Lone Star Blues

THE 2012 presidential race in Texas might as well have been in Mexico, so little did the Democrats campaign for the state’s 38 electoral votes.

Yet during a fund-raising swing on a sweltering July day, President Obama let a political secret out of the bag for his rich donors. “You’re not considered one of the battleground states,” he said, “although that’s going to be changing soon.”

Democrats are champing at the bit to turn Texas blue. “People are now looking at Texas and saying: ‘That’s where we need to make our next investment. That’s where the next opportunity lies,’ ” one Democratic state senator told Politico. There’s even optimistic chatter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s capturing the state in 2016 if she runs for president.

But it’s going to take more than money or a Clinton. The only constant in politics may be change, but turning Texas blue — or even purple — is going to be a lot harder than most folks imagine. It will require hard work, political infrastructure and a vision of Hispanic voters that goes beyond immigration reform.

Texas was reliably Democratic for more than a century, from Reconstruction through the Lyndon B. Johnson years. Johnson ably — albeit cynically and sometimes illegally — harnessed the Hispanic vote to keep his more reactionary opponents off balance in primaries.

But the liberal 1960s drove white conservatives into what was once a minuscule Republican Party. With the help of Rust Belt migrants in the 1970s, Republican strength grew under John G. Tower, Bill Clements and the elder George Bush.

In 1994, Mr. Bush’s son George pushed that indomitable Texas Democrat, Ann W. Richards, from the governor’s office, after which his consigliere, Karl Rove, engineered a generation of Republican domination. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, though strong in southern Texas and in some cities, withered as a statewide organization.

Now, though, Democrats are hopeful that the immovable object — the overwhelmingly male, conservative Republican power structure — is about to meet the unstoppable force: demography. Texas is home to 9.5 million Hispanics, about 38 percent of the population, just seven points behind the non-Hispanic white population. In 2020, Hispanics will begin to surpass the white population and will outright dwarf it in 2030.

But the Hispanic vote is not monolithically Democratic, nationally or in Texas. In 2004, 40 percent of Texas Hispanics backed George W. Bush for re-election. In 2010, Rick Perry got almost 40 percent of the Hispanic vote statewide, and nearly half in South Texas, the purported base for Democratic growth.

Then there is the problem of Democratic infrastructure: there hasn’t been one for years. In 1995, Ron Kirk forged a coalition of Hispanics and African-Americans to become the first black mayor of Dallas, but he could not do the same statewide; he lost a Senate race to John Cornyn in 2002.

That same year, the millionaire oilman Tony Sanchez, a Democrat running for governor, had money, a Mexican heritage and an ability to appeal to Mexican-American voters. For it, he still lost 35 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mr. Perry, who claimed the governor’s mansion.

But the biggest problem is voter participation. Only about half of eligible Hispanic voters show up nationwide; this edged up slightly in 2012 to 53 percent. In Texas, just 4.1 million Hispanics are registered to vote, and only about half of them make it to the voting booth.

Why? There are a variety of explanations, including cultural ones. It’s pretty easy to feel disenfranchised by a political system that talks about you as an “immigrant” or, worse, an “alien.”

The Democrats have a few things working for them. The national Republican Party and its immigrant-bashing tendencies is one, of course. And it has hitched its outreach wagon to two senators — Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas — who are Cuban-American, a difference that may seem minor to non-Hispanics but that significantly diminishes their appeal to Texas’ Latinos, who are primarily of Mexican heritage. (Indeed, the Canadian-born Mr. Cruz actually got fewer Hispanic votes last year than Mr. Cornyn did in 2008.)

It may be that the demographic wave makes all this beside the point, and that increasing turnout among Hispanics just a little might make a big difference.

But that requires ground troops, voter education and turnout efforts over a multicycle campaign. It also requires that Democrats stop assuming they’re going to lose. “If we start treating this as a purple state,” said Matt Glazer of the activist group Progress Texas, “we would be one that much sooner.”

That also assumes that Republicans continue on their present, self-destructive course. If they moderate their anti-immigrant message, they might cut into the gains that optimistic Democrats are taking for granted.

Aside from get-out-the-vote efforts and pro-immigrant posturing, the Democrats need to develop a better understanding of Texas Hispanics as more than just immigrants. Their No. 1 issue: jobs. Polling and focus groups by the University of Texas political scientist Daron Shaw suggest that economic themes — including education and entrepreneurship — may draw Hispanics to vote in greater numbers. But as long as both parties see voters as mere immigrants, he said, “Hispanics are going to look at the candidate as just another politician.”

It has been 36 years since the Democrats last captured Texas in a presidential election. It could well happen again. But to make it happen, they have to look beyond demographics and start focusing on the hard, long road of party building first.

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G.O.P. Is Resisting Obama Pressure on Tax Increase

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, shrugging off rising pressure from President Obama, are resolutely opposing new tax increases to head off $85 billion in across-the-board spending reductions, all but ensuring the cuts will go into force March 1 and probably remain in place for months, if not longer.

Representative Martha Roby, Republican of Alabama, said on Wednesday, "It's unconscionable to use our military men and women in uniform as a bargaining chip to raise our taxes."

Seeking to Avoid the SequesterDespite new calls from the White House on Wednesday to enact a combination of tax increases and cuts to postpone the so-called sequester, the House is moving forward on a legislative agenda that assumes deep and arbitrary cuts to defense and domestic programs — once considered unthinkable — will remain in place through the end of the year.

Congressional Republicans have relented in the most recent fiscal showdowns with the White House. But lawmakers say they have no intention of surrendering in this one even though Mr. Obama has raised the potential of widespread disruptions in government services and even military operations in the weeks ahead. The president’s January fiscal victory, which yielded increases in income, capital gains and dividend tax rates on affluent families, has only bolstered Republican resolve.

“The president says he has to have tax increases to head off the sequester. Well, he already got his tax increase,” Representative Martha Roby, Republican of Alabama, said in an interview Wednesday after visiting the town just outside of the Army’s Fort Rucker, which stands to take a deep hit this spring. “It’s unconscionable to use our military men and women in uniform as a bargaining chip to raise our taxes.”

House Republicans say they believe they have politically inoculated themselves against claims they are responsible for the cuts by approving measures last year that would have substituted reductions in government programs like food stamps for the lower Pentagon spending. Party strategists have advised Republican members to aggressively blame the president for the creation of the automatic cuts and the failure to stop them.

Taking steps to avoid a full government shutdown at the end of March, the House Appropriations Committee as soon as next week will introduce legislation to keep the government financed through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, but do nothing to stop the pending cuts.

The current stopgap spending measure expires March 27, and Republican leaders are eager to avoid an Easter-week shuttering of the government. In recent days, Mr. Obama has sought to force Republicans into negotiations: a Saturday radio address criticizing “the current Republican plan” that “puts the burden of avoiding those cuts mainly on seniors and middle-class families”; a news conference on Tuesday with uniformed first responders whose jobs might be threatened; and on Wednesday, local television interviews broadcast in eight media markets, from Hawaii to South Carolina, urging Republicans to accept his “balanced approach” to unwind the cuts or accept responsibility for their consequences.

But House Republicans say they are feeling invulnerable in the current clash. Not only can they point to last year’s bills to replace the cuts, but redistricting has made most of them immune to political threats and entreaties. For many representing conservative districts where the president holds little sway, an attack by Mr. Obama is a badge of honor, senior Republican House aides say.

In the last showdowns won by the president, inaction was seen as intolerable. Had Republicans done nothing in 2011, a temporary payroll tax would have lapsed without offsetting tax cuts to ease the blow. On Jan. 1, every tax cut of the Bush administration would have expired at once had the Republicans not relented and let some taxes rise. This time, Republicans need not do anything and deep spending cuts they have demanded for years will go into force automatically.

Speaker John A. Boehner wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: “As the president’s outrage about the sequester grows in coming days, Republicans have a simple response: Mr. President, we agree that your sequester is bad policy. What spending are you willing to cut to replace it?”

And the speaker sought to turn the blame back on the president after Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta on Wednesday fired off a letter, warning that he will have to furlough a large number of Pentagon civilian staff members, “forgo critical objectives” and “do real harm to our national security” because of the cuts.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of the article inaccurately identified the military base Representative Martha Roby had toured. It was Fort Rucker, not Maxwell Air Force Base.

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Senate Democrats, Accusing G.O.P. of Obstruction, Try to Force Hagel Vote

Mr. Hagel’s nomination was endorsed by the Senate Armed Services Committee along party lines on Tuesday. But with Republicans demanding more information before allowing a vote on Mr. Hagel by the full Senate, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, took procedural steps to limit floor debate on his nomination and bring the partisan clash to a head by Saturday.

“This is the first time in the history of our country that a presidential nominee for secretary of defense has been filibustered,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “What a shame. But that’s the way it is.”

Republicans, sensitive to the accusation that they were filibustering Mr. Hagel, tried to draw a distinction between a filibuster and delaying the vote because of unanswered questions.

“There’s nothing unusual about this,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Mr. Hagel was “cozy” with Iran, an accusation that caused the committee meeting to erupt with Democratic outrage. “There’s not a filibuster,” he added.

Even if Republicans succeeded in dragging out the vote into the weekend, Democrats said they remained confident that he would be confirmed by Saturday because Republicans did not appear to have the 40 votes necessary to block the nomination. Such a move would be an extraordinary step, and one that Republicans seem wary of taking should they find themselves in the White House four years from now.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that he intended to try to block the nomination of John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s choice to be director of the C.I.A., until Mr. Brennan provides answers to questions he had on the scope and legality of the Obama administration’s drone operations. Democrats have also sought to extract more information from the White House about those operations.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Intelligence Committee chairwoman, said she expected to schedule a committee vote on Mr. Brennan’s nomination when the Senate returned from recess the week after next. She said that Mr. Brennan would make a “strong and capable C.I.A. director.”

According to the Senate’s historian, Donald A. Ritchie, only 5 percent of presidential cabinet nominees have been blocked or rejected by the Senate. Only twice since 1917, when the Senate’s modern filibuster rules were created, has a cabinet-level nominee been subject to a supermajority vote of 60, as Republicans are forcing with Mr. Hagel.

In the case of Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, the opposition is especially striking because senators have traditionally afforded their former colleagues a high level of courtesy. But many Republicans still nurse a grievance against Mr. Hagel for his opposition to the war in Iraq, and others have sought to make an issue of statements he has made on Israel and Iran. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona want the Obama administration to provide information about the timeline of its actions on the day of the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, an episode that has become a point of conservative ire against the president.

When Mr. Hagel testified before the Armed Services Committee he was pummeled.

As Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, Mr. Brennan has been the chief architect of the administration’s drone policy, and his nomination has focused new attention on it. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that he planned in the coming months to work with lawmakers to “ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remain consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”

White House officials on Wednesday did not give any details about Mr. Obama’s plans for more transparency about the targeted killing program, which has long been shrouded in secrecy.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have expressed frustration that the White House has not allowed lawmakers to read the legal memos, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provide the justification for the targeted killing operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and that have been expanded during the Obama administration.

The committee said that the Justice Department had written 11 secret legal memorandums related to the targeted killing of terrorism suspects but said the Obama administration had shown the committee only four of them.

Senator Feinstein did, however, provide new details about the extent to which her committee has been briefed by the administration about drone strikes.

“The committee has devoted significant time and attention to targeted killings by drones,” she said in a statement. “The committee receives notifications with key details of each strike shortly after it occurs, and the committee holds regular briefings and hearings on these operations” to review their basis and effectiveness.

She added that Intelligence Committee staff members had held 35 monthly oversight meetings with government officials “to review strike records (including video footage) and question every aspect of the program.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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In the Rockies, Growing Support for Renewables

State of the Rockies Project, Colorado College A regional poll found significant support for greater investment in wind and solar power.

A new poll tracking the conservation attitudes of residents of the six Rocky Mountain States shows that support is strong for greater protection of public lands and investment in renewable energy. It also offers some clues to why public policy does not dovetail with public opinion in those areas.

In early January, two polling companies questioned 2,400 registered voters across Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Brendan Boepple, program coordinator for Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project, said the results highlighted “the disparity between the reality and the rhetoric among Western voters.”

In a region where fossil fuel extraction has long been an economic linchpin, wind and solar ranked first in most states when voters were asked what two energy sources they wanted to see more money spent on.

In Arizona, for example, greater investment in solar energy was supported by 74 percent of those polled, and wind, by 43 percent. Support for more oil drilling and coal extraction registered at just 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively. (Support for solar power was far lower in Montana and Wyoming, however.)

“Overwhelmingly, they’re pointing to renewables,” said Lori Weigel, a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, which regularly conducts polling for the Republican Party. The other polling firm, Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, is associated with the Democratic Party.

A majority of respondents said that while some public lands should be drilled, environmentally sensitive places should be off limits forever. Ms. Weigel said the poll indicates that Rocky Mountain residents want a better balance.

“They don’t want to shut the door on development, but it’s pretty clear they want to see more protection,” she said. “They want to make sure that their clean water, clean air, wildlife and places to recreate are protected.”

The poll was released on Thursday, a day after the Obama administration announced the nomination of Sally Jewell as the new secretary of the interior. Ms. Jewell’s blend of oil expertise, enthusiasm for the outdoors and conservation advocacy is viewed by some as emblematic of the evolving land ethic across the Rocky Mountain states.

The survey results also come on the heels of a speech in Washington in which Bruce Babbitt, a former interior secretary, admonished the Obama administration for opening public lands to drilling without making commensurate conservation efforts.

Nine in ten people polled said that national parks, forests, monuments and wildlife preserves are essential to the economy. Three in four said that those lands furnish good jobs, and more than seven in 10 said that no public lands should be sold to private corporations.

Three in five said that drilling should not be allowed in “critical locations” near recreation areas, water sources or wildlife. Only 35 percent said that more public lands should be opened to “responsible energy development.”

To reflect the region’s changing demographics, the poll was also conducted in Spanish. Sixty-four percent of Latino respondents described themselves as pro-conservationist, virtually mirroring the result for the Rocky Mountain states as a whole.

While support for more conservation has remained constant during the three years since the poll began, David Metz, who works for the Democratic-leaning polling company Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, said he set out this year to understand why western politics and policy depart in some ways from public opinion.

He learned that 54 percent of Rocky Mountain residents are unaware of how their leaders have voted with regard to protecting land, air and water. “People don’t have a clear idea of what their elected officials are doing,” Mr. Metz said.

For example, more than two-thirds of people interviewed either said that no drilling was taking place on public lands or that they didn’t have enough information to answer whether it was or not. In reality, 38 million public acres across the United States, including land in 42 national park units are leased for oil and gas drilling, something that most western lawmakers support.

“There’s a mismatch,” Mr. Metz said. “One of our goals with this poll is to show a common scientific set of data to better connect where public officials are and where the public is.”

The poll suggested that voters would have a “more favorable” impression of any candidate who voiced support for public land protection. But the degree varied depending on the candidate’s party affiliation.

The results suggest that Republican candidates stand to gain the most by championing land conservation; a Republican candidate who took that stance would draw support from more Democratic voters than a Democratic candidate would from Republicans.

Walt Hecox, faculty director for the State of the Rockies Project, argues that politicians should pay close attention to the study. “Westerners see the permanent protection of their public lands as an economic imperative and essential to their quality of life,” he said in a statement. “Decision-makers would do well to take notice.”

The poll also showed that while 85 percent of Rocky Mountain residents engage in at least one outdoor recreational activity, 83 percent of parents worry that children don’t spend enough time outside.

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Small Shift in Numbers Gives House Democrats a Fresh Shot at Relevance

Joe Straus became the speaker of the Texas House in 2009, when Democrats and Republicans had nearly even numbers in that body.

Every deal had to be brokered. Party lines were soft.

Republicans clobbered the Democrats in the 2010 elections and ran over them in Mr. Straus’s second term as speaker. They had a supermajority, and they acted like it.

As a bloc of votes, the Democrats were broken. Demoralized, they never coalesced behind any particular leader. They had a caucus head in Representative Jessica Farrar of Houston. And they had a brawler, Representative Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio. But the Democrats did not show up as a unified force in 2011.

Now they get to choose between cooperation and resistance, and you can find Texas Democrats in both camps. The trick for their leaders is to figure out where they want to go. In Mr. Straus, they have a speaker who is probably less of what they fear from the right than any of his would-be replacements might be.

If Republicans who don’t like Mr. Straus are right, he is more moderate than the rest of the party. And if that’s the case, how could the Democrats do better? On the other hand, they are Democrats: any Republican successes weigh against them, and some would prefer to oppose Straus and Company no matter what.

Some important things have changed since the last time around.

The 2010 election left Republicans with the idea that they didn’t need to compromise on anything, what with a supermajority and the national mood coming out of those midterm elections. Moderate Republicans mostly stuck with their party even when they didn’t like what was being served, because the alternative was a potentially risky primary in 2012 with a more conservative Republican at home.

Two years ago, the governor was putting together his bona fides for what turned out to be a presidential run. Remember that list of “emergency issues” at the beginning of the session two years ago? Sanctuary cities, photo identification for voters, state-mandated pre-abortion sonograms and eminent domain protection were all tailored to please Republican primary voters.

The formula is different this time. Republicans don’t have a supermajority in either chamber of the Legislature, and the governor hasn’t declared anything worthy of emergency status that must be handled in the first two months of the session.

The Democrats are also in a better place. They have recovered from the spurning of 2010. Their overall numbers still stink, but not as much as before. Republicans suffered some lumps in the presidential race. The party’s urgent designs on Hispanic voters — spurred by the presidential results — has made some Republican lawmakers more interested in dealing with Hispanic lawmakers of either party.

Instead of Republicans pillaging and looting in 2011 in a Texas House that had previously been evenly balanced, this session finds Democrats seeking a way back into power and Republicans trying to woo Latinos and also needing alliances with Democrats on some votes.

The early days of a legislative session are marked with warm and optimistic feelings, so it’s hard to tell how the relationships will go. But even if the parties hated each other, they would have to work together on some things.

It’s a Republican room — 95 members versus 55 — but some things require 100 votes or more. The Republicans can’t get there alone, but members from both parties wonder whether anyone can pull together a regular Democratic voting bloc.

The Democrats started the session by electing Representative Yvonne Davis of Dallas to lead the caucus. She is not known as a great orator. You are unlikely to see her very often on television — she doesn’t particularly like having her picture taken. But she is one of the best in the House at working members and votes on the floor, putting deals together, and she can raise money for the caucus.

And Mr. Martinez Fischer, who heads the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which includes 37 of the 55 Democratic members, is still around.

Last week, he was part of a bipartisan group working to restore some of the education cuts made last session. Ms. Davis was working the floor on a linked appropriations bill.

Mr. Straus and the others are in there, too, wondering if it will be different this year. Will anyone follow the leaders?

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Senate Democrats Offer a Proposal to Head Off Automatic Cuts

The Democratic proposal would establish a 30-percent minimum tax rate on incomes over $1 million to raise about $54 billion over 10 years. It would raise $1 billion more by subjecting tar sands oil to a tax to pay for oil-spill cleanups and by ending a business tax deduction for the cost of moving equipment overseas.

The remaining $55 billion would come from $27.5 billion in defense cuts from 2015 to 2021 and $27.5 billion in farm-subsidy cuts.

The legislation is more a bargaining position than a solution. Republicans have said they will not accept any new taxes in a deal to head off the so-called sequester — across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs of 5 percent to 8 percent and totaling about $1 trillion over 10 years. But Senate Democratic leaders said Thursday that their party must rally support around an alternative to try to move negotiations forward.

“This bill is an important chess piece,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio on Thursday repeated his demand that the Senate take the first steps to replace the spending cuts before the House considers its move, but no one predicted that the Senate Democrats’ proposal would rally the bipartisan support needed to overcome a near-certain Republican filibuster and reach the House.

“I would hope that we can get to 51 votes, and that majority would rule,” said Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I’m confident we will have the majority — if not the totality — of the Democratic caucus.”

Senate Democrats emerged from a protracted lunch meeting over the plan voicing only grudging support. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, said he worried that wringing savings from farm subsidies now instead of in a broad farm bill would make it harder to pass an overhaul of agricultural programs that has been stalled for nearly a year.

Senators Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, denounced the 50-50 mix of cuts and taxes, after Democrats have swallowed far more spending cuts than tax increases over two years of deficit-reduction efforts.

Republicans dismissed the proposal as a worthless gimmick.

“This is not a solution — even they know it can’t pass; that’s the idea,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “It’s a political stunt.”

The White House praised the package. Jay Carney, the press secretary, called it a “balanced plan to avoid across-the-board budget cuts that will hurt kids, seniors, and our men and women in uniform.”

“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” he added. “Do they protect investments in education, health care and national defense, or do they continue to prioritize and protect tax loopholes that benefit the very few at the expense of middle- and working-class Americans?”

As the cuts approach, warnings of disaster are growing increasingly dire. The Senate Appropriations Committee released a barrage of letters from agencies spelling out how the cuts would be meted out: 600,000 low-income women and children dropped from federal nutrition programs; meat and poultry plants forced to close because of furloughed federal inspectors; deep cuts to the poor school systems that rely most heavily on federal assistance; delayed permits for oil and gas production; and shorter seasons, reduced operating hours and possible park closings in the national park system. Job losses could reach 750,000 this year, said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

While Republicans and Democrats agree the cuts would be destructive, neither side seems ready to negotiate a solution. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, reached out to Mr. Boehner on Thursday. Mr. Boehner said he told Mr. Reid what he has been saying publicly: The House will look at what the Senate can produce.

“This sequester was the president’s idea,” Mr. Boehner said. “His party needs to follow through on their plans to replace it.”

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Duke Energy Loan for Democrats' Convention Remains Unpaid

When Duke Energy extended a $10 million line of credit to the committee organizing the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., last summer, it seemed to be a sign that President Obama would not make good on his pledge to keep his party’s nominating festivities free of corporate favor banking.

The money would have to be paid back, organizers said.

Except that so far, it hasn’t been. The Los Angeles Times reports that the loan remains outstanding, with just a couple of weeks left until it is due to be paid back.

Democrats acknowledged over the summer that the president’s pledge had set a very high bar and that without corporate giving, they were having a hard time coming up with enough small-donor financing to fill the void. And the host committee had already begun to break the pledge by setting up a nonprofit corporation to collect corporate dollars for events outside of the convention hall – like a big welcome party for the news media showcasing Charlotte businesses and a Labor Day festival.

But the nonprofit corporation – called New American City and financed by companies including Duke and Bank of America – wound up paying $5 million for the convention hall itself at the Time Warner Cable Arena, as The Charlotte Observer reported last fall.

The newspaper also caught the first warning sign that the committee would default on the line of credit, noting that Duke had listed it as a loss in its third-quarter report.

Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke, said that the loss of $10 million was recorded as an accounting requirement and that the company was still hopeful the committee would repay the full loan before it comes due Feb. 28. “We still hope there’s some chance to recover part or all of that money in some fashion,” he said. But, he acknowledged, a company generally counts a loss on a loan “when you think there’s a real likelihood it may not be repaid.”

With a default, the loan would effectively become a donation — a fairly large one given that the total budget for the convention was roughly $31 million.

The Democratic National Committee had no comment.

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