Texas looks likely to once again give its 40 electoral votes to Donald Trump next week, but polls suggest he may win the state by considerably less than the 9 percent margin he held in 2016. Not yet throwing in the towel, Democrats continue to invest time and money in what Beto O’Rourke calls the country’s “sleeper battleground state.” No matter how the election swings, signs of a recentering Texas will no doubt be the subject of much analysis and discussion in the coming months.
Just one notch down on the state ticket, Ted Cruz, who entered the Senate with a 57 percent victory, is fighting tooth-and-nail for his political life in a current dead heat with Democratic Rep. Colin Allred.
Unlike other states in various phases of purpling, Texas’ move left chimes with a unique legacy of small “d” democratic politics. It was in the central Texas county of Lampasas that in 1877 a group of farmers planted the seed of 19th century populism. The group they founded, the Farmers Alliance, quickly grew into a statewide movement, then a regional one that birthed the national party known as the Populists.
Texas’ move left chimes with a unique legacy of small ‘d’ democratic politics.
Though the Populists crested as a political force in the presidential election of 1896, its legacy remained a defining feature of Texas politics for another century. As late as 1982, the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, including many who leaned left in the populist tradition. Even centrist Democrats such as Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby were known for progressive policies, such as bringing running water, sewers and roads to hundreds of immigrant barrios along the Mexican border.
It was in 1982 that Texas voters elected a firebrand editor of Texas Observer, Jim Hightower, to agriculture commissioner in a landslide. But Hightower’s election would prove to be more of a last gasp of Texas populism than a sign of revival. By 1990, Hightower would be unseated by future governor Rick Perry in an election masterminded by Karl Rove.
As a reporter for the Observer, Dave Denison had a front-row seat to the state’s rightward slide during the ’80s and ’90s. In a new essay for the Baffler, “Who Lost Texas?” he returned to his home state to investigate the prospects for reviving left politics where democratic populism was born.
His first stop is the South Texas home of Hightower, the 81-year-old grandee of Texas’ liberal populists. In explaining how the state turned right, Hightower highlights the GOP’s national Southern Strategy but also Democratic fecklessness. Not only did the party give up without much of a fight, Hightower says, but it continues to ignore the obvious route to regaining power and reviving the values and concerns of the Populists.
Why did the party not move to relentlessly increase the turnout among Black and brown voters? [Hightower] recalled an Austin activist who did an election study toward the end of the 1980s. He found that if the Democrats targeted voters in about a dozen South Texas counties who turned out for presidential elections but not the off-year elections and then increased that turnout by 5 percent, “we would win every statewide race.” The South Texas region overall is about 84 percent Hispanic, skews younger than the rest of the state and was long a Democratic stronghold. But when Hightower and [state Land Commissioner Garry] Mauro pushed that strategy to the state party’s leaders, the answer was “No, no, we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna put money on television. That’s how you win elections.” The Democrats began to lose their connection to retail politics in the areas most important to their future. “That’s the essence of it. And so people quit voting.”
To understand how a new generation of Texans are seeking to correct this error, Denison visits with Clayton Tucker, a rancher, activist and one-time Democratic candidate for state senate from Lampasas County. The prospects of a Lone Star left do not depend on mobilizing immigrants and Latinos, according to Tucker; there remains a vibrant, untapped vein of populism coursing through old ranching families, many of whom once supported the original Farmers Alliance.
“Every rancher, every person I talked to is economically populist,” Tucker tells Denison. Just as their 19th century Populists held up a banner of “the plain people” against Gilded Age monopolists, today’s ranchers seethe against the power of Big Meat.
Economic issues [are] where he thinks the Democratic Party has a chance to connect with rural voters. As he told me about the current state of the farm and ranch economy in Texas, he spoke about the ways monopoly power takes its toll. He said his ranch work is mostly raising goats. The problem with cattle now is that the beef industry is being “chickenized,” he said. “The chicken industry is the perfect example of what monopolization can do. I mean, there’s just four corporations that control the entire thing. And when we say control the entire thing, we mean the entire thing. They tell you what chickens to have, where you can keep them, what to feed them, when to feed them.” As the cattle industry heads in that direction, a small rancher can’t compete. As of now, that’s not the case with goats; the business remains “fairly unmonopolized,” he said, and the demand for goat meat has grown steadily over recent years.
If fifth-generation Texas ranchers can be converted to goat meat, is it far-fetched to think they can rediscover the democratic populism running deep in their native soil?
Read Denison’s article here.
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