It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like Texas for America's Democrats

Here’s a message to all of the Kamala Harris voters who awoke Wednesday to feelings of despair and dashed hopes, asking themselves how the hell this happened: Welcome to the world of the Texas Democratic Party. It knows how you feel.

For 30 years, Texas Democrats have been waiting for the blue tide to roll in, only to watch the water endlessly recede. Being a Democrat in Texas is a lot like being a Cowboys fan: The team was a winner a long time ago, it has a lot of money and support and looks great on paper, but in the end … let’s just say the way Harris voters are feeling today is probably pretty similar to how Cowboys fans feel at the end of December.

Regardless, next season or next election, hope, the thing that will either keep you alive or kill you, rises again. Lone Star Democrats know this. They’ve been trying to elect one of their own to statewide office for three decades.

Just you wait, the ever hopeful party says as it points to the blue shift in the cities and likes its chances, despite the fact that the fastest-growing communities are in the suburbs, which trend Republican.

Or, the party looks at the rising numbers of Hispanic voters, who have long tended to vote for Democrats, and see demographics shifting its way on the immigration issue. Here’s a reality check headline the New York Post published the day after Tuesday’s election: “Trump flips Texas border county with 97% Hispanic population — ending 128-year Democratic streak.” Donald Trump won Starr County on the Mexican border with more than 57% of the vote, the Post reported.

What’s surprising is that anyone might find that surprising. In 2020, Politico reported a similar story  when Trump became the first Republican in 100 years to win heavily Hispanic Zapata County in South Texas.

“Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark ‘Hispanic or Latino’ on paper, very few long-term residents have ever used the word ‘Latino’ to describe themselves," the report states. "Ascribing Trump’s success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of ‘the Latino vote’ makes the same mistake as the Democrats did in this election: Treating Latinos as a monolith.”

A Hispanic voter with a good, middle-class job working for the Border Patrol or in the oil and gas industry, whose family has been working and living in Texas for generations, is as attuned to Republican messages on lower taxes, economic growth and the effect of uncontrolled immigration as non-Hispanics, Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University, told the Observer.

“I do think that Hispanics know that the border has to be controlled, but they want it to be controlled in a way that respects their dignity,” he said.

In other words, conflating “immigrant” with “Hispanic,” for good or ill, is not a winning strategy.

So in Texas, we have Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who placed razor wire in the Rio Grande to snag and possibly drown immigrants crossing the river into Texas. But as far as we can recall, he has never said anything that can be read as “anti-Hispanic.” He won against Hispanic Democrat Lupe Valdez in 2018 with 56% of the vote, beat fake-Hispanic Beto O’Rourke in 2022 with 54% and has already announced plans to seek another term. (True, Trump’s campaign veered toward racism, but the fact that he can get away with it probably has something to do with the facts that nobody believes anything he says, and there are a lot of racist voters out there.)

Speaking of Beto, surely all you non-Texas Dems remember him. You should, considering the amount of national media love and campaign donations he was showered with when he ran far to the left of incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, a man with a reputation for being deeply unloved by both parties. Like Harris, he was an energetic, attractive candidate with loads of celebrity endorsements.

He lost by 2.6 percentage points.

This election, Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred shifted to the center and billed himself as bipartisan, running hard on restoring abortion rights — an issue that has been a winner for Democrats elsewhere.

"I especially want to thank all of the brave Texas women who came forward to tell their stories, and I will never stop fighting to overturn this abortion ban in Texas," he told those who remained at his desultory watch party to hear his concession speech.

Cruz was beating him by nearly 9 points, with most of the vote counted.

Incidentally, one of three speakers who talked briefly at Allred’s watch party at the Longhorn Ballroom was Wendy Davis, who filibustered an anti-abortion bill in the Texas Senate for 11 hours in 2013 and used the popularity she gained from it to launch a campaign for governor. (The hot pink sneakers she wore during the filibuster briefly became a feminist icon.) Unfortunately, she was never able to articulate a message on abortion or guns that appealed to moderates, Jillson said, and Abbott walloped her 59%–38%. She didn’t even win a majority of votes from Texas women.

Maybe that inability to appeal to moderate voters, or more specifically, to non-college-educated, working-class white males, is baked into the Democratic Party, both in Texas and elsewhere.

“At base, the Democrats have … much broader, more complicated constituencies,” Jillson said, and that makes it much harder for them to focus on economic issues that drive a wider swath of voters. You know … it’s the economy, stupid, as Democratic strategist James Carville once put it, way back before Texas Democrats were shunted to the wilderness.

“I think they know that, but they find it hard to stick to an economic message ...,” Jillson said. Poor Dems. If they could come up with a way to lower the price of bacon, they'd never get the message across because they couldn't offend vegans, or someone would ask them about guns.

In Allred’s case, Cruz’s advertisements late in the campaign hammered the Democrat on the issue of transgender athletes in school, negating Allred’s effort to recast himself as a more center-leaning candidate.

In all, it was a pretty grim election night for Texas Democrats … again … but they’re used to it.

“I think the parties are changing pretty dramatically at this point to the detriment of the Democrats,” Jillson said, when we asked him if there was any hopeful message for the party the day after Trump’s victory. “The Democrats know they have to find a way to talk to the white working class.”

OK, so that wasn't exactly hopeful. Does that mean downplaying or moving toward the center on issues such as transgender rights, guns and immigration reform or even, dare we say it, being a bit less determined to break the glass ceiling for women in the White House?

Could be. “Elections are about getting more votes than the other guy,” Jillson said.

Of course, it’s easy to understand if the prospect of a less principled, narrowed-minded, pocketbook-focused, small government Democratic Party doesn’t seem appealing. We get that in Texas. We’ve been getting it high and hard for 30 years. And now we're getting Trump again.

Welcome to the party.