Will Texas Turn Purple? Journalist Jeremy Wallace Weighs In

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, to the U.S. elections. After this weekend, South Carolina Primary, Super Tuesday will separate winners from losers in the Democratic presidential race. Voters in 14 states will go to the polls March 3rd, including delegate rich California and Texas. Right now, all eyes are on Texas to see whether this red state will turn purple, as demographics shift. For a look into this crucial battleground, our Walter Isaacson at down with the Houston Chronicles, Jeremy Wallace. He spent the last 20 years reporting on politics across the United States and he now gives us the lowdown on the lone star state.

WALTER ISAACSON: In the ’60s and ’70s, Texas in some ways was one of the most bipartisan states. Everybody got together especially when the legislature was in session. Now, like the rest of America, it has become one of the most polarized and bitter states along partisan lines. Do you see any signs that people want to return to a less bitter politics and do you see Texas leading the way for that?

JEREMY WALLACE, POLITICAL REPORTER, HOUSTON CHRONICLES: I think the voters would be fine with going to a less bitter. But I don’t think the politicians are ready. It’s like — I think there’s — even in Texas, I think people are seeing there’s an advantage to being that loud voice and to putting up the good fight and/or, you know, pushing maybe a more extreme agenda. You get a lot of attention for doing that. And so — and I think the politicians, you know, if they could help themselves from, you know, staying away from the cameras for a few moments and just kind of work with people who live in their communities, totally different conversation. But I think too many people are trying to score points, you know, they see the TV. You know, they — you know, if I say the right thing, I’m going to be on Fox News or MSNBC tonight and I’m going to, you know, be famous. My donations will, you know, crank up, you know. So, again, I think that’s infected every place, not just, you know, Texas. But certainly, you know, Texas, you know, we’re seeing that too. There’s still some issues people can get along on, you know, but for the big issues of the day on immigration, on guns, it’s like there’s still a divide there where people just want to make a point.

WALLACE: What are the big issues?

WALLACE: Well, oil, fossil fuels, climate change. It’s all one big giant, you know, issue right there. Because of Hurricane Harvey and the devastation that it wrecked on this community, that is obviously like how we address our climate change is going to be a big issue.

ISAACSON: So, people in the Democratic Primary in Texas will vote with climate change being a primary issue in their mind and vote for somebody who they believe has a serious, but not too extreme —

WALLACE: Yes. Especially in, you know, the Harris County area and places that were hit by the hurricane. You know, that you go, you know, from, you know, the coast in, you know, Corpus Christi and Rockport —

ISAACSON: In Galveston and —

WALLACE: Yes. It’s like those people are paying attention to this issue. It’s like climate change is a real, you know, threat to these communities that are at sea level.

ISAACSON: What about health care?

WALLACE: Huge issue. You know, you can’t find a state with more uninsured than Texas. And so, that is — and I think for any Democrat that can make the case that more people in Texas will have health insurance or health coverage of some sort, you know, I think that’s going to go a long way. That’s a huge issue in, you know, Texas.

ISAACSON: Tell me about guns as an issue. How big of an issue is that and if you’re a Democrat, how do you navigate Texans and their guns?

WALLACE: Yes, that’s obviously a big issue. This has been an issue that’s perplexed Texas Democrats for decades, you know, trying to figure out what’s the right lane to have on this. It’s a big issue. You know, it’s like, look, you know, it’s still a state that, you know, isn’t going to deal with, you know, gun seizures and things like that but there is a place where, you know, moderate Republicans have talked about trying to figure out a way. You know, the lieutenant governor who is a Republican, a good conservative Republican, Dan Patrick, he talked about we need to do something about the, you know, stranger-to-stranger gun sales, you know, how do we address that. He got —

ISAACSON: And Congressman Dan Crenshaw and the red flag issue.

WALLACE: Yes. He’s, you know, talked about — you know, there might be a way to do a red flag law that would make it okay. And so, you have Republican voices who are trying to talk about this issue. When they do, they get a lot of pushback.

ISAACSON: If you look at Biden, Bloomberg, somewhat moderate on some of these issues, although Bloomberg is pretty much in favor of more gun restrictions and then you look at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, very strongly in favor of things like that. Do you think in a general election, it’s possible that a Biden or a Bloomberg or a moderate like a Klobuchar or a Buttigieg could win Texas? And do you think it’s possible Bernie Sanders could beat Trump in Texas?

WALLACE: I do think so now on all of those fronts. You know, I — four years ago, I was a great skeptic until we started to change the — you know, see the changes in voter registration and voter performance in Texas. I think it’s clear that the right message is going to have a shot at it. I’m not saying it’s probable. But, you know, certainly, you know, I think, you know, the right Democrat at this point — because again, I think gun control is a sneaky, difficult issue for both Republicans and Democrats in Texas. There are people in the suburbs who are seeing these guns — you know, these mass shootings have started to happen in places that people aren’t used to seeing them. And these are in conservative areas, these are in suburban areas, these are in shopping centers, at churches, at schools in the suburbs. You know, that’s what’s happened in Texas, just Texas. And so, it’s like that has triggered a different kind of response from Texans who are like, OK, maybe we have to look at how we’re doing this. And so, I think that gun control issue could be kind of the way for a candidate to distinguish themselves, if they can find that right lane. You know, I don’t think — you know, it’s impossible to think that Bloomberg or Biden or even a Bernie Sanders could win Texas with the right message on guns. But it can’t be threatening at the same time.

ISAACSON: How many mass shootings have there been in the past couple of years in Texas?

WALLACE: It’s funny, because we’ve had so many of them, it’s hard to count them. But we know like, you know, we had Santa Fe High School, we had, you know, Southern Springs, we had the shooting in El Paso, we had the madman who was shooting people in Odessa Midland, we had the attempted church shooting just up — in — a couple months ago up in North Texas. And so, there’s — you know, right there, you have five in a very short period of time.

ISAACSON: And after each one of these, can you or somebody as your finger on the pulse of Texas politics, detect any shift in sentiment about guns?

WALLACE: Yes. You know, there is a change that’s going on and there’s a lot more pressure. And I think that’s why we’ve seen the conversation change with the lieutenant governor and with people like Congressman Dan Crenshaw. I think they recognize that like it’s getting too common. It’s like there is now a reaction, even from Republicans who are saying there are things that — if Republicans can look like they’re finding some solutions to the problem, they’re going to be in really good shape in election cycle. But if they let the Democrats make that case for them, they would open a door for the Democrats, you know, to take control on that issue.

ISAACSON: What’s happening in Texas in terms of voter registration? It seems to be surging recently?

WALLACE: Yes. It’s an amazing phenomenon that I haven’t seen before, which is our voter registrations are actually gaining faster than our population. It doesn’t make sense on the surface, of course. But what’s happening is that the voter registration groups have done an amazing job of finding the people who are already in Texas, you know, who could have been registered before and getting them signed up. And this particularly is like diverse communities. They’ve really like honed in on, you know, Latino communities and black communities and been really working to bring out these younger voters who maybe in the past wouldn’t have thought to register to vote right away, not thinking that they had the power or the influence maybe. But, you know, what we’ve seen over this — particularly over the last four years, four to six years, is a surge that is really unparalleled. Just here in Harris County, the biggest county in the state, our population grew about 4 percent since 2014. Our voter registration has grew 14 percent. And so, that’s completely changing the electoral map in Texas alone. And it’s changed the dynamic of Republicans and Democrats and really made the Democrats a lot more competitive because of those registration gains and because of how much more blue Harris County has gotten over the years.

ISAACSON: So, do you think that Democrats will be able to win statewide races any time soon?

WALLACE: Not immediately, but close. We’re getting there. It’s like what’s happening — you know, you look at the 2018 election cycle when Ted Cruz was running against Beto O’Rourke, that race was separated by 218,000 votes.

ISAACSON: Which in Texas is a small number?

WALLACE: That — yes, is — we’ve never seen — we haven’t seen a race that tight since the ’70s, you know, for the —

ISAACSON: So, to what extent is this voter registration thing a Beto O’Rourke driven phenomenon?

WALLACE: It’s interesting. I’ve looked at it — I hear that a lot of — well, Beto O’Rourke, you know, maybe had influence there. But I kind of think of it the other. I think the voter registration gains, that, you know, the groups on the ground had been making over the last four to five years really helped fuel the Beto O’Rourke campaign. We saw a surge in new registrations of voting, not just in the year that he got in there, but even in the weeks before election day. We saw like just incredible amounts of voter registration for a campaign. There is one county just south of Austin that grew its voter registration by 40 percent.

ISAACSON: Why? What’s driving it?

WALLACE: You know, one, like the voter registration groups, like you have to look back at, you now, President Obama’s final term in office. A lot of the people who had been working on his campaign or at least a group of them who had been working on his campaign came to Texas and decided, we’ve got to start registering people in this state. Because we were sitting at about 12 million voter registrations from 2002. And by 2012, we were still around 12 million registrations. The state was growing but the voter registrations were flat. And you’re watching places like Arizona and Colorado and Nevada turn more southwestern Democratic, right, where you have, you know, these influences of Latino populations that are really kind of changing the nature of those places. In Texas, it wasn’t happening. And so, they started, you know, really kind of drilling down on how to register voters here. It’s a very complicated system. The Texas legislature has put a lot of hurdles in the way for people to do voter registrations to whereas groups like the League of Women Voters can’t really register voters here.

ISAACSON: Wait, wait. Explain that to me. Why?

WALLACE: Well, because there — each county has a separate registration process. And if you don’t follow each county’s registration process individually by the letter, you’re committing a felony. And so, if you’re registering somebody to vote in Montgomery County but you’re in Harris County, and it turned out they’re in the neighboring county over, you could be committing a felony.

ISAACSON: Was that done to suppress voter registration?

WALLACE: Certainly, a lot of voter registration groups will tell you that, that they felt it was targeted at the surge of voters, the new people who were coming into the state or the — just people who are already here. And so it helped kind of keep the numbers flat for a long time, until some of that Obama machine, that political machine, decided to really kind of start investing in, well, how do we register people? And so they basically had — in every single county in Texas, they need to have like trained registrars, who go in for days-long training with each individual county, so they can kind of work on it. And the thing is, they had the stamina to do it.

ISAACSON: And will that totally push the state to be more Democratic?

WALLACE: In South Texas, deep South Texas, you get to the Rio Grande Valley, it’s a very different Democratic politics than it is even in Dallas or Houston. And so there’s definitely differences. There are conservative Democrats in those areas who are pro-life Hispanic leaders in South Texas. So there is an underperformance that Democrats have had traditionally in the Rio Grande Valley, and some of it’s due to the politics hasn’t always matched up. But in the era of Trump, and the discussions about immigration reform, something’s happened, where, like, there’s a lot more Democratic registrations, and particularly with younger Latino voters. It’s like they’re coming in and they’re trying to upset what they have seen happening for years. So you see a lot of, like, the more conservative Democrats even are facing primary challenges, like they haven’t had before, because they look at people like AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and say, why not me? Why can’t we challenge our more conservative Democrats here in Texas? And I think that’s what we’re seeing across the board. As we head into Election Day, there are people running — incumbents who are getting challenges that they have never seen before and they’re having to fight for just even to win the Democratic primary.

ISAACSON: So what are the Republicans doing on voter registration?

WALLACE: Well, they’re reacting, for sure. They have brought in some big guns to start trying to help them sort this thing out. It’s like Karl Rove, who was, you know, famous for helping the Bush family get into power, he’s gotten involved also in trying to like work on voter registration gains. They have put a lot more money into it and been trying to work on creating a volunteer network on the grassroots level to kind of revive it. They see that as a big part of what’s kind of gotten away from Republicans. And so they’re making those new investments and, like, again, doing the voter registration, trying to find the groups that are meeting once a month, like women Republican groups, trying to get them invigorated and energized and, like, build upon those. And so you see that they’re trying on the ground level to improve their numbers. That, ultimately, they think, will help them battle in the voter registration.

ISAACSON: Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration, the border, the border wall, refugees, to what extent does that cut in his favor in Texas? And to what extent will that hurt him in Texas?

WALLACE: Well, that motivates his base of more issues. In Texas, even in Texas, Republicans understand that the idea of building a wall in Texas doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of conservatives, because anybody who’s from Texas and who has seen the border knows you are never going to have a wall stretching from Brownsville to El Paso. It’s impossible. There’s some terrain in there that there’s no way you would ever be able to build it. So, Republicans have kind of an understanding of that, I think, in large part. But, even so, the language of having a more secure border and having different ways to secure the border to keep down the illegal immigration that is coming across, I think that’s a big deal for a lot of Democrats and Republicans. In our school systems, those people are coming in there, and they’re having, like, an influence on the education budgets. The Texas lieutenant governor, who runs the Texas Senate, talks about this a lot. The extra money that we’re paying out to help educate people who may not be in the country legally yet is a real cost. And they’re having to deal with that in their budgets every year. And so I think there’s a — there is a point where Trump is winning support by talking about that issue and really keeping his base fired up. But what’s happening in — like we said, in Harris County, and along I-35 – – I-35 has totally changed the way Texas is. I have kind of started to call it the blue spine of Texas. We’re still a red state, but we have a blue spine. The 22 counties from Laredo to just north of Dallas, those places are voting much more Democratic. And when they hear Trump’s rhetoric on the wall, it turns — it’s turning them somewhere else. They’re against that. When we had Beto O’Rourke running for the U.S. Senate, and you had an anti- Trump sentiment, and you had the voter registration gains, it was like a cocktail of disaster for Republicans. It’s not just that–

ISAACSON: Yes, but wait a minute. Beto O’Rourke lost.

WALLACE: He did lose, but up and down along I-35, the Texas legislature flipped 12 seats — or 10 of the 12 along I-35. In the Texas Senate, two more seats flipped. On the congressional level, we had five members of Congress who suddenly went from winning by 20 points the cycle before to all winning by 5 percent or less along I-35.

ISAACSON: Explain to me the I-35 Corridor.

WALLACE: It starts in Laredo, and it goes all — up through San Antonio and Austin, and heads on into Dallas and Fort Worth. It splits up there. And it’s along those counties that we started to really kind of see the electoral shift happening. In 2014, that stretch was pretty Republican. John Cornyn ended up winning that stretch from the — from Laredo to Dallas by I think it was about 300,000 votes that he won it by. Hillary Clinton, a couple years later, she ended up winning that stretch by 100,000. In this last cycle, Beto O’Rourke won it by over 300,000. So you’re talking just about a 700,000-vote shift in four years.

ISAACSON: But tell me what happened. I know the votes shifted, but why?

WALLACE: Because of the diversity. The diversity is a big part of it. And the urbanization, the suburban areas have become more Democratic. And so — and that’s — a lot of that has to do with Trump. Right? Trump has pushed a lot of suburban women to be more Democratic in their voting tendencies. And we saw that in the congressional districts, counties like Williamson County, which is just north of Austin, had always been Republican. It flipped. It was completely blue. Candidates who never thought they were in danger were all of a sudden out of office. And so it’s that diversification. That’s a higher-educated area. It’s part of Texas that’s growing, for sure. But it’s also adding voters at a far faster clip than the rest of the state, even beyond our population increase, right? And it’s like we’re actually adding more voters along I-35 than the population grows.