Sanders riding momentum as Texas voting begins

Fifth in a series of reports on the chief presidential contenders in Texas’ March 1 primaries.

As Bernie Sanders was storming to a double-digit victory in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, more than 30 of his Texas supporters were energetically reaching out to voters from a makeshift phone bank in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema on South Lamar.

Among those manning the phones was Tim League, the movie chain’s founder and CEO, who opened the doors of Theater Six to Sanders volunteers. The featured movie was scheduled to have been Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but for a few hours Tuesday, with the lights turned up and phone pitches echoing throughout the auditorium, Bernie Sanders, at least figuratively, was the starring attraction.

The scene at the south Austin cinema offered a small snapshot of Sanders’ expanding legions in the Lone Star State as the hard-fought Democratic presidential race — once considered a political cake walk for Hillary Clinton — begins moving toward March 1 Super Tuesday primaries in Texas and more than a dozen other states, predominately in the South. Early voting in the Texas primary begins Tuesday.

Clinton has deep ties in Texas, dating back to her days as a young Yale law student registering minority voters in the 1970s, and has long been favored to prevail in the state’s earlier-than-usual mega primary, the biggest prize on Super Tuesday.

But, as he has nationally, Sanders, a 74-year-old independent senator from Vermont, is waging an unexpectedly potent assault in Texas by tapping into widespread anger over Wall Street corruption, pay-for-play politics, social inequality and other ills.

League, 45, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with “Bern the White House” in a mock presidential seal, said he and his wife, Karrie, are aligned with Sanders because of his promised reforms of big banking and the nation’s campaign finance system. “One thing that really bothered us was the 2008 financial crisis and the fact that nobody went to jail over it,” he said.

Those on board the Sanders bandwagon include an eclectic mix of longtime Democratic progressives — former Texas Agriculture Commissioner and nationally known populist Jim Hightower is one of Sanders’ leading surrogates — as well as college students and other young people, many of them first-time participants in political activism.

“It really is a broad coalition. That’s not just a talking point,” said state campaign director Jacob Limon, who is on leave of absence as chief of staff for Democratic State Rep. Nicole Collier of Fort Worth to run Sanders’ operations in Texas.

Wide appeal

Campaign officials and supporters say they are also broadening ties to blacks and Hispanics, who have traditionally formed a powerful share of Clinton’s political base.

“I can identify with his message,” said Kenneth Sanders of Arlington, an African-American who serves as a North Texas field officer for the campaign. Sanders, a former logistics manager for Lockheed Martin who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2012, said that Bernie Sanders, as an advocate for the working class and ordinary Americans, presents “a body of work that African-Americans will grow to respect and accept and elect.”

Jubilee Dickson, a 30-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington, said she became an active volunteer after doing a Google search to find out more about Sanders. “I didn’t really know who he was,” she recalled. “And as I started reading about him, I found myself kind of agreeing with everything he was saying, and that made me want to get involved.”

Dickson, who is also on the adjunct faculty at Tarrant County College, said she was particularly attracted by Sanders’ proposals on education, including free college tuition and reducing interest on student loans. An independent who has never been actively involved in politics before, Dickson said she now passes out fliers, participates in phone banks and posts on Facebook “to get out the word” for Sanders.

Sanders was one of the first presidential contenders of either party to establish a state operation in Texas, setting up shop in November with a campaign headquarters in east Austin that now features an 8-foot-tall, free-standing “Bernie 2016” sign in the front yard.

Perhaps in a statement to set Sanders apart from other candidates, his organizers got their candidate on the ballot for the Texas primary by raising more than 12,000 petition signatures — well over the 5,000 needed — in lieu of paying a $2,500 filing fee. All other presidential candidates who registered for the Texas Democratic and Republican primaries paid the filing fee, according to party spokesmen.

Seeking ‘revolution’

Sanders, an independent running as a Democrat, also served notice that he planned an aggressive campaign in Texas when he swung through the state in July to deliver his now-familiar call for a “political revolution” before more than 8,000 spectators in Dallas and more than 5,000 in Houston.

The candidate promoted the North Texas appearance on his campaign’s Facebook page by advising supporters: “I am coming to Dallas for a rally to discuss getting big money out of politics, combating climate change, making college education more affordable, and dealing with obscene wealth and income inequality.”

The opening rounds showed that the race for the 2016 Democratic nomination will clearly be a two-person street fight as Sanders came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and then dealt her a withering setback in the New Hampshire primary with a 60 percent to 38 percent victory. Next comes Nevada on Feb. 20, South Carolina on Feb. 27 and the Texas-Super Tuesday contests in just over two weeks.

The relatively few, and somewhat dated, polls in the Texas contest have typically shown Clinton with a commanding double-digit lead. Sanders has clearly strengthened his support in Texas, say experts, particularly with his performances in the opening contests, although the exact measure is difficult to gauge.

“There is more interest in Bernie than I would have thought 90 days ago or six months ago,” said former Tarrant County Chairman Steve Maxwell, a Fort Worth attorney who says he has not taken sides in the race.

While Clinton “probably has the inside track,” said Maxwell, “you have a lot of people who see something exciting in him. … There’s more of a following here than you would expect.

“If you’d asked me this question six months ago,” he added, “I would have told you there’s not even a contest.”

This story was originally published February 13, 2016 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Sanders riding momentum as Texas voting begins."