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Efforts to get out of the vote hampered by the coronavirus pandemic and an 11-hour voter registration for well-funded Republicans thwarted the ambitions of a blue wave in Texas during the 2020 election, according to a new post-mortem that the State Democrats met with the Guardian.
‘The majority of Texans would vote for Democrats in the ballot box. The problem is that Republicans are more likely to come out again, ‘said Hudson Cavanagh, the Texas Democratic Party’s director of computer science, who wrote the report after the election.
Texas aroused excessive buzz last year as an increase in early voting left much of the country wondering if its 38 votes at the Electoral College were finally at stake. Former President Donald Trump still won by more than five points – a much closer presidential contest than any other in recent years, but one that has strengthened Republicans as the dominant party of the state.
Now the Democrats are blaming last fall’s defeat, mainly on programmatic problems, which enabled the Republicans to do their best in an out-of-poll vote. “Texas is still the next frontier,” said Abhi Rahman, the Texas Democrats’ communications director.
Despite a record turnout in 2020, Texas ranked 44th out of 50 states in terms of ballots counted as part of the total voting population, according to the U.S. election project. High Asian voter turnout was a major shift, but “voters were whiter than predicted,” Cavanagh noted in his analysis.
Latinos – considered a major demographic to shift Texas to the left – have also obscured projection projections. But the Republicans from Latino voted at a higher rate than the Democrats in Latino, and the difference in turnout largely created the false impression that the Democrats had lost ground with one of their main blocs, which too often acted as a monolith. merged.
One exception was the Rio Grande Valley, a typical democratic fortress where Latinos at the top of the map drew more to Trump.
While ‘Latino voters still strongly support Democrats’, the party must ’empower Latino votes at the ballot box’, Cavanagh wrote in his report.
In addition to Texas’ reputation as a voter oppression state – based on the requirement of voter IDs, a difficult registration process, ballot restrictions and other barriers – Covid-19 added another barrier to Texas voters in 2020. , while long rows of ingredients that did not have to wear masks threatened exposure to the virus.
“It took a lot of courage for a lot of these Democrats who understand the risk that you, they know, would put themselves in to go to the polls,” Cavanagh told the Guardian. “I’m incredibly proud of the people who did it.”
Amid the public health crisis, Democrats in Texas have decided not to call for voter involvement because “even one life lost is too much,” Cavanagh said. Republicans, on the other hand, have personally linked to eligible voters, a clear advantage in one of the few states where residents still cannot register to vote online.
In the last months before the election, a huge push by Republicans to register new voters removed the gradual advantage that the Democrats had honed for years, especially since almost all of the new Republican registrations turned into net votes.
“Their willingness to put people at risk of winning the election has made it very difficult for us to keep up,” Cavanagh said.
As Democrats turned to virtual registration and telephone banking, they spent too much time with trusted party members who would vote regardless. Similarly, the lack of contact information for young and rural Texans – as well as people of color – and the inability to make canvas make it difficult to make contact with voters who were less likely to come out.
Estimates suggest there are still more than 2 million democratic unregistered voters in the state, and Cavanagh said the party should focus on registering them and then building relationships so they get to the ballot box.
“We know this is how the Democrats are winning across the country,” he said. “We look people in the eye, we tell them our values, we tell them what we believe in, and so we get people to come out.”