Patti Fink

Tammye Nash | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com

Strange as it may sound, it seems that Texas is an at least borderline battleground state in the upcoming general election, with polls showing Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden running neck-and-neck with Republican President Donald Trump.

According to a new statewide poll from Data for Progress, Biden is leading Trump by three points. According to Progress Texas, since July 1, Texas voters have been polled 21 times on the presidential race; of those 21 polls, Biden has been ahead in 10, and Trump has been ahead in 11.

Although LGBTQ Republicans, such as Log Cabin Republican members, tout Trump as the most pro-LGBTQ Republican president ever, actions speak louder than words. And this administration’s actions have been, most decidedly, not LGBTQ-friendly.

“President Trump and his Republican Party are no friends of the LGBTQ community, and in fact have worked very hard to strip LGBTQ — especially trans and gender non-conforming — Americans of many protections and civil rights during the last four years,” said Patti Fink, longtime LGBTQ political activist. “As a community, we have been harmed in countless ways by this administration, and we have an opportunity and a duty to ourselves and to each other to speak up and to vote Trump and his anti-LGBTQ enablers out.”

Biden, on the other hand, is “a true advocate for LGBTQ equality and a leader in the expansion of human rights and civil rights for all Americans,” Fink continued. “Remember, it was Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s vice president who first advocated for marriage equality from the White House and declared that, ‘Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.’

“We must stand with each other and with all Americans who have been othered, targeted and harmed by this administration,” Fink said. “As a community and as a nation, we must speak in one overwhelmingly loud clear voice at the ballot box that Trump and Trumpism are over, and so each of us must plan now to vote in this election.”

But the 2020 election in Texas is about more than just the presidential election. Fink and others see Nov. 3 as an opportunity for progressive, LGBTQ candidates and LGBTQ-friendly candidates to take control of the Texas Legislature, too.

Fink said, “We have a real chance to overturn decades of Republican control of the Texas House. Texas Democrats need to hold the seats we have and to flip at least nine more seats, and a Democratic majority in the Texas House will be able to stop all of the anti-LGBTQ nonsense and to advance meaningful change for our equality in Texas.

“Turning Texas blue is very much within reach, not just in the Texas House but also in the U.S. Senate and, yes, in the presidential election,” she added. “Trump only won Texas by 9 points in 2016, and the 2020 race is much much tighter in Texas. If we each make sure that we are doing our part by voting — by mail or in-person, either early or on Election Day — and make sure that our friends and allies also vote, we can send a massive and monumental message that our community will no longer be the punching bag for bigotry and hate.

“It’s not just our democracy on the ballot this cycle; our lives on the ballot,” Fink declared. “We must vote in this election, y’all. WE. MUST. VOTE.”

Many people believe that higher voter turnout will benefit Democratic candidates. Trump himself has suggested as much. At the end of March, in comments dismissing Democrats’ efforts at reforms including vote-by-mail, same-day registration and early voting intended to make voting safer during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the coronavirus stimulus package, Trump said during an appearance on Fox & Friends, “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Glen Bolger, a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, told The Atlantic magazine in June that 2020 could see turnout that sets a record “in the modern era,” meaning since 1972 when voting rights were extended to 18-year-olds. In that same article in The Atlantic, University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald predicted “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.” And the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist earlier in the year projected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, compared to 139 million in 2016.

The Atlantic article also noted that in the 2018 midterm elections, 120 million people voted an increase of about 35 million over the 2014 midterms. And 2018 was the year that the Democrats reclaimed control of the U.S. House.

Back to the polls
A Quinnipiac University poll of 1,081 likely voters surveyed from Aug. 28-31, with results released Sept. 2, showed Biden leading Trump, 52 percent to 42 percent. The poll showed that Democrats go to Biden, 95 percent to 4 percent, and Republicans go to Trump 90 percent to 8 percent. The key, though, is the independent voters who, the Quinnipiac poll shows, back Biden by a 50 percent to 40 percent margin.

The poll shows that voters are equally split — 48 percent-48 percent on the question of whether Biden or Trump would do a better job handling the economy. But on four other key issues, voters give the edge to Biden: racial inequality (58-36); response to the coronavirus pandemic (56-40); health care (55-41) and handling a crisis (53-43).

it came to job approval rating, 54 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the job Trump is doing as president, compared to 43 who approved. Asked about Trump’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, 57 percent said they disapproved, compared to 41 percent who approved. And more than half, 55-39 percent, said Trump is hurting rather than helping the effort to slow the spread of the virus.

When it comes to the economy — something Trump has long touted as a strong point in his presidency — 60 percent of the Quinnipiac poll respondent described it as either”not so good” or “poor,” while only 37 percent described it as “excellent” or “good.”