The Battle of El Paso: How Trump Could Lose Texas in 2020

BETO! by Mike Siegel

-by Mike Siegel

It was a throwback to the cross-country trips of my college years: leaving Austin at 8:00am on Monday morning, driving 600 miles to El Paso, joining a rally of thousands of local activists, marching a mile through dark city streets on a wintry evening, rallying again, and then jumping in the car to drive 600 miles home. For a guy with two little kids at home, running for a congressional seat that stretches from Austin 150 miles to the east, you'd be fair to question my sanity, or wonder if this is some sort of mid-life crisis.

And this is a crisis, of course, but not one of the personal variety. Rather, this is a crisis rooted in the racist and xenophobic base of Trump's rise to power, his foolhardy government shutdown in pursuit of $5 billion in Border Wall funding, a State of the Union speech rife with repeated lies about El Paso and what makes the city safe, and finally a return of the Hate Rally Road Show that is Trump's bread and butter.

I decided to make the trip to El Paso with my campaign manager two days prior, after native son Beto O'Rourke announced he would join a locally-organized March for Truth, scheduled to take place at the same time, and mere blocks away from the President's rally. Beto's decision to participate made clear that Texas would have an opportunity, in the national spotlight, to show how our state is changing. To prove that Texas is not Trump country.

To be clear, I'm not hitched to the Beto-for-President bandwagon, although his candidacy would likely inspire the Texas grassroots to turn out record numbers of Democratic voters in 2020. Like many local Democrats, I see how valuable Beto can be for Texas, and believe he can unseat John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate in 2020. (Cornyn himself can see it, and was notably aloof from Trump during the President's Monday visit.) But Beto's decision-making process aside, I didn't make this trip for him.

Rather, this felt like history calling. With the Mueller investigation progressing and Trump's influence waning, with even the President's own supporters indifferent to specific policy objectives or accomplishments, El Paso felt like an opportunity to strike a major blow against the Trump regime. To embarrass him with the whole world watching. To show that, even in Texas, more people oppose the President than support him.

And if facts still matter, we succeeded. According to the El Paso Fire Department, our march and rally against the Border Wall attracted as many as 15,000 people, while 6,500 filled an auditorium to watch the President. From my first-hand observations, the final numbers were a little closer, as a few thousand people watched Trump's speech on screens outside his venue. But even if turnout was even, that's a win for the resistance.

Trump announced his rally a full week ahead of time, and had all the infrastructure of his campaign--with plenty of astroturf supporters-- to fill out the event. By comparison, the March for Truth was a completely grassroots affair. Beto showed up, but he did not deploy his team to organize the event. We were led by local human rights organizers, who performed amazing feats with minimal resources to accommodate the massive crowd. A crowd that rivaled or exceeded the President's.

And more important than turnout, Trump lost the battle of ideas. The March for Truth put forward a simple, elegant message: "border communities are places of opportunity and hope." A Wall does not make us safer, but serves only to divide us. The real enemy is not immigration; instead, we must address injustice and prejudice, wealth inequality and a crippled democracy.

Meanwhile, Trump's rally hinged on a huge lie: that the Border Wall resulted in improved public safety for El Paso. Countless news outlets reported that El Paso's decline in crime rate occurred entirely before the construction of border fencing. Even the Republican mayor of El Paso contradicted the President. And Trump himself acknowledged the shifting playing field by trying to repurpose his "Build the Wall" slogan to "Finish the Wall," in effect admitting he will accomplish a tiny fraction of his absurd promise.

Gaslighting only gets Trump so far. When a sitting Republican President comes to Texas and has to struggle to draw even with a grassroots coalition, you know something has changed. The lies, the investigations, the shutdown, the trade war, the unfulfilled promises-- all of it has combined to strip away the Republican margin of victory. What is left is the 35% or so that still thinks dressing in blackface is acceptable Halloween attire.

Recognizing their vulnerability, Texas Republicans are focusing on voter suppression. In 2018, Beto narrowed a 19-point Republican statewide advantage to a 2.6 point Cruz victory. In the Texas 10th, I cut what was a 19-point Republican advantage to four points, holding a seven-time incumbent to 51% of the vote. Across the state, Democrats picked up two Congressional seats and twelve Texas House seats, and set up the possibility of controlling the Texas Legislature in time for the 2021 redistricting process.

So the news last week (a lifetime ago in this news cycle, of course) was that the Texas Secretary of State had targeted 95,000 Texas residents for "illegal voting," and had referred them all to the Attorney General for prosecution. Never mind that the 95,000 named consisted of legal permanent residents who sought Texas drivers licenses as long ago as 1996. Never mind that 50,000 Texans become naturalized citizens every year. Never mind that the targeted 95,000 are overwhelmingly Mexican-American voters. With the blessing of the Governor and AG, the Secretary of State authorized counties to begin "maintenance operations," sending out 30-day notice letters that threaten to purge voters from the rolls.

Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (D-El Paso) by Mike Siegel

Thanks to alert advocates and a ready base of activists and lawyers, we are fighting this latest attack on voting rights. It looks like the Secretary of State will not hold his office long. Three separate lawsuits will stop this latest voter purge in its tracks. We can win these battles.

But the context underlying the voter suppression is the same as that in El Paso: desperation for the reigning party. Clinging to power by resorting to the lowest tactics available. When neither facts nor people are on their side, Republicans try to cheat their way to power.

Of course, it has worked for them before, so we can't discount the strategy. But in a State that, for decades, has been the symbol of Republican power in America, the trend is going the other way. In El Paso, in Austin, in cities and towns across the state, the status quo is changing. Monday night may have been the tipping point.

You probably recognize Mike's name as the TX-10 congressional candidate endorsed by Blue America in 2018. He came closer to beating entrenched GOP incumbent Michael McCaul than anyone elver has in the past and is well-set up to finish the job next year. Blue America has endorsed him again for the 2020 cycle. Mike is a former public school teacher and civil rights lawyer and a full-on, across-the-board progressive. You can read more about him, his issues and his 2018 campaign here and you can contribute to his 2020 campaign by clicking on the ActBlue congressional thermometer on the right. Mike is running a from the ground-up, grassroots campaign powered by small donors, so, please don't be shy about contributing whatever you feel you can, whether it's $5 or $10 or $20.20. Everything will go to good use.