DNC Funds Voter Registration In Texas Amid Complaints About National Investment

The Democratic National Committee announced Friday that it will be funding a full-time voter registration director position in Texas, fulfilling a grant request from the Texas Democratic Party as it prepares for what is expected to be a bruising midterm election cycle.

Texas Democrats’ new voter registration director will focus on expanding the electorate in Texas, targeting Black, Latino and young Texan voters in particular.

“The DNC is proud to be able to provide ongoing support for the Texas Democratic Party’s work including new funding for a voter registration director,” DNC political director Alana Mounce said in a statement. “We are excited to see the critical organizing they will do to bring new voters into the fold ahead of this year’s elections.”

The investment adds to the DNC’s existing monthly contribution of $12,500 to the Texas Democratic Party — and all state parties — which is an increase of $2,500 from the monthly payment amount in the 2020 election cycle.

The DNC insists that the grant to the Texas Democratic Party was in the works for some time, but the announcement follows complaints about a lack of investment in Texas voter outreach by national Democrats in general, and the DNC in particular.

In an interview with HuffPost last week, Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, lamented the lack of financial support from the DNC and other national party organs.

Specifically, Hinojosa worried about a mismatch between Republican and Democratic investment in South Texas, where former President Donald Trump made inroads in 2020. The GOP is seeking to build on that momentum.

“There is really one big issue,” Hinojosa said. “The national party needs to decide they want to spend some money in South Texas. And that’s why we’re having problems in terms of a lot of the messaging down here.”

“We’re not getting a penny from the DNC to counter some of the [Republican National Committee] stuff here,” he added. “And I have asked repeatedly.”

HuffPost reached out to Hinojosa again on Thursday, seeking his reaction to news of the grant for the voter registration director.

“I thank them for the $55,000,” he said.

Hinojosa went on to say that he meant to direct his criticism toward national Democrats more broadly, rather than just the DNC. He argued that if even two-thirds of the 2 million unregistered Texas voters with a Democratic-leaning demographic profile ended up voting for Democrats once they registered, it would turn Texas blue and upend the national political landscape for years to come.

“We are down to the point where this is a very doable thing,” he said.

Hinojosa’s frustrations are part of a broader debate about how to both build on Democratic gains in the suburbs of Texas’ major metropolitan areas and ensure that Trump’s improved performance in heavily Latino parts of South Texas in 2020 was a fluke rather than a harbinger of a new trend.

On the one hand, Texas Democrats reached new heights in the 2018 midterm elections. That cycle, Democrat Beto O’Rourke came within 3 percentage points of unseating GOP Sen. Ted Cruz. Democrats also flipped two U.S. House seats in the Dallas and Houston suburbs, contributing to the party’s takeover of the House.

But in the 2020 election cycle, when President Joe Biden held Trump to a narrower margin than in many Midwestern states where Democrats invested more heavily, Democrats failed to deliver on hopes of flipping the state House or picking up additional congressional seats.

In addition, Trump’s gains in heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley and other South Texas border regions where turnout shot up stoked fears that the GOP was gaining traction with some Latino voters who make up part of the Democratic base in the state. For example, in Zapata County, where voter turnout jumped by nearly 6 percentage points, Trump went from receiving 33% of the vote in 2016 to winning the country with 52% of the vote in 2020.

With rare exceptions, such as the mayoralty of McAllen, Trump’s gains did not translate into Republican gains lower down on the ballot.

But Republicans, eager to show they could erode Democratic appeal in the party’s traditional Latino base, responded by doubling down on their outreach to these voters.

The Texas GOP succeeded in convincing state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a conservative Latino Democrat in South Texas, to become a Republican in November.

And the Republican National Committee has opened five community centers in Texas to improve its communication with Latino and Asian American voters, part of what it says is a multimillion-dollar investment in outreach to those groups.

Tellingly, the RNC decided to locate its Texas community centers not only in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, but also in Laredo and McAllen, two historically Democratic cities on the U.S.-Mexico border. Each center is assigned a permanent paid staff member charged with recruiting volunteers, increasing voter contact, and getting out the vote, according to the RNC.

When HuffPost visited the RNC’s community center at a strip mall in Laredo on primary election day this week, the office was closed to the public and empty. The RNC subsequently told HuffPost that the center’s dedicated staffer and volunteers were busy phone-banking, canvassing and getting out the vote that day.

“Our community thrives under Republican leadership, which is why so many Hispanics are ditching the Democrats and voting for Republicans,” RNC communications director Danielle Alvarez told HuffPost in a statement. “The grassroots enthusiasm for Republicans, coupled with our permanent ground game and multimillion dollar investments to grow our party will deliver Republican majorities come November.”

The clearest opportunity for Republicans to show that their gains in South Texas are more than a Trump-fueled flash in the pan is in a series of potentially competitive U.S. House districts.

The National Republican Congressional Committee — the U.S. House GOP’s campaign arm — is hoping to flip Texas’ 15th, 34th and 28th congressional districts.

But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the NRCC’s Democratic counterpart, has only pegged the newly open 15th District as a seat where the party has a serious fight on its hands. The Texas GOP redrew Texas’ 15th Congressional District such that it went from being a seat where Biden had won narrowly to a seat where Trump won narrowly. The redistricting, which also put Texas 15th Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s home into the neighboring 34th District, prompted Gonzalez, a Democrat, to run in the more Democratic-leaning 34th instead. In the 28th District, scandal-marred Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) now faces a primary runoff in May against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros.

The DCCC already has two permanent staff members on the ground in the 15th, and plans to open its headquarters in the McAllen-centric district in the coming months.

“Democrats aren’t taking anything for granted in South Texas and we’re putting in the work earlier than ever before,” DCCC spokesperson Monica Robinson told HuffPost. “The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s organizing investment will build critical relationships between Democrats and Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley.”

Part of the challenge for Democrats, however, is that party insiders and activists disagree about both the scale of its attrition among Latino voters in South Texas, and the causes of the problem. The Democratic primary in Texas’ 28th exemplifies this phenomenon: Cuellar argues that his socially conservative views have helped keep the seat blue, and Cisneros maintains that the economically challenged region’s voters are hungry for new leadership and bold solutions.

After the 2020 presidential election, Hinojosa blamed the Biden campaign and the DCCC for strongly discouraging door-to-door canvassing in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. As vaccinations became available and the severity of the pandemic waned, the national party abandoned its aversion to canvassing.

Hinojosa and other local Democrats also concede that the GOP has succeeded in tying mainstream Democrats to left-wing positions on immigration policy, clean energy, and defunding the police that are unpopular in many parts of South Texas.

“When you talk about Latinos, don’t put them in a certain box. They are good on a lot of the Democratic value issues like education, access to health care, higher education,” said Hinojosa, a Rio Grande Valley native. “Down here in the [Rio Grande] Valley, they don’t take the normal [liberal] position on immigration.”

The answer he suggested is not for national Democrats to veer to the right, but for them to sink resources into explaining their more popular positions to South Texas voters and correcting the record when necessary.

Sylvia Bruni, chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Webb County, where Laredo is located, echoed Hinojosa’s sentiments. She encouraged Biden to visit the U.S.-Mexico border to help push back on Republican talking points about undocumented immigrants flooding the region.

“We’ve got [Texas Lt. Gov.] Dan Patrick, we’ve got the chair of the Zapata County GOP complaining about how they’re being overrun [by immigrants] and Biden isn’t doing anything,” Bruni said. “And I’m thinking, where are we? Where’s the rebuttal? There’s no rebuttal.”