Don't Republican My Texas
Why Republicans are ruining the Texas miracle, and how Democrats can save our state.
Happy Monday, and welcome to the eighth edition of Waco Can’t Wait, a progressive newsletter focusing on McLennan County, Texas, and Federal politics.
WOW, WOW, WOW, this has been one hell of a week. We’ve got Russia invading Ukraine, Greg Abbott coming after transgender children and their parents, and Joe Biden announcing his Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. The piece that I wrote this week seems to pale in comparison to all the things happening around us. There are so many different stories begging for our attention, and I am going to do my best to address all of them without getting too into the weeds.
As we get closer and closer to the November 2022 election, I have been thinking about what Democrats will need to do differently in order to win. In 2018, we found out that spending $80,000,000 on hardcore base turnout and voter registration (while running a once-in-a-generation candidate) will get you about 1.6% away from winning a U.S. Senate seat. Considering that Democrats lost this seat by 15.9% in 2012, this was still a huge accomplishment. That said, I believe it is going to take a compelling message to put us over the top.
I think the best message Democrats have is that the Republican Party’s hard turn to the right runs the risk of ruining all of the things that make Texas great. We have to create a compelling narrative for Texas that runs on the things that have made it successful, explains the path we are currently on under Republican leadership, and makes clear where we could be with Democrats in charge. Texas is the greatest state in the union and we need to fight for it like it is. But before we dive into all of the reasons that our state kicks ass, let’s take a look at the news!
Week in review (a collection of news from Waco, Texas, and beyond)
Waco:
The last day to vote in the Democratic (or Republican) Primary is this Tuesday, March 1st. If you are voting in the Democratic Primary and need some recommendations for who to vote for, check out my piece from last week. I am also not naive, and I understand that many of you vote in the Republican Primary to have a say in the general election candidate. More power to you, and make sure to read some of the Q&As from the different candidates. Few voters turn out for the primaries, so make sure to participate!
Waco ISD Trustees Keith Guillory and Jeremy Davis will be hosting “The Forgotten Way: A Workshop On Educating Minority Students” in the University High School cafeteria on March 5th from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm. Keith and Jeremy have been strong advocates for our children in their short time on the board, and I strongly encourage y’all to check out this event.
The McLennan County Democratic Party will be hosting a happy hour at the Inn on Austin Ave on March 1st from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. We will be watching the State of the Union Address from President Biden and the Primary Election results. Wine, beer and appetizers will be served. This will be a great opportunity to meet some of the county party leadership and our great Democratic candidates.
Candidate filings for Waco City Council and Waco ISD have come to a close, with the exception of the special election for Waco ISD At-Large Place 7 that closes on March 7th. We have several contested races across city council and school board, and I will be working with many of these candidates in the coming months. As we get closer to the race, I will be sure to provide more information on all of them.
Texas:
This week has only confirmed my prior that Greg Abbott is an absolute bastard. How does he continue to ruin our state? Let me count the ways:
Greg Abbott sent a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) outlining an Attorney General opinion that found gender affirming care for transgender children (in the form of reassignment surgery) to be child abuse. This letter urges the DFPS to investigate parents who are accused of providing this surgery and includes the caveat that teachers and licensed professionals would be required to report this “abuse.” The ACLU of Texas has argued that this opinion is not legally binding, and that its findings are inconsistent with the medical community’s consensus concerning gender affirming care.
After the Travis County District Attorney indicted 19 Austin police officers for excessive use of force1 during the May 2020 racial justice protests, Greg Abbott floated the idea of pardoning these officers before even hearing the evidence against them.
Finally, the former chief of Texas’s power grid testified that Greg Abbott instructed officials to charge the maximum amount for power during the winter storm. Abbott has disputed these claims, but it doesn’t change the fact that Abbott raised $4.6 million in campaign contributions from oil & gas executives after he let Texans freeze to death. Curious. 🤔
Despite winning 59.3% of the vote in 2014 and 55.8% in 2018, Abbott only leads Beto 48.8% to 40.0% in the RealClearPolitics polling average of the Governor’s Race. Perhaps Beto can find a narrow window of attack against Abbott based on these unpopular moves. We shall see.
Elsewhere:
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin launched his invasion into Ukraine. After months of growing tensions between Russia and the West, and the amassing of troops on the Ukrainian border, Putin invaded under the pretext of protecting two breakaway regions in Eastern Ukraine. So far, the Ukrainian military and its people have been resilient in the face of occupying forces, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has committed to remain in Ukraine throughout the fight. Here is what he said in a recent video on Twitter:
“We are not putting our weapons down, we are going to protect our country. Our weapons are our truth, it's our country, our children and we will protect them”
President Joe Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court, replacing retiring justice Stephen Bryer. Judge Jackson currently serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit and once served as retiring Justice Breyer’s law clerk. Judge Jackson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, then attended Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Judge Jackson is also a former public defender (she would be the first ever to be confirmed to the Supreme Court) and served as Vice Chair on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. If confirmed, Judge Jackson would be the first ever African-American Woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
God Save the Lone Star State
Between Greg Abbott’s culture war tweeting, he is consistent in his messaging that Texas is the place to be. He boasts of record population growth, economic security, relocation of big businesses, and our world class universities. Many Democrats are silent on these successes, and choose instead to focus on the deficits of our state: we haven’t expanded medicaid, we lack voting rights protections, our state doesn’t protect workers, etc..
While I strongly agree with all of these positions and think that they need to be central to any democratic candidate’s platform, they are not sufficient to capture the attention of the median Texas voter. Though these policies are broadly popular, they are not necessarily what someone’s vote is turning on. As much as it frustrates our candidates and activists, there are many people in our state who I believe fall into two camps:
Nonvoters who do not see why it is necessary for them to vote in order to preserve their otherwise happy existence, and
Moderate to conservative voters that recognize the social conservative bent of the Republican Party, but do not wish to upset the regime they believe to be largely responsible for their economic security.
Though I think it is quoted ad nauseam, Democratic consultant James Carville put it best when he coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” While this sentiment is a powerful force in politics, the tendencies towards preservation is equally strong and compounding. This same politics of preservation is what keeps many incumbent politicians in office. While we do see swings between elections [largely based on differential turnout and vote switching at the margins], people are not inclined to mess with long term “success” when it has largely been good to them up to that point.
I want to be clear. My intent is not to disregard the Texans who have been hurt by Republican politics and who have also been loyal Democratic voters. The purpose of this piece is to acknowledge the political reality we live in. While Democrats have benefited greatly from increases in turnout among our most loyal constituencies, we have seen equal success in converting Republicans into Democrats. In 2020, the latter group proved to be the stronger force when we saw Texas Latinos shift to the right while our suburbs continued to trend left.
Moving on, people can be spurred to action and amenable to voting differently if they are told that there is a party, candidate, or ideology that is seeking to upset something central to their way of life. Two examples come to mind:
In the 2000 election, Karl Rove made a concerted effort on behalf of the Bush/Gore campaign to convince West Virginians that Democrats would destroy the coal industry. This was a state that had recently been won by Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. It had long been in the Democratic column, and had a long history of Democratic senators and congressmen. Through a targeted messaging campaign, Bush won the state by about 6%, and two decades later Trump would win the state by 39%.
In the 2018 election, Congressional Democrats were able to successfully take back the U.S. House for the first time since 2010. They were able to do this by running on the GOP’s attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Despite its early unpopularity, people had come to rely on and support the individual provisions of the ACA. It came down to supporting the party who wanted to keep popular healthcare provisions, or the one that wanted to get rid of them. For many the choice was clear, and Democrats would go on to net 41 congressional seats.
Given how little our government can get done, the politics of preservation can often be far more salient than the politics of what is possible. Like businesses, individuals value certainty and continuity. I think this is hard to swallow for people who believe in ambitious policy change (like myself).
What does this reality mean for Democrats? I have two takeaways:
Democrats need to acknowledge and run on all of the things that make our state so amazing and unique, and
We need to demonstrate to voters that the misguided policies of the Texas GOP are a detriment to our state.
Texas
I was born in Texas, I went to public school in Texas, and I was married in Texas. My children will be born and raised here, and one day I will return to the earth within the borders of the Lone Star State. We are a state of immigrants, cowboys, roughnecks, farmers, city slickers, and hipsters. Our economy is robust, people are moving here in droves, and we offer all kinds of places for people to live. Texas has 11 Tier 1 research universities, affordable community colleges, and our graduates stick around to start new businesses and work for the large companies moving here. There is something for everybody.
Our state is a mosaic and a melting pot. Many people come here from different states and countries, and while they will find that they can preserve their various ways of life in the form of food, religious worship, and cultural affiliation, they can still do all of that in a pair of cowboy boots. We are defined by that beautiful phrase: Y’all means all.
Whether by design or happenstance, the state of our state can be largely attributed to laws that were passed by Democrats and Republicans over the past 25-30 years. Our low taxes, favorable business environment, and incredible cities have attracted all kinds of newcomers to our state. These newcomers and longtime residents have created cultural enclaves that have provided community for religious and racial minorities, LGBTQ+ Texans, and liberal expats coming from more progressive states. It has also provided a place of safe harbor for conservative refugees coming from those same liberal states. According to Republican political analyst Derek Ryan2, “50.4 percent of possible new Texans [are] likely Democratic voters, and 49.6 percent [are] likely Republicans.”
While Republicans for a long time embraced this new form of Texas exceptionalism, a growing conservative wing of the Texas GOP is now hellbent on fighting cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and anything that might harm their delicate sensibilities. Look no further than the Republican Primary for Governor, where every candidate other than Greg Abbott is unsatisfied with a legislative session that effectively banned abortion, restricted speech in classrooms, and passed congressional maps that cement GOP political power for another decade.
This ideological shift did not happen over night. This has been the longterm political project of groups like the Texas Freedom Caucus, Empower Texans, and the True Texas Project. Feeling that Texas Republicans were insufficiently conservative, they’ve been playing the long game over the past decade by primarying incumbent Republicans and replacing them with far right ideologues. This ideological change has also taken place inside of the Republican Party establishment, where far-right conservatives are winning precinct chair and senate district executive committee positions that ultimately choose statewide leaders. It led to the brief selection of Allen West to the Texas Republican Party Chair (before he resigned to run for Governor), and later to the election of Matt Rinaldi.3
More recently, Dan Patrick has been encouraging former President Donald Trump to get involved in Republican Primaries at the state house and state senate level. It remains to be seen how effective these endorsements will be (we will find out on Tuesday), but these endorsements can only increase the hard right shift in the GOP caucus that has led to these dangerous pieces of legislation.
We have already seen the consequences of these bills. During 2017, top business groups and companies strongly lobbied against the passage of the Texas Bathroom Bill. They argued that this bill would hamper companies’ ability to recruit top talent to major metros in Texas and would encourage large sporting events to relocate from Texas. While this bill did not ultimately pass, Republicans have since then made it clear that they have no qualms with passing red-meat policies like a prohibition on abortion after six weeks.
Republicans also show no signs of stopping. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick recently proposed stripping tenure from public college professors who dare to speak about “critical race theory,” however it is that he defines that. Even in the K-12 schools, I have spoken with education majors at Baylor who are terrified to teach in Texas because they’re worried about running afoul of the new laws. They also may not have anything to teach their kids by the time the libraries have been raided by the local school board.
This culture war-driven, reactionary form of politics does not seem to have any logical end. It only seems to be interested in further enraging an ever-shrinking base of voters, and the only beneficiaries appear to be the grifters who peddle this nonsense. The rest of us will have to face the consequences of nobody wanting to teach, work, or do research here. Businesses will call it quits, people will move to friendlier pastures, and the financial prosperity we enjoy as a state will fall into disrepair.
Those who have lived here for generations and who moved here looking for a better life will be shocked to find a state that is hostile to freedom of expression, antagonistic towards marginalized communities (for many this isn’t anything new), and insensitive to the priorities of the median voter. While Republicans continue to run on and implement nonsensical policies, our property taxes continue to rise out of control, our public schools suffer from poor funding and weak teacher recruitment, and our electric grid continues to fail us. This doesn’t just hurt people along the I-35 corridor, but also our rural and exurban residents out in West Texas and deep in the Piney Woods.
The Message
Texas Democrats have been given a golden opportunity here, and it is up to us to draw this clear contrast for voters: Republicans are ruining the Texas miracle, and it is up to Democrats to right the ship. Republicans have failed to address property taxes, public education funding, or the electric grid, and their crazy policies threaten our ability to recruit workers, teachers, and businesses to our state. Republicans want to strip local control from your school board, ignore our state government’s lack of funding for basic services, and let our state go dark while they collect $1,000,000 campaign contributions from oil barons.
Texas Democrats found this to be a successful strategy in 2018. Though Beto had some long coat tails in 2018, voters were still splitting their tickets and were paying close attention to the policies being pushed by down-ballot Democrats. The 12 state house and 2 state senate candidates that were able to flip Republican seats in 2018 campaigned on fully funding public education, responding to the damage from Hurricane Harvey, and (most importantly) highlighting how Republicans were too distracted by social issues during the prior legislative session.
Following this election, we had one of the most productive legislative sessions in a couple of decades. We passed transformative funding for Texas public schools, and Democrats were able to defeat many of the most conservative bills that Republicans wanted to pass. They felt their feet being held to the fire, and Democrats had a lot of momentum behind them to hold Republicans accountable (despite still being in the minority). The best example of this ideological shift was State Representative Jeff Leach’s departure from the conservative Texas Freedom Caucus. This departure came after Leach’s state house district was won by Beto in 2018.
Voters are highly responsive to narratives that threaten the things they have come to value and enjoy. That said, this brand of politics cuts both ways. Republicans found this to be an effective form of messaging in the 2021 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial and legislative races. Republicans took control of several statewide positions and the state house, and Democrat Phil Murphy almost lost his governorship. Republicans ran on taxes being far too high, parental/local control in public education, and other socially conservative issues that resonated with voters.
Translating this strategy to Texas is complicated by the fact that Democrats are not in charge of Texas, and our local elected officials are nonpartisan. If Republicans see any problems in our state, it happened on their watch and is their responsibility. Voters are smarter than that, and they can smell horse manure from a mile away. We need to think more about these folks who are not directly affected by these new laws, but would be sensitive to the collateral effects caused by the laws.
Anyone that knows me understands how I love to invoke the great cartoon Texan, Hank Hill4. Hank Hill is a run-of-the-mill moderate conservative who cares about community, family, and a well-run society divorced from nonsense. While he frequently invokes his love for the Reagan years, he is also quick to combat the conspiratorial ramblings of his neighbor and best friend, Dale Gribble. While Hank is generally skeptical of entrenched bureaucrats who fail to perform their duties, he has a deep respect for institutions and believes that collective action is necessary for a well functioning society. When it is clear that someone has departed from tradition or his strong moral convictions, he is spurred to action.
Despite a lot of online discussion concerning the matter, I do think Hank Hill would be disgusted with the current state of the GOP and I don’t think he would have voted for Donald Trump (who Hank would probably describe as a giblet head). With a little cajoling and one-on-one conversation, I think Hank could be convinced to cross over to support a common sense Democrat interested in righting the ship. Perhaps someone like Ann Richards, who Hank meets in Season 5, Episode 11.
I’m not necessarily asking Democrats to solely message to a middle-aged white man who sells propane and propane accessories. But I am asking that we consider the power of the familiar and how the politics of preservation can be a powerful force. Our state is in trouble, and we need to have the guts to take pride in what we have and fight for its future. I tell you what.
One of these indicted officers is Republican State House candidate Justin Berry.
As crazy as it may sound, I highly recommend signing up for his email updates. He does some really smart analyses on early voting data and some post election analyses that go deep into the voter files. It’s always good to know what the other side is up to.
Rinaldi famously threatened to call ICE on a group of demonstrators who were protesting the passage of S.B. 4, i.e the “Show Me Your Papers” law that targeted Latino Texans. That same day, he threatened to shoot State Representative Pancho Nevarez on the floor of the Texas House. Rinaldi would go on to lose his state house seat in 2018 to Democrat Julie Johnson.
I could probably write an entire newsletter about Hank Hill, but I think the Texas Monthly already beat me to it.