A20 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAy, MARCH 3 , 2020
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INTELLIGENCE FOR LEADERS WASHINGTONPOST.COM/POWERPOSTBiden had the best chance,
besting Sanders by a 25-point
margin. White voters were more
evenly split: 32 percent said
Biden, 28 percent said Sanders,
18 percent said Bloomberg, and
13 percent said Warren.
Anthony Blake, a 35-year-old
management consultant, will
vote for Sanders in the primary.
“Sometimes I think you’ve got to
fight fire with fire, as terrible as
that sounds,” he said. When I
asked about the electability fears
expressed by his fellow
Houstonians, he pointed to
several recent polls that showed
Sanders leading Trump in head-
to-head matchups and in many
cases outperforming other
Democrats. “The data doesn’t
really show that,” he said,
playing down the concerns of
elected lawmakers.
He added that he comes from
a conservative family. “They’ve
been Republicans for 30 years
now, but they dislike Trump,” he
said. “They’re terrified of Bernie
right now, but they’ll vote for
him over Trump.”
The NBC-Marist poll showed
1 in 4 likely voters in Te xas
remained undecided. Sarita
Gomez-Mola, 70, is among them.
The foreign-language
interpreter, who lives in the 7th
District, said she will cast her
ballot for whoever she concludes
on primary day has the best
chance of blocking Sanders from
clinching the nomination, which
she acknowledged may be Biden.
A friend visiting from New York
encouraged her to think about
Bloomberg, but she’s “angsting”
over which of the Democratic
alternatives to Sanders could
best unify the party.
“Will the Sanders voters
support Bloomberg? I worry,”
she said. “But Bernie cannot
hijack the Democratic Party. He’s
divisive, and we’re lurching from
one extreme to the other. There
would be nothing but gridlock. If
Barack Obama couldn’t get his
priorities passed, how is Sanders
going to?”
Gomez-Mola’s husband is a
geologist who works for an oil
company. “All his colleagues are
Trumpers,” she said. “They will
all vote for Trump, no matter
who he’s up against.” Likewise,
she said, she’ll vote for any
Democratic nominee over
Trump.
“I was born in Cuba, and I’m
very afraid of Sanders because of
all the changes he wants to
make,” said Gomez-Mola. “But
even if Fidel Castro came back
from the grave and was the
nominee, I’d support him over
Trump. Castro was my nemesis
all my life, but Trump is just that
bad.”
This is exactly what the
Sanders campaign is counting
on. The senator’s strategists
express confidence that dislike
for Trump is so strong among
Democrats that even moderates
will coalesce and consolidate
behind Sanders if he wins the
nomination.
[email protected]the wrong direction. My gut says,
‘Don’t go with Bloomberg.’ ”
Carol Alvarado, a Democratic
state senator who represents
Houston, endorsed Biden on
Sunday after his win in the
South Carolina primary.
Democrats picked up a dozen
state House seats in 2018 and
could win control of the
chamber if they gain nine more
in 2020. Several of their best
pickup opportunities are around
Houston. Alvarado, who leads
the Senate Democratic Caucus,
identified certain seats in both
the state House and Senate that
they’re more likely to win if the
former vice president is the
nominee.
“We could lose seats if we’re
having to talk about democratic
socialism,” she explained in an
interview. “And if we lose those
seats, that gives Republicans a
larger majority — which matters
for the next decade.” She’s
referring to redistricting. The
outcome of the 2020 state
elections will determine who
draws the boundaries that will
be in effect until 2031. Alvarado
said a Democratic-controlled
legislature could also vote to
expand Medicaid under the ACA,
something Republicans have
declined to do. “There’s just so
much riding on this election for
the future of Te xas,” she said.
Houston is also the epicenter
of the American energy industry,
and Sanders’s plan to ban
fracking and pass a Green New
Deal makes moderates
jittery. When you fly into town,
you see the scope of the region’s
dependence on fossil fuels in the
form of tankers and refineries.
“People’s livelihoods are
directly tied to that industry,”
said Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Tex.).
He represents a Fort Worth
district, where he notes that
many African Americans and
Latinos depend on energy
industry jobs that Sanders could
put in jeopardy. He said union
members also regularly express
“worry and concern” to him that
Sanders’s Medicare-for-all
proposal would take away
health-care benefits they’ve
negotiated hard to secure from
their employers.
Veasey lamented that Sanders
being at the top of the ticket
would make it harder to play
offense against people like
freshman Rep. Dan Crenshaw
(R-Te x.) in the Houston suburbs.
Veasey, who endorsed Biden in
November, added that many of
his Democratic colleagues would
have little choice but to distance
themselves from Sanders if he’s
the nominee to get reelected.
“There’s absolutely no question
about that,” he told me Sunday.
The CBS-YouGov poll asked
likely Democratic voters in Te xas
which candidate has the best
chance of beating Trump,
regardless of whom they
support. Interestingly, Latino
voters said Sanders has the best
chance of winning the general,
topping Biden by a 24-point
margin. Black voters thoughtTwo polls published Sunday
put Sanders ahead but by
significantly different margins
among likely voters in the Lone
Star State, reflecting the degree
to which the contest remains
fluid and also how hard it is to
predict what the electorate will
look like in this evolving
megastate. Sanders led Biden
34 percent to 19 percent in an
NBC-Marist poll, with
Bloomberg at 15 percent and
Warren at 10 percent. But
Sanders led Biden by only
four percentage points,
30 percent to 26 percent, in a
CBS-YouGov poll, which was
within the margin of error, with
Warren at 17 percent and
Bloomberg at 13 percent.
Sanders fares particularly
poorly in the same well-to-do
suburban areas that fueled the
Democratic wave in the
midterms and where Trump
remains most vulnerable. The
7th District, where Fletcher
already faces a tough reelection
fight, is the sort of place that
national Democrats fear they
would lose if Sanders leads the
ticket. Mitt Romney carried the
district with 60 percent of the
vote in the 2012 presidential
election, but Trump lost it to
Hillary Clinton in 2016 with
47 percent. Establishment-
minded Democrats worry that
voters who don’t like Trump or
Sanders might stay home,
especially moderates who voted
for candidates like Fletcher in- They fear that Sanders
would galvanize more
Republicans than he would
bring in the new voters he
promises to mobilize.
Armstrong is undecided but
eager to vote for a Democrat in
Te xas’s presidential primary on
Tuesday who can block Sanders
from winning the nomination.
She really likes Warren, but she’s
mainly concerned about beating
Trump. She texted all weekend
with friends as far away as New
Jersey and Massachusetts to
mull what she should do. “I
would vote for Joe Biden. He’s
not my first choice, but I would
if I thought he was the only one
who could beat Bernie,” she said.
“I just don’t want Bernie. There’s
a big contingent that doesn’t
want Bernie, but they’re all
splitting.... Do I vote my
conscience, which is Warren? Or
do I vote strategically, which is
Biden?”
The Galleria, in the heart of
Fletcher’s district, is one of the
largest and ritziest malls in the
United States. It has every fancy
chain store you can think of, plus
an indoor ice-skating rink. It was
packed over the weekend as I
interviewed more than 30 voters.
Charlotte Sullivan, 70, a
retired HR director, looked at
Bloomberg but concluded that
he’s a Democratic version of
Trump. “A ll my antennae go up,”
Sullivan said. “It’s the feeling
that tells me something’s not
right about him. I’ve had very
few circumstances in my life
where that instinct took me in
Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
spoke to a crowd of 2,000 at an
outdoor rally on Saturday night.
Former New York mayor Mike
Bloomberg stumped here last
week with the mayor of Houston,
who endorsed him. Sanders
visited the University of Houston
on Feb. 23, where he celebrated
his triumph in the Nevada
caucuses.for grabs. Houston, the fourth-
most-populous city in the
country, has become a
battleground within the
battleground. Harris County,
home to Houston, has more than
4 million residents, a bigger
population than that of 26 states.
Joe Biden on Monday had a
rally scheduled at Texas
Southern University. Sen.houston —
Joanne
Armstrong was
tired of screaming
at the television.
It’s why she
volunteered for
Lizzie Fletcher in 2018. And it’s
why she doesn’t want Bernie
Sanders to be the Democratic
nominee for president this year.
Armstrong, a physician in her
50s, decided to channel her
anger at President Trump two
years ago by going door-
knocking, for the first time ever,
to help Fletcher, a Democratic
congressional candidate in the
suburban Houston district
where she lives. In the midterms,
Fletcher toppled nine-term
Republican congressman John
Abney Culberson, a powerful
appropriator, picking up a seat
that had been comfortably in
GOP hands since George H.W.
Bush won it in 1966.
Armstrong worries that
Fletcher, still a freshman, would
lose her quest for a second term
if Sanders (I-Vt.) i s at the top of
the ticket and that Trump would
handily win a second term. She
said it was hard enough to
persuade voters to take a chance
on a Democratic candidate last
time when she could warn while
canvassing about how
Republicans were trying to
destroy the Affordable Care Act
without a replacement plan,
putting people with preexisting
conditions at risk. But Sanders’s
Medicare-for-all plan also
threatens to upend the system,
jeopardizing people’s private
health insurance coverage.
Houston is world renowned for
its medical centers, especially
related to cancer treatment.
“People looked at Trump in
2018 and said this is not who we
are. But Bernie also isn’t who we
in Houston are,” Armstrong said.
“I’m still tired of screaming at
the TV after three years. I don’t
want four more years.”
Te xas is the second-biggest
prize on Super Tuesday, behind
California, with 228 delegates up
Down-ballot angst over Sanders is acute in Houston suburbs
The Daily
202
JAMES
HOHMANN
SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
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