Clinton counting on friendlier reception in Texas
Sixth and final installment of a series of reports on the chief presidential contenders in Texas’ March 1 primaries.
After struggling in the opening rounds of the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton is headed to friendlier territory in Texas and other Southern states, where she is counting on strong support among minorities and long-standing regional ties to smooth her path toward the Democratic nomination.
Texas is the largest of more than a dozen states that will conduct simultaneous primaries and caucuses in just over a week, on March 1. For Clinton, it forms the centerpiece of her strategy for a Super Tuesday triumph to douse the momentum of her hard-charging adversary, Bernie Sanders.
Underscoring the importance of Texas, the former first lady and ex-secretary of state swooped into Houston on Saturday night for a get-out-the-vote rally at Texas Southern University, one of the nation’s largest historically black universities. On Monday, former President Bill Clinton will be in the state to publicly campaign for his wife in Dallas and Laredo.
“Hello, Houston, is this a great night or what?” she asked a crowd of several thousand cheering supporters just a couple hours after her victory speech in Nevada. Clinton said the “stakes are high” in Texas, and have gotten even higher in wake of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The appearances by the former first couple are part of an energized Texas offensive that the Clinton team unveiled last week, including headquarters announcements in key cities, prominent endorsements and a spike in volunteer activities such as block-walking and phone banks.
The effort, which followed sporadic criticism that Clinton is off to a slow start in Texas, was designed to widen support in advance of the primary and propel voters to the polls during early voting, which ends Friday.
Clinton is under intense pressure to catch fire on Super Tuesday after she barely beat Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, in the Iowa caucuses and lost by 22 points a week later in the New Hampshire primary. She took the next step to regaining confidence by slipping past Sanders in the Nevada caucuses Saturday.
A survey released by Public Policy Polling of Raleigh, N.C., last week gives her reason for optimism, showing her leading, mostly by double digits, in 10 of the 12 states that will hold Democratic primaries between March 1 and 8. In Texas, she led by 23 points, 57 percent to 34 percent.
Former Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, a leader of Clinton’s presidential campaign in Texas, said one of her biggest strengths is a deeply entrenched network of political support and personal friendships in the state, dating to the days when she was a young Yale law student registering South Texas voters in the early 1970s.
In her first run for the White House, in 2008, she defeated her future boss, Barack Obama, in the Texas primary although Obama got the most support in post-primary caucuses under a now-abandoned system called the Texas Two Step. Clinton, a former state first lady from neighboring Arkansas, also visited Texas frequently to campaign for her husband during his two presidential races in the 1990s.
No stranger in Texas
“We’re not introducing her to Texas or Texans,” said Mauro, a friend of the Clintons for more than four decades. “She’s known Texas and Texans for a long time.”
A total of 252 delegates are at stake in Texas, the third-largest package of delegates in the Democratic nomination race behind California and New York. Some 222 delegates will be proportionally awarded based on the results of the primary, and 30 will be doled out to “super-delegates,” consisting of Texas Democrats in Congress and Texas members of the Democratic National Committee.
An overarching goal, Mauro said, will be to duplicate and build on the support Clinton got in the 2008 race while capturing the black vote, which overwhelmingly went to Obama.
According to exit polls, Obama got 84 percent of the black vote in Texas, compared with 16 percent for Clinton, who ultimately became Obama’s secretary of state. The PPP survey for Texas, which was conducted among 514 likely Democratic primary voters on Feb. 14-16, shows Clinton leading Sanders among blacks by 40 points, 63 percent to 23 percent, suggesting that the Clinton campaign is closing in on its goal. Clinton also leads overwhelmingly among blacks in the other states that will vote in early March, according to the PPP survey.
Another reliable bloc of support for Clinton comes from Hispanics, who constitute 37 percent of the state’s population. Clinton outpolled Obama by more than 2-to-1 among Texas Latinos in the 2008 primary, according to exit polls, and leads Sanders 54 percent to 38 percent among Hispanics in the recent PPP survey.
Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said Clinton has reason to be “pretty confident” in Texas but he cites some possible “yellow flags,” including the high degree of enthusiasm among young Sanders voters and the perception that Clinton’s team is off to a late start in Texas. Still, unlike New Hampshire and Iowa, Texas has major urban areas with large populations of minority voters, he said, “and those have been areas of strength for Secretary Clinton.”
Clinton recently snared a crucial endorsement from the political arm of the Congressional Black Caucus and counts Reps. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth and Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston among her leading African-American supporters in Texas. Hispanic leaders supporting Clinton include Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, often mentioned as a potential Clinton running mate, and his twin brother, congressman Joaquin Castro.
Local efforts
Another active supporter is former state Sen. Wendy Davis, the 2014 Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee who is slated to campaign in Clinton’s behalf in Texas and other Super Tuesday states. Davis, who recently moved from Fort Worth to Austin, said Clinton, whom she has known since 2008, sent her a supportive letter just after Davis earned national attention in 2013 with a Senate filibuster against a Republican abortion restriction bill.
“She doesn’t back down on women’s issues,” Davis said last week. “She doesn’t back down on the importance of reproductive freedoms.”
Fort Worth attorney Jason C.N. Smith, who is heading the Clinton effort in Tarrant County, said the Texas campaign has been laying the groundwork for well over a year with a preparatory “Ready for Hillary” super political action committee and residual support from the 2008 race but has slammed into high gear within the last month, particularly to raise awareness of early voting.
In Fort Worth, he says, volunteers are staffing phone banks out of an office in the medical district and conduct block walks in key precincts. Local Democratic leaders engaged in the campaign, he said, include state Reps. Chris Turner of Grand Prairie, Nicole Collier of Fort Worth and Ramon Romero of Fort Worth, and Fort Worth Councilman Sal Espino.
Clinton is overwhelmingly out front in the quest for campaign dollars, according to the Federal Election Commission, raising $4.9 million in Texas, compared with $670,475 for Sanders. Houston attorney Carrin Patman, a longtime Clinton friend and fundraiser, said she has “been on the horn” since the campaign began taking root and has raised over a quarter of a million dollars.
“Certainly among the people I contact for fund-raising, there’s great enthusiasm,” Patman said. “It has not been hard to raise money.”
Hillary Clinton at a glance
Age: 68.
Born: Hillary Diane Rodham was born in Chicago.
She is the oldest daughter born to her mother and father, a small-business man in the textile industry, and has two younger brothers.
Grew up: She spent her childhood in the Park Ridge suburb of Chicago. She was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. Reflecting the conservative nature of her household, Clinton was active as a young teen helping promote Republican candidates in Chicago and volunteered for GOP candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race.
Education: She graduated in the top 5 percent of her high school class, then enrolled as a political science student at Wellesley College, where she served as president of the Young Republicans. Her political views shifted sharply and she became a supporter of Democrat Eugene McCarthy. She graduated in 1969 and went on to Yale Law School, where she excelled as a student and also met Bill Clinton.
Family: Husband, Bill; one daughter.
Religion: Methodist.
Professional bio:
First went to Washington to work for Sen. Walter Mondale and then Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. She served as a member of the presidential impeachment inquiry staff during the Watergate scandal and then became a faculty member at the University of Arkansas Law School, where Yale classmate and boyfriend Clinton was teaching. After they married, she went on to work for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign while Bill Clinton was elected governor in Arkansas. She practiced law and went on to become first lady, a United States senator from New York and later secretary of state under President Barack Obama after losing to him in the Democratic presidential primary eight years ago.
Prior reports on key presidential contenders in Texas
This story was originally published February 20, 2016 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Clinton counting on friendlier reception in Texas."