Biden’s Path to 270 Widens, Trump’s Path Narrows, as Texas Moves to Toss Up
To win the election, Trump will need to win every state we currently have in the Toss Up column: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Maine's 2nd CD, as well as the newest addition, Texas...[and then] would need to win at least two of the seven states currently sitting in Lean Democrat: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Hampshire.
I am now back to agreeing with the sentiments in the draft, agreeing with Beto O'Rourke, and am pissed at the Biden campaign: Joe Biden should go to Texas and go BIG.
“If Joe Biden would come here it would be catalytic,” he insisted. “There are millions of Texans who have not voted yet.” O’Rourke even had the speech written if Biden came.
Just like me. More:
“Here’s one story that I think is fucking —” he said, pausing and trying to settle down. “They are spending something close to a kajillion dollars in Pennsylvania. [T]he strategy seems like it’s focused on winning over disaffected white Dems...Maybe we get them back and maybe we don’t,” he said. “Good luck!”
He even talks like me! More:
Meanwhile, in Texas, he argued, an enormous and diverse electorate that more closely represents the new Democratic Party was turning out in massive numbers — one Austin area county had already exceeded its 2016 vote — and doing so in the face of the strictest voter laws in the country. All that may be needed to put Biden over the top was a visit from the candidate.
Okay, now I'm getting pissed lol:
O’Rourke has made the case to Jen O'Malley Dillon, his former campaign manager who now manages the Biden campaign. “Jen has been great,” he insisted, though others close to O’Rourke here in El Paso who make up his brain trust told me they have become deeply frustrated with her.
“It’s a cookie cutter campaign strategy,” said one top El Paso Democrat. “I feel like I’m reliving the Clinton campaign, like there’s a book, ‘Recipe for Presidential Campaigns,’ that’s just being followed.”
It really does feel to me like a cookie-cutter campaign, too.
Also like me! lol:
O’Rourke is one of the most passionate and excitable speakers in American politics. When he gets going about an idea he gets obsessed with it...
The flip side:
The Texas temptation is a familiar problem...
“You get those all the time,” said an adviser to Biden who has worked on several presidential campaigns. “‘We need the candidate to come here, there, or wherever.’ And they always put it in the language of it being in the interest of the candidate and usually it’s in the state politician’s interest.”
David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top political adviser in 2008 and 2012, remembers two states that never lived up to the hype. “Missouri was always fool's gold for us,” he said. “Georgia was tempting.”
The Romney campaign in 2012 thought blue Minnesota was competitive. “We dumped some money in there late when some polls indicated some tightening,” Kevin Madden, who was a senior adviser to Romney, said in a text. “And of course it didn’t materialize on Election Day. ☹️”
In 2016, Hillary Clinton looked toward the Southwest and neglected the Midwest. “She went to Arizona,” said a top member of Clinton’s 2016 braintrust, who didn’t want to be named. “That didn't work out.”
The danger for Biden is hubris. Nobody on his campaign wants Texas to be what California was to Bush in 2000 or what Arizona was to Clinton in 2016. What if Biden spends one of the six remaining days of the campaign in Texas — then narrowly loses the race to Trump? The recriminations would be brutal: Instead of staying focused on winning 270 electoral votes, he got sucked into a state that Democrats haven’t won since 1976 in a vain attempt to run up the score.
With respect, more contempt though, that thinking is not sensibly cautious that is scared-of-the-shadows bullshit. They should not have made 22 charges up the hill toward the stone wall--in Pennsylvania. They should have charged into Texas earlier and then seen what happened with the polls. But they did make those charges in Pennsylvania and, in for a dime, in for a dollar, now they're just gonna have to make some more.
But O’Rourke is persuasive.
Biden’s weakness in the state is among Latino voters.
“Latinos still don’t know Joe Biden,” said [Chuck] Rocha [Democratic Congressional Campaign consultant]. “They know he was the vice president, but they don’t know him.” He said that Biden fares better once Latinos learn more about him, but earlier in the year, when Biden was broke coming out of the primary, Trump invested heavily in Spanish language media. “When Donald Trump went up with his first ads he wasn’t talking about how great he was, he was just talking about how much Joe Biden sucks.”
That's where I left off. The Biden campaign should charge into Texas. They have the money to be everywhere, including in Pennsylvania, and Joe Biden has got to pick up his travel schedule and go to three states in one day, including TEXAS.
