The Kamala Harris campaign hasn’t spent money campaigning in Texas this election season. It hasn’t spent much time here, either. Outside of a quick rally in San Antonio with second gentleman Doug Emhoff in late September before a fundraiser, there’ve been no further public campaign events.
The reason for her absence is obvious: History suggests that she hasn’t got much chance of winning here. The last Democrat to claim Texas’s electoral votes was Jimmy Carter, nearly fifty years ago. The idea of a blue—or at least purple—Texas has tantalized national Democrats for at least a decade, but the real measure of how competitive they see the state is in where they’re spending their time and money.
Progressive politicians appear to see it a little differently. This week, Congressman Greg Casar from Austin, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senator Bernie Sanders—joined at times by Texas Dems’ perpetual ex-boyfriend, Beto O’Rourke—rallied voters at a series of events on the explicit premise that Democrats could finally score a statewide win in November. In front of a majority Gen Z audience at the University of Texas at Austin’s Hogg Auditorium on Tuesday evening, the group laid out a familiar proposition: Texas isn’t a red state but a voter-suppression state, and the power to overcome that rests in the hands of young folks.
It’s the same case Democrats have been making for at least a decade, when national political strategists launched Battleground Texas to help flip the state in the 2014 midterms. The results there speak for themselves, and talking to actual nonvoting Texans doesn’t really bear out the claim that there are vast, untapped reserves of Democratic voters simply waiting to be activated, but it seemed to resonate with the young voters present. It makes sense why this would be: They haven’t spent a decade or more watching the theory get tested and come up short.
“I came here to make sure that Kamala Harris wins the state and that Colin Allred becomes your next senator,” Sanders declared at Tuesday’s rally. Allred, notably, was nowhere to be seen along the Interstate 35 corridor during the progressives’ Texas tour. It may seem unusual that a candidate in a tight senate race would skip the four rallies held, in part, on his behalf by several of the most prominent politicians in the country, but it’s consistent with Allred’s strategy. His campaign is focused on portraying him as a moderate, maverick-style Democrat who bucks his own party on issues that poll well among traditional GOP voters who may be a bit Dem-curious. For those voters, it’d do Allred no favors to be photographed with AOC, Bernie, Casar, or Beto “Hell Yes, We’re Going to Take Your AR-15” O’Rourke. While the progressives were busy rallying voters, the candidate was finalizing the announcement of a “Republicans for Allred” coalition chaired by former GOP representative and newly minted Texan Adam Kinzinger, who once singled out the trio of AOC, Bernie, and Beto as “a disease that has infected the Democratic party.”
That left the rallying politicians walking a narrow line. None of them were in Texas as campaign surrogates for Allred, and many of them have strong policy differences from those he has made centerpieces of his campaign. When Allred’s ads boast that he stands up to “extremists from both parties,” it’s an allusion to the same figures who were in town telling college students to vote for him. But the progressive leaders seemed to recognize that if they said anything too provocative during their speeches, it had the potential to blow back on the candidate. Accordingly, they offered a lot of vague language that alluded to issues students were passionate about—at UT, which saw massive protests in the spring, that includes the war in Gaza—without saying anything that could be clipped and stuffed into a Cruz campaign ad. During one of the evening’s several surprising references to Texas native Lyndon Baines Johnson, who died more than three decades before most of the crowd was born, Ocasio-Cortez invoked his name to say that one lesson she’s drawn from history is that she doesn’t want to see the U.S. send endless munitions overseas. Presumably she was talking about Israel and Gaza, but the statement was vague enough that one could have assumed she meant Ukraine, whose foreign aid she’s vocally supported. In place of outright endorsements of Allred, the crowd heard a lot of references to sending Ted Cruz back to Cancún.
Were Bernie and buddies here for Allred, for Harris, or simply to encourage young voters to show up in November and make sure their friends were registered before the October 7 deadline? The answer was mostly just that they were here. As O’Rourke noted during his time on stage, he and Casar live in Texas, but Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez could have been holding rallies in a more conventional swing state. They can draw crowds in Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania too—so what are they seeing that other national Democrats aren’t?
Mostly, visiting Texas seems to be an act of faith for the high-profile Democrats—that there is an opportunity and an energy here that the polls are failing to capture and that they wanted to do what they could to seize on it. (Sanders, in a pander that we didn’t know the notoriously gruff senator had in him, noted that he was here, in part, because Texas also has better barbecue and tacos than Vermont.) Young, newly registered voters without prior election history aren’t on any pollster’s radar, and the argument those voters heard from the stage was that they would be the ones making a difference in this election. O’Rourke, a volunteer deputy voter registrar, talked about his efforts to ensure they were on the voter rolls in November; Ocasio-Cortez reminded them that she had started her career as a community organizer in Texas and had seen the state change; Sanders exhorted that they were the most progressive generation in American history and could act on that to change the country.
The numbers challenging this faith are rather unforgiving. Donald Trump received more than 630,000 more votes than Joe Biden in Texas in 2020, a five-and-a-half point margin over the current president. The polling average from poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight.com has Harris trailing Trump by six points. Given the state’s population growth over the past four years, she’ll probably need to find well over half a million votes that weren’t there for Biden to win. Might those voters exist and be pushed to the polls by the enthusiasm of the students who chanted “AOC! AOC!” as the New York congresswoman took the stage? Anything’s possible, but they’ll have to overcome history and math to do it. If not, all those young Democrats who’ve not yet had their hearts broken by Texas politics will get to join their more seasoned fellow partisans in waiting for the state to go blue in the next election, or the one after, or maybe the one after that.
