GTT
We've been losing in Texas so long we forgot how to win
This week Robin Whetstone offers another chapter from her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket, in which she is finally accepted by her boyfriend’s family. My friend Matt Zeller, who used to write Presidential Daily Briefings for President Barack Obama, writes a country assessment of the United States for The Experiment. It’s … discomforting. And my friend Kate Dawson should be crying in her Cheerios. Her well-reviewed American Sherlock was all the rage in February, and then, well, you know. So why is she so happy?
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, including the longest list of great new music out that does not include The Chicks, who are awesome, but The Experiment is where you go to discover new things, right?
But first, did I tell you about the last time a Democrat was winning Texas?
In 1996, I worked for the Texas coordinated campaign committee, and though George W. Bush had unseated Ann Richards in the 1994 wave, Texas was still on the map, trending red, but not considered a lost cause yet. The DNC had spent a little money on TV to help President Bill Clinton recover, and as we approached his re-elect he was making a play for Texas, so we polled to find out where we stood. When we got the numbers back, there was a problem.
We were too far ahead. No one would ever believe it. We barely believed it, but Clinton was so far ahead of former Senator Bob Dole that we couldn’t dismiss it outright. Still, we feared looking foolish, so we asked the pollster to adjust the screen — that is, put his thumb on the scale on predicting the makeup of the electorate — to show Clinton only winning Texas by five. We released the poll and were assailed for our foolish optimism. The 1994 wave had reshaped more than the electoral landscape; Democrats began to expect losing, and the press, likewise internalizing conservative criticism, began reflexively treating us like losers. For Texas Democrats, the dream of the ‘90s died in the ‘90s.
Clinton ended up so far ahead nationally that they hit on a brilliant strategy: Clinton is so corrupt that you can’t trust him with a Democratic congress. Check presidential power by balancing things out. No sooner did they throw Dole overboard did their fortunes rise. As they hit Clinton on fundraisers in Chinese temples and renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, their numbers rose. The spell was broken in Texas, and we lost by five, which was the last time we lost by single digits until Donald Trump won Texas by nine in 2016.
Here we are again. Polls are showing Texas in play, and our first reaction is to question whether Texas is actually in play. The Real Clear Politics average of recent Texas polls shows Trump with a 0.2% lead, which includes a One America Network poll showing Trump up 2%. (If One America Network was a doctor, it would be Harold Bornstein.) The Cook Report lists Texas as leaning Republican, along with Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. It’s closing time, and Texas is touching your forearm, asking where we’re going next.
The latest bit of good news we’re not sure to believe is the Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll showing Uncle Joey B up 5%.
What you need to know about polls — honestly, if you only pick this up, this will make you so much smarter — is that the last thing to change in a poll are the toplines. That is to say that things will move in the foundation — single women will start moving from one candidate to another, attitudes about job performance will erode — before you’ll see this reflected in the horserace.
Here’s what I see inside that poll that gives me some confidence that the DMN/UTT results are within the realm of probability:
Democrats have a 5% lead in the generic state house ballot, which given the consolidation Trump has in solidly Republican districts means voters in competitive districts are at the least not trending red.
9% of Texas Republicans are planning to vote for Biden, which is about how many Texas Democrats usually vote for the Republican presidential nominee. This time, fewer than half that many Texas Democrats are voting for Trump.
16% of Texas Republicans say the President’s COVID-19 response has caused them to reconsider their vote.
Together, all this tells me that there is a subset of Republican voters in Texas who are increasingly trying to pretend that they didn’t come to the party with the blowhard in the ill-fitting suit. If you shake your head and look out the window at the world, you see it. If he’d just focus on the pandemic and not his poll numbers — that is, if he’d do his damn job — his standing would improve. People are beginning to accept what is in plain sight; he’s going to yell about law & order, discredit medical advisors, and tantrum his way to November. The morgues are full in Texas, and schools are opening next month. The over-under for the pre-election death toll is 200,000. All of this tells me that the conditions that create a five-point lead for Uncle Joey B are not ephemeral or temporal. These are structural conditions.
Enter Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster who is no fan of Trump.
She makes one good point, namely that there is only so much money, and Texas is expensive. She argues that we need to be rebuilding the blue wall of the Great Lakes states, which is as good an example of committing the cardinal military blunder of fighting the last war as you’re ever going to see.
Longwell also makes several arguments that are mostly fallacies.
Beto, she points out, spent more than Ted Cruz and lost, which ignores not only that Beto had a much bigger lift to reach parity with Ted Cruz in an off year but that had Beto eschewed strategic romanticism he would have won.
She also argues that Biden’s dollars would be better spent in Florida, as if he weren’t already spending millions there. To be sure, Florida is a true toss-up where Biden enjoys an average polling lead of 6.4%.
Her real argument, which I will quote directly lest you suspect me of taking her out of context, is this:
Because it’s Texas.
That was an entire paragraph, which deserves a tip of my pith helmet. She gives a little of the game away later with this sentence:
Is it crazy that the Democrat is within the margin of error against an incumbent Republican president in Texas? Yes it is.
I will admit that Texas is, in fact, Texas. There is no sense arguing that cartological assertion. I try to reserve my energy for other nonsensical arguments most often of the sort found on the editorial pages of The New York Times.
But politically, Texas has become an exercise in madness. We do not believe it is winnable and have set about for a generation to prove ourselves right, lest we are mocked by the press and gatekeepers, lest we break our own hearts. We began the game by taking Texas off the map and have made this kind of losing — the never-trying kind — our tradition. Republicans crowed their dominance and seemed proven right each time. We try, sort of, with a Bill White, kind of, then a Wendy Davis, knowing where it would lead. When a slate of no-names came within spitting distance of upsetting Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, Sid Miller, et al, in 2018, we wrote it off as an anomaly, not an opportunity.
Here’s the fun of it, though: Texas is winnable paradoxically and precisely because Texas has not elected a statewide Democrat since Michael Jackson was married to Elvis’ daughter. (This is a thing that actually happened. You could look it up. An aside: The Daily Texan had the best headline announcing their separation: “Love on the Rocks. Ain’t No Surprise.”) Texas Republicans have grown so fat on our slaughter that a generation of GOP operatives lacks any experience in general elections, and therein lies the first half of our opportunity.
The second half of Texas’ counterintuitive opportunity is that Trump pulls Republican candidates in competitive races in opposite directions. Though the numbers above show measurable erosion in Trump’s Texas base, your average Texas Republican sees themselves as loyal to Trump first and the Republican Party second. What this means is that Republicans cannot reprise their 1996 rescue strategy of campaigning on ticket splitting. If they ran against giving Uncle Joey B a blank check, the Republican base would correctly deem them disloyal to Trump. But if a generic Republican — and I’m thinking of John Cornyn here — runs toward Cornyn to solidify base turnout, then they run the risk of alienating the suddenly purple suburbs and angering the newly activated youth vote.
If Texas Democrats make competitive races about Trump, this puts a candidate such as Cornyn in a box. Texas Republicans love Trump more than they love him; he has to convince them of his fealty to the President to count on their vote in November.
At the same time, he needs to win over cul-de-sac voters who like public schools, believe in science, and wish the President would wear a damn mask. Absent competitive general elections, Texas Republicans have been able to straddle this divide in private. Now M.J. Hegar can taunt him, daring him to say in Texas what he’s been saying in Washington for almost four years. Making John Cornyn say Donald Trump’s name out loud could be good sport. Making him say nice things about a Republican president is all Democrats needs to do to win over the suburbs.
Cornyn is not the only Republican who needs to convince his base vote he’s with them and the swing vote that he’s against Trump, and his senate seat is not the only prize. There are more than a few competitive congressional races we could mess up and win, as well as an open seat on the Railroad Commission. Texas Democrats are also targeting nine state house seats (see generic ballot above) and could flip control of the lower chamber before redistricting in 2021 when the state is likely to get three more congressional seats. There is more to win in Texas than simply the last war. There is another decade to look forward to.
It’s true, Democrats don’t need Texas to win back the White House nor Cornyn’s seat to win back the Senate. But a win here could expose yawning gaps in Republican strength and firmly establish Texas as the swing state it apparently already is. To do this, we do not need anything more than the courage to accept the opportunity that is staring us in the face.
Uncle Joey B, go to Texas.
Red Ticket: My Arrival
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. This week, Robin is finally accepted by her boyfriend’s family.
“America,” said the man like it was a ribald joke. “Let me ask you, how is the sex with your husband?”
“What?” I said, hoping I’d misunderstood him.
A Presidential Daily Briefing
by Matt Zeller
My friend Matt Zeller, a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Major in the Army Reserves, used to write Presidential Daily Briefings for President Barack Obama. He remarked to me the other day that a PBD, as they’re called, would be quite frightening these days, and I asked him to write one for us in the same format President Obama would have received it.
It is quite frightening.
The United States is currently embroiled in overlapping medical, economic, and political crises that combined will likely lead to profound civil and social strife and poses the greatest challenge to the country’s well-being since 1861.
A Happy Story
by Kate Dawson
My friend Kate Dawson is a senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at UT-Austin. She has also produced almost two dozen documentaries including longer form pieces for Nightline, WCBS and Fox as well as independent films. She is the author of Death in the Air and American Sherlock, which was released exactly one million years ago in February. I asked her to write about how the pandemic messed that up; she turned in a happy story, and I love it.
I want to tell you a happy story about COVID-19, which I realize is rare right now. It didn’t begin that way.
RIP
Bexar County’s emergency manager
How we’re getting through this
Playing human foosball
Taking exercise snacks on Insta
Getting internet from hot air balloons
Watching what I say around tomato plants
Getting hyped about Amazon’s new grocery carts
What I’m reading
The Atlantic: “The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic”
Keri Blakinger: “How Long Can You Hide a Dead Body in a Prison Cell?”
Michael Corcoran: “25 Most Significant Nights In Austin Music History”
Leslie Gaines-Ross: “Corporate Activism — Win Some, Lose Some”
GQ: “The Political Education of Killer Mike”
Monica Hesse: “The weird masculinity of Donald Trump”
His complaining, his insults, his pouting, his neediness, his histrionics, his jagged, self-centered emotionalism — none of it is beside the point. It’s what makes him a real man.
Insider: “An influencer turns her Instagram outtakes into hilarious side-by-side photos to prove that social media isn't real life”
Sarah Longwell: “What Women Want”
Donald Trump and his campaign think they can stop the bleeding with women by leaning into the culture wars and highlighting looters, rioters, and vandals pulling down statues. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of these voters. They don’t see Trump as someone who can protect them from the chaos—they think he’s the source of it.
Steve Martin: “Carl Reiner, Perfect”
Bruce Mehlman: “The Great Acceleration”
Radio Free Europe: “Tragic Magic: Moscow City Contract Written With Disappearing Ink, Deputy Alleges”
John Stoehr: “The intellectual fraud of Bari Weiss”
Vanity Fair Hive: “What do I do? What do I do? Trump Desperate, Despondent As Numbers Crater, ‘Loser’ Label Looms”
Torn between the imperative to win suburban voters and his instincts to play to his base, Trump has complained to people that he’s in a political box with no obvious way out. According to the Republican, Trump called Tucker Carlson late last week and said, “what do I do? What do I do?”
VQR: “Ned”
What I’m watching
My friend J.K.’s Facebook video of taking one of his daughters to get tested.
Turned off the Scorsece documentary on Bob Dylan after an hour. If I wanted to hear old white men talk about how great the good old days were I would go to a city council meeting and listen to them inveigh against growth.
Not sure the Lonely Island crew could have hit the Zeitgeist any more squarely than with the new goodhearted and optimistic Hulu movie, Palm Springs.
What I’m listening to
Tons of great new music to catch you up on:
Austin’s Tameca Jones has a new single: “IDK.”
Love everything about Juice WLRD’s new album except for the reason it’s his last.
If you like hiphop and aren’t listening to LA’s Blu & Exile, then do you even lift, bro? Start with “Miles Davis” and work your way back in time.
Related, every Rufus Wainwright album is a gift to humanity. If you don’t know him yet and want some music that orchestrally connects you to a broader humanity, give “Only The People That Love” a listen.
We’ve already talked about Song Confession, the KUTX podcast from Walker Lukens and Zac Catanzaro, and you should be subscribing to that if you subscribe to this. Next week, that will be our feature “What I’m listening to” because it’s bonkers good, even better than this week’s episode with Kam Franklin from The Suffers and her new single “I Can’t Wait.” It’s the debut of Walker and Zac’s “Love in Quarantine” EP; we got an advance listen to the songs. People: bonkers good songs.
Speaking of love in quarantine, Snoh Aalegra dropped “DYING 4 YOUR LOVE.”
In a normal week, my discovery of Quentin Arispe would be enough to secure the featured spot in the newsletter. This Corpus Christi queer hippopster has had me dancing in my chair all week. Start with “FRUIT.”
But the top spot was secured by Remi Wolf because every time one of her songs has come on this week, my wife has asked who it was. The intersection of our musical tastes is hallowed ground, all the more precious because its existence is an article of faith and not a permanent residence. Remi’s “Woo!” is the quarantine song we need right now, and the Willy Wonka-via-Spy Kids video made possible by the limits of social distancing.
“It’s about feeling good and bad all at once. Love and hate. It’s kinda an ADHD anthem. I wrote it in 20 minutes and it was done.”
Enjoy.
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