immigrants in particular are finding Trump’s candidacy a rallying cry. Murray described a “startling” scene at a Houston early-voting location he visited Monday, the first day of in-person voting in Texas. The facility, Ripley House, is located in a “low income, pretty sparsely populated old barrio area,” he said, and it saw about 450 early voters in 2012. On Monday, there were 1,050 ballots cast. Murray noted that there are a million more Latino registered voters in 2016 than there were in 2012.

Jacob Monty, a prominent Republican Hispanic activist based in Houston who resigned from Trump's National Hispanic Advisory Council after an incendiary Trump speech on immigration, said he will not vote for the top of the ticket, but will vote Republican down the ballot — highlighting the failure, even in deep-red Texas, to fully consolidate the GOP base behind the party nominee.

“So many people are telling me, ‘I’m doing what you’re doing,’ voting straight-ticket down ballot, but not at the top,” Monty said. “It’s the Trump hangover. So many people are displeased with the person who is our standard-bearer, people are seeing that what he stands for is not Republican values. It’s a bizarre world where he’s advocating protectionism and demonizing immigrants but yet he is the standard-bearer as the Republican.”

While Texas Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. John Cornyn have won upward of 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in their statewide elections, polls suggest Trump is unlikely to do nearly as well thanks to a message built around mass deportation and the construction of a border wall with Mexico.

Still, some Republicans note that even an enormous Latino turnout for Clinton won’t be enough to capture the state.

“Every cycle, the Democrats claim this is their year, and it never is,” said Ray Sullivan, a veteran Texas GOP strategist who advised Perry. “I do think that the dynamics of this race and the personalities of the candidates will result in a closer election than it’s been in recent history in Texas … but Texas remains a very successful, very prosperous and growing Republican state.”

Monty also expects that Trump will ultimately pull off a win in Texas, despite depressed GOP enthusiasm. But, he added, “it’s going to be closer than it should be.”

Republicans like Sullivan and Monty predict Trump will win despite his rejection in the state’s March GOP primary, when he finished a distant second to Cruz. One reason is that many in the party have worked aggressively to coalesce support behind the nominee — despite Cruz’s months-long resistance to supporting him. (Cruz, under pressure from grassroots activists and donors, ultimately backed Trump, too).

A Clinton victory would also require on a massive rejection of Trump by the Republicans who dominate the Dallas and Houston suburbs and formed the core of the George W. Bush coalition. While establishment Republicans appear to have ditched Trump in crucial areas like the Philadelphia suburbs and in suburban enclaves in Virginia and Colorado, there's little sign of significant suburban erosion in Texas. Some Republicans actually see evidence from early voting suggesting high turnout in Republican-leaning areas of Fort Worth’s Tarrant County and in the suburbs north of Dallas.

“I’d watch the big suburban vote in Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston. If they bail and there’s a lot of Latino turnout, Trump could lose the state despite carrying rural and small-town Texas,” said Murray, the University of Houston pollster.

“It’s a statewide phenomenon,” said Paul Simpson, chairman of the Republican Party of Harris County, which includes Houston and is the largest battleground county in Texas. “It’s hard to tell exactly why people are turning out. The optimist in me says that people … are turning out to change the status quo.”

There’s still no indication that Clinton will even make a concerted effort to win the state's 38 electoral votes. Allies described limited paid media buys touting her Dallas Morning News endorsement; one of her top Texas surrogates, 2014 gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, has largely been deployed to more competitive swing states.

Davis was skeptical of Clinton’s odds of winning the state this year, saying it’s too soon to read much into early voting figures or polling.

“It’s certainly the case that there’s a perfect storm right now, where we have a candidate, Donald Trump who’s particularly reviled by Latinas, African-Americans and women,” she said, pointing out that even a whisper of hope for Democrats this year could pay dividends in down-ballot races and in future elections.

Trump’s candidacy, she said, will be used as a bludgeon in 2018 when a slew of elected Republicans — from Abbott to Cruz — seek reelection. And any inroads Democrats make this year, Davis said, could encourage other Democrats to seek office.

“I think it could,” she said. “A lot of people in Texas who are considering running statewide in the future are going to be closely watching what the indications are coming out of this election and re-analyzing the possibilities of when it makes sense to try to launch again a statewide race in Texas. I think we’re going to see a lot of new Hispanic voters in this election, African-American voters and of course fair-minded Anglos that we can build a coalition around.”

Republicans aren't thinking that far ahead. They're busy fretting over the possibility that even if Trump wins, a weak finish could leave a trail of vanquished down-ballot Republicans behind.

“Would [Democrats] rightly consider it a moral victory if Trump were held to single digits in Texas? Maybe,” said Travis County Republican chairman James Dickey. “But the real question is, if the margin slides from double digits to low single digits, who else becomes jeopardized?”