It’s big. It’s brash. And, this year, it’s relevant.
Texas is relishing it’s new role as the biggest prize of Super Tuesday. The Lone Star state will award 155 Republican delegates March 1 — nearly double Georgia’s 76. And that means the candidates are lavishing extra time on the state. It’s widely viewed as a must win for Sen. Ted Cruz — elected from Texas just four years ago as a tea party firebrand. Some polls nonetheless show the race tightening with frontrunner Donald Trump. A Cruz loss in Texas dramatically alter the contours of the GOP race, in which Trump has benefited from a crowded field which has featured support for his rivals.
One thing is clear: voters are engaged. Early voting numbers are high. Texas' primary used to come later in the cycle, muting its influence. Now the deep-red state looks to swagger into Super Tuesday prime time.
At the Harris County Republican Dinner on the eve of the last week’s debate in Houston, several hundred GOP faithful turned out. Boots and cowboy hats were plentiful among the men. Sequins were de rigueur for the women. Although all the candidates were invited, only Cruz and Ben Carson accepted. Attendees were polite to Carson, but this was clearly Cruz’s crowd.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Cruz’s old boss who had endorsed him earlier that same day, made a full-throated pitch for his guy.
“I know the man’s heart. I know Ted’s commitment,” Abbott said. “He will live up to the promise of true Texas conservative values.”
As Abbott outlined them, those values include protecting religious liberty and the right to bear arms as well as reining in the Environmental Protection Agency.
“What you do is going to reverberate all across the country,” he said, noting that the state will hand out more delegates Tuesday night that were awarded in the first four primary or caucus states combined.
Cruz rose to speak and drew applause as he ticked off some additions to Abbott’s list. Cruz said he he would repeal Obamacare, appoint a conservative constitutionalist to replace Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, launch an investigation into Planned Parenthood and rip the Iranian nuclear deal to shreds.
Don Sensabaugh, a retired rancher from Nagodoches, likes Cruz but is pragmatic about his road to the White House.
“If he can’t win Texas he doesn’t have much of a chance,” he said.
Sensabaugh said he respects that Cruz has waged a sometimes lonely fight in Washington that has put him at odds with even the other members of his own party.
“He knows the Constitution,” Sensabaugh said. “He’s the only one of them that showed up and fought. That stood up and did what the people hired him to do.”
But then there is someone like Lydia Sears.
“I love what Donald Trump is saying and I love how he is saying it,” Sears, 52, said.
Sears, a homemaker, said she has nothing against Cruz, but feels that the bare-knuckles Trump would be stronger against Democrat Hillary Clinton in November.
“He doesn’t take nothing from nobody. That’s a good ol’ Texas quality,” she said with a laugh.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said the state “likes it politics outsized.”
That is Trump to a tee. The New York billionaire could also benefit from another dynamic, Rottinghaus said: the tea party is yesterday’s revolution; Trump’s populist revolt is emerging as the next chapter.
“Texas, by it’s nature, is always looking for the next insurgency,” Rottinghaus said.
“The target is constantly moving. Trump benefits from the fact that he is not part of the system. What we are seeing now is that the most extreme tea party people are being challenged by even more extreme tea party people,” Rottinghaus said.
Case in point: state legislator Debbie Riddle. A horse breeder from Harris County, the Republican was seen as the fringe of the tea party movement. She once said that things like free education and health care came “straight out of the pit of hell” and alleged that Middle Eastern women were coming to the United States to give birth, then returning to their home countries to raise their babies as terrorists with U.S. citizenship.
Now, she has a primary opponent — from the right.
Polls show Cruz ahead, but they are divided on the size of his lead. One, from Emerson College Polling Society, has the Texas senator outpacing Trump by just one percentage point, within the margin of error. A CBS News poll has him with a wider 11 percent lead. An average of polls by Real Clear Politics places Cruz ahead by 8.6 percent.
What it will all mean for Cruz is difficult to say.
It’s unlikely that anyone will walk away from the state with a massive delegate lead. The state’s delegates — split between statewide and congressional districts — are awarded by a complicated proportional formula. A candidate would need to claim 50 percent of the vote statewide and in congressional districts to run the table and pocket all the delegates. None of the candidates is polling that high. Otherwise, the delegates are distributed proportionally to candidates who earn at least 20 percent of the vote.
But there is math, and there is perception,
“A shared win on Tuesday is a loss for Cruz,” Rottinghaus said.
Gama Paz agreed.
“He has to win,” the building project manager said as he sipped from a longneck beer at the Harris County dinner.
Paz likes Cruz.
“One word: conviction,” he said.
If he falls, Cruz will likely move his support to Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, runner-up in South Carolina and Nevada. Rubio is also battling for votes in Texas, but the contest has largely shaped up as a two-man race.
Paz is not a fan of Trump, who he mocked for failing to answer questions and provide specifics on policy issues.
“‘What are you gonna do Mr. Trump?’” Paz asked, chiding the candidate. “We’ll look at that and it be huuuuge.”
As he campaigned in his home state, Cruz pulled from Texas lore, invoking the Alamo and quoting one of the heroes of that famed battle, William Travis.
“Victory or death,” Cruz said Wednesday night. “Like the brave heroes of the Alamo we are besieged.”
Of course, things didn’t turn out so well at the Alamo (for the Texans). And some say Texas could prove to be Cruz’s Alamo as well.
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