Texas Democrats at a crossroads after devastating election

Texas Democrats are sorting through what went wrong after their shining hopes turned to ash in November — and what it means for their long-term plans to take power.

The party was optimistic it could make pivotal gains across the state, especially in the hard-fought race between Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and Democratic Rep. Colin Allred.

But in the end, the party “woefully underperformed,” according to state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D), the latest gut punch for Democrats in a state they’ve desperately tried to turn blue.

"It's sort of a Lucy-and-the-football story,” Southern Methodist University historian Cal Jillson told The Hill.

“Every election cycle, they feel as if they are on the verge, and if they just had some natural money to put into the race, they could close it out."

But many Democrats agreed that the wrong message, wedded to a too-thin electoral strategy and handled by a part-time staff with little connections to local Democratic machines, ultimately cost the party potential wins in the Lone Star State.

The Democrats “keep losing because we are poorly organized and we are not talking to Texans about the things they care about,” said Carroll Robinson, former chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats who challenged Gilberto Hinojosa to lead the state party in 2022.

For the party, the scale of the loss was made all the worse by its optimism going in. Before the election, state Rep. Vikki Goodwin (D) told The Hill, “We're out there talking to folks, and they're nodding their heads in agreement, where we feel like, ‘Oh man, we've got this in the bag.’”

And at the Democratic National Convention, Hinojosa referred to Texas as “the nation’s biggest battleground state.”

Instead came a wipeout. Despite occasionally polling within striking distance of Cruz, Allred lost by 9 points. In the state House, Texas Republicans flipped enough swing seats to cement control by the ascendant far-right.

The loss was significant enough that it led to last week’s resignation of Hinojosa, who has run the party since 2012. Many state Democrats have blamed him for failing to build a permanent infrastructure, and for presiding over an embarrassing run of statewide failures that helped enshrine the image of Texas among local Democratic donors and the nation at large as unassailably red.

Now, the party is at a crossroads, torn over whether to ally with the tattered business wing of the state GOP against the rising MAGA wing — which wants to shut them out of power — or whether to embrace the politics of chaos perfected by congressional Republicans.

Disappointed Democrats pointed to some bright spots: Amid a catastrophic cycle for Democratic incumbents, the party largely held control of Harris County, the state’s largest urban county and its principal stronghold. It also held a vulnerable seat in conservative Collin County, home county of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a sign Democrats can win in the state’s growing, purpling suburbs.

And while Allred lost handily, his margin of defeat was still less than M.J. Hegar's against Sen. John Cornyn (R) in 2020 — also a presidential election year.

“If you graph every gubernatorial, Senate and presidential election in Texas from 2012 to 2024, the trend line is still moving in the right direction — that’s just mathematically true,” said Luke Warford, who ran in 2022 for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, the state's oil regulator.

That convergence, Warford said, “isn’t happening in a linear fashion — it’s happening with a lot of noise. But there’s definitely an opportunity.”

One problem for Democrats in Texas, however, is that the party has begun losing members of its coalition that once solidly voted for Democrats.

In the Rio Grande Valley, for example, pro-Trump Latinos from Democratic families recalled being told by their parents that the family supported the Democratic Party “because they’re the party of the poor — just like us,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini told The New York Times.

“And the response of the people who became Republicans in that area was, ‘What if we don’t want to be poor?’”

In the days before the election, Allred’s campaign staff was proudly circulating reporting by Newsweek that former president and onetime liberal bogeyman George W. Bush thought Allred was “great.”

It was part of a strategy by Democrats in the state that tacked to the center. In the lead-up to the election, Fort Worth Rep. Marc Veasey (D) argued that the way to win Texas was by projecting confidence and competence and hitting Republicans on abortion and democracy.

Democratic strategist Matt Angle praised Allred during the campaign for his sober avoidance of a “‘Turn Texas Blue’ pep rally.”

But that strategy had been a mistake, argued Gutierrez, a progressive Democrat who lost to Allred in the 2024 Senate primary.

“Progressives aren’t the enemy,” he said, pointing to the 2018 Senate challenge by then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D). “They’re the ones that light it up and get you within 2.5 points of a guy like Cruz.”

When it came to rising prices for food or insurance in an era of climate disruption and corporate consolidation, “the other side is talking about them,” he said. “They just don't tell you that ... their corporate backers are screwing people on those things.”

In making that case, Texas Democrats could have also pointed to how the ruling party was “in the process of dismantling the opportunity infrastructure that was proposed during the New Deal and has been built and refined ever since,” argued state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt (D), who represents Austin.

The irony for Democrats, Eckhardt noted, was that many of the state’s most popular middle-class programs “are actually Democrat ideas, and to the extent that the Republicans passed them, they passed them 10 years after the Democrats proposed them.”

That list, she said, included “ObamaCare, universal access to broadband [internet] and the funding of public education — [policies] that truly are the building blocks of a strong economy.”

Failures of messaging had been compounded by failures of strategy and fundraising, Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project, told The Hill.

To win a county, Angle argued, campaigns needed an overlapping and highly targeted strategy of media, door-knocking and phone banking. Outside of Harris County, he said, “there wasn’t enough money and muscle behind the turnout effort.”

But to Democrats who spoke with The Hill, the on-the-ground failure in the weeks before Election Day suggested a more fundamental and permanent one: the dependence of the party on a part-time, largely volunteer staff that largely stood down between elections.

In the past, Goodwin told The Hill, “we've talked about having a state party leader who actually has a salary, so that it can be a job where that person is spending time communicating with the Democrats throughout the state.”

“We've left that in recent times, and I think as a result, we aren't having those conversations that we need to have on an ongoing basis, and instead just focusing on get-out-the-vote right in front of the election.”

The opposite approach would be something like the now-defunct Democratic political machines once characteristic of the state: year-round organizations that are known to their constituents because they are providing them with regular services.

But building such an organization will require money — something that has been harder to come by as some big Democratic donors have lost patience with the state party and closed their wallets, noted Jillson, the SMU historian. More recently, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has attempted to crack down on Democratic small-dollar fundraising.

With Hinojosa stepping down in 2025, party leadership will have a chance to fight out its vision for the future in the open — with the clock already ticking for the 2026 election season, when the bulk of statewide offices, from governor and lieutenant governor to Cornyn’s seat, will be up.

Beyond that lies 2030, when the state government will draw new district maps — a process from which Democrats will have been excluded for 30 years.

That year is “the ball game,” said Warford, who now co-runs a Democratic campaign strategy group aimed at building the permanent infrastructure needed to transform Texas. If the party hasn’t taken some level of statewide power by then, Republicans will have the chance to nix any Democratic gains by eliminating their districts — as they did in 2000, 2010 and 2020.

As they make their pitch in 2026, Gutierrez argued, Democrats would benefit from taking the fight to Republicans and not back away from a bold, practical vision.

What’s wrong, he asked, “with saying everyone should have health care for free in the United States? That college can’t be free? That we should get people opportunities in our trade schools?”

“These are things our country used to do, and that we don’t do any longer.”