AUSTIN, Texas - In a cramped and musty office just across from the Rio Rita Lounge on East Sixth Street, its walls painted a sickly Subway yellow, seven folks, average age 30, sit around an oval table, tapping on their laptops, plotting the takeover of Texas.
This, for the moment, is the nerve center of Battleground Texas, an effort led by fresh-faced veterans of the Obama campaign to take what they learned electing and re-electing a Democratic president of the United States and turn Texas Democratic. And do it without a candidate like Barack Obama, or any candidate for that matter, in what for Democrats has been a vast, snakebit stretch of no-we-can’t America for a generation, and without much prospect for a discernible payoff for years to come.
So far, it’s going well.
“Texans are so excited, it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before,” said Battleground Texas’ executive director, Jenn Brown, the 31-year-old community organizer from Southern California who ran Obama’s field operation in Ohio in 2012. “Texans are ready. It’s time.”
Battleground Texas just completed the first phase of its launch - 14 organizing meetings from Houston to Lubbock that drew 3,200 people interested in signing on to the effort, and the kind of breakout coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, The Economist and the like that accorded the infant initiative serious consideration as at least potentially a bellwether of epochal political change.
Just as good for Battleground Texas was the reaction of Texas’ Republican officialdom.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott called it a greater threat to Texas than reports that North Korea had Austin in its nuclear sights.
State Republican Chairman Steve Munisteri affixed his signature to a fundraising letter characterizing the Obama alumni as “masters of the slimy dark arts of campaigning,” an apparent reference to the advanced campaign analytics that made them the wonder and envy of the political world.
But perhaps most significantly, Battleground Texas quickly won the allegiance of Steve Mostyn and Mary Patrick.
Mostyn is a Houston trial lawyer who, with his wife, Amber, is the foremost contributor to Democratic and liberal causes in Texas. He was among Obama’s top donors nationally. Big, bald and bold, Mostyn has emerged as the Daddy Warbucks of Texas Democratic politics.
Patrick, slight, gray and indefatigably determined, is the epitome of the long-suffering progressive Austin uber-volunteer, on whom Battleground Texas’ success will depend every bit as much as on Mostyn’s money.
It was Patrick signing people in at the Battleground Texas organizing event at the AFL-CIO hall in Austin in early April. It was Patrick, an active volunteer with the Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, who has opened the doors of its fellowship hall every Saturday morning since mid-April so that Battleground Texas can train recruits and have them sworn in as volunteer deputy voter registrars, phase two of their battle plan.
“I’ve been real pleasantly surprised,” Mostyn said. “When they came and met with me, the question we had for them was, ‘How do you replicate any enthusiasm when you don’t have a candidate?’”
“They said, ‘We may have to build excitement,’” he said.
And, so far, they have.
Persuaded, Mostyn traveled to New York, California, Colorado and Washington, D.C., “meeting with people from all over the progressive movement who understand that there are four majority-minority states, and Texas is the only one that’s Republican.”
“We’ve never seen the money commitment that’s coming and the money commitment that I’m going to put in,” Mostyn said. “It’s large, and that’s new, and it’s sustaining. All of us are talking - those of us in the donor world - about a long-term plan.”
What kind of money? Mostyn pauses: “Battleground’s budget is millions and millions and millions and millions and millions.” (Battleground Texas doesn’t have to file its first semiannual fundraising report until July 15.)
The Battleground crew likewise impressed Patrick, who has been active in Democratic campaigns and liberal causes in Austin since graduating from the University of Texas in 1968.
“This is a very smart group of people. If they had never done this before, I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ But they’ve done it before, and they know what to do,” Patrick said.
“It’s very exciting, and I’m very eager. I want this to happen before I get too old; please, sometime before I’m 90,” she said. “For those of us who have been slogging it out for years, we want it now.”
A few hours after the April 27 registrar training, Patrick was back at home with a half-dozen friends from Women for Good Government, a long-standing progressive group she now leads, gathered around a table, talking politics and stuffing envelopes with Battleground Texas bumper stickers for some of the 2,000 online requests.
Not far away, revelers at Pease Park are celebrating Eeyore’s Birthday, an annual tradition ostensibly to cheer up the depressed and hapless donkey of Winnie the Pooh fame - a fitting symbol for a Texas Democratic Party that hasn’t won statewide office since 1994.
“The Democratic brand is a very low brand in Texas. Democrats themselves feel very demoralized,” said Mustafa Tameez, a Democratic strategist in Houston, explaining why Battleground Texas’ entrance, with its Obama campaign cachet, is so welcome and timely.
After Obama’s re-election, analysis focused on Mitt Romney’s abysmal performance with Hispanic voters and what that portended for a party in an increasingly less white America. That narrative trail naturally led to Texas.
“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat. If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House,” Republican Ted Cruz told The New Yorker last fall before his election to the U.S. Senate. The quote is now the opening slide of the Battleground Texas PowerPoint presentation at the organizing meetings.
“Never thought I’d say this - Ted Cruz, smart guy, right?” said Brown, the Battleground Texas director, wincing a smile at an organizing meeting held in a side room at a Luby’s in San Antonio.
When Gov. Rick Perry was asked about Battleground Texas’ ambition, he responded, “Competition is good, but the idea that Texas is going to become a purple state, or even a blue state, is out of the realm of - give me a time frame, are we talking 50 years?” In other words, sure it could happen, but not for a long time.
But those who study political demography, such as Robert Stein and Mark Jones at Rice University, project that Democrats could start winning statewide in the 2020s - a long time from now, but, considering the enormous stakes nationally, well worth a protracted Democratic effort to lay the groundwork.
Still, Richard Murray, director of the Survey Research Institute at the University of Houston, is dubious that national Democrats will pour money into a long term effort in a state as vast and expensive as Texas when the money could be used to far greater tangible effect elsewhere.
“To my knowledge, there is no precedent nationally of an attempt to change a state that is pretty solidly in the other party’s political base by investing surplus resources that don’t have any immediate payoff,” Murray said.
Texas Democrats have romantic notions about what Hillary Rodham Clinton as the potential Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 could do in Texas, but Murray said that if Clinton were within striking distance of winning Texas, she would be on her way to an electoral landslide that wouldn’t require Texas.
For now, Brown finds herself having to tamp down expectations.
“I’d like to do well in 2014 and convince somebody we are here for them,” she said at an organizing meeting in Austin.
But if not, “that’s OK,” she said. And if Democrats don’t carry Texas in 2016, “that’s totally OK, too. If 2020 is the year we turn this state blue, that’s OK with me.”
Front Section, Pages 3 on 05/12/2013