A strange piece from Politico's Tim Alberta today on Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke as voters head to the polls tomorrow to see if he can beat GOP Sen. Ted Cruz tells me two things: One, nobody likes Ted Cruz in the state at all, period, and two, Texas Republican voters are wondering out loud now why Beto ignored them in favor of getting more non-voting Democrats to the polls.
In selling a symbolic candidacy, the Hurd roadshow was foundationally essential. But it wasn’t enough. To score the biggest upset of 2018, O’Rourke would need a brand that reinforced his rejection of status quo politics. So he created one—a campaign that rejects corporate money, that avoids negative attacks, that refuses to employ pollsters or consultants. And it worked. By offering a cause rather than a candidacy, O’Rourke convinced America that a Texas Democrat could win statewide for the first time since 1994. A staggering $70 million flooded into his campaign. Celebrities came calling on a first-name basis. LeBron James made the black-and-white “Beto” signage famous. National reporters took turns deifying the skateboarding, punk-rocking congressman. And all the while, O’Rourke was flatlining. When Quinnipiac polled the race in April, after he clinched the Democratic nomination, he registered at 44 percent; in July, the same poll pegged him at 43 percent; it was 45 percent in September; and 46 percent in late October. Whenever the race has tightened, it’s due to Cruz dropping below 50 percent. In dozens of public and private surveys this cycle, O’Rourke has never broken 47 percent.
Somewhere along the line, the rock-concert crowds and record-setting fundraising and JFK comparisons obscured a basic contradiction between Beto O’Rourke the national heartthrob and Beto O’Rourke the Texas heretic. While the coastal media’s narrative emphasized his appeals to common ground, framing him as an Obamaesque post-partisan figure, the candidate himself tacked unapologetically leftward. He endorsed Bernie Sanders’ "Medicare for all" plan. He called repeatedly for President Donald Trump’s impeachment—a position rejected by Nancy Pelosi, and nearly every other prominent Democrat in America, as futile and counterproductive. He flirted with the idea of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He took these positions, and others, with a brash fearlessness that reinforced his superstardom in the eyes of the Democratic base nationwide. But it likely stunted his growth among a more important demographic: Texans.
Over the past six months, I spoke with a host of Texas Republicans about the U.S. Senate race. Many of them dislike Cruz. Some of them privately hope he loses. And all of them are baffled by the disconnect between the superior branding of O’Rourke’s candidacy and what they see as the tactical malpractice of his campaign.
In their view, Cruz is uniquely vulnerable, having alienated Texans of all ideological stripes with his first-term antics—and especially those affluent, college-educated suburbanites repelled by Trump. The senator has long lagged 10 to 15 points behind Governor Greg Abbott at the top of the ticket; Cruz’s internal modeling has consistently demonstrated there are several hundred thousand voters committed to Abbott but not to him. This is the paradox of the Texas Senate race: Though it’s clear a significant bloc of soft Republicans and conservative-leaning independents are open to rejecting the incumbent on Tuesday, it’s equally clear the challenger has done little to move them. The Quinnipiac poll in April showed O’Rourke pulling 6 percent of Republicans; by late October that number was 3 percent. And while there are signs to suggest he will win more votes than a traditional Democrat in the metropolitan areas of Dallas and Houston and San Antonio, O’Rourke is almost certain to underperform in the rural and exurban areas of the state.
The campaign is a study in extreme contrasts: Cruz, the cartoonishly unlikeable conservative whose machine-like enterprise is run by a platoon of political gurus, versus O’Rourke, the obnoxiously likeable liberal whose garage-band effort is guided by gut instinct and raw emotion. Nothing is certain in such a volatile political climate, and there have been indications of a tightening race in the campaign’s final days. Cruz learned first-hand in 2016 that an organizational advantage doesn’t guarantee victory; O’Rourke can draw inspiration from Trump, of all people, in proving the pollsters wrong. If O’Rourke wins, he will have revealed a blueprint for animating the base and turning out new voters. But if he loses—as Texas insiders in both parties expect—the autopsies will speak of a strategically imbalanced campaign that did too much mobilizing and not enough persuading.
The conventional wisdom here is that Beto ran too far to the left in Texas, worried too much about his national profile and not enough about winning over suburban white Republicans in the state and is going to find a way to lose to arguably the worst Republican in the Senate, Ted Cruz.
The conventional wisdom is also complete hogwash, because those suburban Texas counties are exactly where record early voter turnout is happening and it's not because people love Ted Cruz.
By the end of 12 days of early voting, 529,521 Dallas County residents had cast their ballots in the midterm elections — more than twice that of the 2014 and 2010 midterms.
The total is about 40 percent of the county's 1.3 million registered voters. It was about 20,000 shy of the early-voting total in 2016, a presidential election year in which turnout is traditionally much stronger.
In 2010, Dallas County had 218,156 early votes, and in 2014 there were 215,147.
On Friday, El Paso Rep. Beto O'Rourke said the voter turnout signifies that he's on the verge of making history as the first Democrat to win a statewide office in Texas since 1994.
"If North Texas continues to turn out in the record numbers that we've seen, shattering every midterm total for as long as we've been looking at them, in some cases rivaling presidential voter turnout, then we're going to win this race," O'Rourke said. "The best thing I can do is continue to be with the people of North Texas, just as we have been for almost the last two years."
If Democrats show up at presidential year turnout levels, and rural Texas remains at midterm turnout levels, Beto wins. This was the idea from the beginning. Texas isn't a red state, no matter what the GOP wants to believe. It's a non-voting state. Texas's turnout percentage is dead last in the country, and it's the second most populous state. Only 28.4% of Texas voters showed up in 2014. If we're already seeing that being eclipsed just by early voting, then Beto can win.
Watch.
Texas, get out there and vote. I know I have Texas readers. Make that difference.
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