One of the biggest pet peeves my better half has is when people complain about stuff. but never offer any constructive suggestions. It occurred to me that in my last little rant I mentioned that the Texas Democratic Party has been a dumpster fire over the past two and a half decades. So, I am offering a few suggestions to the party in case they are listening.

Craft a Consistent Message

The GOP does a few things well. The main thing they do well is repeat their message ad nauseum. How many times have we complained about their obsession about transkids using the wrong bathroom, wanting to play girls sports, or Hunter’s laptop. It’s all about distracting you from stuff we don’t want you to see. It is all about working you into a frenzy. Hell, they spent five decades trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. It took a long time but it worked. We can do the same thing.

Could you imagine if we could muster an anti-assault weapon message and keep sustaining it over years? If all you did is link the GOP and our state reps to gun violence and gun deaths then you’d go a long way. This is where strategy comes into play. We care about a lot of things. That’s good, but that’s not good for elective politics. If you care about twelve different things then you really don’t care about anything. If you care about one or two things and repeat that message over and over again you have a fighting chance.

Avoid the Labels

Most Texans are not progressive. At least they don’t label themselves that way. Usually when you describe a policy or idea they buy in even if it is a progressive idea. For the love of everything good and holy, please avoid catch phrases. Stuff like “defund the police” isn’t going to win elections. All it does it give the GOP more fodder. If you describe it then you have a fighting chance. It should go without saying but we cannot step too far away from the center in this state. I can’t speak for anywhere else, but when you start talking gun confiscation or anything else that sounds radical you’ve lost. That is why Beto got his ass beat. Too many people saw him as extreme.

Run your best

It drives me absolutely nuts when Democrats run people for statewide office that no one has ever heard of. It’s what I loved about Howard Dean when he ran the DNC. He had the 50 state strategy where you contested every election in every state. On a national level it might swing one state, but as we have seen in recent elections, one state can make a huge difference. At the state level it might be a handful of legislators. It might be a few percentage points here or there. When you run prominent people that can both repeat a message and offer a realistic alternative then you have a chance.

Every year, Texas Monthly publishes their Bum Steer Awards, naming the worst of the worst statewide.  It’s not a list anyone wants to make, much be Bum Steer of the Year.  Past winners include an ugly cast of characters like Dick Cheney, Rick Perry, Jerry Jones, and none other than 3 time winner Tom DeLay.  Ugh.

The 2021 Bum Steer Awards came out last night and the Bum Steer of the Year? None other than our own Texas Democratic Party; management of the Salon agrees.  Worse, they beat out COVID-19 and Ken Paxton for Worst Honors.  In granting the award, Texas Monthly had some choice words like these:

“Since 1992, their fortunes have been in decline, and since 2002 they’ve been kept at arm’s length from control of both the Texas House and the Texas Senate, as well as from the Governor’s Mansion and any other statewide office. The party has a long history of launching failed comeback attempts, but all of them have either failed disastrously or come up short in a way that seems designed to demolish morale and crush hopes.”

The TDP is a textbook example of insanity – for 30 years, they’ve done the same thing over and over, with the same consultants, same party officials, and same pecking order. The results in each cycle have been predictably disastrous.  There was a bright spot in 2018 when Beto came close to taking out Cruz, and it was so close it felt like a win to Texas Dems.  It was still a loss, though, but the TDP didn’t take it to that way.  Magical thinking once again set in, and here we went for 2020.  Beto even got WAY out in front of himself, thinking that an also ran for Senate qualified him to run for President.  THAT was stupid.

Democratic politics in Texas is a lot like golf…you hack your way from water to rough to bunker, but then on the 16th hole, you hit that beautiful lofted draw that lands the ball softly right in the center of the green.  Then you 4 putt the hole for a double bogey. On 17, you hit it in the water again, and on 18 you lose your ball out of bounds.  BUT, that beautiful shot on 16 keeps you coming back time after time.

In 2020, the TDP kept going for that great shot, but because of the euphoria over Trump’s waning influence in Texas, they got over confident, believed the polls, and then couldn’t get the ball off the tee.  Dems have believed for decades that turnout is everything, fantasizing that new voters will automatically vote for them; but that certainly didn’t work this year.  The Biden campaign didn’t spend as much time or money here that they should have, and the state party didn’t stick to fundamentals, especially in South Texas.  South Texas is one of those areas where politics are extremely local and it requires a lot of contact and money to get the turnout and then to get those turning out to vote for Dems.  With the elimination of straight ticket voting it requires even more contact not less.

Dems here assumed that Trump was such an idiot that people would do the right thing and automatically vote against him and other Republicans.  But it didn’t happen that way.  Sure, way more people turned out, and many voted for Biden, but down ticket they stuck to the familiar.  On top of the bumbling and overconfidence, the TDP swatted away all opinions that disagreed with the statewide lack of focus and scattergun approach.

The result was predictable to anyone who was objective.  The TDP lost 8 out of 9 targeted state house races that were winnable, lost the Senate race, lost a House seat, and got pummeled in the Railroad Commission race despite $2.6 million cash injection from Bloomberg.  They gained one seat in the state Senate but none in the state House.  What this means is that, once again, the GOP will control redistricting AGAIN, and will continue their radical gerrymandering started by DeLay in 2002.

Once again, the TDP did what the TDP always does – pour money into the pockets of the same losing consultants, with the same losing strategies, lost focus, and shot way too high without playing the ground game that the GOP has down so well.  And they got rewarded for all that bungling by getting slaughtered at the ballot box and now slaughtered by Texas Monthly.

It was well deserved.

Ya’ll, I am at the SDEC meeting in Austin today.  This afternoon all five candidates for DNC chair will speak.  I’m headed to it because I want to hear what they plan to do about party building.

For the past 8 years the DNC has been a miserable disgusting failure at party building.  We have lost all the gains we made with Democratic governors and state houses.  What good does it do us to have the presidency when we lose both houses of congress for a stalemate and then face states with Republican governors and state house who won’t impliment programs we somehow manage to get passed?

The DNC doesn’t need tweaking.  It needs a bonfire. As we should have learned by now, dammit, money alone won’t win anything if you are spending that money with consultants who haven’t learned any new tricks since Elvis died.

I will take good notes but you probably won’t hear from me tonight because Ole Bubba and I are going to Marble Falls to see the Christmas lights.