Last night in Texas was disappointing, but not surprising.  All statewide races were lost by Dems.  100%.  And the spreads were predictable, all double digit losses but for the race for Ag Commissioner.  Susan Hays lost to the worst Ag Commissioner in Texas history by a mere 7 points.

Who to blame?  Leaving out for now the radical gerrymandering in state and US districts, the statewide blame for this kind of loss lay with the Texas Democratic Party and the candidates it produced, period.  Sure, Republican voter suppression, intimidation, and misinformation shaved 2 or 3 points from turnout, but it didn’t shave over 10.  The TDP did in 2022 what the TDP always does, just expected a different result.  In the governor’s race, the polls here were pretty clear and surprisingly close to actual results.  Real Clear Politics averaged Abbott + 10.4, and he won by 11.  A lot of the blame, too, needs to be laid at Beto’s feet.  He had a promising future when he came within 2 points of Cruz for Senate in 2018, but starting to believe his own bullshit, throwing it all away with his disastrous run for president in 2020.  That was stupid.

The lessons here are clear and need to be learned.  First, the TDP needs a serious housecleaning and fumigation.  Old assumptions need to be thrown out the window, especially the longstanding myth that Texas is getting more blue just because demographics are changing.  GOP messaging and ideology plays well with some groups like the Latino community, especially since the Dems have taken them, and African Americans, for granted for decades.  The party always plays to these demographic groups in voting years and then underserves them until the next election.  That’s got to stop.

I know this is hard to hear, but the GOP in Texas has outplayed, outworked, and out strategized Dems for years, and the asymmetric performance at the polls is the result.  Starting in the 1960s, Repubs went after school boards, precincts, city councils, and county offices.  Over this time they’ve built a huge base with a bench a mile deep.  The Dems have done the opposite; the Dems are every person for themselves until election season, and then try to build a strategy around a standard bearer who elbows their way in, be that for president or governor. (See Barack Obama, 2004 to 2008.)  They then vehemently resist change, leaving petrified party leadership in place for decades, stiff arming all new comers and those with opposing opinions.  Doing this discourages younger leaders because there’s no opportunity for leadership roles and stultifies policy.  What you get then are losers like Beto and Mike Collier.  In Beto’s case, you can’t build a statewide strategy on a standard bearer who acts like a teenager and says stupid shit in public.  Lastly, and this is not just a Texas problem, is that the Democratic party needs to stop counting noses.  I’ve been to meetings where the majority of the time is spent doing math to make sure every possible demographic is in the room before the meeting can start.  I’m not saying the party needs to be less inclusive; I’m saying the time for inclusivity is at the beginning, not at the end. There needs to be an obsessive focus on inclusion of demographic groups at the micro local level, not only at state conventions and statewide campaigns.  Being inclusive at the start would negate the necessity of nose counting at the end.

The textbook example of party failure in 2022 is not Beto, it’s Rochelle Garza.  Dems overwhelmingly chose Garza and rejected a very experienced and well known attorney, Joe Jaworski.  Let’s be frank – Ken Paxton is a deeply flawed, dishonest, embarrassing, and weak AG.  He was ripe to be picked off.  The Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by overwhelmingly nominating a less experienced, less well known candidate who didn’t have a prayer of beating Paxton; her nomination was a vote for diversity, not for a win.  Another example was Lupe Valdez in 2018.  Dems overwhelmingly chose her as the standard bearer over Andrew White, son of former governor Mark White.  Valdez ran a terrible campaign, had low name recognition, and then lost to Abbott by over 13 points.

Before you say it, I am actually all about diversity and inclusion.  But diversity and inclusion doesn’t get you a goddam thing unless you WIN.  Not winning has a lot worse negative consequences than winning every time.  The TDP (and all Dems) can actually do more than one thing at a time.  They need to be strategic, not just inclusive, because what the Dems are doing, and have been doing for decades, is a loser.  I know this opinion, just like the one I hold about Hillary, will piss a lot of you off, and I accept that.  But until the Texas Democratic Party and Dems in general start operating strategically they’ll keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.  And we all know what that’s called.  Until they start working strategically, there will be no joy in Mudville.

Oh, and Beto?  I love ‘ya, bro, but please go back to El Paso. Run for mayor or even the House again. Do some maturing.  You’ll have another chance at some point, but you need some years of growing up.

Welp, I don’t like it, but Beto’s campaign probably ended today before it even started.  Reuters has published a story that he was involved as a teenager with a computer hacking group, Cult of the Dead Cow, which was selling tools to hack into Microsoft Windows machines.  Members of the group kept his involvement secret during his Senate run, but have now spilled the beans.  Beto acknowledged the truth of the story today, admitting that his involvement “…was not anything that I’m proud of today.” Dems will instantly throw him overboard by Monday.

I know, I know, he was a teenager, blah, blah, but I can see the RNC commercials now, and all I can hear right now is Ol’ Dandy Don: