LAT: A TIME OF TRANSITION
Democrats set sights on Texas
Some believe Latinos can help change the state from red to blue.
By Peter Wallsten
November 9, 2008
As they review the results of Tuesday's election victories and begin looking toward future campaigns, some Democrats have settled on a rallying cry: Texas is next.
It sounds improbable for the Republican bastion that produced President Bush and served as an early laboratory for Karl Rove's hard-nosed tactics. But Texas is one of several reliably red states that are now in Democrats' sights as party strategists begin to analyze a victorious 2008 campaign that they believe showed the contours of a new movement that could grow and prove long-lasting.
A multiethnic bloc of Latinos, blacks, young people and suburban whites helped to broaden the party's reach Tuesday well beyond its traditional base in the Northeast and the West Coast -- carrying Barack Obama into the White House and expanding the party's majorities in Congress....
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Obama's winning coalition, some Democrats said, could mark a turning point in history: Republicans can no longer achieve an electoral college majority with their decades-old strategy of winning whites in the South and conservatives in the heartland. Now, Democrats have a path through the Rocky Mountains and even some states in the old Confederacy....
Texas, the nation's second-most-populous state and home to 34 electoral votes, was not a 2008 presidential battleground, and Republican nominee John McCain won there by a comfortable margin. The Obama campaign spent little money there, apart from recruiting volunteers to work in other states. But strategists believe the large and growing Latino population there remains untapped, along with a large black electorate, which could make Texas competitive with a major investment of time and money from an Obama-led Democratic Party....
One top Obama strategist said the campaign had already sought to build the Texas state party, handing over a database with hundreds of thousands of voter names and phone numbers gathered when Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton competed in the state's Democratic primary. Much of the campaign's attention in that effort focused on Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley.
The strategist, Cuauhtemoc "Temo" Figueroa, Obama's top Latino outreach official, said the state could be taken seriously as a presidential battleground if Democrats could win statewide races there in 2010. "I don't know if it's four years or eight years off, but down the road, Texas will be a presidential battleground," Figueroa said....
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-assess9-2008nov09,0,6888420,full.story
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