Another Texas election and a bunch of Democrats asking:  Why didn’t money and TV ads persuade Texas?  After all, our TV screens were bombarded with anti-Cruz abortion ads.  We were also constantly reminded that President Trump is a felon who led an insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government.  In the end, Trump and Cruz won easily, and the Democrat party state chairman resigned.

The blue wave didn’t hit Texas.  What happened?

Well, let’s start with the Biden presidency.  Very unpopular here.  It was no better for Kamala Harris, who never even visited our border cities or took seriously her border czar position.  The border issue was so bad that the GOP scored historic gains with Hispanics in border counties.

So what’s next for Democrats?  It will be tough, as we learned from Congressman Allred, who challenged Senator Cruz.  Allred has a profile that should win in Texas—he’s got a nice family image, and he’s a former NFL player and Baylor star.  So what happened?  Well, let me share this from Bill King:

First, the abortion issue flopped again for Democrats. In devising their strategy, Democrats read too much into polls that showed a wide majority of Texans oppose the abortion ban, at least in its current form. Texans are particularly opposed to the failure of the law to include an exception for rape and incest. A recent University of Texas poll found that 78% of Texans supported such an exception, at least, at some point during pregnancy.

However, if they had read that same poll a little more closely, they would have also learned that only 4% of Texans identified abortion as the most important issue in the election. Women and voters under 30 were only slightly higher at 6%. The economy and inflation were identified as the most important issue by a third of the respondents, with virtually no difference between men and women (35% vs. 32%). Immigration was the second highest at 14%. Abortion was a distant eighth.

Also, women under 30 make up only about a million of Texas’ 18 million registered voters and, of course, a fair number of those are pro-life. So, it is hard to understand how anyone ever thought this was going to be a winning strategy.

King goes on to explain how attacking the oil and gas industry is a loser in a state where thousands work in that field, especially Hispanics in South Texas.  Furthermore, Allred was never able to explain why he voted in favor of boys playing in girls’ sports, but then ran TV ads saying that he didn’t believe in it.  Why did he vote for it?  He can thank Speaker Pelosi for forcing Democrats to vote on issues like that.

As 2026 approaches, and a governor’s race is coming, who can the Democrats count on?  It won’t be Beto O’Rourke, because I think that donors must be tired of writing him checks.  It won’t be Collin Allred, unless he does a massive transition to the center and deletes all of those votes from history.  It won’t be one of the Castro brothers from San Antonio, because they can’t compete in rural areas.

The party is in trouble down here and that’s the truth.

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Image: Free image, Pixabay license.