Wayne Thorburn is author of Red State: An Insider’s Story of How the G.O.P. Came to Dominate Texas Politics. He has lived in Austin since 1977 and has held a number of positions in Republican politics.

While Texans have always welcomed newcomers, they have never liked invasions. They didn’t like it when Santa Anna did it in 1835. They didn’t like it when the Yankees did it during the Civil War and Reconstruction. And it’s pretty clear from the midterm election results that they definitely didn’t like it when Jeremy Bird and his team of Obama organizers known as “Battleground Texas” did it in 2013.

Two weeks ago, Democrats took a walloping in Texas. Wendy Davis, the Lone Star State’s Democratic star a year ago, got just 38.9 percent of the vote—some 283,000 votes fewer than the party’s gubernatorial candidate four years ago and 200,000 less than Democratic Texas Gov. Ann Richards obtained in her losing re-election effort nearly two decades before that. Even more disappointing: Davis got more votes and a higher percentage of the vote than any of the other 11 Democratic candidates on the statewide ballot.


Yes, it was a bad year for Democrats across the country, but you can’t blame the GOP landslide in Texas purely on President Obama, the Islamic State and the “national mood.” Why did Battleground Texas—so sure a year ago that it could make the Sunbelt state competitive for Democrats—fail? Is the possibility of a purple Texas gone forever? Was it ever really there?

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In January 2013, Jeremy Bird, the former field director for the Obama campaign, announced the formation of Battleground Texas to much fanfare and media attention. Backed by a number of major Democratic donors, the new effort was committed to turning Texas blue by rebuilding party infrastructure, recruiting strong candidates, registering new voters and turning out those whose voting history was erratic at best. Bird would be the overall strategist and spokesman for the effort while Jenn Brown, an Obama veteran from Ohio, would move to the state to oversee daily operations. In the end, Battleground Texas would raise a hefty nine million dollars to finance its operations.

Many observers believe Battleground Texas made a strategic mistake right from the start. Rather than recruit a prominent Texas Democrat to serve as nominal chairman or prime spokesman for the effort, Battleground Texas chose two non-Texan Obama organizers, Bird and Brown, to be the faces of the organization. Working apart from the existing state and county Democratic organizations, Battleground was viewed by some as an invading army made up of outside political operatives who might have understood politics better than the local folk, but who couldn’t relate. As Glenn Smith, a longtime Texas Democratic consultant, notes, “You have to speak Texan if you’re going to do well here. They didn’t. There was this belief after 2012 that if ya waved this turnout wand you would wake up some progressive majority. It didn’t exist.”

As the campaign year progressed, tension developed over Battleground’s failure to share much of the voter data they had accumulated with the major county Democratic organizations committed to boosting turnout. Operating distinctly from the regular party organization became a further bone of contention, a development described by Chris Young, political director of the Harris County Democratic Party, as a “kind of privatization of the political system.” Of course, in most Democratic circles, privatization is not viewed as a positive trend.

Then came the second strategic mistake. When State Sen.Wendy Davis launched her filibuster against a bill restricting abortion services in Texas, she became a bi-coastal liberal hero. Money and media attention came from Hollywood, Manhattan and Washington from those who hoped to see Davis bring Texas into their vision of the 21st century. But as Davis gained more popularity in liberal circles around the country, back home she became viewed, even among the state’s liberals, as unrepresentative of traditional Texas values and perspectives. By the time of the midterms, more Texans disapproved of Davis (47 percent) than approved of her (40 percent), according to a UT/Texas Tribune poll. Davis ended up losing to Republican Greg Abbott by a 20-point margin—a significant change from a year earlier, when she had been polling within five points of her eventual opponent.

The name identification, media appeal and fundraising potential of Davis led Battleground to merge much of its effort with the Davis gubernatorial campaign. In effect, Battleground Texas became the field operation for Davis: The two entities shared fundraising through what they labeled the Texas Victory Committee, and Battleground’s operations moved from the capital city of Austin to Davis’ home territory of Fort Worth. Suddenly the long-term effort to turn Texas blue had become a short-term objective to elect Wendy Davis as governor. Rather than building a lasting base at the local level, Battleground was now engaged in a top-down effort to change Texas politics.

This lack of a bottom-up strategy was particularly glaring on Dec. 9, 2013, the filing deadline for 2014 candidates. Far from attracting a number of qualified and vigorous candidates to the Democratic banner, Battleground and the party ended up ceding much of the field to the Republicans without even a whimper. In fact, Democrats failed to recruit anyone to run on their ticket for more than 40 percent of all state legislative positions on the ballot. The end result would be almost a two-to-one Republican majority in both the Texas Senate and the House. Even more depressing was the party’s showing at the county level. Democrats could not find anyone willing to run for County Judge (chief elected official in the county) in 165 of Texas’ 254 counties, ceding almost two-thirds of all counties to the Republicans without an election. Thus, by 2015, while the Democrats will retain the county judge in four of the six largest counties, the GOP will hold all 29 suburban county judge positions, 18 of 21 in the other metropolitan counties scattered around the state, and 150 of the 198 small town county courthouses. Of all the major counties in Texas, only Dallas, Bexar, El Paso, Jefferson and Travis, along with the border counties of Webb and Hidalgo, will have a Democratic county judge.

And even more depressing than that was the fact that not a single Democratic candidate could be found who was willing to run for any county office in 86 counties—more than one-third of the total. These 86 included the heavily populated suburban counties of Denton, Johnson and Parker (outside Dallas-Fort Worth), Montgomery (suburban Houston) and Comal (north of San Antonio) as well as the other urban counties of Bell (Temple), Randall (Amarillo) and Grayson (Sherman). As the saying goes, you can’t win a game if you don’t field a team.

The next embarrassment for an effort to rebuild the party base and attract new voters to the Democratic cause came with the 2014 primary. Primary elections in Texas are conducted by the political parties, although funded by the state, and depend on the efforts of local partisans to administer the election in most counties. Unfortunately, in 22 counties no one could be found who was willing even to carry out a Democratic primary election, thus denying voters in those counties any ability to select the party’s nominees. Battleground Texas was supposed to be in full swing, but never before had so many counties been without a Democratic primary. Yes, these were all small, rural counties; but it did not auger well for the efforts to expand the Democratic presence throughout all of Texas.

When the primary votes were counted in March, the Democratic tally had fallen to roughly 555,000 voters, a dropoff from both 2012 and 2010. In fact, one has to go back to 1920, when the state’s total population was 4.7 million, to find a year when so few Texans chose to vote in the Democratic primary. Equally gloomy was that national star Wendy Davis lost 28 counties to an unknown, unfunded primary opponent before eventually gaining the party’s nomination.

But there was more to these early defeats than just Battleground’s strategic blundering—a fact that its organizers might have realized had they been more familiar with Texas politics. Because political observers in the state had seen it all before: Twelve years earlier, Texas Democrats faced an election with an open U.S. Senate seat (Phil Gramm having announced his retirement), a governor’s race with an incumbent not elected to the office and open contests for lieutenant governor and attorney general. To take advantage of the situation, Democrats recruited a “dream team” of former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk for senator, wealthy Laredo banker Tony Sanchez for governor, respected moderate John Sharp for lieutenant governor and former Austin mayor Kirk Watson for attorney general. The dream team became a nightmare on Election Day, with none of the four coming within a quarter of a million votes of victory.

Four years later, opportunities looked promising again. The GOP was divided with the incumbent comptroller running in November as an independent candidate against Gov. Rick Perry. The Democrats nominated former Houston Congressman Chris Bell but failed to recruit any widely known names for the other top statewide positions. Bell ended up losing by 400,000 votes while the other statewide Democratic candidates all fell short by margins approaching one million votes.

Then came 2010, when U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Tea Party candidate Debra Medina took on Perry in the GOP primary. Perry easily disposed of both opponents, but some political observers believed that the fallout from a divided Republican primary would allow the Democrats a chance to win. Former Houston Mayor Bill White, perceived as a popular moderate who could unify the party, was the Democrats’ nominee. When the votes came in, White was 700,000 votes short of victory with only 42.3 percent of the vote. His running mates for lieutenant governor and attorney general both received under 35 percent and were more than 1.3 million votes short of winning.

Battleground Texas, it seems, thought that things would be different this time. But given recent history, it should have been little surprise that Davis and the other Democratic candidates came up short on Election Day. Over the past seven elections since 2000, Democrats have fielded 57 candidates for statewide office. Only five were able to obtain as much as 45 percent of the vote. None has come within 250,000 votes of victory.

When the polls closed on November 4, Wendy Davis had received the support of 38.9 percent of the electorate and carried 18 of the state’s 254 counties. Of the state’s Big Six counties, she lost Harris (Houston) and Bexar (San Antonio), both carried by Mayor White in 2010, as well as Tarrant (Fort Worth). All 29 suburban counties went to Republican Greg Abbott, giving him a net advantage of 422,000 votes. Abbott got an additional 190,000 votes from the 21 Other Metro counties and a 387,000 margin out of the 198 Small Town counties. In the end, Davis was nearly one million votes short of winning. And she still did better than the rest of the statewide Democratic ticket, including Hispanic State Sen. Letitia Van De Putte, the party’s candidate for lieutenant governor.

In a post-election interview, Jeremy Bird maintained that Battleground Texas had increased turnout among young voters, suburban women and minorities. Yet, he failed to acknowledge that it was the voting behavior of these three groups in particular that helped ensure the Republican victory. According to the NBC exit poll, Abbott and Davis split the 18-29 year old cohort evenly, while married women went 62 percent for Abbott (he received 54 percent from all female voters), and a near-record 44 percent of Hispanics cast their ballots for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.

And in fact, despite the nearly 40 million dollars Battleground Texas and the Davis campaign spent to enlarge the electorate and boost turnout (with special emphasis on the Hispanic community), turnout didn’t rise. Hispanic participation remained at the same 17 percent of the electorate that it had been in the last gubernatorial election, in 2010. Statewide, turnout was down approximately 6 percent, and in eight highly populated and heavily Hispanic counties, participation was down nine percent. Not only was turnout down, but voter registration as a percentage of the eligible voter population also decreased in these counties.

Republican political consultant Ted Delisi believes that Battleground Texas misread the preferences of new voters. Using a voter file of new registrants in the state’s 15 largest counties, the Republican Party of Texas found that 56 percent of these new registrants said that they intended to support Republican candidates. Notes Delisi, “It’s now clear that Texas isn’t trending blue amid a tidal wave of new Democratic voters. Instead, Texas voters—specifically new registrants—are identifying in much greater numbers with Republicans.” This trend may be occurring due to the types of individuals who are attracted to, and repelled from, Texas. As Delisi claims, “Texas isn’t just a magnet for jobs—we may have also become a magnet for people who identify with conservative politics.”

And it may well be a two-way migration for, as one disgruntled Democrat wrote to the Austin American-Statesman after the election, “So glad I am moving from here in December … I have lived here my whole 36 years. I finally said enough and I am moving out of state.” As Republican-leaning voters move into the state, those who seek a more progressive state government might well be deciding to move elsewhere. If so, a purple Texas seems out of reach for many years to come.