The Trump campaign is dismissing polls that show traditionally deep-red Texas competitive, urging presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to squander resources by placing a big bet on winning the state’s 38 Electoral College votes.
“I would invite the Biden campaign to play in Texas,” Bill Stepien, President Trump’s campaign manager, said Friday in a conference call with reporters. “They should play hard, they should go after Texas really, really heavily — spend a lot of money in the Houston and Dallas media markets. I would invite them to do that. I’ll even buy their first ad.”
Texas is traditionally Republican and has not voted Democratic for president since 1976. For years, GOP insiders waved off as outliers the occasional poll showing the state up for grabs. Like Stepien, they encouraged Democrats to invest there because it is expensive to compete in the state’s approximately 20 media markets and viewed it as a drain on money and manpower.
But an influx of newcomers and voter erosion Republicans are experiencing in Texas’s heavily populated suburbs around Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are changing the political character of the state. The RealClearPolitics average of recent public surveys shows Trump and Biden essentially tied in Texas, and Republican insiders in the state say the shift is real — and so are the polls.
“It’s completely consistent with everything I’ve seen,” a Republican strategist in the state said of the polls. “We’re heading into the face of the tsunami in a kayak with a rope tied around every other Republican in the country.”
Confident the suburbs are out of reach for the president and down-ballot Republicans, Texas Democrats are encouraging Biden to focus on denting in Trump’s big advantage in rural counties and energizing voters in South Texas, where Hispanic voters make the demographics more favorable. Although Biden began advertising in Texas this month, the former vice president has yet to make a full-scale investment in the state.
But the Texas Democratic Party is claiming a staff of 100 mostly dedicated to field operations. Abhi Rahman, a party spokesman, said the data, the Trump campaign’s social media advertising, and the president’s travel schedule, all suggest that Stepien knows Biden could win Texas. “It’s completely false bravado,” he said.
Meanwhile, Stepien is rejecting polls showing Biden would win Arizona and Georgia, two other states that have voted Republican for president for decades but appear in danger of turning blue.
