The Biden campaign is doing something no national Democratic ticket has done in decades: dropping nearly $6 million into Texas, where no Democratic nominee has won since Jimmy Carter all the way back in 1976.
The $5.8 million ad buy starting Tuesday targets voters in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. The state's Democratic party chairman, Gilberto Hinojosa, who has been pushing for a bigger investment in the Lone Star State, called the investment "a very good sign."
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Trump won Texas by nine points in 2016, but the recent poll aggregate puts the race at closer to a 4-point advantage for Trump. That said, Texas demographics are changing fast, making the state more of a wild card than expected. As of two weeks ago, the state had "shattered" voter registration records, adding more than 1.5 million voters to the rolls since 2016, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Biden's effort will also be getting a boost from allies. The state party is investing several million in ads focusing on Black and Latino voters, while the anti-Trump Lincoln Project just unveiled a $1 million ad campaign in the state targeting over 600,000 suburban and rural Republican women.
Though neither Biden nor vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris is slated to visit the state yet in the closing weeks, the campaign did deploy Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, to visit San Antonio and Edinburg. He is also scheduled to swing through Dallas on Tuesday.
State GOP officials have also been urging Trump to visit at least once more before Election Day, according to the Dallas Morning News, but Trump's campaign schedule has been truncated by his COVID-19 diagnosis. Trump has already lost at least a handful of days due to this diagnosis and serious questions remain about when and even whether he can get back on the campaign trail. More than likely, that will keep whatever campaign stops he makes more narrowly focused on the most crucial battleground states, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, though the campaign hasn't made any official announcements yet.
One GOP lawmaker who seems to be taking the threat rather seriously is Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who is suddenly in a tighter-than-expected reelection race.
While other GOP senators were busy downplaying Trump's recklessness and even pushing Trump's claim that Americans shouldn't be afraid of COVID-19, Cornyn adopted a message that is surely intended to sell much better to the suburban women who have left Republicans in droves since 2016.
Talking to the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board, Cornyn dared to be moderately critical of Trump following his recent coronavirus infection, saying he "let his guard down" on the virus.
“I think in his desire to try to demonstrate that we are somehow coming out of this and that the danger is not still with us — I think he got out over his skis, and frankly, I think it’s a lesson to all of us that we need to exercise self-discipline,” Cornyn said.
Or alternatively, someone in a position of power, like Cornyn, could publicly and privately urge Trump to modify his own behavior before he single-handedly incapacitates Congress and the entire U.S. military command structure.
A sure sign of a tsunami is when a state that wasn’t even considered close at the outset of a cycle suddenly flips on election night. Flipping Texas is no sure thing, but as The Upshot’s Nate Cohn tweeted Tuesday: “Biden is also a light breeze away from leading in Texas, which would give him 413 electoral votes along with the other states where he leads in the polls.”
Again, Texas is still a red state until it demonstrates otherwise. But former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s 2.6-point loss to Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 was the closest any Democrat has come to winning a statewide election since 1994.