Are Harris, Trump suddenly competing in Texas? Nah. Here’s what they’re up to | Opinion
Texas will be the scene Friday for the kind of late-campaign drama generally reserved for Georgia or Pennsylvania: dueling presidential candidate visits.
Kamala Harris is headed to Houston for a late-afternoon campaign rally. She’ll be joined by Senate Democratic candidate Colin Allred, where they’ll reportedly focus on the state’s strict abortion laws and be overshadowed by Beyoncé and Willie Nelson.
Donald Trump will dip in ahead of them, landing in Austin for a news conference on one of Harris’ biggest campaign weaknesses: border and immigration issues. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who told the Houston Chronicle that he could use a boost from Trump, will be there, along with popular podcaster Joe Rogan.
Politics enthusiasts, especially hopeful Democrats, can be forgiven for wondering if this is it, the moment when Texas is finally up for grabs, maybe even turning blue and altering the presidential landscape.
But that’s not what this is. For candidates, it’s a priority nearly as important as winning — trolling the other side.
Harris and Trump surely want to boost their Senate counterparts. Democrats face long odds to keep control of the Senate, given contests in other states. But an upset in Texas would give them a greater shot, along with the psychological boost of winning statewide here for the first time since “Friends” was in its rookie season and the Cowboys were actually competing for Super Bowls.
But the Texas presidential and Senate contests are both leaning in the GOP’s direction, based on polls and fundamentals of the electorate. So, the greater goal is to poke at the other party and perhaps project to swing-state voters a new twist on ideas that have been discussed for months.
It’s a different way to send the same message. Harris wants women in Michigan and Wisconsin to consider what could happen if Republicans win their states and enact abortion bans, or if they have the votes in Congress to do it. Trump wants more attention on the Biden administration’s failure to check illegal immigration and for voters in Georgia and Pennsylvania to consider how long it will take for the effects to trickle down to their states.
If Texas were truly up for grabs, you’d have known about it long ago, simply by turning on your TV. In a true swing state, you can hardly find an ad for dog food or mattresses in the fall, because the campaigns buy up available spots months in advance. Here, we just have to see a lot of Cruz and Allred.
Campaigns love to poke at the opponent. A former reporter who covered Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign used to tell me how, in the final days of the campaign, the president made a surprise visit to Minnesota. That race was so out of hand, Reagan could afford to drop into opponent Walter Mondale’s home state.
Even the Gipper couldn’t pull off a win in Minnesota, but the move let everyone know where the campaign stood. Mondale won only his home state and Washington, D.C., as Reagan enjoyed one of the biggest landslides in American history.
We won’t see that sort of thing this year. But trolling the other side plays in every campaign on the ballot.
