The Texas suburbs are slipping away from the GOP. These women for Trump want to win them back.

The Texas suburbs are slipping away from the GOP. These women for Trump want to win them back.

January 5, 2020 Comments Off on The Texas suburbs are slipping away from the GOP. These women for Trump want to win them back. By admin
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Texas Republicans need women on their side if they’re going to keep the state red in 2020, but recent polls suggest President Donald Trump’s support among women is plummeting.

HOUSTON — An audible groan erupted in the lounge area of Houston’s Gulf Coast Distillers in late October when high-profile Trump campaign operative Mica Mosbacher invoked the idea of a Democratic presidency.

Mosbacher encouraged the audience of roughly 50 GOP women — a group that included a millionaire Texas congressional candidate, the owner of a gun store and a Gov. Greg Abbott political appointee — to turn their grumbling into action.

“It’s not the boy’s club anymore,” she said.

Texas Republicans need women on their side if they’re going to keep the state red in 2020, but recent polls suggest President Donald Trump’s support among women is plummeting. A secret recording of outgoing House Speaker Dennis Bonnen laid bare the GOP’s anxieties about the president: “He’s killing us in urban-suburban districts,” Bonnen told a Republican activist in late June.

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Trump’s campaign seems to take the risk seriously. At the October Women for Trump panel discussion, a group of female surrogates — mostly white, some living in D.C. — parachuted into a historically black neighborhood in the heart of Texas’ biggest city to sip drinks and implore Republican women: “We need your help.”

Mosbacher, whose resume includes stints working for GOP fixtures like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and the late John McCain, turned to one of the women next to her to bring the point home.

“What would you tell people who are on the fence about President Trump?” Mosbacher, a member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Board, asked Women for Trump member Karen Henry.

“It would be hard for me to be nice to ‘em,” Henry, a mother of four and Houston-area business owner, quipped. “But if you want somebody who’s going to stand up to the media, who does what he says he’s going to do … he’s the only person you can vote for.”

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Onstage next to Henry was fellow member Melanie Luttrell. “Don’t you want your kids to grow up in the America you grew up in?” she asked the crowd. Many women nodded their heads solemnly in agreement.

The visit to Houston was one of many that Trump campaign surrogates have made in recent months as part of a broader national outreach to suburban women, a voting bloc that will be essential to Trump’s reelection campaign. But a majority of Texas women said in October they would definitely vote for someone besides Trump in the 2020 presidential election, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll. And 46% of people living in the suburbs said the same thing, according to the poll, compared to 41% who said they would definitely vote for him.

Panelists speak to attendees during a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Training hosted by Women for Trump at Gulf Coast Distillers in Houston on Oct. 29, 2019.
Women for Trump Advisory Board Member Mica Mosbacher asks a question to panelists during a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Training hosted by Women for Trump at Gulf Coast Distillers in Houston on Oct. 29, 2019.

First: Panelists address attendees during a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Training hosted by Women for Trump at Gulf Coast Distillers in Houston on Oct. 29, 2019. Last: Women for Trump Advisory Board Member Mica Mosbacher asks a question to panelists during a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Training hosted by Women for Trump at Gulf Coast Distillers. Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune

The goal of the Houston gathering was two-fold: energize existing supporters and encourage them to spread the gospel of Trump campaign’s promises — lower taxes, free-market health care, less government regulation, telling off the “fake news” media, and cleaning up “the swamp that is Washington D.C. bureaucracy” — to their friends and neighbors.

“We need every one of you to replicate yourselves,” said Penny Nance, the CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, who also said she is an evangelical Christian.

“Texas has the largest group of new voters,” she continued. “So guess what? We need to get them signed up.”

But beyond the four walls of the Houston distillery, that might be easier said than done. Even Texas’ historically conservative suburbs now appear competitive: A Houston-area congressional seat flipped to Democrats in 2018, and both Harris and Fort Bend Counties are overwhelmingly blue. In the Dallas region, Republicans lost a second congressional seat last year, along with a slate of state House seats and a state Senate one.

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