It's Election Season, So Suddenly Everyone Is A F*cking Expert In Texas Politics

Debunking the loudest wrong opinions in the Lone Star State, one hot take at a time.

It’s election season in Texas, which means every co-worker and classmate you’ve never spoken to and every rando online with 58 followers has a dissertation ready on “Why Texas can’t flip this year,” “Democrats in Texas aren’t on a winning trajectory,” or “Such-and-so candidate needs to appeal to Republicans to win.”

Let me tell you, they’re full of shit. Most of them, anyway.

I don’t know if it’s because of decades of conservative talk radio normalized hot-take certainty, it’s the Dunning–Kruger effect, or just because Texas’ culture of DIY individualism makes everyone feel personally deputized, but every election turns half the state into self-appointed strategists who couldn’t tell a runoff from a rodeo.

But most of the time, they get it wrong. Does that mean that I’m THE expert? No, absolutely not. I’m just a girl with a decades-long hyper-obsession who’s been crunching numbers, dissecting voting data, and mainlining campaign finance reports while everyone else was arguing on Facebook.

Gina Hinojosa’s campaign announcement yesterday has garnered significant attention from both Texas media and national mainstream media. The overwhelming response has been positive. Hinojosa has been the only Democratic gubernatorial candidate to get national media attention upon announcement, and the only one Greg Abbott has responded to by name so far.

So, knowing me (naturally), I’ve been reading all of the comment sections in all of the news articles and eavesdropping on all of the social media discussions, and wouldn’t you know, it’s expert season once again.

In honor of the election expert season once again being upon us, I think there are some so-called expert “opinions” we need to debunk early on. Oh yes, and we’re bringing receipts. Save these rebuttals, memorize them, and get ready to regurgitate them the next time a so-called expert throws them at you.

DEBUNKED: Wendy Davis lost in 2014, and Lupe Valdez lost in 2018; therefore, Texas isn’t ready to elect a woman as Governor.

First of all, anyone saying this obviously doesn’t have “Ann Richards” in their regular vernacular, but we can overlook that. The 1990s were a long time ago, and Texas has changed a lot since then. Let’s talk about those two races and why their losses had nothing to do with them being women.

In 2014, Wendy Davis’ campaign was basically a barrage of incoherent messaging. She ran on the heels of her abortion filibuster, then omitted it from her launch story; she distanced herself from the abortion issue completely, only to drop a memoir containing her own abortion story right before the election. On guns, at first she came out in favor of more firearm restrictions, then flip-flopped in favor of open carry.

Now, if y’all remember 2014 in Texas, Obama was super unpopular, and Wendy Davis embraced Obama’s endorsement, which didn’t help her. Then some misteps pissed even Democrats off, like airing a TV ad with an empty wheelchair.

By the time election day rolled around, the average everyday voter didn’t know if Davis was a progressive, a centrist, or an out-of-touch elitist.

On top of all that, because of Obama’s sinking unpopularity in Texas and the rising Tea Party movement, the Democratic Party’s infrastructure was not yet capable of material change. Texas was a hostile political environment for blue, and Wendy Davis’ campaign was full of failures. Even if it wasn’t, in 2014, it might not have still been enough.

In 2018, Lupe Valdez’s campaign was very different, if you even remember that campaign at all. While Valdez made history as the first openly gay and openly Latina nominee, she really struggled to maintain a competitive statewide campaign.

Valdez began with low name recognition right off the start. No one knew who she was outside of Dallas. Then she only raised $222,000, compared to Greg Abbott’s $28.9 million. Perhaps due to financial constraints, she ran a weak statewide campaign. It just never generated the coverage in Houston, Austin, or other parts of the state. I would argue that her wins that year were mainly due to Beto carrying the ticket.

The State Party was under previous leadership at that point, and for whatever reason, they completely ignored this race. I don’t know why. Maybe limited resources. In the long run, Valdez didn’t have the money, the infrastructure, or the name recognition to run a race of that magnitude, let alone win.

So, as you can see, comparing Gina Hinojosa’s race to Wendy Davis or Lupe Valdez doesn’t make a lick of sense. We’re in different times, the party is under different leadership, the makeup of the state is completely different, Hinojosa isn’t unknown, and she’ll do fine in fundraising.

DEBUNKED: Texas isn’t ready to turn blue.

How do you know?

The problem in Texas isn’t that too many voters are voting red; it’s that too many voters just aren’t voting. Check it out. The last four elections:

I created the spreadsheet using data directly from the Secretary of State’s website.

Let’s look at the last two midterm elections (since we’re going into another midterm). In 2022, 54.15% of registered voters stayed home. In 2018, 46.99% of registered voters stayed home. Do you know what that says?

It says Texas has a turnout problem, not a Republican problem.

And all these butt-heads walking around here saying, “Texas isn’t ready to turn blue,” or “Texas won’t turn blue this year,” are sowing discontent in all the non-political people, who don’t read data, who will say to themselves, “Whelp, I’m not going to vote this year, because Texas isn’t going to turn blue anyway.”

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we do it to ourselves by making assumptions instead of just making sure EVERYONE gets to the polls.

In 2018, when Beto ran, we hit 53%, and Democrats overperformed. If we see something similar this year, with a turnout of 55% or greater, Democrats could see wins up and down the ballot.

Texas is ready to turn blue; it’s been ready to turn blue. It just needs people to start believing that and make their voices heard at the polls.

DEBUNKED: Democrats need to pander to Republicans and moderate Independents to win in Texas.

I’m not even sure how this one got started, and it’s surprising it isn’t simply debunked by glancing back at the long line of failing campaigns that tried this strategy. On the contrary, lessons from other red-to-purple states suggest that Democrats can capture statewide offices by energizing and expanding their base rather than diluting progressive values.

Look at Beto’s 2018 race. Honestly, if you’re running a statewide race in Texas, or even a district race, Beto’s 2018 race should be your blueprint. He ran as an unapologetically pro-immigrant, pro-civil rights progressive. He energized new voters across Texas and came within 2.6 percentage points of unseating Cruz. Record turnout in Tarrant County. He embraced racial justice and healthcare expansion. Beto proved that a progressive Democrat in Texas can narrow the GOP advantage by expanding the electorate.

Then look at Lina Hidalgo’s election success in Harris County in 2018 and 2022. She championed criminal justice reform and public health (hardly conservative talking points) and won by driving up Democratic base turnout in Houston.

Texas is a historically non-voter state, but many of these non-voters are from demographics that lean Democratic (young people, low-income individuals, and minorities). Energizing the party’s base voters can yield far more net votes than chasing the relatively small number of actual swing voters in Texas.

Texas isn’t a red state, it’s a non-voting state. And if we change that, we change everything.

Texas Democrats haven’t lost because we’re too red or too progressive, or because we run women.

We lose because too many people believe the lie that their vote doesn’t matter, that change is impossible, that Democrats have to sound like Republicans to survive. None of that’s true.

We’ve seen what happens when Texans actually show up. 2018 proved it, Harris County proves it every cycle, and you can feel it bubbling up again. The numbers are there. The people are there. The energy is there. What’s missing is belief.

If Democrats stop talking about what’s “not possible” and start acting like this state belongs to ALL OF US, Texas will flip faster than anyone expects. So register your neighbors, drag your cousins to the polls, and remind every “expert” you meet that this state changes when Texans decide to change it.

Because Texas doesn’t need saving, it needs showing up.

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