As if we needed to dump any more sriracha sauce all over the already spicy bowl of hot Hillary Clinton 2016 speculation, there's now word from the folks at Public Policy Polling that the former FLOTUS/New York senator/presidential aspirant/secretary of state could put Texas in play. And by "in play," I mean, based on a series of possible circumstances that may or may not come to pass in about 1,400 days' time.
PPP's newest Texas poll finds that, at least for now, Hillary Clinton could win the state in 2016. This follows on the heels of a survey last month where we found she would have a decent chance of winning Kentucky if she makes another White House bid.
In terms of what matters right this very minute, these results probably reveal more about how esteem for Perry has fallen in recent months than it does about an electoral match-up in which the protagonist, Clinton, hasn't agreed to participate. On Tuesday, PPP reported that its poll respondents were cool to the notion of Perry running for office again. According to its results, there is a dearth of support for a Perry reelection bid -- less than a third of respondents desired it, while 62 percent of the respondents were against it, including nearly 40 percent of Republicans surveyed.
As far as a future Perry presidential bid goes, that fever has broken. Nearly eight in 10 Texans were against another run at the White House, including two-thirds of Republicans, the poll found.
Democrats in general have been talking up their chances of turning Texas blue, though it has not been explicitly suggested that this could realistically happen in as short a time frame as the next four years. The going theory is that Texas' growing Hispanic population could be the seed bed for a new generation of majority-tipping Democratic voters, but complicating the effort to divine how Texas' Hispanic voters are shifting is the fact that there were no exit polls out of Texas this past November. Nevertheless, Democratic party strategists are organizing around this effort. As Politico reported last week:
National Democrats are taking steps to create a large-scale independent group aimed at turning traditionally conservative Texas into a prime electoral battleground, crafting a new initiative to identify and mobilize progressive voters in the rapidly-changing state, strategists familiar with the plans told POLITICO.
The state of Texas has significance in Hillary Clinton's political career: It was there that she and former President Bill Clinton served as staffers for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. Bill and Hillary would, of course, go on to get married. McGovern, on the other hand, lost the state 67-33 percent.
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