Texas, Election Battleground: Democrats Aim to Mobilize the Hispanic Vote

At the community center in Killeen, Tex., about 70 miles north of Austin, Alex Steele is trying to persuade a small audience of Democratic activists that the party can wrest control of the state from the Republicans. An organizer for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Steele is now field director for Battleground Texas, an offspring of the Democrats’ data-driven, get-out-the-vote strategy that helped secure the president a second term. The group was formed last winter by Jeremy Bird, a political operative who headed the Obama campaign’s national field operation and now wants to replicate its success on a smaller scale. He’s targeting a specific group the Democrats see as key to winning in the state: Hispanics. “Our goal is very simple,” Steele tells the audience. “It’s to turn Texas back into a battleground state by treating it like a battleground state.”

Governor Rick Perry has dismissed Battleground Texas as a “pipe dream,” perhaps for good reason. Republican presidential nominees have carried Texas in every election since 1976, and Republicans have won every statewide race since 1994. They’ll win them all in 2014, too, says Mike Baselice, a Republican pollster, “because the state leans 10 points more Republican than Democrat.”