WOODVILLE, Texas — Trish Robinson was dropping off supplies for Hurricane Harvey relief efforts in Liberty County, about 40 minutes from Houston, when a handful of people scowled at her left-leaning political T-shirt.

David DeLuca, head of the Fayette County Democrats, said he recently introduced himself to a Republican volunteer poll worker, but the woman declined to shake hands.

And during a Tyler County town hall hosted by Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke on a recent Friday in February, multiple people thanked the Democrat for coming to the Republican stronghold.

“It does take guts to come to this area,” Amy Pramuk said. “It really, really does.”

In other words, it can be tough to be a Democrat in some of Texas’ reddest rural communities. “Yellow-dog” Democrats — those who would sooner vote for a dog than a Republican — were dominant in areas such as Woodville until the GOP sharply gained power statewide in the 1990s, and Democratic officials soon switched parties or were voted out.

Amy Pramuk holds her child Evey Cordray, 2, as U.S. Congressman Beto O'Rourke makes a speech at the Emporium for the Arts in Woodville, Texas on Feb. 9, 2018. O'Rourke is running for the U.S. Senate. (Nathan Hunsinger/The Dallas Morning News) (Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer)

As a result, many of the remaining rural Democrats say they’re leery of making their political views public.

Now, as national and state party leaders talk a big game about a blue wave this November, some Democrats in rural East and Central Texas say they’re working to overcome a drag on local momentum ahead of the primary: stigma.

“They are afraid it might affect their businesses and their business relationships, if it were known they are Democrats,” explains Michael Mark, the loud and proud chairman of the Democratic Party in Liberty County, where 78 percent of the electorate chose Donald Trump in 2016. “They are closeted and don’t want anybody to know.”

In the state's 15 most populous counties, Democrats have outpaced Republicans in early voting, and even surpassed their early voting totals from the 2016 primary, according to data from Texas secretary of state. Similar data for rural counties wasn't available from the state website.

But Robinson, who after Trump’s election began a Liberty County Indivisible chapter, a Democratic grassroots group, said she’s heard from people who say they’re nervous about voting in the March 6 primary because they’ll be asked to pick a ballot.

“They’re concerned about announcing they’re a Democrat,” said Robinson, of Dayton. To ease the process, she continued, “a lot of times, poll workers, I’ve been told, have just asked them to point.”

Sam Haney, who runs the Woodville Emporium for the Arts, where O’Rourke held his campaign event, said he fielded questions from people in the community after he rented the theater to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s opponent.

“People were surprised that I let them do this here, but their money is just as green as the other ones,” said Haney, who did not divulge his political views.

It's not that Democrats are unwelcome in Tyler County, he said, where more than 80 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump. It's that they're "different."

Red wave

It wasn’t always this way, Democrats in East and Central Texas are quick to point out. The area, as in much of the South, was long represented by Democrats like powerhouse Rep. Charlie Wilson.

But then came a series of political and cultural shifts that left rural Democrats in the dust.

Republicans gained traction in the 1980s and '90s, an era that saw a set of Bushes rise to power and Democratic Gov. Ann Richards lose to George W. Bush in 1994.

Then controversial redistricting in the early 2000s, led by GOP Rep. Tom DeLay, resulted in Democrats losing about a half dozen congressional seats.

Jim Turner, a "blue-dog" Democrat from Crockett, decided against running for re-election in 2004 after a GOP-led remap moved his home turf into the district held by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis. Republican Rep. Ted Poe of Houston, who is retiring this year, has held Turner's old seat since then.

“When you lose Democrats higher up on the ballot, it tends to cause the county officials who are running for office to want to run as Republican,” Turner said. “They know that’s where people are beginning to vote and where they need to run for office to have a chance to win.”

Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist, said the trend was exacerbated by the national party’s shift to the left on social issues, a move that alienated more conservative Democrats.

And then came former President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, a feat that Jones said highlighted racial divisions in some rural communities. “That region of Texas is much more Southern, and the election of President Obama was perhaps the last nail in the local Democrats’ coffin,” he said.

Robert Wood, head of the Tyler County Democrats, agreed that Obama’s election further split the party along racial lines. “The blacks are Democrats and the whites are Republicans, with a few exceptions,” he said.

Polk County Judge Sydney Murphy, a self-described moderate Republican elected in 2014, said racial dynamics didn’t play a role in her county’s evolution from blue to red. Nearly 80 percent of voters here went for Trump in 2016.

She also pushed back on the notion that Democrats are stigmatized in her community, noting that she drew support from the left in her election and has since tapped Democrats for committee work, to the chagrin of some Republicans.

“I don’t think we have the Republican KKK or the Democratic KKK running around knocking on people’s doors,” she said.

People in Polk County generally know who’s a Democrat and “like them anyway,” she quipped.

Campaign signs for Beto O'Rourke went up for an event at the Emporium for the Arts in Woodville on Feb. 9. O'Rourke is running for the U.S. Senate. (Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer)

Small steps

Something changed after Trump’s election. Through social media, Democrats in rural areas began finding each other and organizing in small but meaningful ways. County chapters have dusted off their welcome signs and other Democratic-leaning groups have emerged, both publicly and privately.

Robinson said she began the Liberty County Indivisible chapter after reading the handbook published by its national founders, which gives guidance on anti-Trump grassroots political organization.

“That sort of fed into what I believe and how I felt, and what I wanted to do,” she said. “Liberty County [Democrats] need to know there’s options for them, too. We shouldn’t always have to leave the county to feel like we belong or have a purpose or can speak up.”

She began with a Facebook post, and then held meet-ups at local restaurants. Sometimes, only one person showed up. But “if one person comes every time, I feel like that’s progress,” she said. The group has since grown to about 40.

Not everyone is ready to go public. In a rural Central Texas county, more than 100 women have formed an anti-Trump group so secret that, after initially speaking with The Dallas Morning News, one of its members asked for her name, and her area, to be withheld. The News independently confirmed the group's existence through two other people with knowledge of its activities.

New energy

Fueled by anti-Trump sentiment, Democrats are now fielding candidates in every congressional race, a move that state leaders say changes the proposition for rural members.

“That there is someone on the ballot for you to vote for, who is a local Democrat ... builds a different sort of pride for folks,” said Manny Garcia, deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party.

Texas Democrats are also contesting the highest number of state Senate and House seats since 1992, he said.

There are smaller signs of progress in rural areas. In 2016, Democrats didn’t even have county chairs in 42 of 254 Texas counties ahead of the primary election. That number has dropped to 32, Garcia said.

Nancy Beck Young, a political history professor at the University of Houston, said an early test of whether Democratic activity in rural counties such as Tyler or Liberty will yield results could come next week, when Texas voters go to the polls on March 6.

“Is this just an anti-Trump thing that passes? Or is this something that sustains itself at the very local level?” she said.

While national Democrats hope this is the year they take back control of Congress, Democrats interviewed for this story have more modest expectations. They want to help Democrats post some wins, but they also want to reclaim some standing in their communities.

Willie White, head of the Democratic Club of Polk County, said that political parties usually take down their signs after an election. But after the 2016 election, “we left everything up,” he said, to show “we’re making an effort.”

On the building’s exterior reads a simple message: “Come home to the Democratic Party.”

Staff photographer Nathan Hunsinger contributed to this report.