“… A new assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons.”
Greg Abbott, then Texas Attorney General, now the Governor of Texas, gave this ominous warning to a group of Republicans in 2013 during his gubernatorial campaign. This danger greater than a threatened nuclear fallout? A Democratic Political Action Committee founded barely a year before: Battleground Texas.
Battleground Texas’s (BGTX) core mission lies in voter registration and increased mobilization of inactive and young voters.The grassroots organization emphasizes the power of community outreach and snowballing volunteer recruitment. They aim to register low-income and minority voters to make Texas more competitive for Democrats running within the state.
BGTX, trains representatives to reach out and recruit more volunteers in their own neighborhoods. Why then would prominent Texas Republican politicians fear the registration of more voters as a threat? The current national voter paradigm—or at least most of the country’s perception of it—has Texas as one of the most deeply decided red states: the last Democrat elected to be the state’s governor was Ann Richards in 1990, and a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won Texas since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
BGTX set out to challenge the assumption of a red Texas; instead of looking towards the past patterns, they extracted their mission from current and projected demographic shifts that are pointing to a more diverse and left-leaning Texas.
Their core idea is that the racial and socioeconomic demographics in Texas do not reflect who is being elected: if these minority and low income voters become mobilized, Texas will shift blue or at least become a swing state. Texas is one of three majority-minority states in the country; non-Hispanic whites make up only 45% of the population. According to The Pew Research Center, Texas has the second-largest Latino population in the U.S., with data projecting that over half of the population of Texas will be non-white Hispanic by the year 2020.
There are 2.2 million Latinos that are not registered to vote in Texas; the unregistered Texan voter population is larger than the whole population of 20 individual states. BGTX finds their purpose in these 2.2 million, looking to unregistered minorities as an untapped resource, an unheard voice that has the power to shift Texas to become a competitive swing state.
Jeremy Bird, the National Field Director for Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, founded BGTX in 2013. The 2014 gubernatorial race between Senator Wendy Davis (D-TX) and then Attorney General Greg Abbott tested the organization’s capacity. Not only was this election cycle crucial for determining important seats in the State Senate, but Wendy Davis was enjoying massive amounts of national attention following her viral filibuster against a Texas law restricting abortion. BGTX seized the opportunity, linking themselves to Davis’s campaign so much so that they even moved their headquarters to Fort Worth (Davis’s base) from Austin; this thrust them into the national spotlight, earning them both coverage in the press and intense scrutiny from Republicans on a state and national level.
Sarah Al-Shalash, a sophomore in Silliman from Frisco, Texas, testifies to the to the inseparability of the Davis campaign and BGTX. At the end of her junior year in high school, she thought she was signing up to volunteer for Wendy Davis, but found herself actually assigned to a group that worked for BGTX. As a fellow, she was expected to both prepare the materials and volunteers for “walk-blocks” (canvassing) and be active in canvassing (every week, each fellow had to knock on at least 50 doors and make at least 500 phone calls). As the liaison between her county’s BGTX group and the media, Al-Shalash experienced the shortcomings of the Davis/BGTX alliance firsthand.
“Messaging was a huge problem.” she says, “If someone wanted to talk about something that Wendy Davis’ headquarters said we couldn’t talk about, like abortion, we couldn’t talk to them about it. There were very limited things that you could talk about, and so we weren’t able to address many people’s major concerns.”
This risky decision to associate themselves so closely with a campaign came under fire when, despite the overwhelming hype surrounding Davis as a competitive candidate, Abbott won the governor’s seat with a whopping 20-point lead. The down-ballot took a hit as well, with each Democratic candidate being defeated by double-digit margins, thus turning over important seats in the legislative branch to Republicans. Immediately after the results, Democrats were reminded that this was “not a battle to be won in one election cycle”, but many donors were still unsatisfied. How did such a promising, attention-garnering movement fail?
Battleground Texas’ immediate shortcomings could be linked to their organizational tactics, but they also fought larger obstacles in their attempt to increase voter registration. Issues surrounding voter rights in Texas call into question the Republican-controlled legislature and may point to the larger, root factors that may hinder any Democratic movement in Texas.
Professor Joseph Fishkin is Yale Law School’s Irving S. Ribicoff Visiting Professor of Law from the University of Texas, Austin. He both teaches and writes on election law and political theory, namely voting rights, campaign finance, and larger issues surrounding inequality. When asked to elaborate on the institutionalized issues surrounding voting equality in Texas, he leaned back into his chair and chuckled to himself: “I mean, how long do you want this answer to be?”
Battleground Texas would have very quickly encountered restrictive voter registration laws in their efforts to register more voters. Fishkin explained that in Texas, the only people that can register others to vote are Volunteer Deputy Registrars (VDRs), all of whom must complete a training session, hand deliver all voter registration forms to the county election office, and—the biggest hinderance to BGTX’s efforts—only be able to register people from the county in which they are certified. This is incredibly limiting, as Texas has 254 counties, with a single city possible sprawling over two or three counties. These VDRs must be re-deputized at the end of every even numbered year, and no one out of state can be deputized.
On a larger scale, there have been continued controversies surrounding voting rights in Texas, most notably their 2011 contested voter ID law. Over the past ten years, there’s been a rallying cry to “stop voter fraud”, leading to support of restrictive voter registration legislation in many southern states, notably manifested in Texas’s photo ID law.
Fishkin notes that these laws have considerable popular support, making them politically effective to push for; proponents advocate that they improve confidence in the election process and are applied fairly.
Alicia Pierce, the director of communications for the Texas Secretary of State’s office, describes these voter ID laws as flexible and non-prohibitive: if a person doesn’t have one of the seven acceptable forms of identification when they go to the polls, they can give a “reasonable” explanation for why they don’t have the approved I.D. and vote with any government document that proves their name and address.
The Secretary of State in Texas is the chief elections officer in the state, drafting and enforcing election laws in the state. These laws are nearly universally opposed by Democrats because of their ability to disenfranchise left-leaning voters like lower-income citizens, racial minorities, and the youth; they argued against instances where there are perceived partisan skew in the law, like the fact that a gun license is an acceptable form of identification, but a student ID is not.
Very early on, Voter ID laws were challenged in the courts; Fishkin describes three subsequent rounds of litigation against these laws, the third of which is still ongoing. Democrat-backed plaintiffs initially challenged Voter ID laws for infringing on citizens’ right to vote, but the courts upheld the laws based on a very similar, earlier voter ID case, Crawford v Marion County.
The second wave of challenges brought forth in the courts by Democratic groups attacked the laws by claiming that they violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. After the 2013 Supreme Court judgement in Shelby v. Holder, this section no longer applied to Texas, effectively gutting these cases. Plaintiffs instead challenged the laws using Section 2 of the VRA, which aims to protect against gerrymandering and voter dilution. In the 5th Circuit, judges ruled in banc, or all together at once, that this law did violate Section 2.
Currently, the state of Texas is attempting to bring the case to the Supreme Court, but Fishkin says that it’s unlikely to happen: “It’s October, so the Supreme Court will decide that it’s too close to the election,and allow the lower courts to let people vote based on the current decision,” he speculates.
When asked about the office’s stance on the the laws under review, Pierce bristles.
The litigation against the Voter ID law in Texas highlights what Fishkin describes as two generations of voting rights violations; the first generation cases are focused on disenfranchisement, while the second generation cases revolve around vote dilution.
Disenfranchisement is clearly demonstrated in the voting laws that simply prohibit certain groups from voting (i.e. the now-overturned 2011 Voter ID law); vote diluting practices appear to have emerged from these disenfranchising laws as more evolved and nuanced ways to manipulate the vote: instead of just making it impossible for people to vote, certain strategies are used to make their votes count less or not at all.
One striking example of vote dilution is obviously gerrymandering, a practice that one can observe quite easily in Texas. Under the innocuous guise of “redistricting”, which takes place every 10 years, there has been a long history of the Texas House drawing the congressional districts in ways to benefit the party in power; for many years, the districts heavily favored Democrats.
However, in 2002, Republicans won back the House and, although 10 years hadn’t passed since the last re-drawing of the lines, pushed for a re-redistricting of the state. This map would have, and did, make Texas decisively a red state instead of a compromise one. The strategy under fire is one that condenses most minority voters (presumed Democratic) into a few districts, so that that small number of districts are conceded as blue, but they’re not nearly enough to outweigh the majority of unwaveringly red districts.
Here, partisanship is almost completely tied to race: the minority-majority inner cities go blue, while the rest of Texas remains red. Because of this, it becomes difficult to legally question these maneuverings: the Supreme Court has never struck down a case of gerrymandering because it was too partisan, but the remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act specifically act to protect minority voters against disenfranchisement. To strike down these maps, it would have to be proven that the Republican legislators knowingly drew these districts based on the race of the citizens within in order to discriminate a certain group- racist intentions that the courts are reluctant to see.
At one point during the interview, Fishkin expresses his own discomfort with the litigation against the restrictive voting laws, pointing out the overwhelming partisanship that influences them. While he understands that these laws do seem to be written with partisan skew in favor of Conservatives, it is still frustrating that the litigation is motivated by the partisan effects of laws instead of their actual consequences.
“Ultimately, we shouldn’t be exclusively focused on the partisan effects of laws, we should be interested in whether people are supposed to have a right to vote, can vote,” he says, “Even when that doesn’t have a partisan skew, it’s still Constitutionally important.”
He argued that in situations that Democrats and Republicans are in agreement, but there are people disenfranchised by a policy, there seems to be no action by either side to work to give these voters their Constitutional rights because neither party feels that they have any partisan incentive to do so. He points out that this litigation is often brought forward by party-backed interested groups, but never individuals that are negatively affected by these laws.
“What you don’t have, in this litigation, is somebody coming forward and saying ‘I am actually not able to vote this cycle because of this law.’And it’s possible to find those people- journalists found those people in writing about the story- but they weren’t the plaintiffs, really. Had they been there, there might have been a different result, a result that maybe neither of the two main sides may have wanted.”
Here lies the gap between the interests of a particular side and the interests of actual voters, a divide that was also a point of contention in the context of Battleground Texas. Did BGTX register people to vote because it’s a fundamental right, or simply because they wanted to increase the influence of Democrats?
The assumption that simply registering hordes of minority voters would lead to a gradual Democratic shift proved to be problematic, highlighting Battleground Texas’s partisan focus. Even when registered, citizens did not necessarily vote for the candidates that BGTX projected them to. For example, Wendy Davis infamously polled horribly among Latino men, a group specifically targeted by BGTX; her advocacy for abortion rights turned many conservative, minority voters off, who then either didn’t vote or voted for her opponent.
In general, Latinos in Texas do tend to be more conservative than Latinos in other parts of the country: in 2012, PolitiFact Texas reported that, while only winning about 27% of the Latino vote in other states, Mitt Romney carried a staggering 37% of the Latino vote in Texas during his presidential campaign. One could criticize building a massive outreach campaign whose “success” hinges on a preconceived notion that generalizes the majority of an ethnic group in and of itself. If BGTX’s goal focused more on enfranchising people than attaining the immediate Democratic vote, the organization may not have received the backlash it faced post 2014, where many Democratic donors withdrew support.
After the 2014 election, BGTX publicly maintained that they never intended to flip Texas were in one (or even two) election cycles; the organization optimistically look towards the future. However, the backlash from Republicans and withdrawal of many Democratic supporters created lasting effects of the organization: BGTZ has been less active amidst the voter rights litigation in the courts and have maintained a relatively low-profile in the 2016 national election.
However, Al-Shalash highlights the relatively groundbreaking impact that Battleground Texas had across the state. In addition to connecting and bolstering so many Democratic headquarters across the state, Al-Shalash emphasizes how truly far-reaching and impactful the movement was.
“Mobilization was their biggest achievement.” she says almost immediately. “My county is very very red, but we had the most active group in the state. There would be blocks when 200 people would come out and spend their day volunteering. It was incredible.”
With crucial elections and Supreme Court decisions coming in the next four years, it’s clear that Battleground Texas has set the stage for what could be a monumental shift in Texas politics, but they will need all the help they can get.