Texas Democrats are mad and motivated after a slew of new hard-right legislation. But it’s not clear the party has the organization to translate the anger into electoral wins.
The Texas Republican Party’s hard tack to the right over the summer, culminating in the abortion law and election bill last week, has sparked a palpable backlash in the state. For the first time since Texas Democrats’ dreams of flipping the state leadership were dashedin 2020, many in the party are eyeing a path out of the political wilderness. As Abbott and other Republican state leaders work to appease their conservative base ahead of the 2022 state elections, Democrats see an opening to notch victories up and down the ballot.
The question is whether they can organize themselves to do it, which even some left-leaning strategists and organizers here doubt.
Many of the new measures in effect — on mask mandates, abortion, guns — are broadly unpopular in a state with a growing urban and suburban population. While Abbott so far has dominated the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, his approval ratings have dropped by double digits since June, hitting the lowest point in his tenure as governor, according to the Texas Politics Project. Fifty-two percent of Texans think the state is heading in the wrong direction as of August, the highest share since pollsters started tracking the trends in 2008. At some point last week, the hashtag #TexasTaliban was trending on Twitter.
The Texas electorate might be changing quickly. But Republicans still make up the majority of voters — a fact that is not lost on the politicians who pushed through this year’s new legislation. About 65 percent of Republicans in Texas agree strongly or somewhat with the state government’s handling of the pandemic, according to a June poll. More than 70 percent support outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. GOP strategist Brendan Steinhauser, who has been tracking social media sentiment on the right, said many Republican voters are “thrilled” by the recent culture war-style legislation. “For Republicans those are the bread-and-butter issues,” he said.
Still, there are signs that the abortion law, in particular, might have gone too far even for some Republicans.