Flipping the Narrative: Texas Democrats Aim for Victories with Local Focus

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are locked in a fight for seven swing states that appear to be in control of who will be the next president. But outside the Rust Belt and Sun Belt contests that have dominated everyone’s attention, Republicans and Democrats are both putting states no one expects to be competitive on their November wish list. The Washington Examiner looked at four contests where the parties are looking to flip the script and steal a win where no one expected they could.

Though widely seen as a solid-red bastion, Texas Democrats are once again trying to send a senator to Washington, D.C., for the first time in more than three decades.

Texas has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, and its last Democratic senator left office in 1993. Its last Democratic governor left in 1994. Despite this, Democrats hope that a surge in funding, focus on local parties, and finding common ground with voters could finally turn the state blue once again.

Crushing Cruz

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has been a powerhouse in Texas since he rode the tea party wave into the Senate in 2012. The former solicitor general of the state posed a formidable challenge to then-candidate Donald Trump in the chaotic 2016 presidential election, and he’s since positioned himself as one of the characters Democrats love to hate.

Texas Democrats think they may have found the answer to booting Cruz from office in Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), a former NFL player who rode Beto O’Rourke’s coattails to victory in 2018.

At the time, O’Rourke had become Democrats’ greatest hope to knock off Cruz. He raked in millions of dollars in out-of-state donations and appeared on the cusp of crushing Cruz’s reelection chances.

Though O’Rourke wound up losing to Cruz by 2.6 points, Allred benefited from the focus on Democrats in the state, building up a formidable war chest for himself. Allred has raised more money in the first quarter than O’Rourke did in 2018, but he has also pitched himself to voters not as a Democrat but as someone trying to compete with Cruz.

“I’m a very different candidate from O’Rourke and I’m running a very different campaign,” Allred told Texas Monthly last month. “My focus has always been on trying to tell my story so that Texans know who I am.”

Despite his track record of aligning himself with Republicans in criticizing Biden’s response to the southern border, he still faces a double-digit polling hole to overcome if he wants to stay in Washington next year.

Staying within the state

Democrats’ primary strategy is to shift their focus to concentrate on state-level issues, giving the Texas Democratic Party a different look than the national one. Beginning in 2022, Democrats began to focus on winning local races, such as city councils, municipal utility district boards, and school boards, Kut News reported.

A massive fundraising effort led by Democratic megadonor George Soros has helped inject fuel into this effort, with millions of dollars going toward county Democratic parties. The Democratic parties in Dallas, Cameron, and Hidalgo were given particular attention, all receiving six-figure donations, according to the Texas Tribune.

The heads of local parties described the new income as a “game-changer,” allowing them to expand their operatives and run a better campaign.

“[The] overall investment is a game-changer for not only us but for county parties throughout the state,” Dallas County Democratic Party Chairman Kardal Coleman, who received $200,000 from the Soros-aligned Texas Majority PAC, said.

Flurry of funding

Katherine Fischer, the deputy executive director of the group, spoke of the effort as being thoroughly transformative. In a statement to the outlet, she said the funding would allow voter mobilization efforts “on a scale never seen before, year after year, in the key regions of our state.”

“We need millions of more dollars and hundreds of more full-time staff to do this,” Fischer continued. “Texas Majority PAC works with partners across the state to create the conditions that will make flipping the state possible.”

Cameron County Democratic Party Chairman Jared Hockema said that the new funding is “more than we’ve ever had available to us.” In Cameron’s case, the money was spent on hiring a full-time staffer, establishing an office, and mobilizing voters in low-income areas.

Abortion

Eyeing the success of abortion-rights access groups in solid red states, Texas Democrats have maneuvered to make abortion a central part of the 2024 election. In response to a question from the Washington Examiner, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said the issue of abortion will be of primary importance in November.

“Well, it is part of our main discussion that we are having with voters across the state of Texas. It is simply because Republicans have been able to gain control of the legislature that we are seeing this happening in Texas,” he said, referring to abortion bans. “This election, the issue of abortion will be on the ballot. There’s no question about it.”

He suggested that abortion will play a pivotal role in local, congressional, and presidential elections.

Hinojosa focused especially on the Texas Supreme Court, saying, “Every one of those justices that are on the ballot voted to deprive a woman of her right to determine her bodily autonomy. Every one of them, every single time this issue has come up, every one of those people have taken the lead from whatever Greg Abbott and the MAGA Republicans tell them to do. There is no independence in this court. They’re completely controlled by them, and they have been at the forefront in depriving these freedoms for women.”

Pulling the platform back toward the middle

The Texas Democratic Party’s 2022-2024 platform is also noticeably more centrist than other state’s Democratic Parties, particularly those in solid blue areas. The preamble of the platform contains five principles: representative democracy, equality and freedom for all, smart government, “a healthy Texas,” and support for veterans, using broad language under each. In contrast, California’s party platform includes paragraphs stressing the need for diversity and “gender-affirming healthcare” under its preamble.

The Texas Democratic Party platform’s first direct mention of transgenderism is on page 33, though the “LGBTQIA+” community is first mentioned on page 14.

Despite the rhetoric of party leadership, however, many Democrats speak of the effort to turn the state blue as a long-term project, with limited hope for the immediate future.

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“When you are making an investment for a long term, you can measure growth in voter participation and it isn’t necessarily about, did our candidate win?” Michelle Tremillo, co-executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, told the Texas Tribune. “This is about becoming a voter on a regular basis.”

The Texas Democratic Party and its leadership team did not respond when reached for comment.