In Leaked Report, Texas Democrats Blame COVID-19 For Weak Performance in 2020
Democrats in Texas are blaming their failure to flip the state and the Texas House of Representatives on an inability to campaign during the pandemic, according to a new report obtained by Houston Public Media.
In an examination of how the Texas Democratic Party came up short in the election, the report puts much of the blame on how the party campaigned during the pandemic, finding that Democrats lost the get-out-the-vote battle to Republicans largely because they would not put their volunteers at risk for COVID-19 to canvass in person.
"By not being able to knock doors and other sort of logistical impacts of the pandemic...we think that definitely hurt us in 2020," said Hudson Cavanagh, director of data science for the Texas Democratic Party and author of the report. "Republicans really all cycle were knocking doors, were doing in-person voter registration, were really less concerned about putting people in harm's way than we were on our side."
That made it harder for Democrats to register voters, Cavanagh said.
"In the last three months…Republicans really outregistered us, and they did a good job of turning out those voters that they had recently registered, and that actually cost us a lot of net votes in terms of the final vote share," Cavanagh said.
Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2021/03/29/394654/texas-democrats-blame-covid-for-weak-performance-in-2020/
