Thread: Democrats set sights on Texas

Democrats set sights on Texas
Some believe Latinos can help change the state from red to blue.
By Peter Wallsten
November 9, 2008

Reporting from Washington -- As they review the results of Tuesday's election victories and begin looking toward future campaigns, some Democrats have settled on a rallying cry: Texas is next.

It sounds improbable for the Republican bastion that produced President Bush and served as an early laboratory for Karl Rove's hard-nosed tactics. But Texas is one of several reliably red states that are now in Democrats' sights as party strategists begin to analyze a victorious 2008 campaign that they believe showed the contours of a new movement that could grow and prove long-lasting.



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A multiethnic bloc of Latinos, blacks, young people and suburban whites helped to broaden the party's reach Tuesday well beyond its traditional base in the Northeast and the West Coast -- carrying Barack Obama into the White House and expanding the party's majorities in Congress.

That new formula was evident in state exit polls and county-level election results showing that Democrats scored gains from a voting base that is growing progressively less white than the population that helped forge Republican advantages in past elections. In state after state, from GOP strongholds like North Carolina, Indiana and Colorado, minorities made up a larger share of the vote than in the past, and in each case they helped turn states from red to blue.

A major shift in the Latino vote took place in Florida and the Southwest, where the Obama campaign spent at least $20 million on targeted appeals and organizing, including one television ad in the final days featuring the candidate reading Spanish from a script.

Latinos made up a greater share of the electorate than in the past in every Southwestern state, according to exit polls compiled by CNN. And in each Southwestern state, as well as Florida, the Democrat pulled a bigger percentage of the Latino vote -- a turnaround from 2004, when President Bush cut deeply into Democrats' hold on Latinos and won that bloc in Florida, where many Cuban Americans remain loyal to the GOP.

"The Democrats have built what looks like a coalition they can ride for 20 or 30 years," said Simon Rosenberg, head of the pro-Democratic group NDN, which has spent millions of dollars targeting Latino voters.

Obama's winning coalition, some Democrats said, could mark a turning point in history: Republicans can no longer achieve an electoral college majority with their decades-old strategy of winning whites in the South and conservatives in the heartland. Now, Democrats have a path through the Rocky Mountains and even some states in the old Confederacy.

Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress who in 2002 co-wrote "The Emerging Democratic Majority," said that Obama "was able to realize the political potential in the ways the country is changing." That, Teixeira added, bodes well for the party's future because "you have all these ascendant groups leaning increasingly Democratic."

Texas, the nation's second-most-populous state and home to 34 electoral votes, was not a 2008 presidential battleground, and Republican nominee John McCain won there by a comfortable margin. The Obama campaign spent little money there, apart from recruiting volunteers to work in other states.

More untapped potential voters

But strategists believe the large and growing Latino population there remains untapped, along with a large black electorate, which could make Texas competitive with a major investment of time and money from an Obama-led Democratic Party.

Similar possibilities exist in Arizona, another heavily Latino state that leans Republican, and Georgia, with a growing Latino population and a black electorate that grew from one-quarter of the overall voters four years ago to nearly one-third on Tuesday.

In turning Florida and Ohio, among other states, this year, Obama organizers focused for months not only on registering new voters but also on tracking down blacks, Latinos and young people who had been registered but never voted.

One top Obama strategist said the campaign had already sought to build the Texas state party, handing over a database with hundreds of thousands of voter names and phone numbers gathered when Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton competed in the state's Democratic primary. Much of the campaign's attention in that effort focused on Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley.

The strategist, Cuauhtemoc "Temo" Figueroa, Obama's top Latino outreach official, said the state could be taken seriously as a presidential battleground if Democrats could win statewide races there in 2010. "I don't know if it's four years or eight years off, but down the road, Texas will be a presidential battleground," Figueroa said.

The big question is whether Tuesday's results can fairly be interpreted as a sea change in American politics when so many unusual circumstances were at play.

Many Latinos, for instance, are angry at Republicans for the harsh anti-illegal-immigration rhetoric used by some in the party in blocking a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. African Americans turned out in large numbers -- and voted almost unanimously for the Democrat -- because of the historic nature of Obama's candidacy to be the first black president.

Moreover, polls showed voters moved to Obama when the global financial crisis hit and stocks plunged. And the percentage approval rating of the Republican president was mired in the low 20s.

Republican strategists concede that their party faces some demographic challenges with the Latino vote growing and moving toward Democrats. But they dismissed the idea that Tuesday's results paved the way for a long-term GOP deficit.

"We're certainly at a disadvantage right now, but these things tend to be cyclical," said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. "We'll find our voice again soon."

GOP officials have already begun searching for that voice, with party leaders set to hold at least two different meetings this week, one hosted by the South Carolina party chairman and another by the conservative group GOPAC. Among the topics being debated: how to try to bring minorities back into the Republican fold.

Greg Strimple, a GOP strategist who advised the McCain campaign, argued that Republicans would regain their footing because elections are decided by centrist voters who tend to shift between the parties.

Independents split evenly four years ago but went decisively for Obama, 52% to 44%. Obama can keep those voters, Strimple said, only if he governs in the middle. "The only thing that really matters is where the center of the electorate goes," Strimple said.

Little coattail effect seen

There were signs that a strong finish Tuesday by Obama did not necessarily help other Democrats down the ballot -- suggesting that this new ethnic coalition could have more to do with Obama himself than an overall shift toward Democrats.

Obama, for example, scored a dramatic win in Florida's Miami-Dade County, beating McCain by 140,000 votes after an aggressive campaign to register minorities and get them to the polls.

But the GOP's three Cuban American members of Congress in Miami-Dade all won reelection, beating well-financed Democrats who had hoped to ride Obama's coattails. Two of those Democratic campaigns had even coordinated with Obama's team on the ground.

The president-elect's double-digit win in Minnesota did not rub off on Democratic Senate contender Al Franken, who finished narrowly behind an incumbent Republican and now faces a recount.

And in Indiana, where Obama poured in money and hundreds of staffers and beat McCain, the state's Republican governor won reelection in a landslide, along with other GOP candidates.

Still, exit polls in Indiana showed the potential for a durable Democratic formula: a slight increase in the Latino share of the vote, up to 4%, with nearly 8 in 10 backing Obama, and a turnaround among Indiana voters ages 18 to 29 who backed Bush in 2004 but this time supported Obama.

Nationally, two-thirds of voters 29 and younger supported Obama, compared with just more than half four years ago who voted for Democrat John F. Kerry.

Obama also cut his losses in the Republican-leaning suburbs, such as Hamilton County outside Indianapolis, where Bush's 2004 victory margin of more than 50,000 was nearly cut in half. And he trimmed margins in some exurban counties such as Pasco on Florida's west coast.

Nationally, the African American vote rose from 11% of the overall electorate to 13% -- a small but substantial gain, particularly when 95% of that group backed Obama.

The Latino share of the vote nationally rose slightly from 2004, but the increases were sharpest in a few states: rising from 8% to 13% in Colorado, from 10% to 15% in Nevada, and from 32% to 41% in New Mexico.

The Latino share rose even in Arizona, McCain's home state. Obama lost there, but his campaign purchased advertising in the final week, perhaps setting the stage for a pickup in four years.

Wallsten is a Times staff writer.

peter.wallsten@latimes.com

Times staff writer Cynthia Dizikes contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la ... full.story

Religious voters helped Obama to victory
His focused effort to target a group that had heavily favored Republicans paid off, an exit poll shows.
By Cathleen Decker
November 9, 2008
As he vaulted into national acclaim with his 2004 Democratic convention speech, Barack Obama directly took on the assumption that his party should cede religious voters to the Republicans.

"We worship an awesome God in the blue states," he said, pointedly adopting words from a song familiar to churchgoers, particularly younger ones.



Obama relies on a close-knit inner... Right-wing media feeds its post-election...Democrats set sights on Texas

The four-year effort by Obama, who is Christian, to narrow the gap between Democratic and Republican support among religious voters paid off last week when he won the race for the White House.

Exit polls showed the dramatic effect: Obama won 43% of voters who said they attend church weekly, eight percentage points higher than 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry. Among occasional worshipers, Obama won 57%, 11 percentage points higher than Kerry, according to the National Election Pool exit survey.

When looking at how members of different faiths voted, the movement among Catholics is striking. They sided 52% to 47% with President Bush in 2004. But this year, they went 54% to 45% for Obama. That means Obama had more support among Catholics than did Kerry, himself a Catholic, by seven percentage points.


"Obama did better than Kerry among pretty much every religious group," said Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life who analyzed the poll results.

Even among voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians or evangelicals, a group that tends to vote Republican, Obama improved on Kerry's standing -- although he came in a distant second to GOP nominee John McCain. Kerry had won 21% of evangelical voters; Obama won 26%.

The shift by religious voters may have resulted partly from changes in the electorate -- voter participation by blacks and Latinos grew, and both groups tend to be regular churchgoers. Yet there is no doubt that secular voters were more supportive of Obama than religious ones, according to the exit poll.

The Obama campaign, however, made sure to court religious voters and took advantage of his connections to influential Christian leaders.

Nearly two years ago, when voters knew little about him, the Illinois senator stood alongside nationally known author and Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest for a televised AIDS conference. Earlier, Obama had asked Warren to review a chapter of his book "The Audacity of Hope."

Obama again gained the attention of Christian voters in July when he pledged to expand a controversial White House program to give federal grants to churches and small community groups. The proposal, which would build on efforts by the Bush administration to direct government money to church groups, was announced in Zanesville, Ohio, a hotly contested state that Obama won on election day.

And at the Democratic National Convention in August, which held its first-ever interfaith prayer gathering, the party platform endorsed by Obama -- while not backing away from its support for abortion rights -- emphatically reached out to women with children who rely on programs meant to ease their struggle.

Obama's ease in talking about his religion also helped him win over religious voters. During a presidential forum held in August at Saddleback Church, where he and McCain were interviewed separately by church leader Warren, Obama spoke about "walking humbly with our God" and quoted from the Gospel of Matthew. His acceptance speech Tuesday night echoed in parts the church-inspired speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"He uses the faith language very well," said Clyde Wilcox, a Georgetown University professor of government who has studied the subject. And that, he said, inspired trust.

"How do you know whether to trust him or not?" Wilcox said. "If you are a deeply religious person, you want to see that he has a grounding. That authenticity is really important. It reassures people."

Religion, for a time, became a thorn for Obama during the presidential race. He was harshly criticized for his association with the now-retired Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose incendiary sermons about white America caused an uproar and led Obama to part ways with his longtime pastor, and endured a viral e-mail campaign falsely asserting that he is Muslim.

But "there was a broad recognition that he was a sincerely religious man," Wilcox said of Obama. "And I think that did come through."

The Obama campaign reached out to evangelicals and other religious communities, aware of the opportunity to peel away some voters.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Pepperdine law professor, caused a stir last spring when he publicly endorsed Obama. One month later, at a Catholic Mass to which he was invited, Kmiec was denounced from the pulpit and denied communion because of his endorsement.

Kmiec said that although Obama's support for abortion rights contradicts official Catholic doctrine, his broader approach aligns well with the church's beliefs on issues such as the economy, healthcare and the environment.

"I was attracted out of my Republican-ness to Sen. Obama's side largely because I could hear, in the way he was articulating economic issues and social issues, the social gospel of the Catholic Church," Kmiec said.

From September through election day, Kmiec traveled to key states including Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, meeting with groups of people at churches on Obama's behalf. The election's focus on the economy was "providential," Kmiec said. Without the usual single-issue debate about abortion rights among Christian voters, the Obama campaign had the opportunity to make its case on other fronts.

"It moderated, it seemed to me, the amount of time that was devoted to these divisive conversations," he said.

The election results returned Catholics to their historical Democratic moorings, which many had fled for the GOP during the Reagan years.

"That is opening a door that had been closed for a while," Kmiec said. But whether it stays open may be determined by whether Obama's actions match what he promised -- and also by what larger political environment defines the 2012 presidential race.

"At some level, if he's a good president, that will affect evangelicals and non-evangelicals, Catholics," said Wilcox of Georgetown University. It is too soon, he said, to know whether Obama's improvements among religious voters indicate a new alignment for Democrats, or were simply a verdict on the 2008 candidates.

"I would want to see this over time," Wilcox said.

Decker is a Times staff writer.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

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