Sine Die For Electoral Mobilization

The Dallas Morning News revisited one of the 80th Legislature’s failures to act in an article frontpaged on their website Thursday: Moving Texas’ primary date up to "Super Tuesday," February 5, 2008. Between watering down the Childrens' Health Insurance Program expansion (we were already first in the nation in terms of the number of uninsured children before the 80th Legislature got underway), amending the Texas Pledge of Allegiance to make sure God gets His due (HB 1034), and burying their long knives in the back of the law-hating tyrant that they made Speaker of the House in 2003, our Republican-led legislature left a lot on the floor. Amongst the detritus left behind was a bill that enjoyed some of the only robust bipartisan support from both Texas Democrats and Texas Republicans to be found these days, a bill that would have moved our primary date up to a more relevant date than the current rubber stamp date of March 4, 2008.

The area where I think this will be felt the most, particularly for Texas Democrats, is in terms of expanding participation and mobilizing “Kinky Texans” behind our in-play Senate race and in taking back our state legislature from the corporate bag men and tinpot hacks in the Republican leadership who have made us a legislative laughingstock since 2003.

There are a lot of generally progressive-leaning independent voters in Texas that I like to characterize as “Kinky Texans.” As you might imagine, this has nothing to do with their personal lives, but rather with their support for Kinky Friedman in last year’s gubernatorial race. Kinky mobilized a group of people who have rarely voted for Democrats (or Republicans for that matter) in recent elections, a group that is generally suspicious of Democrats as being “Republican-Lite” but is at the same time a group that might be convinced to vote for Democrats in an environment where there is meaningful engagement in Texas.

I understand that the national structure of taking money from places where it isn’t competitive and using it in places where it can have an impact is the backbone of individual contributions to political campaigns. At the same time, I also know how much of a downer it is be part of a population (Texas Democrats) who are treated as nothing more than ATMs because of our lack of electoral relevance. I know many Democratic voters here in the Lone Star State who feel the same way, and almost to a person all of the "Kinky Texans" I know feel the same way.

The point of all this bloviating is that I think that a primary date moved up into relevance would have had positive spillovers for mobilizing those “Kinky Texans” behind Democrats in Texas, from our national candidates to our local and Congressional candidates. While I and others here at The Texas Blue are certainly going to put in overtime to increase the DPI in 2008 in Texas, I think that there’s not much question that it’s going to be a more difficult slog without a competitive primary calendar.