Math skills may be the most desired commodity for 2020 Democratic campaigns hiring to win the Texas Democratic primary.
It’s on Tuesday, March 3, the same day as mega-prize California and more than a dozen other states and entities. And the Texas Democratic primary’s complicated, convoluted rules for awarding delegates to candidates make the state particularly difficult to game out for campaigns with limited resources — in other words, most of them.
But ignoring Texas isn’t an option for Democratic candidates serious about winning the 3,979 pledged delegates necessary to claim the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which will be held July 13-16.
Texas has some of the most complicated delegation apportionment rules in the four-month Democratic primary process. Consider that California awards the bulk of its 495 delegates proportionately by the state’s 53 congressional districts. That gives candidates an incentive to campaign in all or many parts of the sprawling state.
Texas, meanwhile, awards its 228 pledged delegates to candidates who win the most votes in each of the state’s Senate districts. Each California congressional district includes roughly 747,000 people. In Texas, a state Senate district covers about 806,000 people. That means Democratic presidential hopefuls have to cover even more ground hunting for votes in Texas than they do in California.
Democratic candidates running in Texas have to be strategic in how they allocate resources since it’s entirely possible to lose the popular vote statewide but still win the most delegates given how they’re allocated in the state’s Senate districts.
And the voting in Texas’s Senate districts function much like the Iowa caucuses — each candidate must receive 15% of the vote to qualify for delegates. That threshold puts pressure on candidates to spend large sums in more than a dozen media markets statewide.
Compared to the Iowa Caucuses on Feb. 3, the New Hampshire Primary on Feb. 11, the Nevada Caucuses on Feb. 22, and the South Carolina Primary on Feb. 29, the cost of advertising in Texas is extremely high. That leaves an opening for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is worth an estimated $54 billion.
Bloomberg, who entered the Democratic race in November and has not participated in any candidate debates, has committed $3 million to secure 60-second television spots in the San Antonio, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, El Paso, Harlingen-Weslaco, and Houston, Texas markets.
Bloomberg and another billionaire Democratic candidate, former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, are the only two White House hopefuls who have spent on ads in the state so far.
[Related: Tom Steyer spent $109,000 per second he spoke during 2020 presidential debate]
Virtually every aspect of campaigning in Texas is expensive. The drive from Houston to Dallas takes close to four hours. A drive from El Paso to Austin takes nearly 9 hours.
Then, there are the millions of Texans who live in border towns and cities toward the south of the state, some of whom are 800 miles away from western portions of the state. For many Democratic candidates, with resources scarce and the Super Tuesday outlook still uncertain, it’s not particularly surprising they’ve held off on Texas advertising so far.
There have been relatively few primary polls of Texas given the state’s physical size and population. The latest survey, conducted by CNN in early December, showed former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders meeting the delegate threshold, at 35% and 15% support, respectively. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned 13% support, with the rest of the field earning 9% or less.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the Texas primary by over 30 points, while Sanders earned 33.19% of the vote. For Clinton, that was good for 147 pledged delegates, compared to 75 for Sanders.
