The Battle of El Paso: How Trump Could Lose Texas in 2020

[TexasTowelie]

by Mike Siegel


It was a throwback to the cross-country trips of my college years: leaving Austin at 8:00am on Monday morning, driving 600 miles to El Paso, joining a rally of thousands of local activists, marching a mile through dark city streets on a wintry evening, rallying again, and then jumping in the car to drive 600 miles home. For a guy with two little kids at home, running for a congressional seat that stretches from Austin 150 miles to the east, you'd be fair to question my sanity, or wonder if this is some sort of mid-life crisis.

And this is a crisis, of course, but not one of the personal variety. Rather, this is a crisis rooted in the racist and xenophobic base of Trump's rise to power, his foolhardy government shutdown in pursuit of $5 billion in Border Wall funding, a State of the Union speech rife with repeated lies about El Paso and what makes the city safe, and finally a return of the Hate Rally Road Show that is Trump's bread and butter.

I decided to make the trip to El Paso with my campaign manager two days prior, after native son Beto O'Rourke announced he would join a locally-organized March for Truth, scheduled to take place at the same time, and mere blocks away from the President's rally. Beto's decision to participate made clear that Texas would have an opportunity, in the national spotlight, to show how our state is changing. To prove that Texas is not Trump country.

To be clear, I'm not hitched to the Beto-for-President bandwagon, although his candidacy would likely inspire the Texas grassroots to turn out record numbers of Democratic voters in 2020. Like many local Democrats, I see how valuable Beto can be for Texas, and believe he can unseat John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate in 2020. (Cornyn himself can see it, and was notably aloof from Trump during the President's Monday visit.) But Beto's decision-making process aside, I didn't make this trip for him.

Read more: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-battle-of-el-paso-how-trump-could.html