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Bloomberg goes to Texas and Ohio

Coronavirus: Texas mayors plead with residents to wear face masks - The  Washington Post

In 2018, Michael Bloomberg’s political operation did late polling that showed a number of House races that were competitive that were not on the radar and they poured a boatload of money into advertising in the final days. They were right and the Democrats won.

In this cycle Bloomberg has spent tons of money Florida already and it may pay dividends. But they’ve expanded their buys in two other states as well:

Michael R. Bloomberg is funding a last-minute spending blitz to bolster former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Texas and Ohio, directing millions toward television advertising in two red states that have shifted away from President Trump in the general election.

A political adviser to Mr. Bloomberg said the billionaire former mayor of New York City would use his super PAC, Independence USA, to air intensive ad campaigns in all television markets in both states. The cost of the two-state campaign is expected to total around $15 million.

The decision by Mr. Bloomberg reflects just how much the electoral landscape appears to have shifted in the final few months of the presidential race, as Mr. Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic has intensified his unpopularity and further alienated crucial voting groups like women and suburbanites.

Mr. Biden’s campaign has treated Ohio as a competitive battleground for some time, even though Mr. Trump carried it by a wide margin in 2016, and more recently, the Democratic ticket has been putting some time and money into Texas. Senator Kamala Harris of California, Mr. Biden’s running mate, is planning to visit the state on Friday.

Howard Wolfson, one of Mr. Bloomberg’s closest aides, said the former mayor had recently asked his team to run a round of polls to see whether Mr. Trump had unexpected vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the campaign’s closing weeks. Up to this point, Mr. Bloomberg’s general-election activities have focused on Florida, where he has pledged to spend $100 million supporting Mr. Biden.

The Bloomberg team conducted polling in a number of states over the weekend and came away convinced that Texas and Ohio represented its best targets — narrowly divided electoral prizes where the war for television airtime is not already cluttered with heavy advertising on either side. The team presented Mr. Bloomberg with the numbers on Monday morning and he gave the go-ahead.

“We believe that Florida will go down to the wire, and we were looking for additional opportunities to expand the map,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Texas and Ohio present the best opportunities to do that, in our view.”

Mr. Bloomberg is also planning to increase the size of his television ad buys in Florida over the next week, Mr. Wolfson said.

Should either Texas or Ohio slip into the Democratic column, it would likely indicate not only a Trump defeat, but also one by a thumping margin. The two states have 56 Electoral College votes between them, and Mr. Trump’s campaign has never devised a path to victory that does not involve carrying both. […]

Mr. Wolfson said the Bloomberg advertising campaign in both states would focus chiefly on the coronavirus, highlighting the new spike in cases across the country under Mr. Trump’s watch. The Texas advertising will include a heavy Spanish-language component.

In Ohio, Independence USA also plans to air advertising about the economy and Mr. Biden’s “build back better” message.

I don’t know if the Democrats can swing Texas. But it’s a sunbelt state and they’ve been moving their way for a while. But it sure would be great if they did. Unless Kavanaugh and the gang are willing to illegitimately hand a whole bunch of states to Trump, the bigger the victory the better.

Update —

Ron Brownstein on Texas:

The huge surge of early voting in Texas’ rapidly growing cities and inner suburbs likely marks the end of unchallenged Republican dominance in America’s second largest state — a seismic shift in the nation’s electoral landscape.

Even if President Donald Trump retains enough rural strength to hold Texas in next week’s election, which many still consider the most likely outcome, the swelling voter turnout in and around the increasingly Democratic-leaning cities of Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth points toward a return to political competition in the state after more than two decades of almost uninterrupted Republican ascendancy.Just alone in Harris County, which is centered on Houston, 1.15 million people had voted through Monday evening, compared with 1.3 million total in the 2016 election. The state’s other big cities and inner suburban counties are experiencing comparable increases.

“We expected a lot of turnout,” Lina Hidalgo, the Harris County judge (the equivalent of a county executive) told me. “We didn’t expect this level.”

Some local analysts believe that with turnout cresting, and a recoil from Trump swelling Democratic support, Joe Biden could win the counties centered on those five big cities by more than a million votes combined — roughly double Hillary Clinton’s margin in them in 2016 and possibly 10 times Barack Obama’s advantage across the same places in 2012.

Whether or not Biden wins the state, or even precisely meets that prediction, a shift of anything approaching that magnitude would provide Democrats a formidable foundation from which to challenge the Republican hegemony over Texas — a foundation that will only grow stronger through the 2020s as these urban and inner suburban counties across what’s known as the “Texas triangle” drive the vast majority of the state’s population and economic expansion.

“If the explosive growth in the urban centers and suburbs continues [for Democrats] that will be the whole ballgame,” says Richard Murray, a longtime political scientist at the University of Houston who has forecast the 1 million vote metro advantage for Biden.While Trump and other Republicans are consolidating crushing advantages in small-town and rural communities, Murray says, the stagnant or shrinking population in those places means Republicans “just can’t keep pace with this big [metro] vote.”

Republicans still have many advantages in Texas — particularly overwhelming support in its sprawling rural areas — and most observers consider Trump something between a slight and a substantial favorite to hold it.

New York Times/Siena College and University of Houston polls released Monday showed Trump leading by about 5 percentage points (though a University of Texas at Tyler/Dallas Morning News survey released Sunday gave Biden an edge). But the trend line in the state’s urban centers — a microcosm of the GOP’s retreat in big metro areas almost everywhere under Trump — is ominous for Republicans.

And the consequences of failure are almost unthinkable for them: Given the Democratic dominance of other large states — including California, New York and Illinois — there is no viable path for Republicans to win the White House without holding Texas and its 38 Electoral College votes.Losing Texas — either next week or in 2024 — would register in Republican circles as a uniquely powerful earthquake that would rattle their confidence in the party’s direction and message, many GOP insiders agree.

I guess the fact that their party has turned into a radical death cult in thrall to an orange imbecile wasn’t enough. But hey, whatever it takes …

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