Here’s What It Takes for a Democrat to Win in Texas

Contrary to what Democratic elites think is conventional wisdom, Representative Jasmine Crockett is not just a viable candidate for the Texas US Senate race next year—she’s the strongest one. Pundits and Democratic politicians haved failed to appreciate her potential, clinging instead to outdated theories about “moderate candidates” and mythical Republican “crossover voters.”

But the path to flipping Texas has already been illuminated: most notably by Beto O’Rourke’s near-miss in 2018 and, more recently, by Zohran Mamdani’s stunning ascent to victory in New York City.

The closest any Democrat has come to winning statewide in Texas over the past three decades was O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign, when he lost by just 2.6 points, falling just 215,000 votes short. O’Rourke’s unapologetic progressivism—his courage to staunchly defend NFL players protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem—separated him from the pack and attracted support from across the country.

His campaign demonstrated that inspiring, galvanizing leadership resonates in diverse states with large populations of voters of color. This same dynamic propelled Stacey Abrams within a hair’s breadth of the Georgia governorship and Andrew Gillum to a near-win in Florida in 2018. The pattern is clear: bold, progressive candidates who refuse to run from their values come closest to victory in these former slave-holding states.

What too many political strategists fail to understand is that Texas is a majority-minority state. People of color are 61 percent of the population and 51 percent of eligible voters. The challenge in Texas is not changing the minds of conservative voters but tackling the low levels of voter participation among communities of color. While not all people of color in Texas are Democrats, the upside is considerable in those communities in light of Republican hostility to racial justice and inequality. Most applicable to Crockett’s candidacy is the fact that O’Rourke won the support of 89 percent of Black Americans and 64 percent of Latinos, according to exit polling data. In that 2018 contest between O’Rourke and Ted Cruz, 5 million eligible people of color did not cast ballots.

The pattern has persisted in the intervening years. While more than two-thirds of eligible white voters participated in 2024, only 44 percent of eligible Latino voters turned out, while 1.5 million Black Texas residents did not cast ballots.

The formula for a Crockett victory lies in following the path blazed by O’Rourke, while increasing the intensive GOTV work necessary to close that gap with voters of color. Texas is not exactly a conservative state; it’s a nonvoting state. Case in point: If every eligible Texan had voted in 2020, Joe Biden would have defeated Trump, based on exit poll data showing how each racial group voted.

A logical and promising starting point for closing Beto’s 215,000 vote gap lies in massive mobilization of Black Texas residents, who, clear-eyed about the Republican Party’s hostility to racial justice and its reliance on stoking white racial resentment, historically vote more than 90 percent for Democratic nominees. As Stacey Abrams showed in 2018 and Barack Obama 10 years before that, when you have a candidate who comes from and speaks authentically to the Black community, you can efficiently and effectively attract hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls.

Unfortunately, many in the Democratic establishment are drawing precisely the wrong lessons from recent elections. They point to moderate candidates like Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger as proof that centrist politics are the path to power, while dismissing Mamdani’s New York victory as irrelevant to other contests.

This analysis ignores crucial context. Virginia’s Democratic success over the past decade stems from the voter registration and mobilization work of organizations like New Virginia Majority, which dramatically changed the composition of the electorate. Democrats have won 10 of the last 12 statewide elections there because they built a multiracial progressive majority, not because they ran away from progressive values. And, notably, while Virginia did elect the relatively moderate Spanberger as governor, they also elevated the very progressive Ghazala Hashmi as lieutenant governor, making her the first Muslim elected to statewide office anywhere in the nation.