O'Rourke can't Find Alignment with Texas Dems
It's going to require Dems going 'off left' to win in Trumpland.
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In Reeling Texas Democrats Get a Rare Sight: Their National Chair, J. David Goodman doesn’t really say much about the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, because Ken Martin didn’t have much to say about Texas. And the situation there is stark:
Republicans control all branches of state government, a Democrat has not been elected to statewide office since 1994, and the party has shown few signs of being able to organize effectively across a vast and expensive state.
There is a race for the leadership of the Texas Democratic Party going on, and the State DEM chair Ernesto Hinojosa dared -- gasp -- to suggest the Dems move right on social policies, and then immediately said he'd not run again.
The subtext is made evident: the Dems didn't campaign 'enough', as if more time and energy with the existing Harris era messaging would have worked:
“We have to be honest about the fact that we didn’t do any work in South Texas,” said another candidate, Lillie Schechter — who is running for chair of the Texas Dems — a former chair of the Democratic Party in Harris County, which includes Houston. “The Republicans have a year-round office down there, and we have nothing.”
As an indication of the gap, the Texas Democratic Party has filled just under 3,000 positions for precinct chair — a kind of elected local party organizer. Republicans have filled more than 4,200 such positions.
So, add a few more offices? But what do others think?
Tania Gonzalez-Ingram, a Democratic organizer who managed the re-election campaign in South Texas of Representative Vicente Gonzalez, who won narrowly in November, said that part of the party’s problem stemmed from Democrats nationally sticking to messages about abortion and immigration, in the belief that those issues would resonate with Hispanic voters.
“I’m not the queen of all Latinos, but socially, we are not progressive,” Ms. Gonzalez-Ingram said. “We are seeing Latinos moving toward the Republican Party because they are the ones having the conversations about money.”
So, the party heads say it's about more door-knocking, while Gonzales-Ingram says it's about the Dems being too progressive for socially conservative voters. If the party actually believes in listening to constituents, Dems that win will have to go 'off left' and disassociate with national progressive messaging.
Beto O'Rourke considered getting into the fray for state Dem chair, but dropped out:
But after several weeks spent talking to elected officials, candidates and party members, he said in an interview, “it wasn’t clear that we were aligned.” So he decided against running.
“From my perspective, this is not rocket science, it is common sense, and Democrats have lost their common sense,” said Mr. O’Rourke, seated in the living room of his El Paso home. “You’ve got to listen to people. Their concerns have to be yours.”
His remarks are completely ambiguous, but could be read as support for 'off left' politics.
A recitation by Goodman of Dem's recent Texas near-wins and disheartening losses doesn't make the case for either approach, and Texas Dem leaders have yet to vote for a new chair. We'll see what happens, but I am betting that big-city party leaders will stick with big-city progressivism and claiming — despire the 2024 evidence — that they could win back ‘off-left’ voters with more door-knocking, media, and messaging.
I think Gonzalez-Ingram and Beto O’Rourke are right: the Dems need to listen to their constituents, talk with them about what they want to talk about, and them press forward with their constituents’ issues. Follow Marie Glusenkamp Perez and Vicente Gonzalez campaigns to see how they win in Trumpland.