El Paso-area Rep. Beto O’Rourke will go for the Democratic nomination against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in next year’s midterm election.
It understates the case to say that this race will be an uphill climb for O’Rourke, who came to Congress from the tech business. His success depends entirely on President Trump turning at least half a million Republican voters into Democrats.
Democrats generally haven’t fared well in Texas statewide races. Their best performance, however, just came in November when Hillary Clinton scored a surprisingly high 43 percent and lost against Trump by only ten points. That may not seem so good, but it really is compared to all of the recent Democratic statewide election efforts:
- 2014 Senate: 34.4 percent (David Alameel)
- 2014 governor: 38.9 percent (Wendy Davis)
- 2014 lieutenant governor: 38.7 percent (Leticia Van de Putte)
- 2012 Senate (against Cruz) : 40.7 percent (Paul Sadler)
- 2010 governor: 42.3 percent (Bill White)
- 2010 lieutenant governor: 34.8 percent (Linda Chavez-Thompson)
For the record, a similar pattern holds on the down-ballot. The best Democratic performer for the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2016 got 41 percent, their strongest Supreme Court candidate got 41 percent, their railroad commissioner candidate got 38 percent, et cetera, et cetera.
O’Rourke is a fresh young face who may draw a lot of attention (there’s a lot of Ted Cruz hate out there, after all), but recall that Texas voters completely ignored all of the national buzz around Wendy Davis and her abortion crusade in 2014. They gave her barely a smidge of higher support than any of the other Democratic statewide candidates. In fact, despite spending $36 million on her campaign and making an abundance of national media appearances, she did only about two points better than the Democratic nominee for agriculture commissioner, who spent nothing and ran no campaign.
Which is to say, there’s a hard ceiling in Texas for Democratic support, and so far no evidence that the state is turning blue.
