Reeling Texas Democrats Get a Rare Sight: Their National Chair

Defeats across the once solidly blue Rio Grande Valley. Shrinking margins in big Democratic cities like Houston and Dallas. Lost seats in the State House.

The drubbing that Texas Democrats took in the 2024 election was bad enough to leave any party stalwart feeling deflated. After all, a yearslong belief that demographic shifts, population growth and rapid urbanization had Democrats on the cusp of flipping the nation’s most populous Republican state was seemingly in tatters after November.

Yet the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, made Texas one of the first stops this week on his first swing through the country. And the message he carried was the opposite: Texas, the second-largest state, could still be a linchpin for the national party’s revival.

“The future of the Democratic Party runs through Texas,” Mr. Martin said in an interview in Houston, pointing to national shifts in population away from Democratic coastal strongholds and toward the South. “We are here right now to start laying down the foundation.”

Mr. Martin spoke on Wednesday between meetings with local Democratic activists — hearing about the need for year-round investments in campaign infrastructure — in the same Houston hotel where Senator Ted Cruz celebrated his re-election victory over a well-funded, well-regarded Democratic challenger, Colin Allred, just a few months earlier.

Texas remains a tall hill for Democrats to climb, so Mr. Martin’s pitch this week says as much about the party’s struggles nationally as it does about its hopes for flipping the state. With once solidly Democratic states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania now competitive, and population continuing to shift toward the Sun Belt, Democrats need to cultivate new ground.

For now, that ground does not seem particularly fertile in Texas. Republicans control all branches of state government, a Democrat has not been elected to statewide office since 1994, and the party has shown few signs of being able to organize effectively across a vast and expensive state.

Demographics were once seen as political destiny in Texas, where a plurality of residents now are Hispanic. The state has five of the nation’s 15 largest cities — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth — and its population has been growing more diverse. Those trends, Democrats believed, would eventually shift Texas from red to blue.

But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Instead, Hispanic voters in traditional Democratic strongholds have shifted rightward, and in the last election, many Democratic voters in cities simply stayed home.

Vice President Kamala Harris received more than 400,000 fewer votes in Texas in 2024 than Joseph R. Biden Jr. did in 2020, even though the state’s population grew by about 2 million in those four years. President Trump’s vote total in Texas grew by 500,000.

“Cycle after cycle,” Democrats are “sold this dream that it will flip,” said Delilah Agho-Otoghile, the executive director of Texas Future Project, which works with progressive donors on strategies for investing in the state.

“The way we lost in November provides an inflection point that didn’t exist before,” she said, adding that Democrats need hard work and campaign investments, not any natural trend in the voter base, to change their fortunes.

Despite the rough defeat in 2024, demographics — specifically the shifting patterns of where Americans live — continue to fuel the Democrats’ dogged interest in Texas, which could gain four or more House seats after the 2030 census. Mr. Martin and others have argued that Democrats need to become much more competitive in Texas, as well as in places like Georgia, North Carolina and even Missouri, where Mr. Martin also traveled this week.

“We have to be present,” he said of his party. “We have to give people a sense that we actually give a damn about their lives, and not just about their vote.”

Texas Democrats are still debating exactly what went wrong in the last election, and what needs to be done in response. Early efforts have not gone smoothly.

In the immediate aftermath of the November loss, the head of the state party, Gilberto Hinojosa, suggested that Democrats should take more moderate positions on social issues, particularly when it came to transgender rights.

He faced immediate pushback, and then apologized. Soon after, he said he would not run for re-election.

In the race to replace him as party leader, candidates have offered an array of approaches but a common theme: the Democratic Party has lost touch with its working-class base.

“We forgot about people who are marginalized, who are the underdogs,” said Steve Miller, a pastor from the East Texas town of Henderson who is seeking the post.

Democratic activists conceded that the party had done a poor job organizing in 2024, especially among Hispanic voters. As a result, the Democrats lost many once-solidly blue counties in South Texas.

“We have to be honest about the fact that we didn’t do any work in South Texas,” said another candidate, Lillie Schechter, a former chair of the Democratic Party in Harris County, which includes Houston. “The Republicans have a year-round office down there, and we have nothing.”

As an indication of the gap, the Texas Democratic Party has filled just under 3,000 positions for precinct chair — a kind of elected local party organizer. Republicans have filled more than 4,200 such positions.

Tania Gonzalez-Ingram, a Democratic organizer who managed the re-election campaign in South Texas of Representative Vicente Gonzalez, who won narrowly in November, said that part of the party’s problem stemmed from Democrats nationally sticking to messages about abortion and immigration, in the belief that those issues would resonate with Hispanic voters.

“I’m not the queen of all Latinos, but socially, we are not progressive,” Ms. Gonzalez-Ingram said. “We are seeing Latinos moving toward the Republican Party because they are the ones having the conversations about money,”

Beto O’Rourke, a former El Paso congressman whose boisterous, hopeful Senate campaign in 2018 nearly unseated Mr. Cruz, considered entering the race to lead the Texas Democratic Party.

But after several weeks spent talking to elected officials, candidates and party members, he said in an interview, “it wasn’t clear that we were aligned.” So he decided against running.

“From my perspective, this is not rocket science, it is common sense, and Democrats have lost their common sense,” said Mr. O’Rourke, seated in the living room of his El Paso home. “You’ve got to listen to people. Their concerns have to be yours.”

Despite Democrats’ defeats, including his own, Mr. O’Rourke echoed the message of the Democratic Party chairman, Mr. Martin, that Texas was more “essential” than ever.

“I really don’t see a path to the White House for a Democrat, 2032 and beyond, without Texas,” he said. “We have no choice but to figure it out.”

For years, it appeared that Democrats were making gains in the state. The party was closing the gap in presidential elections, and in 2018, during a wave of opposition to Republicans during President Trump’s first term, Mr. O’Rourke’s race to unseat Mr. Cruz fell short by fewer than three percentage points.

Along the way, the Democratic Party was cutting into the Republican advantage in the Texas legislature. A wave of energetic new Democratic state representatives won office in 2018. And then President Biden came within 6 points of winning the state in 2020.

Change in Texas seemed close at hand.

But it was not: Mr. O’Rourke ran for governor in 2022 and was defeated. Democrats lost seats in the State House last year. Ms. Harris lost Texas to Mr. Trump by more than 13 percentage points.