GOVERNMENT

For Biden, the middle held on Super Tuesday in Texas

Jonathan Tilove / jtilove@statesman.com
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during an event at the Chicken Scratch restaurant in Dallas the night before Super Tuesday primary voting. He was endorsed by former rivals Pete Buttigieg (left), Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke. [Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News]

Joe Biden’s super short and super successful Super Tuesday campaign in Texas effectively began with an early afternoon rally Monday at Houston’s Texas Southern University and culminated a few hours later as three former rivals converged in Dallas to bless him as the best bet to beat President Donald Trump.

"We saw in South Carolina the power that voters of color have,“ Texas Southern student Adunola Osinuga declared in introducing Biden in the crowded atrium of the historically black college’s science building a mere two days after Biden’s commanding victory in the Palmetto State primary, propelled by overwhelming African American support, changed the course of the Democratic nominating contest.

“We have the power to swing this entire race for the candidate that can beat Donald Trump in the fall,” Osinuga said. “We had that power in South Carolina, and we most definitely have that power here in Texas.“

That night, Beto O’Rourke was the surprise final act to take the stage at Biden’s jampacked rally in Dallas, becoming the third former Biden rival — after former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — to endorse the former vice president on Super Tuesday eve.

“We need somebody who can beat Donald Trump,“ said O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman and Senate candidate. ”The man in the White House today poses an existential threat to this country, to our democracy, to free and fair elections, and we need somebody who can beat him, and in Joe Biden, we have that man. We have someone who is, in fact, the antithesis of Donald Trump. Joe Biden is decent, he’s kind, he’s caring, he’s empathetic.“

It all worked. With overwhelming support from African Americans, who made up about 1 in 5 Democratic voters in Texas, and the consolidation of support from erstwhile opponents and the dramatic weekend winnowing of the field — also including billionaire Tom Steyer — the center held.

Biden narrowly defeated U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in Texas, capping a strong coast-to-coast Super Tuesday run, winning 10 of 14 contests, and seizing the momentum in the race for the Democratic nomination.

It was dramatic, late-breaking stuff.

As O’Rourke said in a Facebook Live appearance from El Paso on Friday with his wife, Amy, explaining their decision to throw in with Biden, which rubbed some admirers the wrong way, it was a “hard decision, not a slam dunk, not an easy call for us to make.”

“Like millions of Texans, millions of people in this country, we made our decision who to vote for pretty close to the last minute,” O’Rourke said. “For the first time in my life that I remember, I didn’t vote in early voting, not because I didn’t want to, but because I did not know who I was going to vote for.”

Sanders outpaced Biden in the early voting, which ended the day before South Carolina’s primary, by more than 6 points but lost to Biden in primary day balloting by twice that margin. The final tally was Biden 34.5%, Sanders 30%, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg 14.4%, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts 11.4%.

Bloomberg ended his candidacy Wednesday, endorsing Biden. Warren got out on Thursday and is mulling her options.

“South Carolina was a very significant win. It gave him the boost that he needed,” Chris Ulasi, 64, chairman of Texas Southern’s department of radio, television and film, said amid the crowd at Biden’s Monday rally. “The energy has shifted quite dramatically.”

“He’s a very decent man. That’s the perception of most people I talk to,” Ulasi said. “Klobuchar and Buttigieg are sending a very strong signal to the nation and to the party that this is who we should support, that key Democrats are scared about Sanders.”

Moving the agenda

Sanders, a democratic socialist who has been elected and reelected to the Senate as an independent and had the backing of only a small handful of elected officials in Texas, set off a panic among Texas Democratic officialdom that his nomination could doom the chances of the state’s Democrats having a big year down ballot, challenging Sen. John Cornyn’s reelection, picking up some congressional seats and maybe even flipping the Texas House.

But hidden in plain sight in Tuesday’s bad news for Sanders is the fact that an avowed democratic socialist had moved his agenda in his 2016 campaign and this one — Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free public college and university tuition, and canceling student loan debt — onto center stage of the national debate, and that the race was now down to just Sanders and Biden.

“As good of a night as Joe Biden had on Super Tuesday, the reality is it’s not as though he ran away with the election in Texas that elite Democrats described as too conservative a place for someone like Sanders,” said Josh Blank, director of polling and research at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.

Tracking a decade of polling, Blank and Jim Henson, director of the project, found that Texas Democrats are becoming more full-throated in their liberalism. It is true of white Democrats generally, in both cities and suburbs, and among younger voters of all colors, which in Texas are increasingly black and especially brown. They are more and more likely to want their elected Democratic representatives to be more liberal, not less.

According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, Sanders narrowly out-polled Biden with white voters 32% to 29% and nearly doubled Biden with Latino voters 45% to 24% but lost the black vote to Biden 60% to 17%.

Sanders is the favorite of African Americans under 30 and the overwhelming favorite of whites and Latinos under 40.

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton whupped Sanders by a 2-1 ratio among Hispanics in Texas. Four years later, Sanders had turned that around. He carried Bexar County and won almost all the border counties from Cameron County, at Texas’ southernmost tip, all the way to El Paso.

Down-ballot races

Two more centrist Democrats — MJ Hegar of Round Rock and state Sen. Royce West of Dallas — finished first and second in the Senate primary to challenge Cornyn and will face off in a May 26 runoff.

West, who has said that “no one on the far left is going to ever get elected” statewide in Texas, edged Austin-based organizer and activist Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez for second place. She was backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the influential New York congresswoman who endorsed Sanders in October, helping revive his campaign.

Tzintzún Ramirez might have made the runoff but for a little-known candidate, Annie "Mamá" Garcia, who is not Hispanic but has a Hispanic married name and ballot nickname of her own choosing. A Houston attorney, Garcia received 10.3% of the vote, carrying 11 predominantly Hispanic counties in South Texas, as well as a smattering of West Texas counties.

In the 28th Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, an entrenched, eight-term Blue Dog Democrat with the hands-on support of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, narrowly survived a challenge from Jessica Cisneros, a 26-year-old immigration attorney backed by Sanders, Warren and Ocasio-Cortez, winning by 2,700 votes, or 3.6 percentage points.

“The days of Cuellar having uncontested races are over,” Henson said. “There will be more liberal to progressive candidates in the next Senate primary, and there will be more liberal to progressive candidates in congressional and state rep races where the traffic will bear it. And where the traffic will bear it is in the most rapidly growing parts of the state.”

In the 25th Congressional District Democratic primary, Julie Oliver, making her second run at U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin, crushed a challenge from Heidi Sloan, a member of the Austin chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. But Oliver essentially shared with Sloan the Sanders agenda.

In the 31st Congressional District, two candidates — Christine Eady Mann and Donna Imam — who occupy the Warren/Sanders space on the political spectrum, together got two-thirds of the vote and will face each other in a runoff for a chance to take on U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock.

Austin attorney Mike Siegel, seeking a rematch against U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, in the 10th Congressional District, faces a runoff, but he ran a strong first, with 44% of the vote, over two far better-funded rivals closer to the political center.

While some Democratic candidates and elected officials shuddered at the thought of finding themselves down ballot from Sanders, Siegel did not.

“In terms of the top of the ticket, I think I can win with Joe or with Bernie, or if there's some compromise convention candidate, but it is a little bit of a different equation depending on who's at the top of the ticket,” Siegel said.

“To me, Bernie at the top of the ticket — I'm much more likely to have a lot of (grassroots) engagement,” Siegel said. “At the same time, if it's Joe, and he convinces these moderate suburban voters to go to the Democratic side, that can also benefit me. So I think there's benefits to both.”

Biden’s appeal

Ashkan Jahangiri, 24, a Democratic Socialists of America leader in Austin who was active in the combined effort for Sanders and Sloan, said the temper of the presidential contest changed swiftly at the end.

“It was a different race than it was two weeks ago, than it was one week ago,” Jahangiri said Thursday. “The consolidation behind Joe Biden by the Democratic establishment definitely changed the narrative very quickly in a way that was difficult to respond to.”

“If people are hearing on NPR on their morning commute, ‘Yes, everybody is saying vote for Joe Biden now,’ yes, that does signal that that’s the safest vote,” Jahangiri said. “The challenge for us — us being anybody that supports Bernie — is to make the case that it’s really not the safe vote for Joe Biden against Trump because a similar candidate lost to Donald Trump in 2016, and now he’s the incumbent, and there are all the reasons why Biden is vulnerable.”

“That is a case that we can make, but can we make it fast enough, clearly enough to enough people in time? That’s the challenge,”Janahgiri said.

Julie Ann Nitsch, a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and an elected trustee on the Austin Community College District board, said that Biden is simply not a good candidate to take on Trump.

Four years ago, she said, “a lot of the people that I know sucked it up and voted for Clinton. You know, they are unwilling to do that this time around.”

But Ed Espinoza, director of Progress Texas, cautioned that “for all of these people who say the establishment stepped in at the last minute (to thwart Sanders on Super Tuesday), they need to open their eyes and realize that it was African American voters who didn't get to really have their say in this nomination process” when it dwelled for months in Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the whitest states in the nation.

“I think most people don’t really understand the black electorate,” said University of Texas historian Leonard Moore, who teaches a course called “Race in the Age of Trump.”

While they may be liberal on matters of race, he said, “we are pretty much moderate on everything else. We are not by and large into far-left politics.”

If the economy stays strong, Moore thinks Trump, whose rhetoric on immigration resonates with some in the African American community, will do better with black voters this time than last.

And he thinks the majority of blacks, who want Trump out, are clear-eyed enough about American politics to know that Biden is a lot more likely to be able to accomplish that and effectively govern than Sanders.

Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication at Texas A&M University, said she has Republican neighbors who voted for Trump in 2016 as the lesser of two evils but don’t want to do it again.

“They are persuadable on Joe Biden,” she said. “To them Sanders represents socialism, and that’s not something they are persuadable on.”

Historian Lance Hill, a founder of the Southern Institute for Education and Research based at Tulane University in New Orleans, said for Democrats, defeating Trump trumps everything, and 2020 is not a year to foment revolution but to save the republic.

To that end, Hill said it’s OK if Biden is not the greatest candidate.

He said it reminds him of the 1991 governor’s race in Louisiana, in which he was a leader of the effort to defeat David Duke, who was mounting a strong challenge to Gov. Edwin Edwards, a candidate who was anathema to many for his carefree attitude toward ethical standards.

“That Edwin Edwards could possibly lose to David Duke forced off the fence all the white business and civic leaders who had previously been silent,” Hill said. “A weak candidate makes people feel they have to join in and lead the movement to preserve democracy. Biden will be the beneficiary of this fear.”

In his Facebook Live appearance Friday, O’Rourke offered a more ennobling case for Biden, describing him as the man best able to heal the nation, build coalitions to enact a progressive agenda and extend coattails to down-ballot candidates in Texas. But ultimately it comes down to beating Trump because, O’Rourke said, “If he’s reelected, there’s a really good chance we remain a democracy in name only.”

Race Biden Sanders

White (44 % of voters) 29% 32%

Black (21% of voters) 60% 17%

Latino (31% of voters) 24% 45%

Asian (2% of total) 13% 57%

Age by Race

White Biden Sanders

18-29 (5% of voters) 9% 69%

30-44 (10% of voters) 13% 48%

45-64 (17% of voters) 34% 24%

65+ (12%) 44% 13%

Black

18-29 (2% of voters) 30% 45%

30-44 (3% of voters) 49% 30%

45-64 ( 9% of voters) 68% 12%

65* (6% of voters) 62% 7%

Latino

18-29 (8% of voters) 10% 66%

30-44 (8% of voters) 14% 55%

45-64 (9% of voters) 36% 30%

65+ (6% of voters) 36% 31%

Source: Exit polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool

Texas Democratic primary preferences by race and age