The NPR Politics Podcast - Takeaways From Texas, As Midterms Kick Off

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

The first primary votes of 2018 are in, in Texas. Democrats had a strong showing, turning out over a million voters. But Republicans still outnumbered them, by a solid half a million votes. And a record number of women ran — and many of them won. This episode: host/political reporter Asma Khalid, political editor Domenico Montanaro and congressional correspondent Susan Davis, with a special guest appearance from Ben Philpott of KUT in Austin, Texas. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Austin Smith recording in Austin, Texas, where I'm waiting to vote in the primaries. This podcast was recorded at 1241 p.m. on Wednesday, March 7th. Things will likely have changed by the time you listen to this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR One app, or your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Hey there, this is the NPR Politics Podcast, and we are here in your ears to talk about the first primary of the 2018 political season. That was in Texas. And three quick things to know. About a million Democrats turned out to vote and about a million and a half Republicans. Finally, the women running for Congress did really well last night. So how much can we read into the Texas results?

What does it tell us about future primaries and what we might see in November? I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right. I want to begin by just phoning a friend. Can we dial in Ben Philpott? He covers politics for the NPR station in Austin, Texas at KUT. Hey, Ben. Hello. Hey, how's it going? It's great. You are our resident Texas expert, so I so appreciate you joining us. All right, folks,

I just want to dive in, actually, by beginning to talk about turnout. I feel that for days and days we had been hearing about record Democratic turnout in the early voting numbers that we saw. But then primary comes and it seems like actually more Republicans showed up. So, I mean, Dominica, what what happened there? Well, there are a lot of Republicans in Texas. So, you know, I mean, there's all this attention about a blue wave and all that and all this attention on Beto O'Rourke, who's the congressman from the El Paso area. He's running for the Senate against Ted Cruz. But Democrats keep slipping into this idea that they're going to be able to take over in Texas. And, you know, I talked to Wayne Slater, who's the former, you know, longtime reporter in Texas who'd covered the Bush administration and had said, you know, this whole stuff about a blue

wave coming. Don't hang your hat on that. So. So, Ben, I've got a question there for you. I mean, the fact that there are a lot of Democrats who voted seems significant, right? I mean, we do see numbers that were over 80% higher than the last midterms in 2014. And I do feel like that's significant. Oh, yeah. I mean, they pretty much doubled the number of people voting in a Democratic primary from 2014, the last midterm to this one. And that is significant in that it showed that there was an increased energy on the Democrats side. They had more candidates running. They were competing in more races.

They competed in every congressional race and in a higher percentage of races at the state legislature than they have in 20 or 30 years. And all that is going to do something. It'll do things like energize the base, get more activists who are more willing to volunteer to knock on doors or make phone calls, and it'll probably get more donations to candidates trickling down. You know, it won't in Texas, but if it does a bunch or if it just does some nice incremental increase for the party, you know, that's quite possible. But yeah, it's not a game changer, although I'm sure that that's probably a banned term on this podcast. Do you all feel that last night was a good or a bad night for Democrats or is that unclear?

Well, politics, I think, can be confounding in that last night, Republicans had a really good night. And last night, Democrats had a really good night. And what I mean by that is this idea that Texas on a big, broad level, on a macro level, might be leaning more towards Democrats because of the younger people moving there, because of the Hispanic vote, didn't really materialize. I mean, Texas last night still proved that it is a red leaning state. And Ted Cruz, who is the Republican Senate incumbent running for reelection to a second term, had a great night last night. And I think anyone looking at that Senate race as we pivot into the general election is going to keep Ted Cruz and the strong advantage to win statewide. However, down the ballot with this surge of Democratic turnout,

we are seeing in this primary the anecdotal data we've seen in other special elections that the Democratic voter base, this midterm election cycle, has more enthusiasm than the Republican base. And that in the places that it matters, in the toss-up races in Texas, there's three House races that are considered competitive this November. Democrats have a shot to win in part because of that enthusiasm. Yeah. I mean, it's this double-edged thing where statewide, it doesn't look like Democrats are favored in any way. Beto O'Rourke had sort of a disappointing showing last night. He surpassed the number needed to make it past a runoff and didn't need a run. It got, you know, 60 something percent. But there was an unknown candidate, 32 years old,

didn't spend any money, Sima Hernandez, who wound up with a quarter of the vote. And, you know, what a lot of Texas observers say is that South Texas plays huge in Democratic primaries, but that Latinos in South Texas for a long time haven't gotten fired up really for a favorite Democratic candidate statewide. So we should explain to folks a bit about Beto O'Rourke, right? He is a Democrat running for Senate, and he raised gobs of money through these small donations. I do think that it's fair to say

there were pretty high expectations that he was going to kind of just sail through his primary run for the Democratic race to challenge Ted Cruz in the Senate. And he did get through, as you mentioned. But there is this woman, Zima Hernandez, that I would venture to say, I mean, look, I'll be honest, I didn't really know who she was. I don't know how many folks did know who she was. And she got a quarter of the vote. So, I mean, Ben, was that unexpected? Yeah, I mean, nobody knew who she was and she got a quarter of the vote. So, I mean, Ben, was that unexpected? Yeah, I mean, nobody knew who she was. But, you know, when you look at the numbers, she picked up, she was winning counties along the Texas-Mexico border. That's where, you know, a lot of the state's Hispanic population is. She has a Hispanic surname. She also, though,

another kind of default vote that we seem to be picking up in this election is that she was a woman. And it appears, if you look at a lot of the different races in a low information election where people may not know anything about all these different people on the ballot, being a woman seems to be a plus and has helped a lot of different unknowns do well on these primaries. You saw that in other places where being a woman was an advantage. Yeah, for us, for KUT, the closest one was a race for Congressional District 21. That's a district that runs from Austin to San Antonio, but then jumps up into rural Texas. But that seat, Lamar Smith is the current

congressman there. He's retiring. So they had four Democrats running to take that nomination for in the fall. Three of them were men. One of them was a woman. Two of them, two of the men, were well-funded, had campaign apparatus, had mailers. You saw signs up about them. And they were all beaten by this female candidate who did not advertise, did not raise money. She actually, when one of our reporters called her last night to ask if she was going to have any kind of a watch party, she said, oh, no, should I? What are the results? And that's when our reporter said, well, you're in second place. So she said, OK, great.

I'll call a few friends and we'll head over to a restaurant near my house. And then, of course, she ended up, you know, when all the votes were counted, she came in first. And we'll now have a runoff against a candidate that did raise, like, I think almost a million dollars and has the glossy ads with him standing next to President Obama. So, you know, we'll see how that advantage that she may have gotten in the primary carries forward to the runoff. And the broader part of this story is not just in that district, but broader in Texas as well, but even bigger than that across the country. You know, we've written about the record number of women who are running for office in 2018.

Last night, we saw that of the 35 Democratic congressional races, 17 of the first place finishers were women. And it looks like the state is going to send its first two Latinas to Congress, you know, almost guaranteed one to replace O'Rourke in his seat, Veronica Escobar, who's an El Paso County judge, and over in Houston to replace Gene Green, who is the current congressman there, State Senator Sylvia Garcia. It looks like she's going to be the person to win. Now, look, this is remarkable, given that Texas has never put a Latina in Congress when four in 10 people in the state are Latino. And this could be a first, right? I mean, we don't know that. Yeah, this would be a first, right? I mean, we don't know that for sure, but they both look very promising. Yeah, this would be a first, and they will be overwhelmingly favored.

Got it. So I want to pivot back to that Senate race for a sec, because you know Ted Cruz, you've covered him, right? So given that Beto O'Rourke is now his Democratic challenger, he didn't get as many votes as Ted Cruz did last night. Ted Cruz had no challenger, right? But actually, he just had more people come in to the ballot and ultimately just check his name, right, even with no challenger. So that leads me to think Ted Cruz still has a tremendous momentum and favorability in his home state. Absolutely. And I don't think anybody anticipated that Democrats were going to show up in the same numbers as Republicans were in the primary. The question was just how much would they close the gap between the turnout numbers. And as we said, Democrats did show up in pretty respectable numbers. Ted Cruz has a lot to feel good about as he pivots into this

general election. One thing that I was interested in looking at those numbers is that within the Republican Party and within this primary, Cruz has been really interesting because he did spend a lot of last year, the last two years being a big critic of Donald Trump. And he has since sort of repositioned himself against, you know, if you recall his very famous speech at the convention where he sort of went at Donald Trump. Now he has become an ally of Donald Trump. And I was curious to see if there was any sort of lingering resentment towards Ted Cruz in Texas. You know, does he still compel the base to show up and vote for him? And he had a really strong showing in what was for practical purposes an uncontested primary. And he came out of his primary win last night and he has immediately pivoted to the general election and is already up

on the airwaves with an attack ad against Beto O'Rourke. And I think we have some tape of it. Liberal Robert wanted to fit in, so he changed his name to Beto and hit it with a grin. Beto wants those open borders and wants to take our guns. Not a chance on earth he'll get a vote from millions of Texans. If you're gonna run in Texas, you can't be a liberal man. It's quite catchy. It is. And I think that this very catchy, positive jingle outlines what I think is going to be a very relentlessly negative campaign that Ted Cruz

is going to run. Beto O'Rourke is running for what is still a relatively conservative state, a pretty liberal campaign. And I think that Cruz is going to try and make Beto O'Rourke into a way too left-wing, pandering white guy. And he, Ted Cruz, is the authentic Hispanic who represents Texas values. And so he was actually on CNN this morning. I know you were telling me about that, that he criticized Beto for going by the name Beto. And we should say that Beto is a nickname for Robert that O'Rourke has been using since he was a kid. But the ad, you go after Beto for his name. Beto is obviously a nickname.

Why? One, you didn't like that dirty pool when you were running for president and the president called you Lion Ted. You didn't like that kind of tactic. And, you know, look, your name is Raphael. You know, you go by Ted. Your middle name is Edward. That's an anglicized version of it.

He went the other way and has a more ethnic version of his name. go after it you're both doing the same thing well listen you're absolutely right my name is rafael edward cruz i am the son of my father rafael cruz an immigrant from cuba who came to texas with nothing and had a had a hundred dollars in his underwear couldn't speak english wash dishes making 50 cents an hour yeah so it's a very clever attack in which he uses the Beto attack to kind of remind voters that he is the real Hispanic in the race. And I think it's kind of a clever bit of political jujitsu on Ted Cruz's part. It could be interesting to see how, you know, there's one big issue that that might help carry this forward into November. And that is, of course, the dreamers, the DACA issue with whether or not Congress is going to end up coming

up with some kind of fix there. Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz was, I think, at one point, the only senator voting against part of the legislation moving forward up in Congress. Obviously, Beto has spent more time talking about the need for a fix, the need for something to change. And Texas, of course, has, you know, several thousand of these dreamers living here and family members and on and on. So it'll be interesting to see if that is anything that can help maybe endear him to the Hispanics of Texas as Senator Cruz tries to separate them. And Ben, that question, right, of Hispanic turnout, I think is one that's really interesting and one that from last night, we don't have any better answers to. Like there are no exit polls. We do know that about a third of the state's

Hispanic population is actually not old enough to vote. They are under 18, according to the census. So I think there's a lot of sort of extrapolation about what the Hispanic vote could mean in Texas, but sometimes we just haven't seen that actualized to date, we should say. And Governor Abbott won the male Hispanic vote four years ago. It was very close. It was like 50 and a half percent or whatever, but he won it. That's a level that you haven't seen in Texas since then Governor George W. Bush was running. And it's taken Democrats four years to try and think about chipping some of that back away. So I want to shift gears a bit. And one of the big themes, I would say, even beyond Texas,

but just in general, in this primary season, is this idea of who gets to be a Democrat, right? Who gets to wear the badge? Who has the ultimate, like, ownership of the one true vision of the Democratic Party? And I was really intrigued with Laura Moser's campaign right around Houston, where the DCCC, that's the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, they, you know, essentially accused her of being a carpetbagger who came down from Washington, D.C. to run this race. And it seems like it sort of backfired. Notice who you just said tried to paint her that way. The DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is responsible for electing Democrats to the House and took the unusual step of calling her out for writings in the past, saying that she wouldn't want to move back to Paris, Texas, where her parents are, when she was a writer in Washington, D.C. Sue, do you get the sense that we're going to keep seeing these fights?

I hope so. Yes. Spoken like a Philly brawler. Yeah, I mean, we are seeing this in other states already. And I do think that this is one of the thematics of sort of the Clinton wing versus the Bernie wing that's the leftover from 2016. And it's true. And, you know, Laura, this is the conflict, right? The DCCC's job, the political campaigns, operations, they don't care about how you feel about issues or any of the sort of policy debates. Their job is to win. And their job is to get the candidate that can win. And so you have this inherent conflict of sometimes the people up here in Washington, the candidate they think can win swingy suburban seats or seats that are held by Republicans

aren't the most liberal progressive candidate. And they think, they see Laura Moser, if she emerges from the May runoff as their candidate, she is weak going into a general election. So I don't think it was personal about her per se, even though obviously they attack her on a personal level, but they are not confident in her ability to win a seat that they think that they have a chance at winning. I will say that it's also one of these lessons that when, and Republicans have felt this blowback many times in recent election years too, is when the quote-unquote establishment tries to dip their hand into a local race, it often has the opposite effect of what they intended. And when you single out a candidate, it also has the benefit of

elevating their name ID in races that are otherwise, you know, most primary candidates in wide open fields aren't particularly well known. So they may have inadvertently benefited the candidate that they were hoping to sideline. This really speaks to a broader ideological shift within the Democratic Party that's been brewing for about 12 years. You know, back in 2006, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, who was President Obama's chief of staff, he was in charge of the DCCC. And he took a very hard line against candidates who were seen as too left, too progressive. And Democrats wound up taking back the House in 2006, largely because of the descent of the Iraq war into a civil war, that Democrats were

able to ride that wave into the House. But he upset a lot of progressives and liberals who were just smarting at the fact that Emanuel was edging out so many of these Democrats and progressives. And then you had the Obama White House, which had the same sort of pragmatic approach, you know, whether it was, remember the health care debate, a lot of liberals wanted a much more progressive health care plan. And you had Robert Gibbs, the press secretary for President Obama, talk about the professional left and how they were, you know, undermining the Democratic Party and that they needed to basically get over it. Well, at this point where this Democratic Party is in the age of Trump, they're not trying to get over it. And the question is that, like, if there is this huge splintering of which, you know, Sue, as you were saying, it's kind of the remnants of what we saw already in the 2016 primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Does that affect the enthusiasm? I feel that for months we've been hearing ever since Donald Trump's election, frankly, that there is this anti-Trump anger that's really galvanizing Democrats. But if you know, we'll see we'll have more chances soon to see in other special elections and primaries. Democrats are excited. And I think you could argue from a macro sense that even having these primary fights is good for turnout. Anger is the single best motivating force in a midterm election. Hope to. But there isn't a lot of hope. I feel that you are a polar opposite of human behavior. No, hope is about presidential years. Anger is about midterm years. And people show up to in a midterm election year. It's about a referendum on the president. It's about a referendum on the national climate. And and as the angriest people show up in midterms, at least that has certainly been true for the past decade in American politics. And the anger and froth right now is on the left. The challenge, and this is where I think you see the DCCC and other people trying to pick favorites, is they don't want to see what they see as a big opportunity here and squander it by nominating people who just can't win in the places you need

to win to win a majority. But, you know, it's been interesting hearing some of the response to the DCCC from activists, things along the lines of, you know, it doesn't matter how centrist you are. It doesn't matter how moderate you are as a Democrat. The Republicans will still paint you as a baby killer and someone who's going to come steal their guns. Yeah. So what Democrats here are saying is be liberal, be progressive, be whatever. Don't try to mold yourself into the middle because you will absolutely be a, you know, quote, puppet of Nancy Pelosi, no matter what your views are. That's the Bernie would have won effect in the midterm, right? You know, at least be a strong progressive, take very strong positions because people respond better to clear, authentic

politicians than sort of the wishy-washy moderates that the establishment tends to side with. Sue, you were just talking a minute ago about anger being this energizing force. And so if anger is going to get people to the polls, a lot of the anger we've seen, frankly, since the day after Donald Trump's inauguration with the Women's March comes from women. And, you know, we did see a bit of that, I think, last night in Texas. Do you think we're going to continue to see that?

I do. And we do have record numbers of women running. What Ben said earlier, which I hadn't thought about, which is so interesting, is that in these crowded primaries where people are showing up to vote because they just want to vote, but they don't know who to vote for, is just being the woman on the ballot going to be the advantage in a lot of these primaries? And I think Texas opened the door to that question. And I think that's a really interesting thing to keep watching as we go forward in primaries, where in some of these races, you know, there's six, 10, 12 candidates, and you don't know who they are. So in Texas, obviously, it helped not only to be a woman, but a Latina. In other races, if you're just the woman in a male-dominated field, maybe that's the thing that's going to give you an edge in 2018. All right. I don't want to take too much more time about Texas, but I do have one overarching question. And that is that does Texas help us understand if the talk about this Democratic wave has been overrated? And I don't know if we know the answer to that yet. I get that it was just one primary,

but your guys' thoughts. I think you answered it with your demographics, the fact that Latinos, you know, still a third of them are unable to vote yet, even though Texas is a majority minority state already. Democrats have just not been able to harness the power of Latinos. And I think that showed up in the Beto O'Rourke totals, you know, where you've got a lot of South Texans voting for somebody with a Hispanic surname, even though she spent no money on this race. So you sound like a skeptic. I am very much a skeptic because Republicans have done this over and over again. They know how to win these statewide races until Democrats can show that they can win a statewide race. I will continue to be skeptical. What about you, Sue?

For my purposes, when we look at the midterms, I'm thinking about the House and Senate. I think the House is in play. And I think Texas only backed up that fact because of the trends we're seeing and I think we'll continue to see. I don't think people like Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republican leaders who are looking to protect their majorities woke up this morning thinking, we got this. I think they know that they have a very hard year ahead. I think that the places where the races will be decided in the suburbs, among college educated voters, Trump voters, are they going to show up? I mean, those people are all still in play. I think the House is very much in play. So I don't think the talk of a blue wave has been underrated or overrated. I think it's been rated. I think

the question of of is the House in play and can Democrats take back the House is very much alive today. And I think it's going to be a really fun, dramatic election year. Democrats need 24 seats to flip to take back the House. Three of those seats that they're targeting are in Texas. They're still in play. And Ben, your thoughts? I think Texas kind of is a recalibration of expectations for Democrats. You know, 2017, other than Virginia, was a series of special elections where all of a sudden a Democratic candidate, you know, came out, either came out of nowhere or just, you know, was able to fight back against a 30-point district that Donald Trump had won to either make it close or win a seat. This was not that. This was a primary election heading into a regular general election. And you saw kind of the regular voting patterns that you would see. But then it does show that things like the suburbs are absolutely still in place. So it doesn't dash the

hopes, but it lets you know, no, this isn't a series of special elections. This is the regular series of elections. Yeah. And my take, I would say, is sort of in the middle of what both you and Sue had to say, which is that I do think it gives us some indication of how things are going. And I get, Sue, what you're saying about the midterms being a look at the House and the Senate races. But I do think also there are some indications that things have not changed so dramatically for the Democrats in ways that may help them in another general election in 2020. And I know that that feels like eons away at this point. But I do think like overall suggestions that make it unclear as to even if demographics are totally yet in favor

of Democrats makes it hard to kind of figure out that even if Democrats do win back some of these seats in 2018, is that actually that momentum going to kind of carry them through to another general election 2020? All right, that is enough Texas talk for now. Bye, Ben. Thank you so much for being our resident expert. Bye. Thanks for having me. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow with our weekly roundup, where we'll be answering some listener questions about trade and tariffs. Do you have questions about the new tariffs that Trump is planning to impose on steel and aluminum? Or do you have questions about trade in general?

You can send them our way at nprpolitics at npr.org. And in the meantime, keep up with our coverage on npr.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. Remember, if you really miss us, you can also always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm

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