Ride 'em, cow-gal!

For quite some time now, I have been arguing that the Democratic party needs to contest all fifty states, the way Howard Dean was saying a decade ago.

If Team Blue ignores the south and the west, state Democratic organizations don’t get built up out there, and candidates can’t get their careers going, so even when we do have a fight we want to fight in places like that, we can’t contest it. The next time someone like Bob Kerrey comes along to try to take his seat back in a place like Nebraska, there should be a strong state party to back him up. And if there is no Bob Kerrey, the local party should be able to give us a candidate who can compete. And there should be no big red state that the GOP can rely on in a presidential race, i.e. Texas. The GOP shouldn’t be getting those electoral votes for free.

Team Red understands this: they know that demographics are going to kill their party unless they fight a fifty-state war. So they fight in the blue states, putting anti-tax obstructionists in the California legislature, fascist governors and legislators gerrymandering and messing with the electoral college in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and forcing Democratic presidential candidates to spend time and money nailing down purple states like Virginia when they could be going on the offensive in places like Georgia. It is because of the state-level gerrymandering that we still have a Republican House of Representatives even though voters voted more for Democratic candidates than Republicans.

So the time has come to invade the south and attack out in the west, the mountains and the plains.

And with that in mind, I point out the latest poll by PPP in Texas. If Hillary Clinton were running for president, she would have a good shot at winning Texas: according to the poll she would beat Rubio by a point, Christie by two, and hometown favorite Rick Perry by eight. And that is in spite of the fact that America doesn’t know about Christie’s ethical outrages in New Jersey, or Rubio’s resume, which consists almost entirely of lying about his background. Keep in mind that Hillary’s husband came within a few points of winning Texas in 1996 even though he didn’t campaign there. Even if she doesn’t win there the first time, make the GOP spend millions to defend it, money that would otherwise be spent in Ohio and Florida. If the GOP loses Texas, they have no chance at winning the White House. And if their fortunes are sagging that badly in Texas, then the same thing is happening in Georgia, the Carolinas, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Arizona.

If the Dems can nominate Hillary, and pair her up with a good-old-boy running mate like Brian Schweitzer, we could be on our way to a landslide. Two landslides. Maybe more, if we can do permanent damage to the GOP, or watch as they do it to themselves.

The Republicans know all this. That is why they tried without success to bloody up Hillary on the Benghazi issue. Expect to hear the word “Benghazi” over and over from the loony right for the foreseeable future. But that won’t change the fact that the Republicans are opposing popular opinion on almost every major issue: abortion, gays, guns, protecting Social Security and Medicare, taxes, immigration, the works. They have a platform no one wants, and can’t change it without risking the wrath of their knuckle-dragging party base, and the economy is starting to improve, removing their main argument for tossing out the Democrats. The GOP brand is toxic, and it’s time to drive them out of the market forever, like we did with the Whigs.