Just checking in, but this story does address a question I’ve been wondering about.
The dozen or so Hillary Clinton supporters gathered here late Tuesday had no illusions that ruby-red Texas would play a key role in electing the next Democratic president. They acknowledged they may get sent to other states to phone bank and block walk, and they were told — repeatedly — not to expect Clinton’s campaign to open a brick-and-mortar outpost in the Lone Star State anytime soon.
Yet they held out hope that the former secretary of state could put up a fight in Texas, where Democrats are desperately looking for a boost after devastating losses in last year’s statewide elections.
“She may not win this state,” said Terry Adkins, a former union official who recalls registering voters with the Clintons decades ago in the Rio Grande Valley. “But I do believe she’s going to really scare some Republicans.”
The meeting at the back of the Llano Public Library — held on a dreary evening in the heart of the Hill Country, 90 minutes outside Texas’ liberal refuge of Austin — highlighted the Clinton campaign’s first public efforts to build an organization in a state that rejected President Barack Obama by double-digit margins in 2008 and 2012. The campaign is decisively concentrating on the primary in Texas and elsewhere, reflective of a humble approach to a presidential race in which Clinton has long been presumed as the Democratic nominee.
Still, as they rally donors and volunteers, some Texas Democrats cannot help but imagine a general election in which Clinton shakes the party out of its statewide slump.
“I’m not giving up on the general election in Texas because I think she’s the kind of candidate who could build on the work Battleground Texas and other groups have done and make a credible showing,” said Carrin Patman, a Houston trial lawyer who is helping raise money for the campaign. “It may sound quixotic, but I wouldn’t rule out her putting Texas in play in 2016.”
[…]
For Texas Democrats, it remains an open question how the campaign will mesh with the network of state-level groups working to turn the state blue, especially as those groups find their footing after getting crushed up and down the ballot in 2014. Battleground Texas Executive Director Jenn Brown said in a statement Tuesday that it is “too soon to tell what things will look like in Texas in 2016 or how Battleground Texas and its supporters will interact with the president campaign.”
Clinton’s fans in Texas nonetheless see Battleground as an eventual partner for the campaign. Some believe the benefits of its work last year will not be evident until a presidential election cycle, when Democrats tend to turn out more than they do in midterm elections.
See here and here for the background. This is the first explicit mention of BGTx I’ve seen in one of these stories, though we still don’t know how they will interact with Team Hillary. All I know is that whatever it turns out to be, if it works well we need to keep it going from there. We need for 2018 to be a lot better than 2014 and 2010 were.