The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020 N A

BEDFORD, Texas — Deep in
the suburbs northeast of Fort
Worth, Democrats trying to win
the Texas House for the first time
in years have been getting help
from a surprising source.
Republicans.
For 16 years, until he left office
in 2013, Todd A. Smith was a Re-
publican representing these sub-
urbs in the Texas House of Repre-
sentatives. His district covered a
fast-growing hub of middle-class
and affluent communities next
door to Dallas-Fort Worth Inter-
national Airport.
When it came time to decide
whom he would support for his old
seat, Mr. Smith said he had no
hesitation — he threw his en-
dorsement to the Democrat in the
race, Jeff Whitfield.
“This is no longer my Republi-
can Party,” Mr. Smith said last
week while sitting outside his
house, which has a “Republicans
For Biden 2020” sign on the front
lawn.
“This is the Trump party,” he
said. “If you give me a reasonable
Republican and a crazy Demo-
crat, then I will still vote for the
Republican. But if you give me a
lunatic Republican and a reason-
able Democrat, then I’m going to
vote for the Democrat, and that
applies in the presidential race,
and it applies in the Whitfield
race.”
After a generation under uni-
fied Republican control, Texas is a
battleground at every level of gov-
ernment this year. President
Trump and Senator John Cornyn
are fighting for their political
lives, and five Republican-held
congressional seats are in danger
of flipping.
But some of the most conse-
quential political battles in Texas
are taking place across two dozen
contested races for the Texas
State House, which Republicans
have controlled since 2003. To win
a majority, Democrats must flip
nine of the chamber’s 150 seats —
the same number of Republican-
held districts Beto O’Rourke car-
ried during his 2018 Senate race,
when he was the first Texas Dem-
ocrat to make a competitive run
for Senate or governor in a gener-
ation.
Mr. O’Rourke has organized
nightly online phone banks that
are making about three million
phone calls a week to voters dur-
ing the campaign’s final stretch.
His organization helped register
about 200,000 Texas Democratic
voters in an attempt to finish a po-
litical transformation of Texas
that began with his Senate race.
“I actually won more state
House districts than Ted Cruz,”
Mr. O’Rourke said in an interview
last week. “It’s just that the candi-
dates in nine of those, the Demo-
cratic candidates, didn’t end up
winning.”
Control of the Texas House

comes with huge implications be-

yond the state’s borders. A Demo-

cratic state House majority in

Texas would give the party one

lever of power in the 2021 redis-

tricting process, when the state is

expected to receive as many as

three new seats in Congress. It

would also give them a voice in

drawing Texas state legislative

lines for the next decade.

Officials from both parties said

the difference between the cur-

rent unified Republican control of

the Texas state government and

Democrats controlling the state

House could be as many as five

congressional seats when new

maps are drawn.

“Flipping the Texas House this

year can be the key that unlocks a

Democratic future in Texas,” said

John Bisognano, the executive di-

rector of the National Democratic

Redistricting Committee. “With

fair maps, Democrats will be able

to compete all over the state and

build a deep bench of candidates

who can run and win statewide.”

Nowhere in the country has

there been a surge of voting to

match the one in Texas. Through

two weeks of in-person early vot-

ing, more than 6.9 million Texans

have voted — a figure that ac-

counts for more than three-quar-

ters of the entire 2016 turnout.

The turnout is highest in the

state’s biggest metropolitan ar-

eas, which are the core state

House battlegrounds — and are

six of the 10 fastest-growing coun-

ties in the country. There are five

competitive state House seats in

Tarrant County, which includes

Fort Worth, five more in other

Dallas suburbs, and eight in great-

er Houston.

“I’ve always been political my

whole life,” said Gina Hinojosa, a

state representative from Austin

whose father is the chairman of

the Texas Democratic Party.

“Now, suddenly, everybody is so

political. The last election has had

the result of engaging everyday

people in our political process.”

Texas Republicans have sought

to tie Democrats running for the

state House, who are campaign-

ing on issues like health care and

increasing school funding, to the

most liberal proposals in their

party. Gov. Greg Abbott on Thurs-

day launched a digital advertise-

ment attacking Mr. O’Rourke’s

past statements on police funding,

gun control, tax policy and the

Green New Deal.

This week, the governor and

other Republicans jumped on for-

mer Vice President Joseph R. Bi-

den Jr.’s pledge during the presi-

dential debate on Thursday to

“transition away from the oil in-

dustry,” a bedrock of the Texas

economy, saying that such a move

would cost the state hundreds of

thousands of jobs and shrink reve-

nues that pay for schools.

“He is an albatross around the

neck of down-ballot candidates in

Texas,” said Jared Woodfill, a

Houston conservative activist

and lawyer who is a former chair-

man of the Harris County Republi-

can Party. “Biden just lost Texas.”

Democrats said they were not

worried, calling the outcry over

Mr. Biden’s remarks an attempt to

distract voters from more press-

ing issues, including the contin-

ued spread of the coronavirus in

Texas.

Suburban voters do not appear

to be buying Republican argu-

ments during the Trump era that

Democrats will turn their commu-

nities socialist. Polling in 10 tar-

geted Texas state House districts

shows Mr. Biden gaining an aver-

age of 8.6 percentage points, while

Democratic state House candi-

dates have gained 6.5 points since

March in surveys conducted by

the National Democratic Redis-

tricting Committee, which has in-

vested more than $1 million in

Texas over the last two years.

The suburban voters of 2020,

said Steve Munisteri, a former Re-

publican Party of Texas chairman

who worked in Mr. Trump’s White

House, have far more in common

with urbanites than they do with

the more conservative voters who

used to populate the outer edges

of Texas metropolitan areas.

“Because of urban growth,

many of what are considered tra-

ditional suburbs in Texas metro-

politan areas really are just exten-

sions of the urban areas,” Mr. Mu-

nisteri said.

Collin County, a suburban area

20 miles north of Dallas, has two

competitive state House districts

that Mr. O’Rourke carried in 2018.

In six years, the county has added

200,000 people. It now has a popu-

lation of more than 1 million peo-

ple and has gone from a Demo-

cratic wasteland to one teeming

with liberal volunteers.

In 2014, when John Shanks

moved to Collin County, there

were about 20 dedicated Demo-

cratic Party volunteers. Now Mr.

Shanks, the executive director of

the county’s Democratic Party,

has several hundred — so many

that he has trouble finding work

for them all.

“We’ve had about four years of

people getting used to the idea

that their vote really can matter,”

Mr. Shanks said. “We’ve grown

into realizing that you can make a

difference. And as they realize

that and wake up, things become

more competitive.”

Bedford sits in a part of the Dal-

las-Fort Worth region that has

been deeply conservative for dec-

ades. Republicans have held the

region’s state House seat since

1985, and the Northeast Tarrant

Tea Party was one of the most in-

fluential Tea Party groups during

the Obama era.

The outgoing state representa-

tive, Jonathan Stickland, is a

bearded Cruz-style firebrand who

supported gun rights and wore his

.40-caliber semiautomatic pistol

at the Texas Capitol. In 2015, The

Texas Tribune called him the

“chamber’s antagonist-in-chief.”

Mr. Stickland apologized in 2016

after an online posting he made in

2008, before he ran for elected of-

fice, was unearthed by a political

opponent. In the posting on a fan-

tasy football site, he responded to

a man’s request for sex advice by

writing: “Rape is non existent in

marriage, take what you want my

friend!”

Yet after years of sending con-

servatives to Austin, the district

has changed. In just two years, the

Republican advantage shrunk

from 9,100 votes for Mr. Trump in

2016 to 1,167 when Senator Ted

Cruz defeated Mr. O’Rourke in

2018.

“When you’re hearing people

who’ve spent a lifetime voting Re-

publican and they say, ‘The party

has left me,’ I don’t know that

we’ve ever heard that before,” Mr.

Whitfield, the Democratic state

House candidate, said as he stood

in a parking lot outside the Bed-

ford Public Library, an early-vot-

ing site.

Steps away in the same parking

lot, Mr. Whitfield’s Republican op-

ponent, Jeff Cason, disputed any

notion of a widespread Republi-

can defection.

“I’m a man of faith, and I just be-

lieve the doors are opening for us,

and if the Lord wants us in Austin,

we’ll be there,” Mr. Cason said.

“I’m not getting any sense of Re-

publicans leaving our camp.”

Julie McCarty, who was the

president of the Northeast Tar-

rant Tea Party and is now the chief

executive of the group it trans-

formed into, the True Texas

Project, attributed the Democrat-

ic gains in the region to Republi-

cans not being conservative

enough.

“Republicans want to be left

alone. We want smaller govern-

ment. When we can’t get that, we

move where we can,” she said.

“Therein lies the answer to what

causes Tarrant to turn purple.”

For Mr. Smith, the former Re-

publican legislator, 2020 has been

a year to split his ballot. In addi-

tion to the Biden sign and his sup-

port for Mr. Whitfield, he has a

yard sign for Jane Nelson, a Re-

publican state senator running for

re-election. And he voted for Sena-

tor John Cornyn, the Trump ally

locked in a tough re-election fight

with M.J. Hegar, a Democrat and

former Air Force helicopter pilot.

Years ago, Mr. Smith threw Mr.

Cornyn a fund-raiser at his house.

“I have mixed feelings about it,”

he said of his vote for Mr. Cornyn.

“But I trust what I believe to be his

honest convictions.”

Seeking Lever of Power in Texas, Democrats Work to Flip State’s House

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

and REID J. EPSTEIN

Jeff Whitfield, a Democratic state House candidate in Texas, won the endorsement of a Republican who once held the same seat.

COOPER NEILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Organizers are hoping

to change the map

with high turnout.

GASTONIA, N.C. — Republi-
cans in Gaston County still have
pictures from the last time a presi-
dential candidate visited here dur-
ing a general election: They are
sun-stained images from 1992,
when President George H.W.
Bush’s Spirit of America train tour
made a stop in the town of Ranlo.
When residents heard that
President Trump was planning a
rally in Gastonia, they reacted
with a mix of small-town pride and
general confusion. He won the
county in 2016 with 64 percent of
the vote; have things gotten so
bad for Mr. Trump in the suburbs
of America that he needed to
spend time here two weeks before
Election Day?
“What I’m seeing in my online
communities is that people imme-
diately laughed,” said Courtney
Phillips, a stay-at-home mother
who has been involved in grass-
roots organizing for the Biden-
Harris campaign. “Why is he com-
ing here? Is he really worried
about Gaston County?” Tens of
thousands of people ultimately
turned out for Wednesday night’s
rally, indicating that this red
county, at least, had an energized
Trump base. “People had to park
at the mall,” she said.
In this final sprint of the cam-
paign, Mr. Trump is now holding
up to three rallies a day to try to
“juice” his base, in the words of ad-
visers, as he bleeds support
among the suburban voters who
helped fuel his victory in 2016. His
trip to this bedrock Trump county,
and to Wisconsin and Ohio sub-
urbs and exurbs on Saturday
where his once-solid support is
sliding, reflect his need to ener-
gize as much of his base as he can
since many swing voters are now
behind former Vice President Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr. and there are few
undecided voters left.
Gastonia is only about a half-
hour west of downtown Charlotte,
but once you cross the county line
at the Catawba River, you are in
die-hard Trump country. The only
Democrat elected countywide
here is the sheriff, who shares the

president’s positions on guns and

immigration. Trump flags fly in

front of many houses, and lawn

signs with his name dot the high-

ways. “He isn’t a perfect presi-

dent, but I am more proud of him

now than I ever was before,” said

Sandy Caudle, who works for a

wholesale distributor and had two

Trump banners displayed with his

Halloween decorations on his

front porch in the town of Lowell.

Four years ago, Mr. Trump’s

outsized win in this district helped

him toward an overall victory in

North Carolina by a slim margin of

3.6 percentage points. A New York

Times/Siena College poll this

month of likely voters in the state

showed Mr. Biden leading Mr.

Trump by four points.

Lawn signs and campaign post-

ers for Mr. Biden in this area are

rare sightings. People like Karen

Brown, who had a modest Biden-

Harris sign displayed on her front

yard in Gastonia, said she could

not find one anywhere in town and

finally resorted to ordering the

$10 sign from Amazon.

Mr. Trump’s appearance in this

town of 77,000 on Wednesday

night — where he referred to Pres-

ident Barack Obama by his middle

name, “Hussein,” and claimed, in-

accurately, that the virus was

“rounding the corner” — was not

intended to win back the subur-

ban women voters who have

drifted away from him over the

last four years. That is a hill too

steep to climb at this point, in this

state: Some internal polls show

Mr. Trump trailing Mr. Biden by

double digits in the suburbs. The

rally’s purpose, campaign aides

said, was to activate his base.

There was the added practical

matter of simply securing a

friendly venue in the middle of a

pandemic that would allow him to

hold a mass gathering for more

than 20,000 fans.

“They don’t go to Raleigh or

Charlotte,” said Morgan Jackson,

a Democratic strategist based in

North Carolina. “They’re going to

Gastonia and Selma and

Greenville. They’re playing the

outer game to rally his base.

They’ve given up on the Mecklen-

burg County suburban area. I

think they’ve given up here on

those votes.”

The Trump campaign’s decision

to send the candidate to a conser-

vative county he is sure to win

may not be a sign of strength. But

it is probably his best shot at rally-

ing enough voters to prevail in

North Carolina, where Mr.

Trump’s most optimistic cam-

paign officials think he will eke out

a victory margin of less than

100,000 votes (four years ago, Mr.

Trump won the state by about

173,000 votes).

Bleeding votes in the Mecklen-

burg County suburbs, Mr. Trump

can afford no cracks in his support

in the districts he won four years

ago. In fact, he has to win bigger

here.

“In a year like this, in an elec-

tion like this, a point or two in a

community like Gaston County

could determine the statewide

race,” said Representative Patrick

McHenry, Republican of North

Carolina.

Michael Whatley, chairman of

the North Carolina Republican

Party, said a rally in Gastonia still

hit the Charlotte and Asheville

media markets and that the party

was still investing in a ground

game in Charlotte suburbs like

Matthews. But he conceded, “we

do need to do better in Gaston

County, just because of the num-

ber of people who have moved in.”

He added, “a vote from Gaston

County is the same as a vote from

Charlotte.”

In Gaston County, “we’re hitting

targeted voters with phone calls

and door-knock teams, and the

biggest mail program we’ve ever

run,” Mr. Whatley said. With up to

75 percent of votes expected to

come in before Election Day, Mr.

Whatley also noted that the state

party moved its mail program ear-

lier. “We’re going after targeted

voters there, making sure they’re

aware of early voting and how to

do it.” The party has had 200,

voter contacts in Gaston County.

“We’ve spent a lot of time working

those counties very aggressively,”

he said.

J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of

American politics at Catawba Col-

lege in Salisbury, N.C., said he had

seen nothing from the Trump

campaign that would indicate its

hopes for victory in the state lie

with converting more of the vot-

ers in the urban suburbs that Hil-

lary Clinton won four years ago by

one percentage point. “The way I

look at this race is what’s the shift

in those urban suburbs to Biden

and what are the Republican mar-

gins in those surrounding subur-

ban areas,” he said.

The Trump campaign has been

aware for months that the urban

suburbs are slipping away. The

narrow victory by Representative

Dan Bishop, a Republican, last

year, underscored the party’s

deepening unpopularity with sub-

urban voters, this time in the

Charlotte suburbs. And Republi-

cans in the state said Mr. Trump

was currently performing worse

than he did four years ago in

Mecklenberg County, which in-

cludes Charlotte and its suburbs.

They attribute the slippage to

Mr. Trump’s behavior. People in-

side and outside the campaign

pointed to his performance in the

first debate, as well as to his hospi-

talization for the coronavirus — a

grim symbol of his handling of the

virus crisis over all — as turning

off voters who are not convinced

of Mr. Biden’s policies.

“Theoretically, could Donald

Trump stop the bleeding in the

suburbs? The answer is maybe,”

said Geoff Garin, a Democratic

strategist working with Priorities

USA, a Democratic super PAC.

“Can Donald Trump stop the

bleeding in the suburbs, given

who he is and the way he’s con-

ducting himself? The answer to

that question is definitely no.” The

coronavirus remains the top issue

for suburban voters, Mr. Garin

said, and Mr. Trump “seems intent

every day to demonstrate that he

doesn’t take it seriously and that

he’s part of the problem.”

What may turn the president off

to those voters has endeared him

to the population in the exurbs.

“If he didn’t have rallies, there

would be no way to get his mes-

sage out,” said Stephanie Nixon, a

pharmacist who was volunteering

at a poll site on Thursday, dressed

in a “Women for Trump” T-shirt.

“I think he has to do it. I under-

stand the risks, but I understand

why close to 30,000 people went.”

Even in a Republican district, Ms.

Nixon said she felt that being a

Trump supporter put a target on

your back.

“We’re the silent majority,” she

said. “When I told my mom I was

wearing this shirt, she said,

‘you’re brave.’ ”

Despite the heavy Trump pres-

ence here, and an overall lack of

Biden lawn signs, Democrats and

independents said they saw

changes in their community that

made them feel hopeful that they

were creating a blue ripple that

could deprive Mr. Trump of the

state’s 15 electoral votes. The town

of Gastonia, they said, has become

a blue speck in a red county, with a

majority Democratic City Council

for the first time in recent history.

And some said they saw new

cracks here in the president’s sup-

port.

“I’m in two very intimate

groups: a book club and a bridge

club,” said Jennie Stultz, a former

mayor of Gastonia. “We are made

up of staunch Democrats and

staunch Republicans. Women

have become disenchanted with

the incivility of the president.”

Pam Morgenstern, a volunteer

poll greeter, said that over her 10

years living in Gaston County, she

had never seen as much engage-

ment on the Democratic side as

she had seen in the last few

months, when she has helped or-

ganize “Ridin’ with Biden” events

and block parties. She said she at-

tributes some of the change to

Democratic voters being priced

out of Charlotte and moving west.

“In 2016, the Clinton campaign did

send an organizer here, and we

had a headquarters,” she said.

“But people didn’t like Hillary as

much. We didn’t have the enthusi-

asm we are seeing now.”

On Thursday morning, Ms.

Morgenstern was handing out

campaign literature at an early

voting polling site in Cramerton

alongside Barbara Brown, whose

husband, David Wilson Brown, is

running a long-shot Democratic

campaign for Congress against

the Republican incumbent, Repre-

sentative Virginia Foxx.

Ms. Brown said she had stocked

up on groceries ahead of the presi-

dent’s visit, in order to be able to

quarantine and better protect her-

self from potential exposure to the

virus in the days after the rally.

Despite her increased anxiety

about the virus, she said the rally

also made her hopeful.

“They have to come here be-

cause we’re doing a kick-ass job,”

Ms. Brown said. “That’s why

they’re coming.”

President Trump at a rally last

week in Gastonia, N.C., a re-

gion he won handily in 2016.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Trump Team Fears Blue Ripple in a Red County

By ANNIE KARNI

Election

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