Beto O’Rourke came very close to beating Ted Cruz. How much closer can Dems get in 2020?
Rep. Beto O’Rourke
As newly updated election results showed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory was even tighter than first realized, Democratic-led voter registration groups are saying they’ve never felt closer to turning Texas into a true battleground.
Cruz’s margin of victory fell to just 214,901 votes, according to official results certified by Gov. Greg Abbott this week. That is about 5,000 votes closer than unofficial results showed last month.
Cruz won the race 50.9 to 48.3 percent — the closet U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1978.
While O’Rourke lost, groups like Battleground Texas say that margin of defeat is nearly four times closer than they thought was even possible and it has them itching to get to work on 2020.
“We can register that gap,” said Oscar Silva, executive director of Battleground Texas, a group that runs an aggressive registration program targeting potential Democratic voters.
The state saw twice that number of voters just registered between March and October, and Silva noted that every year 300,000 more Texas high school students come of age to register.
He said while many people suggest that 2018 was a one-year blip because of O’Rourke’s campaign, groups like Battleground Texas have been on the ground building an infrastructure that has lasting implications.
“That is sustainable,” he told the American Association of Political Consultants at a conference in Austin on Wednesday.
Battleground Texas said its data shows that, during early voting, nearly one out of every 25 voters under age 35 was registered by the group. Silva added that 69 percent of the people the group registered this year were voters of color, helping the electorate to begin to look more like the state’s overall minority-majority population.
Just a reminder, when BGTX showed up on the scene in 2013, their initial goal was to make Texas a competitive state for the 2020 Presidential election. Whatever amount of credit you give them at this point, we seem to be on track for that. I do believe that a big key to that is voter registration, which has been way up statewide and in Harris County. Look at it this way: If we get registration in Harris County into the 2.4 million to 2.5 million range for 2020, we could very reasonably aim for total turnout in the 1.5 million zone. Set a goal of 900K Democratic votes for a Presidential candidate in Harris County, and you’re talking a margin of victory in the 300K range. (I am, let’s just say skeptical, that Republicans will be able to push their turnout number much past the 600 to 620K they reached in 2016.) Beto won Harris County by 200K, and he lost the state by 215K. By this math, which I admit is ambitious, you’ve just that deficit almost in half. Obviously, I’m making a lot of other assumptions in here, but you get my point. More voters registered means more voters to turn out, and that’s a winning formula, one we have finally demonstrated we can achieve. Keep on keeping on.
All signs seem to indicate that Beto will run for president. It will be interesting.
I kept hoping that what has occurred with the stock market would happen before the election. That would probably have put Beto over the top.
Many people have found that the stocks for the most part were flat in 2018 and many have lost on paper a ton of money.
But they chose an idiot, crook, and a traitor for president.
If we can get voting centers in HC by that time it will also help. When I was poll watching the provisional ballot count, very few were accepted. It came down to people voted in the wrong precinct and if they did then their vote did not count. If we can make that no longer an issue then we can add thousands of (mostly Democratic) votes to the count.
I have not seen exit poll data, but from individual precinct data it appears to me that urban black turnout was flat in 2018. It would not take too much of an increase in that turnout to erase a 200K statewide margin.
We could always play a game called…
Are the female and black democrats on houston city council dumber than the management at my former employers?
Let us know when they figure out paid maternity leave, $15 minimum wage, childcare assistance