Texas Going Blue: Fact or Fiction?
The real state of the Texas Democratic Party ahead of November.
Background
This post is going to explain my thoughts about the oft-repeated hope of the state of Texas ‘going blue’, ‘flipping blue’ or ‘turning blue’ for any given upcoming election.
As for me, I’m currently a journalist in local broadcast media and I got my bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.
My current position in local news has shown me aspects of Texas politics that throw a wrench into this idea of a fabled party flip.
Before I can provide my clarity on the details of the ‘flip’ I need to explain the state that Democrats enter into when trying to do that flip.
Introduction
As a Texan, you have to understand that you live in a very exceptional place. After all ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’. That saying is exactly right in my mind. Our state faces big challenges but our chances to solve those challenges are even bigger. The next decade is a crossroads for the whole state. All the weight of our state’s history is bearing down upon us, pushing us forward to our destiny or our doom.
The Republicans in Austin have wasted precious time discussing largely unhelpful solutions like book bans, bathroom bans and school vouchers.
When it comes to things that affect all Texans like funding public education, expanding healthcare and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, the government in Austin is often opposed to any practical solution. School vouchers, not expanding Medicaid and relying on natural gas pipes that can freeze in the winter, are all Republican policies and all Republican failures.
To be bipartisan, the Republicans aren’t the only party failing Texans. You could actually give some amount of credit to the Republicans here. Many Republicans have managed to stay locked in with their local base like business owners and community leaders. The reality on the ground is that for many rural Texans there simply is no Democratic Party presence for them to rely on, so they don't.
Republicans (like Democrats) represent business, so local Republican officials are often, in fact, current or former business people. Take for example Mayor of Tyler, Don Warren who owns “Lomoco, Inc., a small oil and gas asset management firm he formed in 1994” or the embattled Dade Phelan who “works as a real estate developer at his family's fourth generation commercial real estate development firm.”
Many others like Governor Abbott and Attorney General Paxton are former lawyers, so these people aren’t just sitting around doing nothing. There are businesses and there are the people who represent them, in the courts and in government.
For poor rural Texans right now, our only hope is that our interests align with theirs and sometimes they do. For a small town, there may be only a few big employers like the school district, local government, maybe a college or a prison and then the businesses. These are the makings of a community.
The schools and government are necessary in these towns but a business could be all that keeps a town together. Consider all the now abandoned sawmill towns in the Piney Woods, consider all the old oil boomtowns scattered to the wind across the state. Those towns needed those businesses to exist but when boom becomes bust, those with the means to leave, will.
This is going to be the case for many of Texas’ rural towns today.
Conservative talking head William F. Buckley Jr. once pointed out that his magazine, the National Review, stood against history and yelled “stop”. In the most positive light possible, that is exactly what Republicans are trying to do, keep the state as profitable as possible for as long as possible, keep these towns together as they are.
Across state history, this is a sinking ship. All across Texas there are abandoned sawmill towns and oil towns that were run by conservative anti-union business titans. If a town doesn't find something new, if Beaumont doesn't become more than Spindletop, it doesn't exist today.
This is the story of Texas going forward. In my opinion, a lack of investment in jobs, healthcare, infrastructure and a receding coastline will force many in Texas into exodus.
Consider this. There's a lot of attention being given to rich Californians moving to Texas because of the lower taxes we have. What does this mean? It means it's supposed to be easier to be rich here, of course. What is the point of this supposed wealth if it doesn't benefit us all? Prices are high, property taxes are a recurring issue, our infrastructure is crumbling and the poorest Texans end up paying more taxes than Californians.
The state shouldn't just be a lifeboat for the rich but that's what it's being used as. Where is the lifeboat for the poor in rural, urban and sub-urban Texas towns? When rent is due and food isn't cheap, where are their low-tax incentives? There are none.
This is the situation the idea of turning blue and the Democratic Party enters into.
There’s a huge lack of clarity when the media talks about the Democratic Party flipping the state blue. My intention is to provide some.
Clarity
On the left side of the Texas political spectrum, people have been talking about the Texas party flip since even before the failed senate and presidential races of Democratic hopeful Beto O’Rourke, the former punk rocker, turned businessman, turned politician.
It’s clear that Texas’ demographics are changing and that the growing Latino population of the state represents potential gains for the party that wins their support. In 2020, Latinos supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump. In 2022 the US Census Bureau showed that Latinos have eclipsed non-Hispanic whites as the largest demographic in the state. All of this should be mostly good news for Democrats who hope to flip the state
But there are problems with that prospect. Despite what some may think, Latinos do not vote as a monolith as shown by Republican gains in the south of Texas. That isn’t even the biggest problem for Democrats in my eyes.
It’s not clear to me how this new demographic reality leads to this fabled party flip without a lack of Democratic organizing in rural communities. If the current situation reflects a near 50/50 split in votes, then what Blue wavers and Dem-optimists hope for is some kind of a miracle where groups they’ve already mostly secured continue to grow and then the state just kind of flips.
That hope is naive because it’s timeless. There’s no knowing when it will ever bear fruit and it’s disempowering because it’s not linked to any strategy. It’s a hope that the voters will save the party and not the other way around. The party is completely neutered and with out any responsibility here.
If you really want to flip the state then you can’t just shore up your margins in the urban areas and south Texas, this won’t win you any more local elections. It will only help you win national races and statewide races like for the governorship. Crucially, I don’t think you’ll simply start to win those statewide races any time soon either because Republicans lack serious and concerted opposition from Democrats in the rural half of the state.
Now I may be just some guy, what do I know about the significance of rural votes, but Hudson Cavanagh, the former director of data science for the Texas Democratic Party, wrote about the importance of the rural voter in terms of turnout for the party’s “2020 Texas Election Retrospective.”
“We were beaten in the turnout battle across the state. Despite record turnout, our collective Get Out The Vote (“GOTV”) turnout operation did not activate Democratic voters to the same extent Republicans were able to activate their base. The pandemic prevented us from getting the most out of our most powerful competitive advantage: our volunteers. We struggled to reach voters for whom we did not have phone numbers, who were disproportionately young, rural and folks of color,” said Cavanagh.
Cavanagh’s prescription for this predicament follows the same kind of train of thought as the people who think the demographics will help the state flip. ‘If we get enough people who want to vote Democrat to the polls, we’ll win’ is the central theme here and that’s easier said than done.
“There is no way that Democrats can underperform relative to Republicans in turnout and still win Texas, given current Republican advantage in the state. We estimate 51% of the voting population are Democrats, but Republicans are more likely to vote. Democrats have to run a superior ground game to overcome this,” said Cavanagh.
Now, when Cavanagh said “superior ground game” what he meant was that Democrats need to do more voter registration by contacting more voters and getting them registered. This looks like expanding phone and text banking and a growing door-to-door canvassing operation. So the strategy here is to do more of what we do now but better.
But like he said before that won’t work if the Republican’s efforts outpace the Democrats’ growth.
Why do Democrats do so well in cities? Is it simply because that’s where most liberal voters live or is it because there are reasons for people to vote for Democrats there? In the city, like in the country, the ruling party has the power to implement policy and to coordinate that policy’s enforcement with various like-minded people. This should be a party’s main focus, not simply winning elections but governing.
Now, out here in the country, that task falls to the Republican Party most times. Local business leaders like Warren or Phelan, often end up becoming members of the party and serving in government. The rural areas know only one party. Local Democratic parties often mainly hold electoral events like voter registration drives or candidate forums.
If you’re an underrepresented minority group in a rural community and you want access to the levers of power, then you will inevitably have to deal with your local Republican officials.
If you really want the Democratic Party to take hold in Texas then you have to have a strategy to govern in places other than the cities, your approach to rural communities can’t start and end in the election years. If you want to have a lasting and reliable party flip then you have to answer,
The Following Two Questions.
What is the Democratic approach to the liberal voter?
What is the Democratic approach to the conservative voter?
If you know the answer to those two questions, not only do you know exactly why I think this party flip won’t be happening anytime soon, but you also have an insight into the entire course of Texas politics for the foreseeable future.
For the liberal voter, the strategy should be very easy because even policies far to the left of President Biden have been endorsed by the Texas Democratic Party and even local county parties.
To get the liberal Texans to turn out, all you have to do is balance the bare minimum policy statements and victories with an abundance of guilting them over the issues you barely bother delivering on. All that’s easy enough and already underway. This approach wins Democrats the cities, assuming that they aren’t completely alienated from the party by national leadership.
However, your strategy can’t stop with your supporters, as Cavanagh points out in the 2020 retrospective:
“Contacting voters has the greatest impact when we speak to registered voters with low to moderate turnout propensity. In other words, these are people who are unlikely to vote unless we speak to them. Talking to somebody with 35% turnout likelihood is approximately five times as valuable as a person with 80% turnout likelihood. Unfortunately, statewide Democratic contact attempts were clustered around high turnout propensity voters who were likely to vote whether or not we talked to them,” said Cavanagh.
Now if you're in too much of a hurry to wait for either the new demographic reality to bear its supposed fruit or the utter ruin of the rural half of the state, then you have to answer,
The Second Question.
What is the Democratic approach to the conservative voter?
The biggest attempts by the Democratic Party to win Texas in recent memory were the abject failures of Beto O’Rourke’s senate, presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. We do not have to look too hard to understand why.
In 2019, Beto O’Rourke took to the stage for an ABC Democratic primary debate and said the following:
"Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore” said O'Rourke.
O’Rourke’s honesty on the issue of gun violence seems more sincere than most. (Generally speaking, I think he actually does come off as a very sincere and respectable guy, having briefly met him at an event during one of his failed campaigns.)
Despite his honesty, his prior statement is problematic. If you believe sincerely like O'Rourke, that there is a uniquely American problem with gun violence, then you must face that there’s a right way and a wrong way to try and solve that problem. Importantly, O’Rourke’s statement did not help solve that problem electorally, it only served to confirm conservative fears that the Democrats were, in fact, ‘coming for your guns’.
In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, the families of the slain children were more able to move the needle on gun safety than O’Rourke, an established politician with millions in support, ever did through his failed campaigns.
Lessons taught but never learned
In my opinion, the power the Uvalde families have has to do with their commitment and the fact that they’re the impacted community. When lobbying and backroom deals don’t provide solutions, people in frontline communities will organize. The Democratic Party must first understand the power of community organization if they want to succeed across the state.
This has been the case on any number of issues over the years. Movements like labor strikes, women’s suffrage, anti-war protests, anti-police violence protests, Occupy Wall Street, anti-apartheid protests and the Civil Rights movement, all materialized because people wanted to see the issues affecting them get solved.
The current Democratic party strategy is to only give lip service to those popular movements to gain momentum in certain races, this was a key strategy for the likes of O’Rourke, Biden and Obama.
In Texas, this strategy fails for Democrats in statewide races because of simple math. If you don’t organize and the rural, mostly conservative, half of the state sees you as a crazy ultra-liberal gun stealer then you definitely aren’t winning any conservatives and you won’t even win enough liberals because lip service wont drive enough of them to the polls either.
(That strategy is even less effective when you consider that the Texas Democratic Party rarely tries to court the left wing of the state. Prominent Texas Democrats like Henry Cuellar and Colin Allred actively ran against more progressive and grassroots campaigns that could’ve had a broader more genuine appeal.)
I think even a modest effort to seriously organize with liberal and conservative people in the rural half of the state could pay out massively in statewide elections and I’ll explain why.
TREMENDOUS LUCK
Democrats should consider themselves very lucky because they could easily represent both rural and urban working-class voters. The very fact that representing most people is an option for your party means that electoral success would be very easy. All you have to do is actually organize around the issues that affect both rural and urban communities.
In Texas, there are plenty of issues like that to choose from.
EDUCATION.
Both rural and urban Texas school systems face perennial neglect and hostility from the state government. For example, Harris ISD, the state’s largest school district, has been taken over by the state government. All across Texas, rural and urban districts are facing a major teaching crisis causing many local school boards to resort to four-day school weeks and prompting the state government to give out checks to high-performing teachers.
All of these issues and more could be pretty readily solved by having a less conservative attitude toward spending and taxing. The state government would have no excuse not to fund education if it didn’t have a problem with paying teachers a living wage and if it wasn’t obsessed with having low taxes for some. There are ways that we can tax that increase public funds without burdening homeowners or the poor. The reality is that all Texans want to pay less in taxes but if a cut doesn’t change how the government is funded then all it does is take money away from needed government services like schools. Notably, school choice would allow those who already pay the least in taxes to keep even more of their taxes away from underfunded public schools.
This, frankly, is the single biggest political issue for many small rural towns in Texas. They know exactly how crucial education is for their local economy going forward and more importantly, they know exactly how much they’re getting screwed. Democrats’ election strategy doesn’t even really try to answer any of this. They act like a touring band and not a political party responsible for making people’s lives better. Meanwhile, local rural often conservative school leaders have to try and stop state Republican leadership from gutting their schools on their own.
(This battle over vouchers has only gotten worse for rural schools since Abbott-backed pro-voucher candidates defeated several of their anti-voucher opponents in the March 4 primaries.)
At the same time, all across the country, conservative ideologues get on to school boards and turn the discussion to banning books and litter boxes. Local leaders and communities are under attack. Where are the liberals talking about buying new computers, raises for teachers and free school lunches? There is genuine support and need for investment in education for small communities but you can’t do that if you only visit once or twice every four to two years. You have to start living with and working for the people you want to be responsible for statewide.
For the Democratic Party, this means mimicking what the Republicans do for business interests but for the interests of the people you want to represent. Ironically, if the local party exists in the community solely as a means to an electoral end then you won’t win those elections. There has to be a reason for people to vote for you.
On education, this means that the Democratic Party has to get people on not only school boards but on PTA boards, in after-school programs, free breakfast programs, day-cares and pre-k programs. Constituent services like this help the community, help the children learn and make your party relevant to the community. Beyond people volunteering with these community organizations, funds for advertising on losing candidates could be spent to help these programs. If such programs don’t exist, start them. This is what many local businesses do to advertise, they volunteer with non-profits, it’s unlimited good PR. Union halls are often the host of various community events and programs for similar reasons. For a political party, it’s also part of the job description.
CRIME.
Urban and rural voters both really care about crime in their communities. Crime is a real crisis for communities. If there’s not enough opportunity, people turn to crime, if there’s not adequate health care people turn to drug dealers to ease their pain. Democrats can offer solutions to crime that are much more effective than what the Texas Republicans have decided to do. Marijuana legalization and medical marijuana use are very popular even in Texas. Through volunteering and financial support, a party can help reduce crime by supporting community organizations like after-school programs, clubs, rehabilitation programs and prisoner education programs. These should be easy issues for Democrats to run on and deliver on.
In comparison, Republican leaders see a public health crisis like fentanyl and say let’s make this into a war.
Operation Lonestar is Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s prescribed medicine for the two-fold problems of fentanyl and immigration. Operation Lonestar has cost billions of dollars and the immigration rate is still rising. There’s also been an increase in deadly high-speed chases since the operation started.
And it seems as if that’s not enough for Abbott. Now there’s an active Standoff at Eagle Pass. This situation could shape up to be a real problem for the state if and when the federal government decides to step in and re-assert its total authority over the border. To that point, I think it’s worth pointing out something Abbott said recently that echoed the Confederate line about the Fugitive Slave Act. “All we’re doing is enforcing the laws of the United States of America,” said Abbott. Historically, when state and federal governments have disagreed like this, it’s not good for the states, to say the least.
Speaking of war, one Republican answer to crime seems to be providing an utterly pointless and seemingly endless supply of new-fangled military gadgets for local police. Why do Texas towns bomb-proof robots and mine-resistant vehicles?
A real answer to the fentanyl crisis would eliminate the demand for fentanyl, short of that, all you can do is merely slow down the supply. That’s basic economics.
Meanwhile, on planet Earth, it’s understood that well-adjusted and gainfully employed people don’t have to resort to crimes of circumstance. Investing in rural communities, in a way that creates new industries, sets up good-paying jobs and provides for good education and stable families, basically making sure they’re not dirt poor, could go a long way to solving the crime problem. That’s not even mentioning what investing in better medical and mental healthcare could do. Again, these are issues that most Republican and Democrat voters agree upon but it involves serious investment.
An investment in jobs and education like I just described, is perfect because it helps solve another problem that’s actually very concerning to the rural conservative voter.
THE ENVIRONMENT.
What comes to mind when you think about Texas jobs? If you answered oil and agriculture, you’d be about right. The necessity of a clean and stable environment for the ag sector is obvious. It really shouldn’t need to be said but farmers care about the land. The only reason I think you don’t see more farmers like those shown here, in such a deeply agrarian state, is because of the other big industry in Texas.
Oil and gas are in many ways the backbone of a lot of rural communities. Consider the role of coal in a state like Kentucky or West Virginia. For many places in those states, the coal mine is the sole reason a town exists, when the mine dies, the town dies. This is the reality for many communities across the country.
(One of the most violent labor disputes in American history happened in Harlan County, Kentucky. It was called the Harlan County War or Bloody Harlan. A documentary about the conflict called “Harlan County, USA” won Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.)
People are willing to fight and die over the bitter rock that poisons our air and their lungs. For the miner, that rock is all they have, all they can provide and all anyone will buy from them, so they're going to fight to make as much as they can off of it.
Similarly, people in Texas understand that Big Oil pays the bills. The state doesn’t fund their schools enough so Big Oil donates to schools. They get their name on classrooms, give out grants, and fund technical programs. They invest in the future of the oil industry by paying beaucoup bucks so their workers can put their kids through school so maybe they can work on a rig someday. They give rural communities some kind of a future. And yet, that future, and all futures, for all communities, may not come to pass thanks to Big Oil’s greed.
If our economy will pay rural communities to drill for oil and gas then that’s what they’ll do. But if they stop drilling now, climate change won’t matter when their town has no more economic reason to be. A problem as big as climate change is far less easy to imagine than your entire town becoming deserted overnight.
If Democrats are serious about climate change there’s only one real solution here, a serious investment in rural infrastructure, green engineering education and sustainable power infrastructure to create a real alternative to the oil and gas industry.
Through the national government, this looks like developing a massive nationwide green energy jobs program. For state governments, it means offering the kind of lucrative tax incentives and funds that the oil industry gets to green energy but even more so. For local government, it means the party supports green energy programs and community solar projects, like Sunnyside in Houston.
It’s not enough to create an abundance of green energy if there’s still a massive economic necessity for the extraction of fossil fuels in places like Texas and West Virginia. This transition would require not just investing in green energy infrastructure but also in manufacturing semiconductors, mining equipment, battery factories, green public transportation, green engineering programs and green agriculture.
This solution kills two birds with one stone. You end our reliance on fossil fuels, saving life on Earth as we know it, and you give millions of hard-working rural and urban Americans something to live for, a life that’s meaningful, productive and healthy for all of us.
Clarity, but even more this time
As I’ve written this, I’ve been struck by the reality of just how far away our state is from the hopeful plan I’ve just laid out.
State Senator Roland Gutierrez ran a very hopeful and ambitious grassroots campaign. He’s saying good things. He’s the type of guy to put a progressive immigration policy in conservative clothing by talking about retooling ‘alphabet soup’. It’s brilliant political messaging and I don’t even know if he means to do it.
Unfortunately, as Gutierrez reportedly admitted, a campaign like his died because of a lack of financial support. The party supporting or not supporting a candidate can be a make-or-break deal.
(Additionally, if you endorse a candidate that soured to half the state, made no lasting inroads in rural communities, or is just as conservative as a Republican then you might as well burn all that money because people will just vote for the R. or not all.)
If Democratic Party leaders continue to endorse more conservative Texas Democrats like Henry Cuellar then, obviously, conservative representatives are what you will get, unless they’re miraculously beaten by a progressive underdog.
That last caveat is important. A party has to have a voter base. If you alienate your energetic voters enough, you could see even more of a massive falloff in party turnout like we’ve just seen in the 2024 primary. That would logically spell ruin for any party. The Democratic Party’s response to progressive victories seems to be not playing into it at all.
To choose to willingly not play into the future of your party, to decide to water down and co-opt any community organization, is to force your party to stagnate and die.
In sports, this is called an unforced error or colloquially ‘taking the L’. In politics, I’d call it political suicide.
There’s little reason that I can see to expect Democratic Party leadership to change this strategy of not supporting common-sense progressive grassroots campaigns that could easily attract them much more rural support. And yet that is exactly what their party and our state might need to do to survive the coming future.
To be clear, the state will not turn blue, unless the Democratic Party really wants it to.
Michael E. Garcia
Links
https://www.cityoftyler.org/government/government/mayor-and-council/mayor
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https://www.newsweek.com/joe-bidens-approval-among-democrats-plummets-record-low-gallup-1838422
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https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/23/texas-gun-bills-uvalde/
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/15/texas-education-houston-isd-takeover/
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https://www.governing.com/now/2-years-and-4b-later-what-we-know-about-operation-lone-star
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https://www.ketk.com/news/texas/live-abbott-hosting-14-governors-at-contested-border-park/
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https://texas2036.org/future-proofing-texas-school-funding/#
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
https://twitter.com/PatrickSvitek/status/1767721833242021936?s=20
https://jacobin.com/2021/03/democratic-party-war-against-bernie-sanders-2020-election
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/henry-cuellar-texas-democratic-primary-runoff/
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/21/henry-cuellar-wins-texas-primary-00041170
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/03/early-voting-turnout-2024-primaries/