Veterans of President Obama’s re-election bid Tuesday announced a project to use voter registration and engagement to turn Texas into a more Democratic-friendly state. The founders will use successful strategies from Obama’s campaign in the new effort called “Battleground Texas.”
Jeremy Bird, who served as Obama’s national field organizer in 2012 and is helping launch Battleground Texas, on Tuesday described the program as a “long-term effort” and compared it to the laborious process of turning Florida into a purple state.
“I have now sat in three presidential campaign offices and looked at a map of the country and say how do we get to 270 electoral votes and I couldn’t go to the president or senior advisors and say we should put 30 percent of our budget into Texas, given where things were at the time,” Bird said on MSNBC. “This is a long-term effort to do what we did in a place like florida. We had staff on the ground for six years, expanding the electorate and turning out voters who hadn’t voted before in local elections.”
The Washington Post has more:
Jeremy Bird, a Democratic strategist who served as Obama’s former national field organizer in 2012, said Texas’s large and growing minority population – an estimated 56 percent of residents are black, Asian, Hispanic or American Indian – makes it ripe for Democratic gains. The problem for the party, he said, was that many of these potential voters are either not registered or have chosen not to participate…
Jenn Brown, who was the Obama campaign’s Ohio field director, is the organization’s executive director, based in Austin. She and Bird said they will draw on lessons from the Obama campaign, including data mining, voting analytics and person-to-person engagement, to expand voter rolls. They said they also have spoken with Democratic donors about fundraising and hope to raise several million dollars in the next few years.
