This midterm year’s primary elections are upon us, and the battle in Texas, where early voting began last week for the March 3 primary, has Democrats feeling feisty.
Rarely have the stakes been higher, and not only because control of both chambers of Congress is in play. Texas is where President Donald Trump launched his sleazy scheme to redistrict Democratic members of the House out of their seats, an effort that has spread across the country like measles. Voters need to hold accountable the state’s Republicans for enabling such antidemocratic meddling. It’s possible — but only if Democrats can avoid past mistakes.
Yes, Texas is Texas, with nary a Democrat elected statewide in over three decades. But the state’s shifting demographics keep the blue team dreaming of clawing back ground, especially in years when it feels a political tail wind blowing. Like this one. Trump’s sad approval ratings are dragging down Republican candidates. Across the country, Democrats have overperformed in special elections, and they dominated the off-year races in November. Then came a Texas shocker.
Last month, a Democratic political newbie named Taylor Rehmet won a special election to the Texas Senate. The 33-year-old machinist beat his Republican opponent by 14 points, flipping a Fort Worth-area district that the GOP had held since the early 1990s and that Trump carried by 17 points in 2024. Low-turnout special elections can produce quirky results, but 31 points is a heckuva shift.
Even Trump smells the danger. The day after Rehmet’s win, the president said he would give “very serious thought” to endorsing in the Republican Senate primary in Texas, contra his original plan, with an eye toward preventing or at least draining some venom out of what is now expected to be a nasty primary runoff. Avoiding a tight, second-round, GOP-on-GOP contest seems newly urgent for Republicans who fear national Democrats will flood the state with energy and money in the general election, up and down the ballot.
I worry about this, too. Or, rather, I worry national Democrats will do that thing where outside players get overexcited, roll into the state swinging their checkbooks, push priorities more appropriate to California or New York, and lavish resources on the flashiest candidates in super longshot bids that fall flat and leave everyone even more demoralized. M.J. Hegar’s 2020 run against Sen. John Cornyn comes to mind, as does Beto O’Rourke’s run for governor in 2022. This phenomenon is not limited to Texas, of course. See Amy McGrath’s Senate challenge to Mitch McConnell in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison’s to Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, both in 2020. But the Democrats’ long-running lust to turn the Lone Star State blue seems to fuel an especially intense national frenzy here.
Democrats need to play hard in Texas, but they need to do so seriously and strategically.
Rehmet’s upset is yet another example of Democrats performing best when they embrace normie candidates who fit their districts. Rehmet kept things local. He spoke to voters about housing prices, the rising cost of health insurance and the turmoil in local school districts. He steered clear of culture-warring and partisan vitriol.
The results speak for themselves. Republican and Democratic pollsters alike have noted that differential turnout favoring the left did not swing this election; persuasion did. Voting analyses suggest Rehmet won swing voters by an overwhelming margin and even drew in some soft Republicans. Among Latino voters, he improved on Kamala Harris’ vote share in his district by about 26%, according to VoteHub.
The state’s political veterans say it’s vital that campaigns feel of Texas. Even after Rehmet overperformed in the first round of voting in November, drawing money and attention from around the state and beyond, none of the state or national groups involved pushed to impose their priorities or messaging on the candidate, said Matt Angle, the head of the Lone Star Project, a political action committee devoted to getting Democrats elected that supported Rehmet’s run.
Alas, this happy dynamic is not the norm in Texas, multiple Democratic political veterans shared with me.
While funding and logistical support from out of state is essential, managing the funders and so-called experts can be … a lot. “Groups come in, and the first thing they’ll do is a press release and then a little social media thing about, ‘We’re coming into Texas, and we’re going to flip it!’ ” Angle said. “They just undermine every penny they’re going to spend in the state.”
Strong Democratic leaders would be useful in refereeing conflicts and coordinating all the moving pieces. But with no Democrats in statewide office for decades, there is no clear big dog. The party’s U.S. Senate nominee typically winds up its de facto leader in the state — but only for the length of a campaign cycle, said Luke Warford, the founder of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund PAC.
The lack of an “alpha voice,” as Angle put it, makes it extra hard to ensure that money and people are put to effective use. Donors, in turn, complain about the disorganization, infighting and lack of campaign infrastructure. This can make them less inclined to invest in the state, especially without an “it” candidate to focus on. In boom-bust cycles, resources flood in for a time, then dry up.
Which brings us to the tendency of Democrats, and not just in Texas, to focus their attention on the most glamorous girl at the party, so to speak.
“Democrats like to fall in love with a candidate — or they fall in love with the possibility of Texas or Florida,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm for state legislative races. “When they fall in love, collectively, they put enormous sums and resources in there, whether the data tells us there is a path or not.”
All too often, this means that less flashy candidates and lower-level races get short shrift during regular cycles (as opposed to special elections), eroding Democrats’ power at the state and local levels of government, where so much of the action takes place.
Generally speaking, Williams said, Republicans think more strategically than Democrats “about the relationship between all of the ballot levels — how they interplay and impact power and results.” Republicans “are less focused on who the individual candidate is and whether they have star power and more on the results they can bring.”
Williams pointed to 2010, when Republicans pursued a coordinated strategy for winning state legislative races. With a modest investment of around $30 million, the GOP reshaped the state-level landscape in its favor, just in time for 2011 redistricting.
Texas Democrats recognize all these challenges. A collection of party players, led in part by former state Sen. Wendy Davis, is working to bring order to the chaos. The Blue Texas project aims to shore up party infrastructure and help Democratic candidates at all levels of the political ladder. The effort has funding commitments from George Soros and another anonymous donor in place for the next several years, Davis said. Among its early achievements: For the first time since at least 1994, Democrats this cycle have fielded candidates for every federal race and every state legislative, statewide judicial and State Board of Education race.
This is a small win, but not one to sneeze at. Even if the GOP wins the brawl for the U.S. Senate seat on Texans’ ballot this November — and, for what it’s worth, the Texas Republicans I’ve spoken with are more concerned about facing James Talarico than Jasmine Crockett in the general election, though none seem especially worried — a savvier effort by Democrats promises to boost candidates further down the ballot, including in the cage match for the House that Trump has tried so hard to rig. And a better Democratic farm team and a stabler campaign infrastructure lay the groundwork for progress in years to come.
Democrats are realizing that in Texas, as in the vast swaths of the country where they regularly wipe out, baby steps can lead to bigger ones — even if they feel unsatisfying to national activists.
