The Texas Democratic Party must do better if they want to win elections
By the time I’m writing this, a couple of days have passed since the Texas Democratic Party released their post-mortem report on the 2020 election. After having read the report and several analyses on its contents, it is beyond clear that Party Leadership has failed at even the most basic of concepts when it comes to actually winning elections — listen to the people who are doing the actual work on the ground.
First and foremost, a party that has leadership that is unwilling to hear criticism from the people who are working tirelessly on the ground to win races is doomed to fail. Party leadership that covers their ears to criticism is doomed to stay complacent and lost ground in future elections, as evidenced by the results in 2020 when compared to 2018. In an election that was supposed to show that Texas is indeed a swing-state and that Democrats can win statewide, the Texas Democratic Party managed to lose seats! How did this happen? Simple. Leadership chose to not do targeted outreach and assumed that things were on-lock.
The Texas Democratic Party made the same mistake that the Democratic Party made on a national level by treating minority voters as a monolith whose only issues that matter are immigration and criminal justice reform. This is a serious strategic error on their part, as evidenced by the fact that Republicans gained ground with Black voters, Hispanic voters, and Asian voters.
In the lead-up to the 2020 Election, I had an opportunity to hear Chuck Rocha speak on the voter outreach that happened with Bernie 2020. As someone who previously didn’t know that much about how to target voters, what Mr. Rocha spoke about really stuck with me and serves as the gold standard in how campaigns should target voters. He taught us about how to effectively micro target sub-groups within demographics. In the examples that he provided for us, he talked about the diversity that exists across the spectrum of Hispanic voters and how the interests of Cuban-Americans in Miami are totally different than Mexican-American field workers in Southern California and Puerto Ricans within New York City.
While talking about this, he slipped a line in that was funny on the surface, but perfectly encapsulated what the main point he was getting at. “You don’t send a mariachi band to Miami,” he told us. That line really stuck with me, and speaks to the failures of the Democratic Party in their attempts at voter outreach.
As a Party, you need hire people from within the communities that you are trying to win over and listen to them while following their lead. You don’t cede ground to the opposition because of an assumption that voters are on-lock. As a Party, you don’t neglect radio, television, and internet ads. You do the opposite. You fight with every fiber of your being to get the field-workers the tools they need to win votes over. You blanket the airwaves and internet in targeted ads that appeal directly to various demographics and explain why they should vote for you and not the other team.
Outreach matters in elections. No matter how safe an election may seem, seats are won by individual votes. When the Democratic Party loses multiple Congressional Races nationwide by single and triple digit margins, it is absolutely a sign of failure of outreach. How many more doors could you have knocked and established a personal connection with voters? How many more phone-calls could have been made? How many more text messages could have been sent? Races are won and lost on outreach, and Party Leadership, both in Texas and Nationally, needs to recognize this.
When you are a State Party and you’re saying that your state is the big swing state, you need to treat every voter as a swing voter. You need to reach out to every single person possible, regardless of their party status or if they’re registered to vote.
How did the Texas Democratic Party chose to respond to criticism when it was levied their way? They doubled down on their thinking and used their official account to subtweet people who were trying to hold them to a standard. In-addition, those who are allied with Leadership launched ableist attacks against individuals simply asking questions about the organizing efforts of the Party and how they were targeted in a now-deleted tweet.
I’m not saying that I have all of the answers to the problems that are rooted within the Democratic Party. That’d be foolish of me to do. I’m simply saying that, if you want to win elections, you have to listen to the people on the ground. In-addition to that, if you are unwilling to take criticism and embrace it so you can improve yourself and win in the future, you simply don’t belong in the politics. As someone who wants to see Democrats win and actually fight for improving the lives of people across the board, the failure of Leadership to recognize where things went wrong and instead attack those who are doing the legwork is beyond shameful.
