When will it be Texas' turn?

The LA Times looks at the national coalition Barack Obama built in winning the Presidency and considers the next obvious target for expansion of the political battleground.

Texas, the nation's second-most-populous state and home to 34 electoral votes, was not a 2008 presidential battleground, and Republican nominee John McCain won there by a comfortable margin. The Obama campaign spent little money there, apart from recruiting volunteers to work in other states.

But strategists believe the large and growing Latino population there remains untapped, along with a large black electorate, which could make Texas competitive with a major investment of time and money from an Obama-led Democratic Party.

Similar possibilities exist in Arizona, another heavily Latino state that leans Republican, and Georgia, with a growing Latino population and a black electorate that grew from one-quarter of the overall voters four years ago to nearly one-third on Tuesday.

In turning Florida and Ohio, among other states, this year, Obama organizers focused for months not only on registering new voters but also on tracking down blacks, Latinos and young people who had been registered but never voted.

One top Obama strategist said the campaign had already sought to build the Texas state party, handing over a database with hundreds of thousands of voter names and phone numbers gathered when Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton competed in the state's Democratic primary. Much of the campaign's attention in that effort focused on Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley.

The strategist, Cuauhtemoc "Temo" Figueroa, Obama's top Latino outreach official, said the state could be taken seriously as a presidential battleground if Democrats could win statewide races there in 2010. "I don't know if it's four years or eight years off, but down the road, Texas will be a presidential battleground," Figueroa said.

I feel like I've covered this ground before, so let me just reiterate that until we see an actual, fully-funded, all-out effort by the Democrats to try and win in Texas, we won't know what is possible here. If you want to bring up 2002, I'll simply note that we're not living in 2002 any more, and the political landscape in the state with its increasingly blue urban areas has shifted considerably. It would be nice to have some proof of concept by winning a statewide race, say the Governorship, in 2010 as a dry run. It would be nice if someone could design and implement a real strategy for turning out Hispanic voters at a higher rate instead of just everyone talking about how nice such a thing would be. Most of all, it would be nice if the national establishment would regard Texas as an opportunity for expansion rather than just a cash cow. Team Obama has proven it can win, or at least come close, everywhere it has really made the effort. Texas is the next logical step for them to take. BOR and MyDD have more.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on November 11, 2008 to The making of the President