Home of the Brave Election Plight
In which Joshua Treviño and Harold Cook swap emails (and opinions) about the 2012 election, political trends, and what happens next in Texas.
Joshua Treviño is the Vice President for External Relations at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a co-founder of RedState.com, and possibly worse than you've heard. You can follow him @jstrevino.
Harold Cook, a Texas progressive who's been in a bad mood for years, provides both humorous political satire and serious analysis to private clients, television audiences, and readers of his blog, LettersFromTexas.com. You can follow him @HCookAustin.
From: Joshua Treviño
To: Harold Cook
Date: November 7, 2012, 11:33 a.m.
Dear Harold,
In the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, "Boy, that escalated quickly! I mean, that really got out of hand fast!" The President's reelection victory was, to me, in the bag by around 7 pm yesterday, when it became clear that Romney's path required a three- or four-state turnaround. He might get one or two of them, I thought, but not enough to get over the top. Sadly, my keen nose for electoral disaster, honed by having partaken of it in ample measure in the past, proved accurate.
And what a disaster it was: at this writing, 303 electoral votes for the President versus 206 for Romney; a 2-point popular-vote victory; and retention of Virginia and Florida from his 2008 win. This election, to my mind, is more historic than the 2008 blowout. There was always a suspicion—and not just on my side!—that what happened then was a unique and irreproducible moment, born of a global economic crisis, war weariness, a remarkably inept GOP campaign, and media swoon over the candidate that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford dubbed “the Lightworker”. Surely the cold light of economic misery and policy failure over the past four years would right the ship. Well, now we know: it wasn't and it didn't.
That's the big takeaway in my book, and it's why I'm calling 2012 the liberals' 1980. This is the moment when a coalition emerged that will likely be with us for the next generation: minorities, women, youth, and whites at the upper- and lower-income extremes. The Democrats have been trying to assemble this coalition, more or less, since 1972, in no small part because they haven't won the white vote in a Presidential election since 1964, and finally the demographics made it work. The Romney campaign rolled the dice on the chance that Republicans had one more cycle with the old model, and consequently won whites by a margin of, I believe, about 20%. The results speak for themselves.
If you're thinking, at this point, "Hey, this is hugely applicable to Texas, with its impending Hispanic plurality," congratulations. (I know you are, Harold, but I understand these emails are being leaked to local press.) We should be wary of assuming national electoral coalitions are reproduced in toto at the state level, but it's fair to say that when and if Texas Hispanics vote in proportion to their numbers, they'll be strongly Democratic. This changes things in ways that doubtless make a Democratic consultant's heart soar.
I focus on Hispanics partly because they're so significant in Texas, and also because nationally, they're a major group with whom the Republicans can plausibly make inroads, which would challenge the new Obama coalition. (The other major group is women, who I think are less monolithic than presented—but that's another discussion.) Romney yesterday ceded a whopping 71% of the Hispanic vote to the President. That's extraordinary, and speaks to an important point that I look forward to deploying rather often in the forthcoming intra-movement debates: any of the other major GOP-primary contenders—Governor Perry, Senator Santorum, Speaker Gingrich—would (ceteris paribus!) likely have done just as well among whites yesterday, and significantly better among Hispanics. And that just might have made the difference.
Harold, you speak from the side of the victor today. I look forward to your pronouncements on the new order. May we agree on one point from the start? That is this: the 2016 field on both sides is going to be amazing.
Yours in defeat,
Joshua Treviño
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From: Harold Cook
To: Joshua Treviño
Date: Wednesday, November 7, 2012, 2:29 p.m.
Dear Josh,
I am not without my sympathies. As a Texas Democrat, I’ve been there. Hell, as a Texas Democrat, I live there.
Your points on coalition-building are well-taken. Put differently, or perhaps extended: the Republican Party simply cannot ignore—or worse, pick on, scapegoat, or otherwise rhetorically molest—entire swathes of the electorate all year, and then expect them to have collective amnesia, forgive all that, jump in the car and show up on election night, just because Republicans texted.
In politics, as in life, if you’re making enemies faster than you’re making friends, you’re doing it wrong. In the face of undeniable demographic and voting behavior shifts that have added to the clout of women and amplified the influence of minorities, too many Republican nominees said and did too many stupid things. They were richly punished for it.
It’s not hard to understand how it could happen. Republican candidates have understandably, over the past several election cycles, developed an absolute terror of their own primary voters. As Mr. Romney himself learned, the things you must say to win a Republican primary these days are nothing short of amazing. And the only thing worse than a candidate like Romney, who was faking it, are the Tea Party-fueled candidates—like Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana—who weren’t.
We Texans are used to this sort of thing. Since Democrats haven’t won a statewide election since 1994, when this year’s college freshmen were born, statewide Republicans well understand that all one must do to win public office around here is win their primary. And so, not irrationally, the only voters Republican candidates in Texas have effectively communicated with in recent years are their own primary voters. Too often they’ve done so by appealing to the worst instincts of the party faithful. The scapegoats in that narrative have included women, students, minorities, gay Americans, and disaffected Anglos. Sure, it’s been more than enough to win statewide elections. But it doesn’t grow a political party. Over time, in fact, it shrinks one.
“But what about our prize Latino, Ted Cruz?!” Republicans screech. Mighty good spin, but not only was Mr. Cruz not elected by Latino voters, last night’s results show that he didn’t even appeal to Latino voters in the slightest. Cruz was effectively elected by a tiny slice of the most right-wing, and Anglo, Texans: those who vote in Republican primary runoff elections. And in last night’s general, Cruz got pounded in many of the counties controlled by Latino voters. Mr. Cruz was elected last night for only one reason: he wasn’t the Democrat in the race. That’s not exactly hero material, nor is it a path forward for a political party attracting fewer and fewer voters among the fastest-growing demographic in the state.
Wendy Davis’ win in the state senate race in Fort Worth represents another case in which Republicans are holding themselves back. Even though the federal courts had little trouble wrapping their heads around the intentional discrimination, as courts termed it, in the Republican-drawn redistricting maps, Republicans have been unwilling to acknowledge it. To be sure, Senator Davis is a great candidate, and she undoubtedly gets her fair share of independent voters. But minorities control the outcome of elections in that district, and this is the second election in which Davis has proved it by attracting virtually all of their votes, and winning. Yet best I can tell, Republicans made little effort, and no headway, in attracting minority support there.
It would be one thing if electoral results like these had been engineered by a Democratic Party so brilliant that they successfully attracted the coalition of women, minorities, working families, and disaffected Anglos with whom they won nationally last night. But I bluntly doubt we're that brilliant. My strong suspicion is that Democrats won based on a coalition of voters that Republicans effectively offended and forced out. Let me say that again, because Republicans should ponder it: Democrats didn’t create the coalition you describe, as much as Republicans repelled the coalition with which Democrats won.
And therein also lies Texas Democrats’ greatest challenge looking forward. It’s not as if we’ve been doing a bang-up job statewide of working to attract those voters; underfunding in recent years has prevented the Democratic Party from doing so, to say nothing of the poor choices of various better-funded statewide Democrats. And it’s not as if any group anywhere is genetically predisposed to vote Democratic, or to not vote Republican. Rather, it has mainly been the Republican Party’s focus on communicating only with its own primary voters which has alienated women and minority voters in the state and, at best, prevented Republicans from making inroads with them.
While Democrats benefitted from it last night—even in Texas—they’d be well-advised to learn how to stand on their own two feet with those voters, before Republicans crack the code.
My best wishes for a sane holiday season, before what promises to be an insane legislative session,
Harold
••••••
From: Joshua Treviño
To: Harold Cook
Date: November 5, 2012, 10:38 p.m.
Dear Harold,
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