How down-ballot candidates could help Democrats flip Texas
Like many others in Texas politics, Wendy Davis spent much of 2018 scratching her head over fellow Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s insurgent campaign against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Just four years earlier, Davis lost her bid for governor to Republican Greg Abbott by 20 points, a margin of defeat shared by several other Democratic statewide candidates that year. It seemed like an implausible jump from those losses to O’Rourke only losing by 2.5 points in 2018.
But Davis, who's now a candidate for Congress, noticed a key difference between O’Rourke’s Senate race and the Texas Democratic campaigns of 2014: There was a robust lineup of Democratic candidates down ballot running for the U.S. House, the state Legislature and other local campaigns. That wasn’t the case in 2014.
Those candidates knocked on doors, raised money, showed up to Rotary Club meetings and de-stigmatized Democrats in once-hostile territory.
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/08/texas-democrats-trump-biden/
