Texas A Swing State? Finally!

Tomorrow's a big day in Texas-- runoffs for the primaries. Two congressional races with progressive candidates are up for grabs-- TX-10 (Travis-Harris county corridor) and TX-24 (-- where, respectively, Mike Siegel faces moderate vanity candidate Pritesh Gandhi and Candace Valenzuela (Kenny Marchant's abandoned seat in the suburbs northeast of Ft. Worth and northwest of Dallas) faces moderate Kim Olson. Each of the non-progressives has out-raised the grassroots oriented reformers, although both progressives are financially competitive. Siegel crossed the million dollar mark yesterday!

That those races are tomorrow isn't news. What is, are new widely touted polls yesterday. The one by CBS/YouGov shows the Democrats surging in Texas. CBS reported that "The coronavirus outbreak is reshaping the presidential race in three key Sun Belt states. Joe Biden is now leading President Trump by six points in Florida, and the two are tied in Arizona and competitive in Texas, where Biden is down by just a point to Mr. Trump. Biden has made gains in part because most say their state's efforts to contain the virus are going badly-- and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden. In all three states, most voters say their state reopened too soon, and those who say this feel their state went too fast under pressure from the Trump administration. Most also say the president is doing a bad job handling the outbreak. He may be paying a price for that, at least in the short term."

A much bigger deal was the Dallas Morning News/University of Texas poll showing Trump destroying himself with his handling of the pandemic so badly that Biden now leads him-- in TEXAS!-- by 5 points. That's outside the margin of error. The paper reported that "Biden had 46% support to Trump’s 41%. If the general election were held today, the outcome could depend on the 14% of voters who were undecided or named someone else." Trump is basically hemorrhaging independent voters. Biden is beating him with independents 44-25%. The reason? his disastrous handling of the pandemic. On Saturday Texas reported 8,389 new cases (bringing the total to 259,465 cases-- 8,948 cases per million Texans). Yesterday the state reported 6,091 new cases, so total of 265,556-- 9,158 cases per million Texans.

CNN poll-whisperer Harry Enten reported that the CBS/YouGov. poll shows that Texas is now a swing state. "It's pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election. The 2020 campaign could be the first time Democrats captured the Lone Star State in a presidential election since 1976. The CBS News/YouGov poll is not an outlier over the last month. There have been eight polls released publicly since the beginning of June. The result is that Biden and Trump are basically tied, with Biden up by a mere 0.3 points in Texas. Enten doesn't see Biden being able to close the deal in Texas but he does see as many as 6 congressional red to blue flips: TX-10, TX-21, TX-22, TX-23, TX-24, TX-02 and TX-31. That's 7 and he left off TX-25. The chances of a Dem winning in TX-02 (Crenshaw) is remote and I doubt they'll pull it off by beating Carter in TX-31. But the others? Yes. Contribute at the Turning Texas Blue thermometer on the right.

Finally, Democrats have a real chance to flip the Texas state House. They need a pickup of less than 10 seats, and race raters give them a decent shot of doing so. If Democrats did flip the chamber, then they'd have a hand in redistricting for the first time since the beginning of the 2000s.

That's big for state and national politics given that Texas has more House members than any state except California.

The bottom line is Texas is fertile ground for Democrats in 2020. Biden has to decide whether he truly wants to compete. Either way, he has a real shot of winning, and a chance to rewrite the political map for this year and for the generation to come.

This morning, TX-25 candidate Julie Oliver told me that she has "never run a campaign based on what the pollsters or pundits or conventional wisdom said-- because those are the folks that had given up Texas and the people in our district and said it could never happen. But we showed up everywhere and talked to everyone, no matter how 'red' the county, and in the process the huge effort of all of our incredible volunteers turned this district into a national battleground. It won't be the presidential race that will find those folks who are least likely to participate and feel the most left out by our politics. It will be the scrappy state House candidates, the city council races, and the Congressional races running straight uphill against entrenched incumbents that will ensure that we win in November. And then the hard work starts."

Mike Siegel is getting ready for tomorrow. It took a minute out of his last minute Get Out the Vote activities to tell me that "We are fired up in Texas. And these numbers show how critical the July 14 runoff is. Texas 10 is eminently winnable, thanks to nearly three heard of hard work by our broad, progressive coalition. We win Tuesday, we are in the drivers seat, not only to send one of the worst Republicans in Congress to an early retirement-- but to elect a true progressive for the seat that unites the communities of Houston and Austin."

Ever see a Texas electoral map without the color red? Get used to it