On this week’s episode of The Brief, hosts Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld unpacked the current state of COVID-19, voting rights, and electoral politics in Texas with special guest Julián Castro—as well as whether Castro himself is preparing for a run against Gov. Greg Abbott next year.
Castro, a Democrat from Texas, served as the mayor of San Antonio and was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama. He has offered critiques of the Texas governor's lack of leadership throughout the pandemic and shared his thoughts with Moulitsas and Eleveld on how Abbott’s failure to adequately respond to the COVID-19 crisis and protect Texans’ lives is one of many reasons why the Texas Republican Party is experiencing rapid losses from their ranks.
As the COVID situation continues worsening across the country, especially in red states like Texas and Florida, GOP leaders are digging in their heels and refusing to enact mask or vaccination policies, putting millions of lives at risk. Eleveld had this to say about what she perceives to be Republicans’ political strategy:
[DeSantis and Abbott] staked a claim on ‘freedom and individual liberty at all costs’ ... when they make their GOP presidential bid, come out and say, ‘I was always for personal freedom and I never let up on that—I never took my foot off the pedal.’ Unfortunately, in both of their states, COVID cases have just exploded. I think that they’ve painted themselves into a corner they can’t get out of.
DeSantis, in particular, has gone to war with any school or local official who has attempted to mandate masking or vaccines in any way. He has banned local mask mandates, and just recently his handpicked board of education said that it would punish two counties in Florida that implemented universal in-school masking by docking teacher pay.
Moulitsas named the absurdity of punishing schools for trying to keep their students safe and doesn’t think it’s popular with Americans broadly. “I feel like I have seen public opinion grow more and more agitated and entrenched against anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers,” Eleveld agreed.
She followed up with a notable statistic to come out of recent polling from an Ipsos/USA Today survey on these issues, which found that 70% agree individuals have the right to choose not to get the vaccine, but they don’t have the right to be around the vaccinated. “That 70% is basically saying, sure, if you don’t want to vaccinate, sure, you do you. But guess what? You don’t get to be around me and the other people who have acted responsibly, not only to help our health, but to help the health of the community as we try to get back to life,” she added.
Moulitsas thinks it’s time to start enacting stricter rules when it comes to vaccination requirements:
[We need to] start making it difficult to be unvaccinated, make it uncomfortable … if you’re going into my supermarket, into my airports, museums, so on—anywhere where I have to be because I have to interact with society. I don’t think it’s a big ask, particularly for the kind of crowd who insists they’re not going to get vaccinated because they don’t know what’s in the vaccine, but they’re going to pump themselves up with horse dewormer and Clorox—they have no problem with that. But they’re so ideologically opposed to the vaccine, yet they’re still clearly afraid of the virus itself. It’s killing people, it’s killing their communities. It’s running rampant. So now they’re looking for the alternative that isn’t the vaccine, because that would admit that they were wrong the whole time? This is what we’ve come down to?
“I will never understand why [wearing masks] became such a cultural flashpoint,” he added.
“What’s amazing is how badly a loud and vocal fringe of the GOP base is desperate to have people lie to them,” Eleveld said, recalling a recent Trump rally where the former president mentioned that vaccines work. “He didn’t even give a full-throated endorsement of the vaccine; he just said, ‘I got vaccinated,’ and they were all booing. They don’t want to hear that the vaccines work—not even from Donald Trump! … This segment, and it’s a fairly large segment of the Republican party, is desperate to be lied to.”
Both Moulitsas and Eleveld expressed their frustration and concern that children under 12 in schools have now become pawns in this political game. As they have no choice in getting vaccinated, the only protection they have is universal masking. “[Mandatory masking] is their last line of defense,” Eleveld fumed. “And it is what these depraved GOP governors want to take away from them.”
Castro joined the show at this point to offer his insights on the COVID situation in Texas and how he thinks Democrats can continue expanding their connection with communities of color in the state.
With the COVID crisis only worsening across Texas, Castro believes the horrendous response the pandemic has accelerated an exodus from the Republican Party that had already begun over the last decade or so, noting that “there are a lot of people who are leaving the Republican Party in Texas. They were already leaving—Trump only won the state by 5.5 points. I say ‘only’ because Obama lost the state by 16 points in 2012, so these guys are putting on full display their failures.”
Biden has also provided the kind of leadership during the COVID crisis that the country needed so sorely during the Trump years, and while 2022 is likely going to be a difficult election cycle for Democrats, Castro believes there is hope:
You would think that if there was a cycle where Americans might buck that trend, it would be where we saw the calamity of COVID under Donald Trump, and how Joe Biden has come in and cleaned up that mess—and delivered more competence, more results, shots in arms, people going back to work. The kind of government where, even if people don’t necessarily like government, they recognize that you need a government that knows what it’s doing, that is effective, that is competent, and that can walk and chew gum at the same time. Biden is delivering that, so perhaps we can buck that trend in 2022, here in Texas and nationally, too.
The trend is clear, Moulitsas agreed. He asked, “What do we need to do to close that last five percent, and do you see anything in the census data that might hint at what that might look like?”
Castro responded:
Texas is growing like crazy … the most fascinating statistic in the write-ups was that for the new growth, it was like 95% people of color. That was one thing. Secondly, for people under the age of 18—so basically, kids, Latinx folks—already account for 48.5% of that group. And the African American community, Asian American community are also growing. Both native-born Texans … but also a lot of people that have come from other states that expect government that is more robust, more effective, more honest, less corrupt—all of that, I think, is changing the state.
Demographics, as people have pointed out, aren’t necessarily destiny. However, there is a very clear trend, and what Democrats need to close that gap is to organize, organize, organize. Don’t give up on anybody, but also bring people into the fold that haven’t always been in the fold. Don’t take communities of color for granted just because they’ve voted Democratic … but I’m confident we can do that here.
The rapidly shifting demographics of Texas, as we got a window into through the 2020 census, are in part due to policy priorities put forth by Republican leaders who have increasingly looked to draw in more money from corporations, especially in the tech industry.
Under Greg Abbott, the state has thrown billions and billions of dollars at tech companies and other corporations that have been relocating their U.S. headquarters or global headquarters to Texas. “They’re not bringing in Idaho—they’re bringing in the Bay Area,” Markos quipped.
This is complicating political strategy for the Texas GOP, Castro explained:
That’s bringing a lot of people that are not from Texas. And it’s bringing a lot of people with different politics from where the state is at. And so in that sense, you are right that they are victims of what you’d call their success in incentivizing these companies with low taxes and low regulation, and so forth. Well, okay, they’re coming. And what they’re doing is voting in people like Colin Allred and Lizzy Fletcher in the suburbs of Dallas and the suburbs of Houston.
Voter suppression efforts could complicate this, however. “On redistricting, [Texas Republican leadership is] going to be partisan as they can be. They’re going to try to get away with as far as they can to try to maximize the number of Republican seats, even though 95% of that growth in Texas was people of color—65% Latino—they’ll try to nullify that,” Castro noted.
Texas has eluded Democrats’ reach for years, despite seeming to be in play. But Castro remains optimistic about flipping the state, highlighting the importance of making Texas an example for other states that could also turn blue within the next few election cycles:
We really are just on the doorstep of when this state does flip over—and it is going to flip over, and you can tell that—when it flips over, instead of being in so many ways a bad example, think about how powerful a good example the state is actually going to be one day. And that’s what I try to hang on to and keep thinking about, even as we have to deal with all these folks who are trying to take us backward.
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