Inside Texas Democrats' ambitious plan to turn the state blue in 2020
Republicans are worried about Texas. For evidence of that, you have only to look at the stream of Texas Republicans retiring from the House of Representatives, or the money the party is pouring into trying to register new Republican voters. Texas Democrats have a plan to make them even more worried—and to win the state.
The Texas Democratic Party is planning to flood the state with more than 1,000 organizers tasked with registering and turning out new voters. Democrats say 2.6 million Texans would vote Democratic if they registered to vote, and that 2.4 million who are registered didn’t turn out in 2018. And 2018 was a year when Beto O’Rourke came close to Ted Cruz and two U.S. House seats flipped, in addition to many more down-ballot seats.
Democrats hope to register and/or turn out 400,000 new voters from communities of color, 225,000 new voters from blue urban areas, and squeeze 130,000 new votes out of suburbs and 100,000 out of rural areas. The efforts will include voter registration, sending out vote-by-mail applications, a massive statewide coordinated campaign helping Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, and voter protection efforts.
Who would have thought we were going to be talking about Texas as a battleground?
