Texas now a prime target for partisan realignment

Targeting Texas

By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT

While the Republican Party struggles to resolve fratricidal conflict over gay marriage and immigration reform, there is another elephant in the room: Texas, the last big-state bastion of the right. Neglected by national Democrats since 1992, when Bill Clinton’s campaign decided to write it off, Texas has emerged as a prime target for partisan realignment.

A group of Democratic operatives, led by two veterans of the 2012 Obama campaign, Jeremy Bird and Jenn Brown, is determined to bring Texas back into the Democratic column. Bird and Brown have put together an independent expenditure committee — Battleground Texas — to combine advances in high-tech microtargeting and digital communication with the volunteer mobilization that characterized Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Battleground Texas has put the fear of God into the Texas Republican Party.

In a speech on April 15 before the McLennan County Republican Club, Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General and a potential candidate for governor in 2014, declared that Battleground Texas represents a bigger danger to the state than Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea:

One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons.

(More here.)