The first Morning Jolt of the week brings a scoop about tomorrow’s State of the Union Address, more reporting from the Koch network’s winter meeting in Indian Wells, California, and then this observation about the coming midterm year…
The Eternal Prediction of a Democratic Comeback in Texas
You may have noticed in the great big 2018 open House seat roundup that a lot of Texas Republicans are retiring; the GOP will be aiming to hold seats in the Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Sixth Congressional Districts.
You’re probably going to hear a lot in the coming year about a potential Democratic comeback in the Lone Star State. The Republicans have been riding high in Texas for a long time, and nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump’s style of Republicanism may not be quite the best fit with the state of Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and George W. Bush; Trump won Texas by nine percentage points, the smallest margin for a Republican since 1996. And Texas Democrats arguably have no place to go but up.
And then there’s the cover of Texas Monthly, featuring Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and an epic-length featured article that declares there are “signs of a nascent Beto-mania taking hold.”
Since the beginning of 2017, O’Rourke has been profiled in the Washington Post, the Texas Observer,Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone. His time playing in punk-rock bands during his high school and college years has proved irresistible for headline writers, who have identified him as “Ted Cruz’s Punk-Rock Problem” and asserted that his “Punk-Rock Past Could Help Him.” An in-production documentary titled Beto vs. Cruz promises that the coming Senate race will be the “most outrageous and consequential political fight of 2018.” O’Rourke’s fund-raising has been robust, with $3.8 million raised in the second and third quarters of 2017—more than Cruz—and his campaigning has been relentless. O’Rourke plans to visit all 254 counties in Texas before the election, and his traveling town halls have drawn surprisingly large crowds in traditional Republican strongholds like Midland, Amarillo, and Tyler, where he attracted so many people to the restaurant Don Juan on the Square that he had to move the meeting out onto the sidewalk to comply with the fire code. (He answered questions for twenty minutes through a bullhorn.)
A Democratic group commissioned a survey and found incumbent Republican Ted Cruz ahead but not by a large margin, 45 percent to 37 percent. Of course, the organization didn’t talk much about the fact that the same survey found 61 percent of respondents didn’t have an opinion about O’Rourke, and only 20 percent had a favorable opinion of him. In other words, most Texans haven’t heard of him.
Beto O’Rourke is enjoying the best cover of Texas Monthly since… well, Wendy Davis and Julian and Joaquin Castro declared “Game On!” in the summer of 2014.
In that issue, Robert Draper wrote:
…the Texas Democratic Party has suddenly found a spring in its step—and not just because of Davis’s performance. The national debut of Castro himself in a much-lauded keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention last summer underscored the growing recognition that a new Texas—replete with millions of untapped and largely nonwhite voters—might be there for the party’s taking. Then came the news, immediately following Barack Obama’s impressive defeat of Mitt Romney last November, that the grassroots brainiacs behind the president’s campaign would soon be descending on the Lone Star State in the form of Battleground Texas: a well-funded organization dedicated to the labor-intensive, long-term effort to turn America’s biggest red state blue.
…the indelible image of that slender blond lady in the pink tennis shoes provided stark documentation. This was real. This could happen. Texas could, at minimum, become a state where elections are actually competitive.
That was in the magazine’s August issue; in November, the Texas Democrats went out and turned in perhaps the worst performance for any state party in a midterm election in recent memory. None of the 15 Democratic candidate running statewide surpassed 40 percent; Davis actually performed best with 38.9 percent.
Besides winning every statewide race in a landslide, Republicans added two State Senate seats and three State House seats, adding to their wide legislative majorities. Battleground Texas turned out to be an expensive, colossal failure; despite all the talk about Democrats having this new, fantastic get-out-the-vote operation, Davis won 300,000 fewer votes than the last Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
As for the cover trio, former state senator Wendy Davis is leading marches of women dressed like Handmaid’s Tale characters, Joaquin Castro is still a San Antonio Congressman, predicting a Democratic comeback in 2018 and Julian Castro became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and might as well have entered the witness protection program.
I suppose I should give Texas Monthly a little credit for noting on the January cover that O’Rourke is “The Democrats’ (Latest) Great Hope” and the sub-headline asking, “Does Beto O’Rourke stand a chance against Ted Cruz?” (If you have to ask that, then it probably means you weren’t comfortable declaring outright, “Beto O’Rourke stands a chance against Ted Cruz,” huh?) The article by Eric Benson even mentions the magazine’s 2014 Draper article and notes, “Since the Democrats last won a statewide race more than two decades ago, hallucinations of a coming restoration have been frequent and fantastical, with a series of would-be saviors vanquished by consistently large margins.”
After a lengthy and largely positive portrait of the congressman, the piece admits that for O’Rourke to win, “he needs to be historically right, and the Castro brothers and every other Texas Democrat who might want a higher office and sat out the 2018 elections need to be historically wrong.”
As I said at the beginning, it’s possible, even likely, that Democrats will improve upon their abysmal performance in the 2014 midterms. But it’s difficult to tell if Texas Democrats are really coming back or not, because the national and state media have been so desperate to see a comeback happen that they find the evidence to write this story every single cycle.