Portside

On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama took a break from negotiating Netflix deals and came to Texas to grab tacos with his party’s Senate candidate, James Talarico, and gubernatorial hopeful, Gina Hinojosa. Meanwhile, the state party announced that Bernie Sanders, the octogenarian Brooklyn Dodgers fan and famed “ultracommie,” would keynote its convention in Corpus Christi this summer. It became, for a moment, harder to sustain the traditional refrain of the committed Texas Democrat that the national party has forgotten about “us.”

In truth, it’s historically Texas Democrats who have tried to push away the national ones. An Obama visit and Sanders speech would have been unthinkable anytime in the past decade-plus. In 2014, Texas Democrats were planning their state convention during a year when they hoped—erroneously—that the political celebrity of state Senator Wendy Davis would help them take the governor’s office. The party had begun the process of reaching out to national figures including Vice President Joe Biden, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But I was told by party officials at the time that the Davis campaign had put a kibosh on the whole search. It wanted to direct the public’s attention away from the Obama administration and the national party, both unpopular in Texas, and tell a specifically Texan story, seeking to impress upon voters that the nominee was nonideological, practical, and not too feminist. 

When Texas Democrats met in Dallas, there would be no celebs, apart from the bands convened by state Representative Trey Martinez Fischer in an upstairs ballroom. Some Democrats thought this was a mistake. In hindsight, it clearly didn’t matter very much. The race never got that close, and in November Davis lost by about twenty points. 

This year, though, there’s reason to believe that at least some of the statewide races will be much closer. What does it mean that Texas Democrats are embracing national figures who historically haven’t been very popular in Texas?

Republicans are arguing that it’s a sign that Texas Democrats are getting lost in the sauce. Dave Carney, top Greg Abbott strategist and proud New Englander, gleefully retweeted Democrats throughout the week. “Best news this week!” he wrote when the party announced that Sanders would come to the convention. Abbott’s campaign account, which has lately adopted an unfortunately Zoomer-esque style on social media, started posting images of Joseph Stalin. When the Talarico campaign thanked Obama for coming, Carney echoed them: “Ditto please come back.” 

The pushback was not always particularly coherent. John Cornyn adviser Matt Mackowiak ripped into Talarico for ordering a “vegan” breakfast taco—the pretty traditional potato, egg, and cheese, which, it has to be noted, contains animal products. A conservative movement that had more vim and vigor, as it has had in the past, might more naturally come upon the better attack on offer here: Talarico didn’t want to offend Obama, a secret Muslim, by ordering bacon.

Democrats, in response to this and other gleeful predictions of backlash, often pointed out that Obama and Sanders are two of the most popular politicians in the country. This seems to be true. YouGov, the polling firm, keeps a list. Obama has 54 percent approval, which puts him at the top. Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, famous for other things, is tied. Sanders sits in third, with 49 percent approval. (The first Republican on the list who didn’t star in Kindergarten Cop is the late Charlie Kirk, who comes in at eleventh with a pretty underwhelming 36 percent.) The trio’s approval ratings are helped by the fact that each is out of the running for the presidency. In Sanders’s case, it also helps that he is not seen as a dyed-in-the-wool Democratic partisan. (He’s an independent senator from Vermont.)

But these are national numbers, of course. The last time the Texas Politics Project conducted state polling on Sanders was in February 2020, when just 36 percent of Texans had a somewhat or very favorable opinion of him and 52 percent didn’t, with 42 percent saying they had a “very unfavorable” feeling. As for Obama, while some Americans who didn’t vote for him may remember him more fondly now—in the glow of our nostalgia for . . . 2015?—the most salient data point would be that he lost presidential elections here by 12 and 16 points in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

Obama’s trip to Austin—featuring a relatively low-profile sojourn to a taco place—would seem to be less of an indicator of a strategic shift than the decision to invite Sanders is. Back in 2018, the last time Texas Democrats had a pretty good shot at winning the top prize, when Beto O’Rourke was challenging Ted Cruz for the Senate, Sanders came to Texas in March to support progressive candidates in primaries but was not invited to the convention, which was once again a Texas-focused affair. 

It would have been strange if the party had invited either Sanders or Clinton that year, given that everyone was still traumatized by the 2016 primary. But there was an additional consideration. In Trump’s first term, the party hoped to make gains among a particular kind of suburban voter—especially the higher-income, higher-educated woman—who might have traditionally voted Republican but was repulsed by the president. This kind of voter was more likely to be a fan of the status quo that the president seemed to have wiped away. That voter was probably not a Bernie bro—though their downwardly mobile children might have been. 

Democrats succeeded in targeting this voter, flipping a number of suburban state and national districts and coming within 2.6 points of knocking off Cruz, fueled by hundreds of thousands of voters who cast ballots for O’Rourke for Senate and Abbott for governor. The results unsettled Texas politics for some years, until Republicans were able to draw new, safer maps in 2021 and the hated Biden replaced the Donald.