Beto, Texas, And A Losing Fight Worth Having

Why Dems Should Try In Texas

Here are two things that are both indisputably true: Beto O’Rourke will not win the 2022 Governor’s election in Texas, and it is absolutely, 1000% a race worth fighting for.

I know what I’ve written in the past about keeping a tight map, and that Democrats need to optimize their 2022 House chances by suicide rushing the majority makers, a philosophy at ill ease with investing in a race we know the outcome of already. I get it, and I’m a hypocrite, I know. This is worth fighting for, even if the outcome is pre-determined. And the reason why is simple – it’s Texas.

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If someone were to ask me what the original source of my great fascination with blue Texas was, I’d be unable to answer it, but the more I think about it, the longer it lasts, the more the current answer makes sense. I understand Texas, or at the very least I understand the pockets of Texas where Democratic fortunes are in the ascendency. I get Southlake and College Station despite never have stepped foot in either, and these are places with an emotional appeal to me because of who I am, a gay man who craves the cultural comfort of the socially liberal enclaves of which Texas has many. These places fascinate me, if only because I could see myself living there one day, potentially.

Hell, I can see myself living in these places so much so that I wrote a whole novel set in Texas, and have spent endless columns on the topic. I get it is an obsession bordering (or well past) insanity, but it’s what I want to happen, and think will, one day. What day that will be is unknown, and I have no interest in trying to pick an arbitrary deadline. But what is interesting is how we get there, and whether 2022 is a fight worth having or a fight worth avoiding. I get the arguments to live to fight another day, but they’re wrong. Texas needs all the fight it can.

Democrats will have to build a meaningful organization in a state where 11 Million votes were cast in 2020, a task that is substantially harder than building one in smaller states. Everyone who has ever looked at statewide incumbency agrees that incumbency is worth more in smaller states than bigger ones (by population, not land), and that holds as you remember that 2 of the 3 Democratic Senators in Trump 2016-Trump 2020 states rep Montana and West Virginia, and the only GOP Senator in a Hillary-Biden state is Susan Collins up in Maine. (Sherrod Brown is a bit of an exception to this rule, but the GOP didn’t seriously contest his race in 2018.)

The state Democratic Party is, bluntly, a mess, and it’s going to remain a mess so long as the people who run that state party have little to no experience working credible campaigns. Will a good or bad organization change the result of a statewide race? Probably not, but there were a ton of Biden-State House GOP seats in 2020, and figuring out who those Biden-GOP voters were and how they can become Democrats up and down the ballot might be a good idea, and having an organization in Collin and Denton would be a worthwhile cause. More importantly, there’s a value to fucking trying, because when the war actually starts, having people who know what they’re doing might be of some value.

One of the things that happens when incumbents get caught – either politicians themselves or political parties – is the idea that the machine atrophied, and the switch couldn’t get flipped back on in time. AOC beat Joe Crowley in large part because he hadn’t had to campaign in 14 years, and when he tried to again, the switch didn’t flip the way he wanted it to, and he was caught. It happened to Democrats in Massachusetts in January 2010, it happened to Alaska Republicans in 2014, and it’s happened a few dozen times at the House level in recent cycles. The answer to “wow, how did they lose?” is almost always “they got caught”, but the thing about getting caught is you have to have an opposition ready to take advantage when the time comes. Texas in 2022 won’t be that time, but it will be soon. And even if it isn’t 2024 or 2026 statewide, every State House and State Senate seat Democrats can win this time is one less they have to flip next time.

I talk a lot about maximizing legitimate value, and generally speaking, losing smaller isn’t a thing I value. Here it is, because Texas Democrats have to build something that will take years and years, and the way they’ll do so is a lot different than a lot of people expected. I remember listening to a Pod Save America episode in (I think) 2017, back when I was still a believer that those guys had some legitimate insight worth listening to, and in that live show in Texas, Dan Pfeiffer did a riff on how we need Texas to hurry up, and how it’s a majority non-white state, and if those voters showed up, we’d win the state. How’d that work out, again?

I remember saying before 2020 that the marginal voters that didn’t vote in 2016 or 2018 were likely to be low-propensity Hispanics, and I was very very right about that fact. What I got even more spectacularly wrong was the second half of the analysis, because I was convinced beyond anything that there was no way those voters would vote for Trump. I got that wrong, but the effect of that fact, the effect of the Hispanic slippage, is that the route to Blue Texas runs through Collin, Denton, Hays, and Williamson, and we have to fight like fucking hell to work those communities and understand those voters.

I have never held Beto in much regard, and I think the argument he was a good candidate runs up against the fact he had a 33M spending advantage and he managed to run essentially even with Hillary, adjusted for the national environment. His gun comments are not going to be what sinks him, but what will is the fact he is the totem for mediocrity. Maybe, maybe, maybe he is Ossoff 2.0, a candidate for whom the second time around is substantially better, but much more likely he’s just running again because everyone with a future in Texas politics would rather run against Cruz or Cornyn (or, for the open Governorship in 2026). Even still, it’s a fight worth having.

I wrote Salvation In The Storm in the warm afterglow of a Texas which had just elected a Democratic Governor. I never set the book because I wanted to keep it separate from the real world – none of the politicians are real, none of the elections are real, the only reference to the real world is a couple references to a soccer player who is real. That said, I’d really, really like it if this book doesn’t end up taking place in 2042 or some shit. Texas is worth fighting a losing battle for, and it’s a fight worth having in 2022, even though it’s a fight we can’t and won’t win.

(Also, Salvation In The Storm is out today. It means the world to me that I actually managed to write a novel and that I released it, so if you’d like to buy it, it would mean the world. I’ll stop adding these addendums to my pieces now, I’m just feeling proud these days. To everyone who’s helped in this journey, you know who you are, and you have my love and appreciation for all your help.)