On the sad state of Texas' Democratic Party, including its neglect of rural places

This gist of this Texas Monthly piece, "Ten Years of Magical Thinking" by Michael Hardy, is that the Democratic Party has been failing in Texas, in spite of the magical thinking of the man who has been its chair for a decade, Gilberto Hinojosa.  Hinojosa now has two opponents in his bid to remain the party's leader. These are Carroll Robinson, a Houston law professor and chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats, and Kim Olson, a 64-year-old retired Air Force pilot who now lives on a ranch in Palo Pinto County, an hour west of Fort Worth.

Olson said she’s challenging Hinojosa because he has systematically neglected rural counties such as hers. She told me that 40 of Texas’s 254 counties don’t have a party chair, and in 170 countries Democrats are fielding just a single candidate in this year’s local elections. (A spokesperson for Hinojosa disputed those numbers, but when asked for the correct ones said he didn’t have them.) “It is the county parties that get voters out the door,” she said. “It is the county parties that understand who should run. There’s not a soul in the bubble of Austin that gets anybody in Palo Pinto County to vote.”

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The problem, as Olson and Robinson see it, is that in much of Texas the Democratic party has no infrastructure. “You ask any rural county chair out there—no one visits them,” Olson told me. “The party does little to help them. The idea is, that population is red and they’re always going to vote red. And I think that’s a mistake.” Robinson told me that he’s been traveling the state for months, meeting local Democratic candidates who have no connection to the state party in Austin. “There are Democratic nominees who were nominated in March that have never been talked to by the Texas Democratic Party,” he said, incredulously. “I cannot express to you my level of frustration that we don’t even reach out to our candidates.”

The conventional wisdom in the party—and part of Hinojosa’s strategy to turn out more liberal voters rather than winning back conservative ones—has long been to focus on the state’s booming urban areas and the fast-growing population of the Valley. But by ignoring rural counties, Olson and Robinson say, the party is effectively surrendering much of the state to the Republican party. Even a small Democratic shift in the rural vote might well have handed Beto O’Rourke the 2018 Senate seat, which he lost by fewer than three percentage points. To his credit, O’Rourke campaigned vigorously in rural counties—and with a centrist message. But with virtually no party footprint in much of the state, there was nobody to turn out the vote for O’Rourke on Election Day. 

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In Hinojosa’s view, the decision to neglect rural areas comes down to funding. “It’s easy to say, well, we should have put more money into rural counties. But when you’re working with limited resources, you have to put it where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck.” But this familiar complaint rings hollow when you consider that Texas Democrats raised and spent a record $200 million in the 2020 campaign. Do Democrats suffer from a lack of money? Or from a fundamentally flawed strategy?   (emphasis mine)

This is a familiar excuse for why the Democrats generally are investing in rural areas--can't achieve economies of scale.  

Here's an interesting paragraph about the Rio Grande Valley in particular, a ruralish and Hispanic region, and why Joe Biden didn't fare well there in 2020: 

Biden’s criticism of the fossil-fuel industry, which powers the Texas economy, also didn’t help, Hinojosa said. Neither did the anti-police backlash after the murder of George Floyd, particularly in South Texas. “There are something like 20,000 Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley,” Hinojosa noted. “They’ve married into the Valley, they have family members in the Valley, they have friends. So when you start talking about defunding the police, people freaked out.”