Texas Primary: Four Trends, All to Obama's Advantage

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Wed Feb-27-08 08:08 PM
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Texas Primary: Four Trends, All to Obama's Advantage

Texas Primary: Four Trends, All to Obama's Advantage
Clinton, Obama, and Texas

Photo Illustration: Everett Bogue; Photos: Getty Images

With less than a week to go before the next round of Democratic primaries, Texas is the state to watch. It’s big, it’s critically important, it’s a dead heat (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are separated by an average of 1.2 points in the most recent polls). And, because its delegate-selection process is governed by wacky, convoluted rules that hardly anybody fully understands, it’s ripe for projections based on our special insights. Here, then, are four trends to watch — and what they mean for your favorite candidate.

The Latino Vote Could Split

What’s left of the Democratic machine in Texas is now concentrated in the heavily Mexican-American Rio Grande Valley, and Clinton has made the border a second home as she tries to amp up her support among Latinos. But guess what: There are many different Latino communities in Texas. Mexican-Americans along the border have benefited from NAFTA and are indeed showing strong loyalty to Clinton. But urban Latinos — there are now more Hispanics in the city of Houston than in the entire Rio Grande Valley — are younger and more susceptible to Obama’s appeal. Voting patterns in other states have also shown that Latinos who have been in the U.S. for multiple generations were more influenced by favorable coverage of Obama in English-language media and Ted Kennedy’s endorsement. It’s the newer immigrants who were more likely to support Clinton. Odds are that overall, Latinos will divide as they did in New Mexico, where they broke about 61-36 percent for Clinton, instead of giving her the monolithic support she is seeking.

Blacks and Students Will Generate More Delegates Than Latinos

Obama is harvesting from richer fields than Clinton, and he has the state party to thank. Next Tuesday’s primary will allocate 126 delegates, but not according to the candidates’ statewide support. Instead, they will be awarded in each of Texas’ 31 State Senate districts. (Complicating things further, not all of those districts will award the same number of delegates: Some have as few as three, while others have as many as eight, depending on the number of Democratic votes the district cast for president in 2004 and governor in 2006.)

The idea behind this breakdown is to reward heavily Democratic areas with more delegates — which isn’t, by the way, crazy. But it has produced extra representation for areas with many black voters or ultraliberals, two groups who have turned out reliably for Democratic candidates in recent years. And it has yielded fewer delegates for districts dominated by Latinos, who split among four candidates in a wild gubernatorial race in 2006, and a chunk of whom favored George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004.

So Senate District 13 in Houston and District 23 in Dallas, which are represented by the only African-Americans in the Texas Senate, plus District 14, which includes the University of Texas at Austin, will award a combined 21 delegates next week. In contrast, the six districts who have Latino senators have a total of just 22 delegates.

Republican Gerrymandering Will Help Obama

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http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/02/why_the_perplexing_texas_prima.html