An opponent for Texas Sen. John Cornyn at the statewide level has yet to emerge. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo 2020 elections Texas GOP races to shore up the suburbs for 2020 The state party is placing organizers in big metro areas early to bolster newly competitive districts.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Republicans barely escaped a colossal defeat last year. Now the party is scrambling to avoid a repeat in 2020.

Facing a rapidly changing voter base, anti-Trump fervor and a more motivated Democratic Party, the state GOP is moving earlier than ever to prepare after watching two House members lose in 2018 and another half-dozen win by fewer than 5 points.


The party has set new fundraising goals and placed field staffers in Dallas and Fort Worth nine months earlier than in the last election cycle to facilitate more engagement with voters, with plans to expand the early hiring to other major metro areas to stanch bleeding Republican support in the suburbs.

"We are taking seriously our need to earn every vote in Texas," said James Dickey, chairman of the Texas Republican Party. And donors "are also taking it much more seriously when I tell them how desperately I need them to participate or become a supporter of the party," Dickey added.

The state GOP will be adding organizers in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and even traditionally Democratic El Paso to its early hires. Those metro areas overlap with the districts of the six House Republicans who won narrowly in 2018: Reps. Michael McCaul, Chip Roy, Pete Olson, Will Hurd, Kenny Marchant, and John Carter.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Field teams will be responsible for recruiting volunteers to knock on doors, attending events to talk to voters and testing out new texting tools to boost voter registration and turn out among potential GOP voters.

"From my personal experience, there is nothing more effective than talking to folks," said Sam Pohl, spokesperson at the Republican Party of Texas.

The state party also plans to raise $5 million this year — double the amount it raised in 2018 — with about half of that money earmarked for television advertising.

Next November will be the real test of whether midterm results were a flash in the pan — a combination of O’Rourke’s popular Senate candidacy and a traditional midterm setback for the president’s party, or signs of bigger headwinds for Texas Republicans.

"I still think people are trying to decide how much of [the midterm results] were idiosyncratic,” said Republican campaign strategist Jerod Patterson, “or how much is structural changes in electorate.”

But Texas Republicans acknowledge that they have to win over voters like women, minorities and others that President Donald Trump has alienated and who are moving to Texas towns.

“Be real about it,” said Brendan Steinhauser, who was Sen. John Cornyn’s campaign manager in 2014 and worked for McCaul and fellow Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw. “Don’t try to run away from the President if you voted with him 85 percent of the time.”

But Steinhauser said that GOP candidates in Texas will have to walk a fine line on issues like border security and trade where many potential Republican voters may disagree with the President.

“Incumbent members of Congress can and should spend the next year communicating to constituents about what they are doing,” said Steinhauser. “That’s a big lesson for 2020 — you have to reintroduce yourself to the voter.”

House Republicans like Olson, who defeated Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni by fewer than 14,000 votes in a fast-changing slice of the Houston suburbs last year, say they have gotten the message too. Campaigns are mirroring the state party’s early staffing,

“We plan on it being more a retail race,” said Melissa Kelly, Olson’s chief of staff, who added that Olson plans on being even more active in the diversifying community, attending events like Chinese New Year and Cinco de Mayo celebrations.

“He’s definitely preparing for it to be a more challenging environment,” Kelly said.

Olson’s race is one of six congressional races in Texas that the national Democrats already are targeting in 2020. With the exception of Hurd’s district, which takes in a massive swath of West Texas along the Mexican border, all are contained in fast-growing, rapidly diversifying suburban districts outside cities like Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth.

In 2018, national Democrats targeted three Texas districts Hillary Clinton had won in the presidential election, including Hurd’s, ultimately flipping two of them. But after watching Democratic candidates like Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke and Kulkarni come close in the midterms, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has identified six GOP-held targets heading into 2020.

"Now as we look toward 2020, the DCCC is taking the lessons we learned and expanding the battlefield further into parts of Texas that are ready to reject the kind of reckless Washington politics that Congressmen McCaul, Roy, Olson, Hurd, Marchant and Carter have rubber-stamped," said Cole Leiter, a DCCC spokesperson.

Brittany Switzer, the digital director of the Texas Democratic Party, said “it is a completely different conversation with our national partners now. We’re ready to deliver Texas.”

Kulkarni, along with MJ Hegar, Joseph Kopser and other Democratic candidates that came close to beating Republican incumbents last November, told POLITICO that they are still unsure whether they will run in 2020. An opponent for Cornyn at the statewide level has also yet to emerge.

But the fact that Democrats view those districts as potential targets — and Republicans acknowledge the need to defend them — speaks to a political landscape in deep flux after the last two elections.

“The question we are going to find out in 2020 is how systemic and how deep issues are” for the Texas GOP, said Patterson.