Off the Kuff

The Chron looks at candidates running in districts they are highly unlikely to win. I have a few thoughts.

Kristin Hook

In the 2022 election, a Houston Chronicle analysis found only about 5% of Texans lived in districts with competitive races for the U.S. House, Texas House or Texas Senate that were decided by a margin of seven percentage points or less.

Before the latest round of redistricting, 20 of the state’s 150 state House seats were competitive, the analysis found. After the maps changed, there are now only three. None of the state’s 38 congressional races are now considered competitive and just one state Senate race was close in 2022.

Election experts say that Texas’ political maps, especially the Congressional districts, are among the most gerrymandered in the nation. And it means most of the state and federal races on the ballot in Texas offer voters a choice only on paper.

The lack of competition can make it a tough sell to get candidates to run in districts where they face such long odds; campaigns are hard work, involving long hours and sometimes awkward solicitations for money or support.

[…]

Kristin Hook, a Democrat running in the Hill County, is counting on the district’s booming population to lean left, as people move there from Austin and San Antonio because of rising housing costs.

She block walks every week night for up to four hours in the district she’s hoping to win over from U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a second-term Republican.

On a cloudy September evening, Hook knocked on doors at a tidy garden-style apartment complex in San Antonio’s Alamo Heights. She started each conversation by asking: “What issues matter most to you this election year?”

“Probably abortion for sure, that’s the one I’m worried about,” said Rylie Williams, 21. Williams was on FaceTime with her mom when she met Hook; her mom chimed in, yelling “Vote Democrat!” through the phone speaker.

“I’m your daughter’s future congresswoman and I’m here to restore our reproductive rights,” Hook says. “I’m actually a reproductive biologist.”

Hook, who has a Ph.D. in animal science and worked for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and at the National Institutes of Health in D.C., moved back to Texas a few months before the fall of Roe vs. Wade.

At a protest at the state Capitol, Hook bumped into Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood, who thanked her for moving back to Texas. “So I thought, how can I be of help?” Hook recalled.

She faces long odds against Roy, a conservative known for his hardline stance on reducing federal spending and securing the border. In 2020, former state senator and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis raised $13 million in her campaign against Roy and lost by nearly 7 points. Two years later, after redistricting , Roy’s Democratic challenger lost by more than 25 points.

So far, Hook has raised only $355,000 to Roy’s $2.2 million. Roy didn’t respond to an interview request.

“I know that the odds are stacked against me,” Hook said. “But I also know that our district has changed a lot.”

Hook’s campaign haul so far is actually pretty impressive, regardless of how it stacks up to Roy’s amassed cash. CD21 is not going to flip, but she has the resources to run a legitimate campaign and generate some turnout, perhaps doing well enough to put CD21 on the map for 2026 or 2028. I sent an email to her campaign to ask for an interview, but haven’t heard back.

There is an objective reason to want to have candidates like Hook in other districts. Mother Jones spells it out.

Last May, Cathy Kott, a resident of rural north Georgia, received a text from an unknown number. “We’re looking for Democrats who would be willing to run against State Representative Jason Ridley,” the message read. “If you’re interested or know anybody who is, call me.”

The sender was Bob Herndon, a longtime political operative in Georgia. Herndon had been involved in recruiting Democrats to run for office for years—efforts he says were often chaotic and generally too little, too late.

Herndon decided to do something about it after the 2020 elections, when President Joe Biden won Georgia by the slimmest of margins and the state sent two Democratic senators to Washington—and Herndon realized that Democrats running unwinnable local races could help the party in higher-profile contests. It’s a theory called ‘reverse coattails’—rather than the top of the ticket driving turnout, local races help bring voters to the polls, to the benefit of the presidential nominee or statewide candidates.

There’s data to back up the strategy. Run for Something, a national organization which supports grassroots progressive candidates, analyzed precinct-level election returns in eight states and found that President Joe Biden did better in 2020 in conservative districts where a local Democrat was running than in districts where a Republican ran unopposed. The difference was small—a boost of .4 to 2.3 percent—but in tight races, accumulated statewide across a range of districts, that amount could make the difference. The report singled out Georgia as a place where such long shot campaigns in rural red areas might have put Biden over the top.

Herndon saw the study when it came out in 2021 and took note, and last spring, he and a friend, Pam Woodley, took it upon themselves to recruit candidates with help from Peach Power PAC, a group where both were then-board members that also supports down ballot Georgia Democrats. The most effective method of outreach, they found, was sending texts. Thousands of them, to lists of likely Democratic voters living in districts where the Republican state House representative would otherwise go unchallenged. It was a recruitment operation of “brute force,” Herndon recalls.

“It’s hard to talk people into running,” Herndon says. “Why should you run in a race that you’re not going to win? And you’re not going to get any support. People aren’t going to give you money.” In conversations with potential candidates, he gave them three reasons: Give Democrats in red districts someone to vote for, force Republicans to spend money on these races, and earn enough extra votes to tip the state for Democrats at the top of the ticket.

“They are making a huge sacrifice for Democrats in Georgia,” Woodley explains, even if some of their recruited candidates are having fun. “All they are getting out of it is they are bringing more Democrats to the polls.”

I’ve long been an advocate for running candidates in as many districts as one can, but I’ve also come to believe that it’s not that simple. Not all candidates are net positives, and it’s not clear to me that a placeholder adds any value. While it’s true that running an even semi-viable candidate does force the other guys to spend resources in that district, their doing so helps their side’s turnout, too. Your candidate has to be good enough and to do enough to offset that.

Ideally, state and local parties would be able to recruit candidates who understand the assignment and can do their part. We need to be honest about this and admit that running for office is hard, it takes a ton of time and effort, and if you’ve never done it before you’ve got a lot of things you need to do and not a lot of resources to do them with. It would also be ideal if state and local parties can offer some assistance to these candidates who are there to move the needle more than anything else. Training and steering volunteers their way is a good start, but helping them raise money so they can do basic things like rent an office and print some doorhangers and maybe run some online or radio ads would mean a lot. I look at the campaign finance reports for Dems in the districts that could be considered competitive and I wince, thinking about how much missed opportunity there is.

To be clear, I think the Georgia model is a good one to follow. I think there are ways of doing it well, and that involves both identifying the priority districts and getting the best possible candidates into them, and then supporting the candidates at some base level to ensure they’re doing as well as possible and it will be reasonably enticing for someone else to take up that same mantle in the next election. I think we can do that here, but it’s going to take some investment and a lot of work.