Ex-Obama Aides Begin 'Battleground' Play For Texas
AUSTIN (CBSDFW.COM/AP) — Former aides to President Barack Obama are kicking off a plan to turn reliably red-state Texas blue.
Or as Governor Rick Perry calls it, "the biggest pipe dream I have ever heard."
Spearheaded by organizers of Obama's re-election campaign in 2012 — when Republican nominee Mitt Romney handily carried the Lone Star State — a new push, called "Battleground Texas," officially launched Tuesday with the goal of seizing shifting demographics to make the state eventually winnable for a Democratic presidential candidate.
Organizers are not, however, projecting when that might happen. Nor are they saying how much money they will need to raise and spend to give Democrats a fighting chance in Texas, where the party hasn't won a statewide office since 1994.
"With its size and diversity, Texas ought to be a place where local races are hotly contested and anyone who wants to be president has to compete," said Jeremy Bird, a senior adviser to Battleground Texas who served as field director of Obama's re-election bid.
Lynda Tran, a spokeswoman for 270 Strategies, the firm behind Battleground Texas, said the group is registered with the Federal Election Commission and the Texas Ethics Commission.
About 70-percent of Hispanics nationwide voted for Obama over Romney in November.
The booming Texas population is being driven by Hispanic growth — minorities accounted for nearly 9 of every 10 new residents in the past decade— and Democratic organizers believe the changing face of the state will boost their chances. Statistics from the 2010 census show 38-percent of Texans as Latino or Hispanic, but Dallas County skewed higher at 38.9-percent. Numbers had just under 45-percent of Texans statewide as non-Hispanic whites, but Dallas County skewed lower at 32.8-percent.
But Perry, for one, isn't buying that Texas will cease to be a Republican stronghold.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last weekend during the National Governors Association meeting in Washington, Perry said the University of Texas would adopt the rival maroon-and-white colors of Texas A&M before the state ever goes blue.
"Democrats are about government getting bigger and bigger and government providing more and more," Perry told the newspaper. "Texans have never been for that, and Texans never will."
State demographers have predicted that Hispanics will make up a plurality of Texans by 2020, and then become the majority between 10 and 20 years later.
For now, even some of the biggest Democratic stars in Texas concede that odds are long in top races for the immediate future.
When a moderator at a Texas Association of Business conference last month joked to U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro that it could be more likely he would be elected president before Texas governor, Castro laughed and said that it might be true.
"I'm sounding a little pessimistic, but I believe that the Democratic Party can come back," Castro said. "If you look around other states, there has been other periods where Democrats have dominated for 40 years and then it changed, or vice versa. Things will change. What I have said is for Democrats, they're not going to change on their own. Demographics are very powerful, but you have to lay a lot of infrastructure to make that change."
(©2013 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
Also Check Out:
