Michael Barnes for State Chair

of our Texas Democratic Party

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 Table of Contents

2 ……………………………… Simplified Convention Schedule

3 ………………………………………… Michael Barnes’ Interview

4 ……………………………………………… Boyd Richie’s Interview

5 …………………………………….. Article: Turning Texas Blue

6 ……………………………………….. Article: A Matter of Trust

7 …………………………………… Article: Redistricting Reality

8 ………………………………….. Convention center floorplan

9 ……………………………… Educated Delegate Pledge Form

 SIMPLIFIED CONVENTION SCHEDULE

“The purpose of the State Convention shall be to elect a State Chair …” –TDP Rules

THURSDAY

• 2PM – STATE DEMOCRATIC EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

MEETING IN OMNI HOTEL BALLROOM

• 7 PM – DEMOCRATIC PARTY PARTIES, NO BUSINESS

FRIDAY

• 8 AM – CREDENTIALS ISSUED TO DELEGATES

EXHIBIT HALL B, AMERICAN BANK CENTER

• 9 AM – ISSUE CAUCUSES MEET, AMERICAN BANK CTR.

• 3 PM – SENATE DISTRICT CAUCUSES MEET, ELECT

REPRESENTATIVES TO SDEC, AND COMMITTEES,
AMERICAN BANK CENTER & OMNI HOTEL

• 6 PM – CONVENTION OPENS, ELECTION OF

PERMANENT CONVENTION CHAIR, AMERICAN BANK CTR.

SATURDAY

• 9 AM – COMMITTEES MEET, INCL. NOMINATIONS,

RECOMMENDS NAME/S FOR STATE CHAIR OF THE PARTY
ROOM 225C, AMERICAN BANK CENTER

• 11AM – CONVENTION RECONVENES, THE ELECTION

FOR STATE CHAIR OF THE TEXAS DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS
THE FOURTH ORDER OF BUSINESS.

NOTE: IF YOU WANT YOUR VOICE TO BE HEARD IN THE

VOTE FOR STATE CHAIR, BE PREPARED TO STICK AROUND
OR ASK THE PERMANENT CONVENTION CHAIR TO HOLD A
FAIR AND TIMELY VOTE – TO BEGIN BY 12 PM.
Michael Barnes: The TT Interview
By Ross Ramsey

Michael Barnes, a schoolteacher from

Edcouch in South Texas, wants to be
chair of the Texas Democratic Party, and
he's making his way around the state
trying to gather support from delegates in
advance of the party's state convention
later this month in Corpus Christi.

Barnes says it's time for fresh blood, for change. "Since when is zero-for-29 a winning record?"
he asks, referring to the number of statewide elected offices held by his kind.

Barnes says Texas Democrats haven't found a way to move frustrated voters into their column —
or even off of their couches. “They can’t find the ‘magic bullet,’ to translate a lot of the anger
and angst people are going through in Texas financially and otherwise, into turnout and electoral
productivity. People can’t convert that right now.”

The Texas Democratic Trust has been the most reliable source of money for the party for the last
several years. Barnes wonders if the Democrats have become too dependent on that particular
source, and whether the Democrats will be financially strong going in the years to come.

“One, how much control does an unelected, privately held PAC (political action committee) have
over what’s supposed to be a democratically elected state party? And if they’re paying a vast
majority of your bills, it’s hard to argue they don’t have that control. And then two, what
happens if that money runs out? Have you built a foundation upon which you can continue the
party, in the absence of that money?”

Democrats need to tap their past voters for votes, he says, rather than just asking them for
money. Money, after all, is just used to turn out those voters, he says.

“If you’ve ever voted in a democratic election, period, in your life, you’re an alumnus of the
Texas Democratic Party. And the question is, what will you do to ensure the long-term viability
of the party? The simple thing is—your vote. Will you commit to vote in every election,
especially the general?”

“The one thing I commit to doing is the unnattractive job of reaching out to people I don’t know,
being humble enough to accept and listen to their expertise, especially regarding their local area,
and to encourage them to get involved in a way that’s going to benefit them locally, as well as in
our State.“
Boyd Richie: The TT Interview
By Reeve Hamilton

It’s true that of the 29 statewide offices

available, the Texas Democratic Party
doesn’t hold a single one. The party's
chairman, Boyd Richie, says it’s
legitimate to criticize the Democrats for
that — but not to blame him for it.

“That’s been going on for 15 years,” he said in his Austin office on Friday. “I’ve been chairman
for four.”

“Frankly when I became chairman in 2006, our statewide candidates had already been
nominated. I had nothing to do with recruitment, or how they got to be nominees. Those
campaigns were doomed from the beginning.”

“This year is the first year that I’ve had the opportunity to have any input about recruitment of
our statewide slate of candidates.”

The 2010 November election is especially crucial to the future of Texas electoral politics because
it will determine the political makeup of the Legislative Redistricting Board, which will tackle
the upcoming redistricting process. This fact is not lost on the chairman of the minority party,
which currently has no representation on the board:

“Lines are going to be redrawn on maps, and that’s important, but at the end of the day it’s a
bunch of lines. What people don’t realize is, it’s what those lines represent that’s going to be the
policy that gets enacted over the next decade.”

One statewide office with a slot on the board that the Democrats certainly won’t win is
comptroller. They didn't even run a candidate in the race. Richie says it wasn’t for lack of trying.
“That was a seat that we took very seriously,” he says, “and I’m very disappointed that we
weren’t able to recruit somebody.” He says there were people considering a run who decided
they didn’t have the financial wherewithal — and that the party, with it’s limited resources,
couldn’t provide the requested level of support.

In fact, much of the Democrats’ electoral effort in the last five years was bankrolled by the Texas
Democratic Trust, which launched in 2005 with a five-year focus on “holding a majority in the
statehouse and capturing one or more statewide offices during the 2010 elections.” Many have
insinuated that Matt Angle, who leads the trust, has been acting as the man behind the party’s
curtain.
SMU Daily Campus

What it would take for Texas to go blue

By Nathan Mitzer, Staff Columnist

Let’s look at the record: Other than Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, the last time a Democrat
was elected to statewide office in Texas occurred in 1990, two decades ago, when Ann Richards
became governor for one term. Since that time, Republicans have won every election for the six
major statewide offices: governor, lieutenant governor, two US senators, attorney general, and
comptroller.

Even more distressing for Democrats is that they now control zero of the 29 elected statewide
offices in Texas, including members of the state Supreme Court and Railroad Commission. No
Democratic Presidential candidate has carried the state since Jimmy Carter, 34 years ago.
Compare that to Ronald Reagan, who carried Massachusetts twice!

If Democrats were going to make any inroads, 2008 would have been a prime opportunity, with a
popular candidate atop the ticket and the party poised to add to its majority in the House and
Senate. Indeed, Barack Obama was able to carry seven of the eight most populous states. The
one exception was Texas, where McCain prevailed by nearly a million votes. In the US Senate
race in Texas, Republican John Cornyn won with a similar majority. Not only do Republicans
always win here, they always win big.

By contrast, Republicans controlled the governor’s mansion in liberal Massachusetts from 1990
through 2006. Apparently, the Bay State has offered Republican candidates better odds of
success than Texas has afforded to Democrats.

This was not always the case. Far from it. From Reconstruction through the 1950s, Democrats
controlled every significant political office in Texas. Back then, the real election was the
Democratic primary; the general election was considered a mere formality.

Things started to change in the early 1960s when Republican John Tower won a special election
to fill the Senate seat vacated by the newly-elected vice president, Lyndon Johnson. By the
1970s, Texas had become a Republican stronghold which in the last 20 years has evolved into a
stranglehold.

That Texas would become so GOP-dominant is rather curious when considering its
demographics. According to the 2010 edition of “The Almanac of American Politics,” less than a
majority of the state, 48.3%, is Caucasian. Latinos and African-Americans, which usually vote
for Democratic candidates by large majorities, are nearly equally represented at just under 47%.

Despite the fact that the Caucasian percentage of the state’s population has shrunk in the past
decade, GOP majorities have remained steady and in many instances have expanded.

If nothing else, their 0-29 record should convey to Democrats a loud and clear message that their
current electoral strategy is not working.
 A Matter of Trust
By Ross Ramsey

At the beginning of 2010, a critical

political action committee in Texas
Democratic politics reported a
campaign finance balance of $453.46.
That turns out to be a non-surprising
condition for the checking account at
the Texas Democratic Trust.

The PAC, run by Washington, D.C.-based consultant Matt Angle, has raised $10.4 million since
its first report with the Texas Ethics Commission in 2005. The money is a lifeline for a number
of key Democratic institutions in Texas. The trust is a critical source of funding for the Texas
Democratic Party.

It's also in what might be its last year. The trust's lofty goal when it got started in 2004 was to put
Democrats in Texas back in a competitive position by 2010, to win a majority in the Texas
House, to make Democrats competitive in statewide races and to get into position to influence
political redistricting in 2011.

Democrats have a contender for governor in Bill White, but he leads a ticket that's got holes in it.
The Democrats, for instance, didn't field a candidate for comptroller. That's the state's chief
financial officer and also the holder of one of five seats on the Legislative Redistricting Board,
which draws political maps if the Legislature itself fails to do so.

"Our statewide outlook has not gotten any better," says Mike Lavigne, who was the party's
spokesman when the trust was formed. He's a skeptic. "We're facing a very hard redistricting
year and still have no one on the LRB."

Lavigne says some of the successes attributed to the trust were going to happen anyhow. He
admits the PAC has raised a bunch of money and helped bulk up other organizations. But he
wonders about the lasting impact. "This was going to make the party self-sustaining and give us
a lot of infrastructure. ... There's no hiding the fact that [Angle] is the de facto state party right
now."

It's true, to some extent, that Angle and the late Fred Baron, a nationally known trial lawyer from
Dallas and the financier behind the trust, basically privatized the functions of the Texas
Democratic Party and left the party itself financially dependent — at least for a time — on the
trust.

Since 2005, the trust gave $4 million to the party. It gave most of the rest to consultants. Angle's
firm got $1.5 million over that five-year period. The trust also has a say in who gets hired, and
stays hired, at many of the organizations it funds. Angle has as much control as most political
bosses in other states.
 Redistricting Reality
By Ross Ramsey

In politics, the crayon is mightier than

the ballot. A political mapmaker can
do more to change the power
structure than a herd of consultants
with fat bank accounts behind them.
And 2011 will be the Year of the
Mapmakers.

They'll take the new census numbers — Texas is expected to have a population of more than 25
million — and use them to draw new congressional and legislative districts for the state. The last
time this was done, in 2003, Republican mappers took control of the U.S. House by peeling away
enough seats from the Democrats to give the GOP the numbers it needed for a majority.

"The mistake is to ask, 'Where will they go?'" says Matt Angle, a Texas Democratic consultant
based in Washington. "What's really important in Texas is who." He says the Anglo population
has grown (according to early estimates) by about 3 percent, while the Hispanic population is up
50 percent over the decade, and the black population is up 21 percent.

Republicans agree with some of that. Republican consultant Craig Murphy, who like Angle is a
veteran of several redistricting bouts, has the same answer as to geography. "'Where' is a
misnomer," he says, noting that mapmakers can put new seats wherever they please — not just in
the high-growth areas — and adjust the rest of the state to make them fit.

"Texas is the perfect shape for malleability," Murphy says. "Perfect is a circle, and we're close."
A state like California is harder to gerrymander, since you can't grab people from the north and
put them in the same districts as people in the south. Texas, on the other hand, has enormous
districts that stretch from San Antonio to El Paso, from Eldorado to Pampa, from Matador to
Gainesville, from Seguin to Pharr, from Mentone to Burnet.

"We've done the most extreme things of any state," he says. "Drawing seats the other party can't
win — we've been very good at that. It's partly our geography … and high population growth
gives us lots of options."

Murphy says it's easier to make big changes when one party has a clear upper hand in the
legislative process — something that won't become clear until after the November elections.

"When you see dramatic changes, it's not the slow movement of demographics," he says. "It's
because one party is strongly in control.
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