Marjorie Kamys Cotera / The Texas Tribune

Turning Texas Blue

In November, Hillary Clinton won Harris County by 160,000 votes. And that margin of victory has some Democrats hoping that Houston can be a leader in turning Texas blue. Andrew Cockburn joins us to talk about how the Texas Organizing Project delivered the victory by reaching out to black and Latino voters. He writes about the strategy in Harper’s.

Andrew Cockburn on … 

… whether Texas can turn blue: 

“There exists this enormous pull of people of color who either, they call them unlikely voters or more occasional voters. People who have voted maybe once, twice in the past, given up on it as a bad job, and didn’t bother to vote, or unregistered voters … In Dallas, there’s roughly 200,000 unregistered voters of color and 300,000 people who vote very occasionally, unlikely voters of color. Harris County it’s even more. Now when you think that Clinton lost Texas by just 600,000 votes, which was half as much as Obama lost it by the way, you know you have Texas flipped right there. That’s why this could be a harbinger of the future.”