Democrats selling the case that Texas is purple had a worst-case scenario last night.
“We have to really reexamine everything from top to bottom,” Matt Angle, who founded the Lone Star Project, said. “From the way we talk to our base voters and the way we mobilize voters, because just importing what they’ve done in other states doesn’t work very well, or hasn’t the last couple of elections.”
Sen. Ted Cruz took an early victory lap, beating Rep. Colin Allred by about 9%, in what Democrats had hoped would be a photo finish. Donald Trump beat Vice President Harris by 14% in the state — the largest margin of victory he’s ever had.
Democrats knew that beating Cruz would be a challenge, but losing at such margins — including in historically blue South Texas and purple suburbs that Joe Biden won last cycle — is cause for concern that what they’re doing isn’t working.
The state party needs a total revamp and must reevaluate how it’s reaching voters, Democrats across the state said. Even more than that, there’s anxiety that voters may stop listening altogether, and Democrats’ money will dry up.
“Many times they’ll say, ‘Why bother? It doesn’t make a difference,’” Rep. Veronica Escobar said last night about outreach in her community of El Paso. “That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Republicans have long called Democrats in the state “the party that cried wolf.” The margins last night do nothing to counter that narrative. Crystal Gayden, the Democratic Party chair for Tarrant County, an important bellwether, said Texas Democrats really needed a win.
“Tarrant County needs more than just the chipping away, because at some point in time, voters begin to become disparaged, and we deal more with voter apathy,” she said on Election Day. “There has to be a win in [Allred’s] particular race.”
Trump won the county decisively, while Allred squeaked out a win of less than one percentage point.
“We constantly have to deal with ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’” she added. “I will never agree with that, but sometimes you can understand why people say my vote doesn’t matter.”
Jen Ramos, an SDEC member who lives in Austin, said the party has “to figure out a new strategy and find a new way to not only remind these voters that it is still important to go vote, but also what’s at stake when we have these elections.”
Six years ago, Beto O’Rourke visited every county in Texas and came close to beating Cruz. He also ran during the first Trump presidency, where the dynamic of the national ticket was different, political operatives noted. Allred ran with a strong focus on the cities and suburbs, and lost by a much greater margin, despite raising more money and multiple polls showing the race nearly tied. The sense among party insiders is that Texas Democrats don’t really know how to win in the state.
“I don’t know that Texas, we’ve really put together a Texas plan to communicate a message to our base,” Angle said. “We still have a lot of importing techniques from other places and trying to try some infrastructure building that people see happens in other places.”
Most Democratic operatives stopped short of blaming the state party. Still, many acknowledged that Democratic infrastructure in Texas has been hobbled by years of Republican control, and it’s been a massive challenge to try and rebuild it.
Monique Alcala, the executive director of the state Democratic Party, acknowledged that there are challenges in building a cohesive campaign across the state, where in the past, county chairs and local operatives have worked independently.
“There’s been a lot of decentralization of work in Texas, and that’s not how you build a strong state party,” she said, citing other battleground states that see more success, like North Carolina and Wisconsin.
“They have a coordinated that runs exactly the way that it needs to be, and that’s where every single person, every partner, every cable partner and outside organizations are all rolling in the same direction,” Alcala said. “That is exactly where we need to be and as a focus for us moving forward.”
Asked if that means more money, Alcala said, “It always means more money.”
But, after a depressing loss, being able to bring in money doesn’t feel like a sure thing. Already, the party is underfunded, James Aldrete, a Texas-based strategist who worked on Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, said. He predicted it would get worse.
“I think all Democratic money is going to be on pause,” Aldrete said. “People are going to want more answers.”
“It’s incumbent upon people who see themselves as activists and leaders in the Democratic Party to make a compelling case to donors. Donors don’t have an obligation to give,” Angle said. “The rest of us have an obligation to make a compelling case for them to give, and so I think that’s a real challenge that we have after this race.”
Not all hope is lost. Jared Hockema, a county chair in South Texas, said that the extent of the failure, in a way, means it wasn’t any one person or party’s fault.
“The folks that have been very generous in funding efforts here in Texas recognize that what happened yesterday was something that was not unique to Texas,” he said. “It was something that was happening all around the United States.”
Yet again, the party hopes voters take it as a call to action, not a reason to quit.
“The work of the Tarrant Democratic Party doesn’t end just because we haven’t won,” Gayden said. “What changes is our approach. What changes is our outreach. What changes is what we need to do to mobilize voters.”
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