How Democrats Could Turn Texas Into the Blue Star State

By Bob Moser

This article appeared in the July 21, 2008 edition of The Nation.
July 1, 2008

The very notion of Texas Democrats glimpsing daylight--of America's biggest chunk of Republican real estate being shaded pink on the '08 election map--seems almost absurd, a contradiction in terms, even to those who are making it happen. Like many of the nuevo pols, bloggers and progressive activists who are constructing a state-of-the-art Democratic machine in Texas, Glazer and Berthume are too young to remember the last time skies were blue for the party that ruled Texas politics from Reconstruction clear through to Reagan/Bush. So is Burnt Orange publisher Karl-Thomas Musselman, who's 23. "The last time Democrats won my hometown"--a small outpost in the central Hill Country--"was 1964," he says. "And that was only because President Johnson brought the chancellor of Germany to Fredericksburg for a visit."

The last Democratic presidential nominee to carry Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976. The party hasn't won a solitary statewide election since 1996. Every November from 1972 to 2004, the Democrats bled seats from their once-unanimous majority in the Statehouse. By the 1990s, national Democrats like Bill Clinton had come to see Texas as "a money pot, period," says Molly Hanchey, a retiree who leads an 8,000-volunteer grassroots group called ObamaDallas. They flew in to raise cash, but they didn't stick around to scare up votes--and Clinton's party did nothing to help rebuild the state's hopelessly antiquated Democratic infrastructure. Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry tried to compete here. By 2004, Democratic fortunes had sunk so low that they carried just eighteen of 254 Texas counties at the top of the ticket.

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