The many states of Texas

NY Times:

When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton issued her gunslinger’s invitation to Senator Barack Obama recently, challenging him to “meet me in Texas,” the question many people here asked was, Which one?

The frontier-conservative Texas of Amarillo, in the Panhandle, where former President Bill Clinton stumped for his wife this month, sharing the civic center with the annual gun show? The vast, immigrant-heavy Texas of Houston, where more than 100 languages are spoken in the city’s schools?

Maybe the one of East Texas, with its Deep South ethos, a region one Democratic consultant described as being more like Mississippi than Texas? Or the profoundly unpredictable one found here, in the central part of the state, among the most heavily Republican areas in the country (and home to President Bush’s ranch), yet represented in Congress by Chet Edwards, a well-liked Democrat who recently endorsed Mr. Obama?

“It’s like running a national campaign,” said one veteran Texas Democrat, Garry Mauro, state director for Mrs. Clinton. “There are no similarities between Amarillo and Brownsville and Beaumont and Texarkana and El Paso and Austin and Houston and Dallas. These are very separate demographic groups with very diverse interests.”

In a 1968 essay, Larry McMurtry wrote that Texas was divided but “not yet fragmented to a degree that would raise difficulties for the novelist.” Forty years later, you could sympathize with the writer, but you should feel really sorry for the presidential candidate, trying to make sense of a state as large as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina combined, and probably even more diverse.

With recent polls showing that Mr. Obama has cut deeply into Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Texas, or even erased it, the state has become a political battleground to a degree not witnessed in a generation. And the rapidly mounting fight has reminded national political strategists yet again of Texas’ strange largeness — or large strangeness — a state that Congress decided in 1845, the year it joined the Union, might well be later divided into four more states should it consent.

That provision stemmed from the debate over slavery, but it was an acknowledgment of the state’s unwieldy size and stark geographical differences, from prairie towns with plainly descriptive names like Notrees and Levelland to the swamps and cypress forests of the Big Thicket National Preserve in the southeast to coastal towns like Galveston, with old Victorian neighborhoods reminiscent of San Francisco.

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Austin is the most liberal area of the state. Harris county, the largest in the state which includes Houston is conservative Republican, but the city often votes Democrat. San Antonio has been traditionally a Democrat area, but with all its growth it is trending Republican now. The Midland Odessa area is conservative Republican. El Paso tends to be more tribal than party oriented. A Hispanic who happens to have an Anglo name will lose to a candidate with a Hispanic name regardless of party. In other words, if Bill Richardson was in the race he would have no advantage in El Paso. In the lower Rio Grande Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic you don't find that strong a tribal influence. Lloyd Bentsen represented a congressional district in the valley for years. Dallas used to be very conservative, but is not so dependable these days. East Texas will still elect conservative Democrats occasionally.

What the article left out is the fact that Democrats have not won a statewide race in this century. What Obama and Clinton are fighting over is what is left of the Democrat party. Democrats are a discredited brand in Texas. That is why even Obama does not want to admit to being the liberal that he is. You can win in Texas as a conservative, but the only place you can win as a liberal is in Austin. That is mainly because of the student vote at UT. Before they lowered the voting age to 18, the city voted for conservative business oriented candidates.