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Efforts to get out of the ballot, hampered by the coronavirus pandemic and an 11-hour rise in voter registration for well-funded Republicans, thwarted the ambitions of a blue wave in Texas during the 2020 election, according to a new post-mortem that the state democrats shared with the Guardian.
“The majority of Texans, if they were in the ballot box, would vote for Democrats. The problem is that Republicans are more likely to come out of the fray, ”said Hudson Cavanagh, the Texas Democratic party’s director of data science who wrote the post-election report.
Texas generated too much buzz last year as a spike in early voting left much of the nation wondering if the electoral college’s 38 votes were finally there for the taking. Yet former President Donald Trump still triumphed by a margin of more than five points – a much closer presidential contest than any other in recent years, but one that cemented Republicans as the state’s dominant party.
Now, Democrats blame last fall’s defeat mostly on programmatic issues, allowing Republicans to outpace them in operations to leave the ballot. “Texas is still the next frontier,” said Abhi Rahman, Texas Democrats’ communications director.
Despite a record turnout in 2020, according to the United States Elections Project, Texas ranks 44th out of 50 states in terms of ballots counted as a fraction of the total voting population. The high participation of Asian voters marked “a major shift,” yet “the electorate was whiter than expected,” Cavanagh noted in his analysis.
Latinos – who are considered a major target for moving Texas to the left – also overshadowed the turnout projections. But Latino Republicans voted at a faster rate than Latino Democrats, and that differential turnout created the largely false impression that Democrats were losing ground with one of their most crucial blocs, too often lumped together like a monolith.
An exception was the Rio Grande Valley, a quintessentially Democratic stronghold where Latinos actually drew more to Trump at the top of the ticket.
While “Latino voters continue to vigorously support Democrats,” the party needs to “bolster Latino votes at the polls,” Cavanagh wrote in his report.
On top of Texas’ reputation as a state that oppresses voters – based on voter identification requirements, a difficult registration process, postal ballot restrictions, and other barriers – Covid-19 added another hurdle for Texas voters in 2020. , while long lines of voters who did not have to wear masks threatened exposure to the virus.
“It took a lot of courage from many of these Democrats who understood the risk of, you know, committed to voting,” Cavanagh told The Guardian. “To be honest, I’m incredibly proud of the people who did that.”
Amid the public health crisis, the Texas Democrats decided not to knock for personal voter involvement because “even one life lost is too many,” Cavanagh said. Republicans, on the other hand, allied with eligible voters in person, a clear advantage in one of the few states where residents still can’t register to vote online.
In the last months leading up to the election, tremendous pressure from Republicans to register new voters has offset the gradual advantage that Democrats have been sharpening for years, especially given that nearly all of those new Republican registrations have been turned into net votes.
“Their willingness to put people at risk to win the election made it very difficult for us to keep up,” Cavanagh said.
When the Democrats turned to virtual registration drives and phone banking, they spent too much time speaking to reliable party members who would have voted anyway. Likewise, a lack of contact information for young and rural Texans – as well as people of color – and the inability to use canvas made it difficult to connect with voters who were less likely to turn out.
Estimates indicate there are still more than 2 million solid Democratic unregistered voters in the state, and Cavanagh said the party should focus on registering them and then actually build relationships so that they make it to the polls.
“We know that’s how Democrats are winning in this country,” he said. “We look people in the eye, we tell them our values, we tell them what we believe in, and that’s how we get people out.”