Texas 6th: Gutless Democratic Lockout Embarrassment To Party
On A Horrible Night To Be A Democrat
What a fucking gutless performance by the Democratic Party in Texas, man. What a fucking disgrace. The party is about to be locked out of the Top-2 primary because, well, nobody fucking cared. It's not like we have a campaign arm of the party dedicated to just this sort of thing, right? It's not like that arm doesn't have a name, with a well known acronym, like maybe the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee? It might be known casually as the DCCC, D-Trip if you're being hip, it might have million dollars on hand, and it might have just done absolutely nothing? No, there's no way they're that dumb, right?
Nope, they are. The DCCC just dropped the bag in the only truly competitive House district up this year so far - a seat Joe Biden only lost by 3% - because they were too scared to take a stand and ensure they got their preferred candidate. A laissez-faire approach led to a bad outcome, a lockout in a seat where even losing the special would be valuable, because of the way we will need that terrain - especially the Tarrent parts of it - for the '22 Governor's race and the '24 Senate race, the latter of which cannot be an afterthought given Democrats are underdogs in three 2024 Senate races (West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio). Nope, the unwillingness to get a bad Politico headline, I guess, led to a collective amnesia and ambivalence about the seat, which Biden and Beto almost fucking won, that led to a lockout.
This is a fucking disgrace.
…
In terms of the actual results, the data is very low turnout, not near my 50% of 2020 votes cast threshold - set before the Louisiana runoffs, so made blind to any results - and therefore not meaningfully predictive for 2022. What is meaningful is the fact that part of my implicit faith in the idea of Democrats winning the House in 2022 was that they would make less ass backwards decisions than they did in 2022. I would never expect strategically optimal decisions, but my God, I wanted the strategic quality of the Georgia runoffs - not too much to ask for, right? Apparently it is.
For a party dedicated to bad decisions in 2020, this might be the worst mistake, because of how easily avoidable it was. This is a disastrous own goal, ceding a Congressional seat to the GOP without a challenge out of sheer malpractice, because, what, the campaign world is too busy right now? Yes, with the *checks notes* zero other races to prioritize, I can see how this got lost in the shuffle.
Like sure, I got this wrong too, I didn't think a lockout would happen, apparently I was wrong. I own that. But I am a guy who looks at bad public polls and opines on the scraps of quasi-data we get released to us, which didn't say that a lockout was likely, but merely a weak possibility. This pathetic performance is substantially worse than those polls, for reasons I'm not smart or sober enough to attempt to discern. What I do know is that this result is a clusterfuck for national Democrats.
It is also a clusterfuck for the Texas Democratic Party, who told everyone that the reasons for bad performances in the Rio Grande and amongst Hispanics was a lack of door knocking and community engagement. This should have been their shot, in a 22% Hispanic, 20% Black (by population) district to get their voters out and really make a difference. Clearly they either punted this race, in which they've leapt the Florida Democrats for worst state party in the USA, or their efforts made no difference, which is probably true, but that also makes a mockery of that hilarious autopsy that avoided any kind of accountability or deep thinking on the 2020 losses.
This is the kind of result that will get shrugged off, but shouldn't, because "Republicans were going to win anyways". Fuck that. Texas 6th suggests that everyone who does professional politics for the Democratic Party is either dangerously incompetent or asleep at the wheel, neither of which bode well for the party trying to pull off Senate gains and a House retention in 2022. This is a sign of a Democratic Party unable or unwilling to take seriously their obligations to the millions of people who vote for it, and the greater number of Americans who need them in government, whether they acknowledge that or not. If the Democratic Party cannot even do this very basic thing right, it is an institution no longer fit for purpose. Democrats need to get their shit together immediately, or we will be sitting in opposition in both chambers after 2024. And the worst part is, we will deserve it.