Democrats and the Texan El Dorado

The money and time is better spent elsewhere

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There’s a new poll out which shows that Donald Trump is only leading Kamala Harris by 5% in Texas, and that Texan Senator Ted Cruz is only leading his Democratic challenger - Colin Allred - by 2%, which is within the margin of error of the poll.

On the one hand, that sounds like great news. Taking Cruz’s Senate seat would help Democrats maintain control of the Senate this cycle, and making Texas competitive at the presidential level would have ground-shaking implications for U.S. politics. But unfortunately, a blue Texas is likely to remain the El Dorado of Democratic politics - a mythical place that people spend a lot of time and energy trying to reach, and which ends up killing them when they try.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of dreaming about a blue Texas. Texas has 40 votes in the Electoral College. Compare that to the Midwestern swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which have 44 combined. Take Texas away from the Republicans, and Harris only has to win one of the seven regular swing states to win the election.¹ And given the changing demographics of Texas - it’s long been on a trajectory to being more urban, less white, and better educated, all markers of leaning Democratic - many Democrats have convinced themselves that this feat is possible, perhaps as early as this decade.

Alas, the dream is not to be - at least not this cycle. There are a few reasons why. The first is that demographic change has not delivered the sort of ideological change that optimists on the left expected. Too often, predictions that Texas would turn blue were based on the idea that Hispanic voters were a monolithic bloc who would always prefer Democrats by a large margin. But in recent years, it’s become clear that this is not the case. “Hispanic” is a broad label which often hides more than it reveals. A third-generation American of Mexican heritage who grew up speaking English and has a white spouse is not going to have the same politics as a recent immigrant from Venezuela who speaks little English. And many Hispanics are ideologically and religiously conservative. For all of his racist rhetoric, Trump managed to take advantage of this in 2020 - when he actually increased his vote share among Hispanics compared to 2016.

Secondly, for all of the change that Texas is experiencing, it’s fundamentally still Texas. It has large numbers of conservative and moderate voters who are repelled by the national brand of the Democratic Party. As the Democrats have increasingly become the party of educated, urban voters, they’ve stopped competing for the kinds of rural and conservative suburban voters who you still need to win Texas. Getting to 40% in Texas is not that difficult for Democrats, but getting that extra 10.1% is still really hard.

Thirdly, this Republican dominance has consequences for election administration. The Texas Republican Party uses its control of the state government to make it easier for its own voters to turn out and harder for Democrats. In 2020, Governor Greg Abbott limited mail-in ballot drop-off locations to just one per county. This meant that Harris County, which contains Houston’s 4.7m residents - 20% of whom are black and 43% Hispanic - had just one drop-off location for a county of nearly 2,000 square miles, necessitating half-day-long round trips to vote. This kind of voter suppression is routine.

Finally, the Democratic Party in Texas is still weak. It’s underfunded, demoralized, and not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to registering and turning out voters. There’s a paradox here - for as long as national Democrats don’t take winning Texas seriously, they won’t funnel in the cash and resources needed to help the Texas Democratic Party become competitive. But until there are real signs that a victory is possible, there’s always going to be a better case for spending that money in a different state, where victory is more obtainable.

And this comes to what, for me, is the crux of the issue - right now, putting money and resources into winning Texas is just not worth it. That’s why I cringe every time commentators and donors start popping up saying that victory there might be possible.

Given the disadvantages that Democrats face in the Lone Star State, if we were living in a world in which Harris was on track to win it, that would imply that she was already on course for the sort of massive landslide in which winning Texas would be irrelevant anyway. Swing states with similar demographic characteristics tend to shift in sync with one another, which is why the people who scold you to “not watch the national polls, look at the swing state polls instead” are only sort of right. If Harris was on track to win Texas - or even come within a few points there - she would already be blowing Trump away in the other Sunbelt states of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada (and likely the Midwestern ones too). But we have no indication, right now, that she is doing that. That means that these more winnable states have to be her focus.

Where discourse about the Texan El Dorado gets dangerous is when people start putting serious money behind it. In 2018, Democrats got very excited about the fact that Beto O’Rourke came within a few percentage points of unseating Ted Cruz. But at the end of the day, he still failed - and in the process of doing so he spent about $80m that could have been used to secure victory in more winnable frontline House seats across the country. This year, when the dynamics of the race are changing quickly and Harris still has only a narrow lead, Democrats can’t afford to dream about El Dorado - they need to worry about what’s happening closer to home.

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1. The swing states right now are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina.