Can Democrats Win in Texas?

Probably not. The conditions are just too difficult and given that in 2018, Beto O’Rourke won among native born Texans but Ted Cruz blew him out among people who have moved to Texas, the demographics of the state don’t really lead one to believe that this is some secret purple state. People move to Texas because they can channel their inner fascist, just as people who move to Idaho and Florida also do these days. But Democrats constantly tell themselves the lie that Texas is secretly just a “nonvoting” state, not a Republican won. This is a lie that the left has often told itself, that if they could just get all the nonvoters to the polls, they’d win. It goes back to telling yourself stories that the “people” really believe exactly what you do, but they are just not motivated or don’t know how to register to vote or whatever. And really, the whole idea of registering people to vote as meaningful political activism is absurd to begin with. The entire left, broadly conceived, loves mythology like this. But as Trump showed, you can have record turnout, but as it turns out, the people who don’t usually vote will end up voting more or less like everyone else.

This is the main subject of this excellent Texas Monthly article that exposes the lies Texas Democrats tell themselves about what the state really is. This time, it’s going to be Jasmine Crockett bringing her progressive bonafides and shit talking to the Texas Senate race. She will lose, perhaps by more than O’Rouke or Colin Allred did, perhaps not. But the point is the lies that they all tell themselves:

Old canards, however, die hard. As we approach another midterm election during a Trump presidency, another Democratic Senate hopeful is preaching the message that Texas is a secretly blue state. Announcing her bid for the Democratic nomination to run for Senator John Cornyn’s seat last week, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett addressed “the haters in the back” of the South Dallas venue and explained how she could win a statewide seat though no Democrat had in three decades. “So they tell us that Texas is red,” she said, pausing, first as laughter erupted, and then to snicker herself. “They are lying,” she said, “We’re not. The reality is that most Texans don’t get out to vote.”

I was not there, but allow me, for a moment, to assume the role of Hater in the Back. Crockett’s claim is, bluntly, wrong. Texas is indeed a nonvoting state. Those who are eligible to vote but abstain have outnumbered those who turned out for the highest vote getter in every Texas election this century. The specific electorate changes every cycle, but as a group, the nonvoters are disproportionately young, poor, and Hispanic—three demographic segments Democrats have long assumed are likely supporters. Part of the reason some Texans don’t vote are voter suppression laws that make the state one of the toughest to cast a ballot in. But Texas is a red state because those who don’t vote, or who don’t often vote, are not, as a bloc, Democrats-to-be. 

In 2022, when I asked dozens of local election officials, pollsters, political scientists, and political operatives for their estimates of the nonvoting population’s partisan allegiance, there was bipartisan consensus on the skew. The Texas Democratic Party’s model estimated about 56 percent of 2018 nonvoters were Democratic leaning. A GOP operative told me that lined up pretty well with his party’s estimate given its voter file, which modeled nonvoters by their consumer habits. (Do they shop at Cabela’s or Whole Foods? Subscribe to Garden & Gun or have a Sierra Club membership?)  

To make up the large advantage Republicans have among existing voters, Democrats need to either drive huge numbers of those nonvoters to the polls while Republicans don’t or convince GOP-leaning voters to support them. Many campaigns try to do both, including that of Crockett’s primary opponent, state Representative James Talarico. JT Ennis, a spokesperson for the campaign, told me, “Ending thirty years of one-party rule in Texas requires a campaign that energizes the Democratic base, turns out new voters, and welcomes Trump voters who are now feeling conned.” 

I asked Crockett about the balance of her strategy. “Nearly half of Texans don’t cast a ballot. Many feel that nothing ever changes or that their vote doesn’t matter. Frankly, too many politicians have relied on the same tired playbook of politics as usual,” she wrote. “By speaking directly to our shared realities, being unafraid in my advocacy, and unapologetic in my service, I’m earning the trust of a broad cross-section of Texans.”

When it comes to the turnout approach, there is no recent evidence, despite high-profile and expensive efforts to do so, that the Democratic party can outperform the GOP in getting nonvoters to the polls. Take the 2020 election, for example, the best turnout operation Democrats have ever run. That year, when there was a presidential race between Trump and Joe Biden, and Cornyn was last up for reelection, the party went all in on a strategy to activate low-propensity voters, those who are eligible to cast ballots but rarely do so. The state party invested a large chunk of its $25 million coffers into a voter model, which assigned each Texan a partisanship rating and a likelihood-to-vote score, based on prior electoral history. For those who were eligible to vote but had not registered—a number leaders said totaled 5 million (likely a twofold overestimate, which you can read more about here, and one Democrats have subsequently lowered)—the party estimated as much as 75 percent leaned Democratic. And then the party contacted all it deemed future Democrats. 

Meanwhile, Republicans also saw fertile ground among the nonvoters. Steve Munisteri, the former party chair who had left Texas in 2015 to work for Senator Rand Paul and then for the Trump White House, returned to the state to assist with Cornyn’s reelection campaign and to help lead a turnout operation with Karl Rove, the electioneer who turned Texas red in the nineties. They focused some on the unregistered but eligible, setting up registration efforts outside places where Republicans gather, including Trump rallies and gun shows, and getting more than 200,000 Texans added to the voter rolls. (In Texas, voters don’t register by party, so the partisan allegiances of those they registered are unknown, but given where they were registered you can get a pretty clear idea.) They focused more heavily, however, on the 7.4 million Texans who were registered but hadn’t voted in 2018, targeting the 3 million the GOP’s voter model had flagged as likely Republican. 

Unprecedented numbers of low-propensity voters went to the polls that year: The election in November was the highest turnout election by percentage since 1992, with 11.3 million of the state’s 17 million registered voters casting ballots. And Republicans swept every race—because infrequent voters in the state aren’t de facto Democratic ones. 

Right. And these lies are not just held by centrists or moderates or liberals or whatever. In fact, no one is worse about this than the far left, who constantly argue that THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED and the like, arguing that in fact, most people think just like they do but just need to be mobilized. The complete lack of evidence to this point never gets in the way though, nope. It can’t really be proven, so why bother trying.

There’s a larger point to make here too. I have often gotten flack here over the years for saying that elections are not the be all and end of all politics. But this shows why that’s correct. First, registering people to vote is a zero, meaningless political action. At its core is the idea that the people are going to vote for you and they often aren’t going to. It certainly helps to get your likely voters to the polls, that’s useful. But the bigger point is that an election is just a single moment in politics and not the one that really matters. An election is where you consolidate your gains or demonstrate how bad your losses are. And that’s all. The important work is what happens before the election to get people to start thinking like you do and then what happens after the election to keep those people motivated and activated. The first part of that is a decades-long process. you have to reorient the entire way people think if you want to get them to vote for you and that starts long, long before anyone has ever heard your name.

The alternative being you can lie to yourself and then just lose every election. Which is easier to do and exactly what happens all the time, including in Texas.