Texas Is Changing—Quickly
Updated on September 6 at 5:04 p.m. ET
Back in the fall of 1992, Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, pressed his campaign manager to schedule a two-day bus tour for him across Texas, a state he believed was within his reach. The campaign manager resisted the idea: He said Texas was too hard to win, too expensive to compete in, and too much of a diversion from other states more likely to go for Clinton. The candidate got his way, but his top aides ultimately blocked a full-scale investment in the state.
Twenty-seven years later, that Clinton campaign manager, the veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, has a very different view about whether the party’s next presidential nominee is going to mount a serious effort in Texas.
“I think of course they will,” Carville told me on Wednesday after news broke about the latest Texas Republican to announce his retirement from the U.S. House. “They’d be crazy not to. You have to look at how fast the white vote in Texas is shifting. That’s the story.”
Not all Democrats agree, of course, that the party’s presidential ticket should devote the time, money, and organizing effort required for the uphill quest to recapture Texas, a state no Democratic presidential nominee has carried since Jimmy Carter won 51 percent of the vote there in 1976. “It is just too expensive,” said a senior adviser to one of the top Democratic presidential contenders, who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy. “You would keep Arizona and Georgia in play first.”
But the fact that Democrats are debating at on Wednesday with the announcement from Representative Bill Flores of Waco—has added to the sense that the state is becoming competitive once again after an extraordinary two decades of complete Republican control.
