AUSTIN — The fight for control of the Texas House is on, and North Texas will be the major battleground.

With Democrats nine seats away from a majority, the first campaign finance reports of 2020 filed last week clearly showed where the most competitive races are, the strongest fundraisers and who needs additional help. Nine of the top 20 fundraisers for House races over the last six months are from North Texas.

Some candidates raised more than $200,000 each in the last six months of 2019. Those big hauls are likely only the opening salvo in a battle that will play out over the next 11 months and will draw huge interest from beyond Texas’ borders from those who are watching to see if Democrats can loosen the Republicans’ two-decade grip on the Texas House.

“We’ll see the sticker price [on some of these races] inflate — especially as we head into the general election,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “The money we’re seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The list of big-money fundraisers includes Dallas Republican incumbents Morgan Meyer and Angie Chen Button, as well as Luisa del Rosal, who is considered a strong GOP threat to win back a seat taken by the Democrats in 2018. Tarrant County GOP incumbents Craig Goldman and Charlie Geren, and Collin County Rep. Jeff Leach and Denton County Rep. Lynn Stucky also raked in large amounts of campaign cash.

GOP money

James Dickey, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, said the numbers were a good sign that the GOP will take back several of the seats Democrats flipped in 2018.

House Democratic Caucus chairman Chris Turner of Grand Prairie was the top fundraiser for his party in this reporting cycle with $327,176. First-term Dallas Democrat John Turner also raised $250,766 for his re-election campaign. He’ll face del Rosal in District 114, which covers North Dallas, Preston Hollow and Lake Highlands.

“There’s big dimes in Big D,” Rottinghaus said. “Republicans are circling the wagons around vulnerable incumbents, especially in places where Donald Trump can hurt them in 2020. Republicans have seen this from a long horizon and have planned ahead.”

Republican Jon Francis, who is in a four-way primary for an open seat in a district on the western edge of North Texas that includes Hood County and Granbury, was the top fundraiser for the period, bringing in $610,017. Most of that — $500,000 — came from his in-laws, Farris and Jo Ann Wilks, megadonors who are the main funders for conservative political action committees such as Empower Texans and Texas Right to Life.

Those groups, which have funded primary challengers to Republican incumbents in the past, mostly stayed out of most elections this reporting period.

Experts say that could be a sign that the warring factions within the Republican Party have set their differences aside to focus on keeping a GOP majority.

“This cycle is different in that the Republican civil war has essentially gone away,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. “We’re not seeing any of that.”

Other Republican political action committees also seemed to be saving their money until after the March primaries, signaling an effort to present a unified front.

The Leading Texas Forward PAC created by Geren and Republican consultant Karl Rove raised $505,987 but still had not doled out any contributions. The House Republican Caucus raised $298,431 but only distributed $16,220.

Texas Forever Forward, a PAC created by former Speaker Joe Straus, had about $2.5 million on hand but gave only a handful of donations. And Texas Leads, the PAC created by disgraced House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, who announced he would not seek reelection after he was caught on tape targeting fellow Republicans, had nearly $3 million in its coffers but did not give any donations to Republican candidates.

What Bonnen will do with that money is one of the biggest questions for the GOP this year. The large sum could go a long way toward helping keep incumbents in office, but accepting money from the scandal-plagued speaker would make any Republican that accepted it an easy target for Democrats.

But with nearly a year before the election, experts said Republicans have plenty of time to figure out how best coordinate their efforts and use their resources effectively. Especially when they still haven’t tapped their big-time donors.

“They’ll get involved later down the road,” Jones said. “That’s an advantage that Republicans in Texas have. If they find themselves in a critical situation, they can raise money really quickly. Because the pockets of these donors are so deep that they can provide enough money that money is no longer a problem.”

Democratic plans

Democrats will also have to make decisions on how to best use their resources, especially in defending the 12 seats they flipped in 2018.

Two freshman Dallas County Democrats, Turner and Rep. Julie Johnson of Carrollton, who raised nearly $160,000, earned high praise from Democratic leaders for their fundraising prowess, which they said would make it easier to defend other incumbents who were struggling to raise cash.

Austin Democrat Celia Israel, the chairwoman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, said on Tuesday she’d be concerned about freshman Democrats who did not have $100,000 in their campaign coffers.

Dallas County Democrats Rhetta Bowers, Ana-Maria Ramos and Terry Meza fell under that amount, as did Denton County Rep. Michelle Beckley. Possibly more troubling for Democrats were the struggles of Harris County freshmen Jon Rosenthal, who won his election by 1,700 votes, and Gina Calanni, who won by only 113 votes.

Jones said it’s early enough in an election year that the campaigns have time to recover, but that Democrats should work to address the lagging numbers in some competitive races.

“I wouldn’t go into crisis mode, but it does suggest that Rosenthal and Calanni are in trouble with their funding,” he said.

Israel said her group would work to help candidates who needed extra help. In the last six-month period, it had doled out $105,000 to candidates, including $10,000 checks to Beckley, Bowers, Meza and Ramos.

Chris Turner, the caucus chairman who gave $340,000 of his campaign money to Democratic candidates in 2018, also came to the aid of candidates who needed funding boosts. He gave $57,000 to Democrats during the last six-month period.

Democrats also may get a boost from former Senate and presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, who has already been campaigning for an open statehouse seat in Fort Bend County that Democrats are hoping to flip in a special election later this month. O’Rourke and his legion of followers have been block-walking and volunteering for Democrat Eliz Markowitz, who is running against Republican Gary Gates. O’Rourke has also created a PAC, Powered by People, that he said would bring together volunteers from around the state to work on the most important races in Texas. One of the goals: win a majority for the Democrats in the Texas House.

“I’ll take Congressman O’Rourke’s positive energy and those who support him any day because he can help convey what we want to convey — that we are a state that is going places. We have positive energy,” Israel said. “So long as we’re working together with the campaigns and with the HDCC, we don’t have a problem at all because every extra person to pick up a clipboard and a map is another person to remind somebody, ‘Oh, yeah, early voting at the school tomorrow.’ Those are very welcome adds to the effort, and it’s going to be replicated dozens of times in the year 2020.”

Now that the battle lines have been drawn, experts say, Democrats can also expect to see strategic giving from donors and national groups who are making a concerted push to flip the Texas House. And sometimes, those donations may come at the expense of some Democratic incumbents whom the state party feels it needs to defend.

“These guys are reptilian, they are cold-blooded,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. “If there’s a Democrat incumbent but they’re not doing so well, they might say, ‘I’d have to spend three times as much money to win that seat, where I can give a third, a third, a third here in three other districts and win three.’ It’s all about the bang for their buck.”

Texas Democratic officials, however, appeared confident that the money would materialize to defend incumbent and pick up the nine additional seats they need to take over the House. Manny Garcia, the party’s executive director, said the party was excited by record-breaking fundraising, strong challengers, and unprecedented enthusiasm.

“Texas is the biggest battleground state in the country," he said. “For too long, money would flow out of Texas instead of in. That simply isn’t the case anymore. We are seeing unprecedented investment among allied groups, donors and grassroots organizations and know that with this investment, the Texas Democratic Party is poised to win up and down the ballot in 2020.”