“San Antonio emerges as a bellwether”
Says columnist Jaime Castillo on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News this morning:
From the time Texas found itself in play in the Democratic nominating process, San Antonio, which is about 60 percent Hispanic, was a strategic center.
Adrian Saenz, Obama’s Texas campaign director, said the candidate’s San Antonio headquarters and election night home was more of a strategic decision than a symbolic one.
If Obama was going to have a chance in this state, he had to cut into Clinton’s rock-solid support with Hispanics, an electorate that had supported her 2-to-1 in other key states like California.
And San Antonio provided several advantages.
It has a media market that extends into heavily Hispanic South Texas and it also includes numerous Spanish-language media outlets.
The San Antonio region also provided the right mix of urban and rural voters from which to target a larger audience in a state that became majority-minority in 2005.
“If you want to be successful in a statewide campaign, San Antonio from here on out is going to be a great test site,” Saenz said shortly before the polls closed in Texas.
The nation’s changing demographics will only serve to further highlight the importance of Texas cities like San Antonio, as well as Houston and Dallas, in future national campaigns, said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist.
By 2010, demographers predict between 10 and 12 states will join Texas as minority-majority. And sometime around 2040, “a majority of Americans will no longer trace their ancestry to Europe,” Klineberg said.
“Texas is now very much a microcosm of America,” he said.
And, as state Sen. Joaquin Castro said last night, Democrats are coming back in Texas!!
My Las Palmas precinct polling station came up repeatedly in today’s news. Fellow volunteer and precinct captain Lupe Cantu got her picture in the paper, in this article re: Latino support for Clinton:
(photo by Edward A. Ornelas)
Hispanics from El Paso to Brownsville turned out in record numbers for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s do-or-die Texas presidential primary Tuesday, offsetting big-city supporters of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
El Paso broke all of its early voting records, said county elections administrator Javier Chacon, and he predicted that the total primary voting record in the county would be easily shattered.
In the Rio Grande Valley, as in much of the rest of South Texas, long lines of voters turned out.
“If she (polls) tonight around the state as she is polling in the Valley, Hillary will win Texas and Mexican Americans will be the reason why she won,” said La Joya Mayor Billy Leo, a Clinton supporter.
Forecasts pegged Hispanic voters at about 25 percent of the electorate in this year’s Democratic primary. But Andy Hernandez, a one-time Democratic National Committee staffer who advised Clinton’s campaign on its Latino outreach in Texas, didn’t buy it.
“That’s way too low for this election,” he said hours before the polls closed Tuesday. He predicted a total of more than 30 percent. “Latinos have never been activated like they have in this election.”
Hispanic voters represented nearly a third of the Democratic primary’s turnout, according to the exit poll.
Her fellow caucus goers were also photoed, but I can’t find it on-line. A column on the confusion surrounding voting twice in Texas featured our polling station, where 3 precincts totalling 21 delegates caucused. Turns out we had about 150 voters participate, despite having to wait for hours to begin.
Filed under: Clinton Campaign
