The Day After
We rounded up some Texas journalists and notables to give us their reactions to the long campaign which culminated in Barack Obama being elected the 44th president. Here’s what they said.
Susan says: I will not claim to be a Democrat nor a Republican, but stand as a true independent, native Texan. I will say that I will not vote for any person who claims the far-right ideology of the Republican party. This great state needs to move way beyond that kind of thinking. (November 6th, 2008 at 2:36pm)
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The Democratic movement also benefitted greatly from urban support for Barack Obama. The big question now is can the Democrats sustain that when Obama is not on the ballot in 2010?
For the Republicans, not all was grim. They still proved they can win statewide, and in most instances the Democrats can′t touch them. That won′t change until the Democrats can roll Tarrant County into their column.
Also, as the most populous Republican state, Texas may become more important in the 2012 presidential elections. That would enhance the possibility of Gov. Rick Perry or U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn to take a serious look at running.
—R.G. Ratcliffe, long-time Texas political reporter for the Houston Chronicle. (Read more analysis of the race on Chron.com: Democrats Gain Ground but Texas Remains a Red State.)
My thoughts? First, I’m thinking it should be today that Starbucks offers free coffee. Okay, beyond that, on the national front, my overall impression is: Wow. No matter who you voted for, the fact that we will have our first black president has got to instill you with some sense of pride. We have come a long way as a nation. We have reached a day where we can judge a man by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. We have achieved a dream. That we only hand him the keys to the car when it’s in the proverbial ditch is another story.
In Texas, Republicans withstood the Democratic tsunami (no less than Kay Bailey Hutchison’s description). But they’ve noticed that it’s started to rain. Dallas County flipped Democratic four years ago. Last night it was Harris County’s turn. In 2002, the 150-member Texas House had 88 Republicans. With last night’s results, it now has 76, maybe 75 depending on a recount. The GOP lost a seat in the state Senate, possibly two depending on a run-off. The margin of victory in statewide races has gotten thinner—more like a comb-over than a thick mane. Can you hear the pitter-patter of the rain drops? When you dominate virtually every office in the state, there’s only one way to go. That’s probably why the Democrats have called a big puffy press conference and the Republicans, looking for coffee, haven’t yet.
—Christy Hoppe, Austin Bureau Chief of the Dallas Morning News
The Travis County Democratic Party is very happy. We showed that a strong field organization makes a huge difference in close races. We were very ambitious with our field plans this year in Travis County—we gambled that if we built the infrastructure, the volunteers would come. And they did. Not only did we make every call and knock on every door that we wanted to this time, hundreds of local volunteers helped Obama by calling or even traveling to swing states.
I had never seen a national news station declare Texas “too close to call” in the presidential race before last night. It turns out that Barack Obama did very well in early voting in Texas. This shows that, should we ever again run a full statewide coordinated campaign with a field component, we can win Texas. The simple fact that Hillary and Obama ran a full barrage of television ads in the primary helped inspire Texans to vote Democratic in the primary, and some of that carried over into the general. It was the first time I can remember that we had more ads talking about the great attributes of Democrats than about the attributes of Republicans. Ads help, but they must be accompanied by a field campaign.
We can win the Governor′s race in 2010, but only if we keep our fundraising dollars here in Texas. We need to have statewide operations in 2010 like those we ran here in Travis County and in Harris County in 2008. Just look at our local results. Yes, Travis County as a whole is very Democratic, but we also won at least three seats in very conservative parts of the county. Karen Huber unseated longtime Republican County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, Adan Ballesteros unseated Constable Bob Vann, and Valinda Bolton was reelected against the Keel name. The key in all of these races was a strong grassroots volunteer-fueled field campaign. I look forward to helping with this effort again in 2010.
—Andy Brown, chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party
As post-election realities sink in on November 5, I′m wondering how the election gets incorporated in the political zeitgeist in Texas. Beyond the obvious predicable orgy of post-election deconstruction of trends and numbers and winners and losers (in which I′ll gladly participate later), just what the new normal is going to feel like is a huge question.
Just how contentious will Texas be now that the state is a de facto leader in the national opposition? The Republican majority in the state will almost certainly take an active role as the political opposition to the new national majority, which is a natural outcome of the election returns in the state and Texas′s size and stature compared to other states maintaining Republican majorities. But this happens as the Republican majority in the state is besieged by both the national political tides and a more competitive political system inside the state. Will Texas Republicans choose to follow the path of their candidate in his concession speech, or instead go the route of those in the crowd who booed and hissed at the mention of Obama′s name? If the mood of the political majority in the state turns toward the Palinist view that Obama is not merely the opposition but somehow un-American or fundamentally intolerable, they will aggravate the political and cultural differences that are already feeding the Democratic recovery in the state.
Three and a half million Texans cast their vote for Obama—and as the ever-astute Ross Ramsey has pointed out, these voters were concentrated in the four major counties in the state. If the ruling majority stakes its political future on an assault on the sensibilities that fueled Obama′s support in the state—urban or urban-friendly, multiracial, educated—it will at the same time be aggravating deep cultural divisions in the state. At best, this is only a short-term strategy for narrowly defined political success. At worst, it pushes the state away from yesterday′s shift in the national political culture—a shift that has nothing to do with political party, and everything to do with people embracing a more expansive and civil view of what Texas is becoming, and what it can be in the future.
—Jim Henson directs the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin. 
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