Democrats are gearing up to spend millions of dollars to “turn Texas blue” by bringing in a new generation of Latino voters.
So when an abortion fight flared in Austin this summer, it seemed the stars had aligned — liberals had a hot-button cause to galvanize new supporters who just might stick around for the long haul.
There’s just one problem: Latinos as a group oppose abortion more strongly than most other voting groups.
Right from the start the effort is running into headwinds, since the battle over the anti-abortion bill is sure to create a month-long spectacle that draws attention to an issue that might galvanize liberals nationally, but isn’t very appealing to the very voters Democrats hope to win over in the state.
In their candid moments, Democrats acknowledge that abortion isn’t the issue they would have picked to lead the pitch for Latino votes. The fight was forced upon them, they say, when Gov. Rick Perry added the anti-abortion bill to last month’s special session and revived it in a second special session that started July 1.
“Is this the issue we would have picked to turn Texas blue? No,” Terri Burke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said with a laugh. “It was kind of thrust at us. We didn’t pick it.”
On the surface, at least, the polls don’t look promising for a party that’s basking in the national spotlight because of a fight over abortion rights. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 53 percent of Hispanic Catholics say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. That’s a lower percentage than white evangelical Protestants and Mormons, but it’s higher than all other religious voting groups, including white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, black Protestants, and Jews.
And Steve Munisteri, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, cited a poll by the Wilson Perkins Allen research firm that found a 2-1 “pro-life” margin among the state’s Hispanic voters. The poll, conducted for the state GOP, showed that 62 percent of Texas Hispanics who voted in the 2012 election described themselves as pro-life while just 32 percent called themselves pro-choice, according to Chris Perkins, the pollster who worked on the survey.
Some Democratic strategists say the key to winning over Latinos is to avoid focusing too much on any one issue — especially abortion.
Matt Angle says the party’s candidates should develop a broader pitch on a whole range of issues that are important to Latinos, but one powerful message, he says, is “overreach” by imposing such strict health and safety standards that many of the state’s health clinics have to shut down.
“If it’s only about one issue, then you’re going to fall short someplace,” said Angle, a longtime state strategist who has worked on other projects to rebuild Democratic strength.
Most liberals agree Democrats will need heart paddles to make the state competitive. The party hasn’t won a statewide race since 1994, it lost control of the Legislature years ago, and President Barack Obama won just 41 percent of the vote there in 2012.
And the party has suffered a series of other humiliations the whole way. At one point it became so weak that it couldn’t stop Gene Kelly, a perennial candidate who shares the same name as the dancer, from winning the nomination to the U.S. Senate.
But most Texas Democrats don’t think Latinos’ anti-abortion views will sink their hopes.
For one thing, other polls that have taken a deeper look at Latinos’ abortion views show their opposition is softer than it looks, according to James Aldrete, an Austin-based consultant. He cited a poll earlier this year by Lake Research Partners that found that Latinos refused to hold other people to their own moral standards on abortion — 74 percent said women have the right to make their own decisions without interference from politicians, and a similar percentage said they wouldn’t judge women who decide they’re not ready to be parents.
There’s also a generational difference in opinion. An April survey by Pew Research Hispanic Center found that 58 percent of Hispanic immigrants believe abortion should be mostly illegal, but that drops to 40 percent among second-generation Hispanics and 43 percent among third-generation Hispanics — closer to the views of the general public.
The abortion issue is “obviously an uncomfortable one for most Hispanics, but it’s rarely the issue that drives the vote,” Aldrete said.
Besides, Aldrete said, the abortion issue hasn’t stopped Obama from getting strong support from Hispanics in both of his elections — and the rise in the number of Hispanic Catholic voters was a big reason why the 2008 presidential election was the first one in many years in which Catholics as a group voted for the Democrat.
“I don’t think you can stereotype Latinos as Catholic, anti-reproductive freedom,” said Burke of the Texas ACLU, which has conducted other polling on political views among heavily Latino state Senate districts. “It’s really a generational issue, not an ethnic issue.”
And they insist that Texas Republicans are making so many other mistakes on issues that are important to Latinos — from voting rights to funding for education and low-income health care programs — that they have plenty of other ways to win new voters to their side.
The leaders of Battleground Texas, a group launched this year to make Democrats more competitive in the state, say the abortion fight has rallied huge numbers of volunteers.
And Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards — the daughter of Ann Richards, the last Democratic governor of Texas — says “there is a whole new activist base” that has been energized by the abortion bill and the way they believe Republicans have dismissed opponents of the bill as a bunch of loudmouths.
“I really feel like the fuse has been lit,” Richards told POLITICO. The state GOP leaders, she said, are “just putting an accelerant on a trend that was already underway … They are leading their party into oblivion.”
Others say there are plenty of other issues that will matter more to Latino voters. Richards said the state’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood — resulting in the loss of federal funding for women’s health — has forced the closure of clinics along the Rio Grande border that provided needed health services for low-income women. And the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid under Obamacare is “literally turning away millions of dollars that could be used to provide health care access for women,” she said.
“They have muddled all of this into a much broader attack on women’s health care access,” said Richards.
Angle said Texas Republicans have also pushed other issues that will hurt heavily them among Latinos, including cuts in education funding and the photo identification requirements for voters that the state imposed immediately after the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act last month.
And for all of the talk that the demographic changes in Texas will make the state more competitive, Aldrete said that will never be enough by itself anyway. Democrats will still need more white candidates who can compete statewide and compete for suburban white votes, he said, and they’ll have to rebuild that strength no matter what happens with Latinos.
“We need to do two things — we need to cut the margins with Anglos, and we need to change the math,” Aldrete said.
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