From the Texas Tribune: After 2018 wake-up call, Texas Republicans were ready to fight back this year

Organization, organization, organization

- Click here for the article.

“I think they thoroughly underestimated the desire to fight and the sophistication of not just the candidates and the consulting class but also these groups who are committed to a conservative agenda,” said Matt Brownfield, a GOP strategist who worked on multiple races in the fight for the state House majority. “They just underestimated us tremendously.”

The Texas Democratic Party spent the cycle touting Texas as the “biggest battleground state,” and while the state attracted battleground-level attention and investment, Democrats ended up with few wins to show for it. President Donald Trump won the state by 6 percentage points, narrower than his 2016 margin but wider than many polls had suggested. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, easily dispatched a late Democratic spending surge and won reelection by 10 points. After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted 10 GOP-held U.S. House seats, Democrats were winning none of them as of Friday. And Democrats’ hopes of flipping the Texas House collapsed, with the balance of power largely unchanged heading into January.

On Tuesday afternoon, the state Democratic Party chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, issued a statement maintaining that the party called Texas the “biggest battleground, not the biggest blue state.”

“We have tough questions to ask ourselves,” Hinojosa said. “There are significant challenges before us, and new solutions are required.”