A coalition of major Democratic organizations in Texas announced Tuesday a new initiative aimed at reshaping how campaigns are run across the state ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
The effort, called Texas Together, brings together the Texas Democratic Party, Texas Majority PAC, Powered by People — founded by former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke — and the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee.
The coalition says it will pool financial and organizational resources to support Democratic candidates statewide. The plan includes helping campaigns manage overhead costs, creating a centralized data hub to guide strategy, and organizing a volunteer network that can be deployed quickly to competitive races.
Party leaders say they are committing an initial $30 million to the effort, with the goal of strengthening candidates in November’s elections and future cycles. According to organizers, Democrats have already recruited candidates for every federal and state race on the ballot — the first time this has occurred in modern Texas political history.
Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said the initiative represents a structural shift in how campaigns operate.
“We’re running an organization that is comparable to that of swing states around the country,” Scudder said in an interview. “When people are asking constantly, ‘What’s different? What’s different? Every year, these Democrats say they’re going to win statewide. What’s different this year?’ Well, this is what’s different.”
A Focus on Coordination
Supporters of the initiative point to recent races as examples of how coordinated infrastructure could influence outcomes.
Katherine Fischer, executive director of Texas Majority PAC, cited Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s upset win in a special election for Texas’ Senate District 9 as a model. According to Fischer, volunteers made roughly 1.5 million calls in the two months leading up to a January runoff, including outreach conducted far beyond the Fort Worth-area district.
A similar organizing strategy was also used in school board elections in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, where two socially conservative candidates were defeated.
“The model is to create a machine that exists indefinitely,” Fischer said. “The goal really is to, like other things we’re doing in the (coordination), share costs wherever possible, to spend less on overhead and fees and more on the work product or the voter contact that we need to be funding to win.”
Political Context
The new effort comes as Texas Democrats look to rebuild momentum following mixed results in recent election cycles.
In 2018, during the last midterm election when Donald Trump was in the White House, Democrats made gains at the local level across Texas, and O’Rourke narrowly lost a U.S. Senate bid to Ted Cruz.
Since then, Democrats have struggled to replicate that performance. O’Rourke lost the 2022 gubernatorial race by a double-digit margin, while both Trump and Cruz secured wide victories in 2024.
Earlier efforts to expand Democratic competitiveness — including the 2013 launch of Battleground Texas — did not yield lasting statewide gains and were followed by strong Republican victories that helped elevate current GOP leadership, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Following the 2024 election, party leadership transitioned to Scudder, who now argues the new structure could allow Democrats to “legitimately compete.”
According to Scudder, the last time the party built a comparable coordinated campaign system was during O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run.
