Texas Republicans face tough 2020 election after a rocky 12 months
Some Texas Republicans have a blunter assessment. George Seay, a Dallas businessman and longtime Texas GOP fundraiser, said the state is becoming more competitive earlier than it should be because Texas Republicans, much like the Democrats who controlled the state before them, became "fat, happy, lazy and bored" as well as consumed by internecine feuding.
Texas is a battleground state and we can pick up some congressional seats and flip control of the Texas state house
"I think that if Democrats are successful, it wont be because Texas suddenly got really liberal," Seay said. "It will be because normal Texans who dont pay attention to this will be sick and tired of Republican mediocrity at best."
The month-to-month distractions started with the secret recording scandal that forced Bonnen into retirement and sidelined a speaker who was set to play a leading role in defending the House GOP majority. Bookending the period was the convention, which the party struggled mightily to pull off virtually after its all-out push for an in-person gathering failed in the courts. But in between, public relations nightmares persisted a state representative who complained his primary challengers were running against him because they were Asian, a spate of county party chairs who spread conspiracy theories about George Floyds death on Facebook, a podcast outtake in which staffers for the hard-right group Empower Texans joked about Abbotts wheelchair use and disparaged him with profanity....
In three of the seats the DCCC is working to flip, Democrats already have vastly more cash on hand than their Republican opponents, two of whom had to get through runoffs. In one extreme case the 22nd Congressional District Democratic nominee Sri Preston Kulkarni has more than 40 times cash on hand than the GOP's candidate, Troy Nehls.
The most consequential down-ballot fight, however, is for the Texas House, where Democrats are nine seats away from the majority. Republicans are hoping to flip back some of the 12 seats they lost in 2018, but even then, Democrats are working with a wide offensive battlefield, targeting at least the 17 seats where Republicans won by single digits in 2018.