A coalition of the biggest Democratic groups in Texas on Tuesday unveiled a new effort to pool their resources to help candidates with overhead costs that can devour campaign coffers, build a data hub to analyze stats that can instruct those camps, and centralize volunteers who can be surged to focus on any given race across the state as contests get down to the wire.
Behind the idea is the Texas Democratic Party; Texas Majority PAC, perhaps the best-funded Democratic group in the state; Powered by People, the group founded by former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke; and the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee.
Those in charge of the coordinated campaign are betting big — $30 million to start, per party leaders — that the investment can boost candidates in November’s midterm elections and beyond. The state party, in collaboration with Texas Majority PAC, already recruited candidates for every federal and state race on the ballot for the first time in modern Texas history.
Kendall Scudder, the Texas Democratic Party chair, said the new effort, called Texas Together, will revolutionize how state parties coordinate and run campaigns well past November.
“We’re running an organization that is comparable to that of swing states around the country,” Scudder said in an interview. “When people are asking constantly, ‘What’s different? What’s different? Every year, these Democrats say they’re going to win statewide. What’s different this year?’ Well, this is what’s different.”
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To see what the Democratic partnership might look like in practice, Texas Majority PAC’s executive director, Katherine Fischer, pointed to Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s recent upset win in a special election for Texas’ red-leaning Senate District 9.
When the PAC got involved last summer to help Rehmet, they created a centralized organizing machine under a lone batch of staffers, who directed volunteers as needed. In the two months preceding a January runoff election between Rehmet and conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss, volunteers made some 1.5 million calls — some of them hundreds of miles away from the Fort Worth area that SD-9 envelops, Fischer said.
A similar playbook was applied last year to school board elections for Cypress Fairbanks ISD, the state’s third largest district.
Rehmet won resoundingly and two socially conservative candidates lost their elections in Cy Fair.
“The model is to create a machine that exists indefinitely,” said Fischer, who was the organizing director for O’Rourke’s losing 2022 gubernatorial campaign. “The goal really is to, like other things we’re doing in the (coordination), share costs wherever possible, to spend less on overhead and fees and more on the work product or the voter contact that we need to be funding to win.”
The devil’s always in the details – and execution – for these things. Like, how well will they play with county parties and other campaigns and organizations? Ideally, the whole would be at least as big as the sum of the parts but that’s not always how it works. And I am well aware that a number of people I known and respect have Big Negative Feelings about the Texas Majority PAC, based on their experiences. We’ll see, is what I’m saying.
It should also be noted that while $30 million is a decent amount of money, it’s a lot less than what Greg Abbott has in his piggy bank. This is a very nice to have, but not a game-changer. I assume it’s also intended to be seed money, to attract more investment in Texas Dems. Again I say, we’ll see how that goes. I want to believe, but I’ve been burned before. You know what I’m talking about.