The group aims to make the Lone Star State politically competitive. 'Battleground Texas' effort ramps up

Two veterans of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign are deploying to Texas to head up a Democratic group aimed at turning the Republican electoral stronghold into a bona-fide swing state.

POLITICO reported last month that Democratic strategists, led by former Obama field director Jeremy Bird, were creating a group called Battleground Texas with a goal of making the Lone Star State politically competitive.


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Now, the group is bringing on two operatives to lead its efforts on the ground in Austin, according to strategists familiar with the plans.

Jenn Brown, who was the Obama campaign’s Ohio field director, will serve as executive director of Battleground Texas. Christina Gomez, a former digital strategist for the Democratic National Committee, will be the group’s digital director.

The duo emerges from two widely-hailed sectors of the Obama reelection effort: the Democratic online effort that far outpaced Mitt Romney’s digital operation, and the OFA Ohio campaign that made the state a firewall for Obama among the mega-swing states.

Battleground Texas officially launches Tuesday, with an online rollout at BattlegroundTexas.com.

Strategists have described the organization as an effort to bring Texas’s electoral behavior more in line with the state’s demographics. Despite having a majority-minority population – 38 percent of Texans called themselves Latino or Hispanic in the 2010 census – Texas continues to vote strongly Republican at the federal and state level.

The impact of Battleground Texas may depend heavily on whether the group can raise the millions of dollars, over multiple years and campaign cycles, to identify and activate voters who are currently punching below their weight in elections.

That’s a model that the Obama campaign pursued across the swing-state map in 2012, bringing new voters into the process in states such as Florida and Nevada in order to overcome the drag of a sluggish economic.

Republicans have dismissed the Texas initiative as a flight of Democratic fancy; Gov. Rick Perry told the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that flipping Texas to the Democratic column is “the biggest pipe dream I’ve ever heard.”

The Battleground Texas organizers think otherwise, and in a memo prepared for the Tuesday rollout, they argue that a concerted Democratic investment in Texas could tip the balance of national political power for the long run.

“With 38 electoral votes at stake, Texas could virtually remake the presidential campaign map. But the current political landscape in the state is keeping Texas – and its residents – from meeting its promise and being relevant at a national level,” the memo says. “The lack of competitive campaigning in recent cycles means that even basic voter registration and engagement efforts should go a long way toward changing the political landscape in the Lone Star State.”

In a statement, Bird – who serves as a senior adviser to Battleground Texas – described the hiring of Brown and Gomez as a first step toward building up the group.

“We know part of the problem is too few Texans are participating in the democratic process,” Bird said, “so we’re bringing some of the best talent and strategies in politics to the Lone Star State to help expand the electorate by registering more voters and by mobilizing Texans who are already registered but haven’t been making their voices heard.”