Republicans Try To Regain Influence In Harris County Ahead Of 2020 Election

After the county went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Republican Party commissioned a 40-page report to determine how that happened.

By Jill Ament & Michael MarksSeptember 16, 2019 2:31 pm

Recent Democratic wins in Harris County have the area’s Republican Party considering ways to appeal to an increasingly Democratic electorate there. 

Jeremy Wallace, a political reporter for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, has been covering the growing strength of Democrats in Harris County. He says John Kerry, for example, lost by 100,000 votes to George W. Bush there, in the 2004 presidential election. Twelve years later, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the county by 162,000 votes. After that, he says the Republican Party commissioned a 40-page report to determine what went wrong, hoping to avoid the same pitfalls in the future.

“They took this pretty aggressively,” Wallace says. “Right after 2016, when they first started seeing the cracks in the dam, they weren’t just saying, ‘Oh, this is a one-time thing; maybe it was Trump.’ They got serious about it.”

What you’ll hear in this segment:

– What Harris County Republicans learned from the report

– How the Party plans to appeal to voters who might support Republicans but not Donald Trump

– How the elimination of straight-ticket voting could impact Harris County’s 2020 election results

 

Written by Savana Dunning.