Why Biden Shouldn't Care About Texas (But Democrats Should)

Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE)

All right, we're going to be doing a series of articles about politics for a few days, as I have a lot of items in the news that I want to put my two cents in on, but I'm going to start with something you may not have noticed unless you have been lurking around polling websites, and that is some polls are showing Joe Biden doing surprisingly well in a few states that aren't necessarily on most people's radar for 2020.  While recent polling from Quinnpiac, Fox News, and SurveyUSA show Biden up in traditionally-considered "tipping point" states such as North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Biden is also leading in Ohio (Baldwin University has Biden up 45-44 over Trump) and in Texas (Biden is up 47-46 in a PPP survey).  The question here is-how does Biden handle these states if they indicate an expanding electoral battlefield?

Before we get into some discussions of electoral strategy, let's kind of establish what this means right now, and what states we're talking about, as it's not just Ohio & Texas that would be in scope here.  First off, this is good news for Biden.  One of the smartest aspects of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 was that he was willing to upend the political map in hopes of pulling off an inside straight in the electoral college.  In the seven days preceding the election, Trump visited a number of states that were assumed to be safely blue (safe enough that Clinton didn't visit them: Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, Virginia...and Wisconsin.  As history has taught us, that last state became quite consequential to the election even if Clinton won the remainder.  So Biden having more options to get to 270 (which is the only sum that ultimately matters), is a good thing, and a bad thing for Trump, who didn't start this election with a lot of paths other than the one he used in 2016-any losses in his 2016 coalition (and to be sure, Trump won both Ohio & Texas in 2016) would be a big deal for Biden.

Most pundits do not list Ohio & Texas as tossups, though more polling like this and they might consider them tossups.  Instead, they group them as "Lean R" along with Iowa, Georgia, and Maine-2, for a total of about 79 electoral votes.  These are states that Joe Biden doesn't "need" to win, and that's going to be important.  He'd obviously like to, but his math runs through keeping the Hillary states, and then winning some combination of WI/MI/PA/NC/FL/AZ/NE-2, enough so that he's over 270 electoral votes.  At the end of the day, that's all that matters.  While people will make claims about mandates and whether or not it's important to beat Trump by a bigger margin (under the assumption that Trump will somehow behave differently with a landslide defeat rather than a narrow one), the reality is that anything past 270, in terms of November 3rd, is just gravy.

So for the time being, my advice to Joe Biden's strategy would be-do nothing in these states.  You are in the lead, and have enough viable options in the seven states I already listed that you don't need to start putting time into these states.  2016 showed us what happens to Hillary Clinton when she over-extended.  Clinton didn't realize until far too late that she was in a tossup race-that Trump had become a viable candidate.  If she had, she might have started to tend to her most plausible path to the election (winning 3/4 of WI/FL/PA/MI, all states she lost by less than 2-points), rather than visiting a state like Ohio before the election, which felt like a "reach" state at that point in the cycle.  Biden does not want to repeat the same sins of Clinton-assuming that his slight leads in a number of states will hold so he can wander into riskier pastures, not tending his best path to 270 electoral votes.

Kate Schroder (D-OH), running in the
potentially competitive 1st district

But that doesn't mean that the Democrats shouldn't start planning for a scenario where 2020 isn't a close election, but instead Trump's unique polarization (and the potential for a struggling economy & the inaction from the COVID-19 pandemic hurts Trump's stance among independents, as well as drives up turnout from normally apathetic voters) leads to a 1980 or 2008 landslide scenario.  In that case, Biden might start picking off these states, which would have little impact on whether or not he's president, but could have a big impact down-ballot.

Let's look further into 2008 since that data is more readily accessible & more recent.  That year Barack Obama won five states/districts by less than 5-points: North Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, Ohio, and Florida; in addition, he lost Missouri & Montana by less than 5-points.  In these seven states, Democrats won both of the Senate seats (including one pickup), and of the 5 House races that were decided by 5-points or less in these states, the Democrats won 3 (including 3 pickups).  They also made two pickups in seats that were decided by more than 5-points.

But here's the thing-in those five races, the three that the Democrats picked up, the fundraising game for the Democrats was (on average) 25% higher than the Republicans, while the two they lost, the Democrats were being out-raised 2:1.  Losing the fundraising race wasn't a complete death knell (Kay Hagan was -57% to Elizabeth Dole, though Hagan was a once-in-a-blue-moon politician), but if Democrats aren't positioned with well-funded challengers in these states, they're not going to be able to take advantage if Biden is suddenly winning or close-to-winning.

So, are the Democrats there in 2020?  Not really, certainly not yet.  In terms of Senate races, they're being out-raised considerably: Iowa (Republican +94%), Georgia-A (R +265%), Georgia-B (+684%), and Texas (+295%); only Iowa is in the same ballpark as to what Hagan was out-raised by, and keep in mind that Hagan was a rarity.  Democrats do better in the lower chamber.  Of the six House seats marked either Tossup/Lean R by Larry Sabato in these Biden "Lean R" states, Democrats lead in half of them, and two of their other misses could be rectified if candidates can rebound from competitive primaries.

Do you see where I'm headed with this?  Joe Biden can afford to ignore states like Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Georgia, but the Democrats can't afford to let potentially plum pickups go to waste. Winning some of these seats if Biden manages to pull them off would be huge for the first two years of Biden's term (giving him more allies on Capitol Hill and giving Pelosi/Schumer more votes to make legislation more progressive), not to mention that those Senate seats last six years, and would be insurance if the Democrats have a bad 2022 midterms.  The DNC and Democratic donors would be wise to start investing in these races as they could pop in the future-it's going to be a grave missed opportunity if we find out Biden was, in fact, able to win Texas or Ohio or Georgia or Iowa later this year but the Democrats couldn't get their competitive Senate & House candidates over the line because they realized too late they were winnable.