This is a good start, but I hope they ratchet it up from there.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s national arm that targets legislative races, announced Wednesday that it plans to put resources into Texas next year for the first time since 2020.
The national interest reflects Democratic optimism that the 2026 cycle will provide a favorable political climate for the party, amid President Donald Trump’s flagging approval ratings and voter dismay over the state of the economy.
In Texas, the effort to flip GOP-controlled state House districts will be led by the House Democratic Campaign Committee. The group announced Wednesday that state Rep. Christina Morales of Houston will serve as its chair for the 2026 cycle, replacing state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat who is running for governor.
Morales told The Texas Tribune that the HDCC initially plans to target four seats Democrats tried and failed to flip in 2024, and one of the two seats Democrats lost:
- House District 34, which Rep. Denise Villalobos, R-Corpus Christi, flipped by an 11-percentage point margin
- House District 37, which Rep. Janie Lopez, R-San Benito, won by 10 points
- House District 112, which Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Garland, won by 8 points
- House District 118, an open seat that Rep. John Lujan, R-San Antonio, won by 3 points
- House District 121, which Rep. Marc LaHood, R-San Antonio, won by 5 points
For the first time in several cycles, Democrats are fielding candidates in every federal and state legislative race in Texas. Among the targeted seats, Morales singled out three Democratic candidates who are running unopposed in their primaries — Zach Hebert in HD 112, Kristian Carranza in HD 118 and Zach Dunn in HD 121 — as contenders who “can relate to the community there and have the right messaging.”
“Republicans have been so good about putting us on the defense, but I want us to focus on being on the offense this time around,” Morales said.
The DLCC has yet to release its own list of Texas House seats that it plans to target.
[…]
Of the five seats on Morales’ initial target list, three — House Districts 34, 37 and 118 — would have been carried by 2018 Senate nominee Beto O’Rourke had the district lines been in place that year. The two others — Districts 112 and 121 — could have been narrowly carried by GOP Sen. Ted Cruz.
Encouraged by Democrats’ strong showing in elections around the country this year, the DLCC is investing an initial $50 million nationwide to flip 42 state legislative chambers. According to the group’s strategy memo unveiled Wednesday, Democrats overperformed by an average of nearly 4.5 points in races it targeted last month.
“The favorable political environment taking shape for Democrats is on a scale that only comes once in a generation, and the DLCC is poised to meet this moment through the largest target map and political budget ever,” DLCC president Heather Williams said in a press release. “We aren’t wasting a moment to execute on our winning strategy by electing more state Democrats in Texas.”
We’ll get a data point here tomorrow, when the SD09 runoff concludes. That race has gone completely under the radar – I’ve yet to even see The Downballot mention it. One way or the other it will be noticed.
Going by the 2018 data, there are other obvious targets, including HDs 108 in Dallas and 133 and 138 in Harris, with numerous districts in Collin, Denton, and Tarrant counties close behind. Others, some more aspirational than others, can be found elsewhere in the state. Look at the Beto numbers in 2018 and 2022, and the Biden numbers from 2020 for a fuller picture. Some of that is illusory – Dem performance with Latino voters in 2018 and 2020 is likely to exceed what we can do in 2026, at least in some places – but the potential to do better among college-educated white voters, which powered a lot of 2018, is also there. Ambitions are always proportional to fundraising, and candidate quality is a factor that’s not always easy to measure, but I say Dems should be super bold, especially if the polls keep improving. Let’s not leave money on the table.
If nothing else, we know the enthusiasm is there.
For the first time in decades, Texas Democrats have candidates in every state House, state Senate, congressional and State Board of Education race, marking a historic shift for the Lone Star State’s underdog party.
Texas Democrats touted the accomplishment with a Wednesday morning Facebook post trumpeting the dawn of a new era.
“Since 1994, Texas Democrats have allowed on average about 50 of these seats to go uncontested, leaving millions of Texans without the option to vote for Democrats below the top of the ticket,” the post read. “That ends now.”
It’s also been over a decade since Texas Republicans ran a candidate in every race in the state, their last full docket being recorded in 2014.
Though running a Democrat in every race is a huge milestone, Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson says it’s just the first step to seeing a strong Democratic Party in the state of Texas.
“I think it’s a good start,” Jillson said. “There’s just a lot more required to start winning important races in Texas.”
Namely, providing the key party infrastructure that can actually win races.
“What has limited the Democrats over the last quarter century or so is that their party infrastructure has eroded,” Jillson says. That includes “the support that they can give to potential candidates as they seek to prepare to run for office, fundraise for their campaigns and then develop themes on which to campaign.”
Getting candidates everywhere is a good start. Now we need to do something with it. You know what I think. The Chron has more.
What does the Democratic Party leadership think is the “right messaging”? There was a cogent article in the Guardian recently about national Dem messaging-
“ Her campaign made a critical strategic error by prioritising an appeal to moderate, suburban Republicans over mobilising its core working-class and progressive base, leading to significant erosion of support among these vital constituencies. A strategy, articulated by the senator Chuck Schumer in 2016, of trading one blue-collar Democrat for “two moderate Republicans in the suburbs” was repeated and failed again.
This led to a catastrophic failure of outreach to the Democratic base. In Philadelphia, campaign organisers were reportedly told not to engage in basic get-out-the-vote activities in Black and Latino neighbourhoods, forcing staffers to form a “rogue” operation in the campaign’s final days.”
Chuck Schumer and other Dems have a lot to answer for.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/kamala-harris-election-autopsy
“I’ll take the lesser of two evils for $500, Alek.”
There are a bunch of wussy do-nothing Ds who deserve primary challenges in ‘26. And ‘28. And ‘32.