Texas. The adopted home of the Bush family. A state whose penchant for electing Republicans up and down the ballot is second only to its love of barbecue. For years now, Democrats have insisted that each election cycle will be the one when Texas finally turns blue, only to be disappointed time and again. Indeed, the Democrats haven’t held the governor’s office since Ann Richards’s loss in 1994, with 1998 being the last time Democrats held any statewide office at all.
In a vicious cycle, repeated losses by the Democratic Party in Texas have left a very thin bench of potential contenders for the upcoming gubernatorial election in 2022. The brothers Julián and Joaquin Castro, once touted as the future of the Democratic Party, seem to show no interest in running statewide — with Julián also facing the additional challenge of having angered many national Democrats with his critiques of President Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Lina Hidalgo, the 30-year-old who flipped the position of Harris County Judge in 2018, has opted to run for reelection instead of running statewide. All this leaves only one familiar face preparing to launch a run for governor: Beto O’Rourke.
Ever since his failed 2020 presidential campaign, rather than immediately fade into the shadows, O’Rourke has launched several efforts to get more and more voters in Texas registered through his organization Powered by People. His vision of politics turns elections into a question of which side can do the most to increase turnout — not too dissimilar from Stacey Abrams’s approach in Georgia — while at the same time winning over independents and some disaffected Republicans, particularly in the increasingly blue suburbs.
O’Rourke raised the hopes of many Texas Democrats with his closer-than-expected run against Ted Cruz in 2018. Yet following that high point, the trajectories of both O’Rourke and the Texas Democratic Party have since plummeted downwards, with O’Rourke running a short-lived bid for president in 2020 — where his pledge to “take away your guns” is sure to haunt his gubernatorial candidacy — and both President Trump and Sen. Cornyn handily winning their 2020 races in Texas.
Nevertheless, O’Rourke still represents a strong candidate for the Democrats to run for governor in 2022. After all, his 47.8% in 2018 outpaced Biden’s 2020 performance in Texas where he only got 46.48% of the vote. A series of “best-case” scenarios, unlikely as they may be, where the best performances in each county for Biden and O’Rourke are combined, leaves paths open for the Democrats to receive 50% of the vote statewide. In particular, O’Rourke’s dominance in the Rio Grande Valley as opposed to Biden’s comparatively disappointing performance (with Zapata County, for example, voting 62% for O’Rourke in 2018, only to vote 52.5% for Trump in 2020) presents him as an appealing candidate for the Democrats as almost any path to victory requires the Democrats to run up the margins in the border counties.
Ultimately, it is more likely than not that O’Rourke will lose, but more important than whether he wins is whether his performance will be enough to create down-ballot effects that will propel Democrats to victories in local races. The Democrats were aiming to flip the Texas House of Representatives in 2020; they had to flip nine seats in order to take control of the state legislature, targeting as many as 22 seats as potential opportunities. They ended up flipping zero. Continued Republican control has allowed the Texas House to create increasingly strict restrictions on abortion — passing a voting rights bill that the Democrats found so objectionable that they even left the state to deny a quorum — and now lets them control the process of redistricting for the state legislature and congressional seats. Thus, the consequences of the Democrats’ failure to flip the Texas House in 2020 will continue to haunt them, not only in the bills they find morally objectionable, but also in the rewriting of maps that will encumber any legislative gains over the next 10 years.
Similarly, Democrats were hoping to flip seats from Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020. Yet after making gains in 2018, they flipped zero seats in Texas in 2020, part of an overall disappointing year for House races. However, once again looking at O’Rourke in 2018, his strong performance outpaced Democrats up and down the ballot. Three districts currently represented by Republicans in the House of Representatives — TX-32, TX-24, and TX-10 — swung O’Rourke’s way in 2018. O’Rourke came within three points of Ted Cruz in another six Republican-held seats.
In an era where split-ticket voting is increasingly rare, having a strong Democrat at the top of the ticket would boost candidates in local level races. Therefore, even if O’Rourke ends up losing statewide, his candidacy and the turnout he can inspire in a midterm year might be enough for the Democrats to notch key victories down the ballot.
The Democrats’ failure to flip the Texas House in 2020 surely weighed on them when the Supreme Court recently declined to strike down the incredibly restrictive abortion law passed by Texas. With a rare chance to make gains on the local level and even a shot of capturing statewide office, rather than running a political unknown whose views aren’t even known to be liberal or conservative (with actor Matthew McCounaghey reportedly mulling an independent run for governor), the Texas Democrats would do well to nominate the one candidate who has shown an ability to make a path to statewide victory plausible.
O’Rourke, fresh off of two losses in a row, may very well lose a third time should he run for governor, but if his run can allow for the sort of gains in the Texas House and U.S. House of Representatives that Democrats have narrowly missed for the past few election cycles, that will be no less impressive of a victory.
Image by Josh Olalde is licensed under the Unsplash License.
