Working Families Party, a political party and relative newcomer to Texas politics that backs Democrats aligned with their platform, aims to spend in the ballpark of half a million dollars this cycle, WFP Texas Co-director Pedro Lira told the Signal.
Much of that money will go to door-to-door canvassing.
“At the end of the day, when you can really connect with people face to face, that’s really what motivates people to get out to vote,” Lira said. “We’re trying to build a real base of working class people. You can’t do that without involving those people.”
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In partnership with CWA and Texas Organizing Project, WFP is also bankrolling “Texans for Better Dems,” a new political action committee that will primary Democrats in the state legislature who returned from Washington D.C. to restore quorum, a move that caused a rift in the state party and led to the creation of the Texas Progressive Caucus.
“We were incredibly proud of the Democrats who fled the state to deny Republicans quorum. It’s exactly the kind of leadership that we need from our elected officials,” Lira said. “We were also just as disappointed to see some of those Democrats come back. And it’s because those Democrats gave Republicans quorum that bills like the abortion ban and the anti-voting legislation were able to pass.”
Lira said the PAC was created specifically to primary those Democrats.
This was a thing I wondered about, and had seen some speculation about a few months ago when the quorum was freshly broken and tempers were high. I tried to keep an eye on it during the filing process, but there was a lot to keep up on, and if any WFP-backed candidates were out there, they didn’t make their presence known in a way that was visible to me. Now that we’re well past the filing deadline, let’s revisit this.
The first question is who the potential targets would be. I did a little digging into who among the Dems were here during the quorum break in Special Session #1, and who came back during Special Session #2 to bring the attendance count to the required level – this was in response to a private question I was asked. Long story short, I trawled through the daily journals on the Texas Legislature Online site, and found enough record votes to mostly fill in the picture.
For the first special session, I identified the following Dems who were present in Austin: Ryan Guillen, Tracy King, Eddie Morales, John Turner, Abel Herrero, Terry Canales, and Leo Pacheco. (There’s one I can’t identify; I suspect it was Harold Dutton, but he shows up in the next session, so it doesn’t really matter.) Guillen is now a Republican, Pacheco has since resigned, and Turner is not running for re-election. According to the SOS Qualified Candidates page, none of the others have primary opponents.
For the second special session, we can add these legislators, who were either there from the beginning or who showed up while the quorum was still not established: Dutton, Art Fierro, Mary Gonzalez, Bobby Guerra, Oscar Longoria, Eddie Lucio Jr, Joe Moody, James Talarico, Garnet Coleman, Armando Walle, and Ana Hernandez. Lucio and Coleman are not running. Talarico is running in a different district, HD50, which is open now that Celia Israel is running for Mayor of Austin. Fierro was paired with Claudia Ordaz Perez in redistricting. Of the rest, only Dutton and Gonzalez have primary opponents, and Dutton was a target well before the quorum break issue. Gonzalez, who has had primary challengers in the past as well for other reasons, faces someone named Rene Rodriguez, about whom I could find nothing. If the goal was to primary these Democrats, it sure doesn’t look like that goal was achieved.
Now, the WFP may well be playing a longer game. As we know, there wasn’t much time between the passage of the new maps and the start of filing season. Maybe they decided it was better to wait until 2024, or maybe they decided to focus more on races like CD35 (they have endorsed Greg Casar) and CD30. Maybe they’ll back Ordaz Perez and David Alcorta, the other candidate in HD50. Who knows? If they intended to make a bigger splash than that, I’d say they came up short. We’ll see what happens after this election.