The first time he met the woman who would become his state representative, they were both giving greetings at a polling place in Round Rock. During early voting and on Election Day, Jennie Birkholz, a Democrat and public health care consultant, answered voters’ questions about a school board election in suburban Austin in November 2022. Remember Caroline Harris Davila, a Republican running for a seat in the state. House of Representatives, shaking hands with potential electors and bringing her adorable golden retriever for voters to pet. In between conversations with those about to vote, Birkholz, who has two school-aged children, asked Harris Dávila what Birkholz considered were softball questions related to public schools and how they are funded. Birkholz says the conversation was friendly, but she didn’t get specific answers and left the chat unsatisfied. She decided on the spot to run for the Texas House of Representatives.
Two years later, Birkholz says public education still motivates his candidacy, especially now that Republican lawmakers in Austin are trying to pass a voucher program that would divert taxpayer funds from public to private schools. Several major GOP donors in Texas and out of state, including some billionaire Christian nationalists, support the voucher program, in some cases as part of a larger effort to undermine traditional public education. But Birkholz says most voters she has spoken to in the fast-growing suburbs north of Austin oppose the plan. “I’ve knocked on (thousands of) doors between the March primaries and now,” she told me recently. “What I’m hearing from voters is that they don’t like their tax dollars going to private entities where there is little or no accountability.”
Their experience jibes with polls on the issue: While a six percent majority of Texans voting in Republican primaries express support for vouchers, an April survey by the nonprofit Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that 57 percent of all likely Texas voters oppose the use of taxes. dollars to provide school vouchers for all parents. While poll results on the issue vary depending on how the question is asked, his biggest opponents on Capitol Hill are lawmakers from small towns or rural areas where public schools serve as centers of community life and private alternatives are few or nonexistent. . Republicans who have opposed vouchers say they are acting on the opinions of their constituents.
However, those opinions mattered little to Greg Abbott. Since last year, amid pressure from his biggest benefactors, the governor has repeatedly pressed the issue despite growing evidence that vouchers do not tend to produce good educational outcomes. When Lege did not yield to his will, Abbott resorted to threats and spread lies about Republicans who would not support his plan. In the run-up to this year’s primary election, his goal was to unseat the majority of the 21 Republicans who, in 2023, voted against funding school vouchers. In the March Republican primary and May runoff, Abbott helped defeat nine of the sixteen anti-voucher Republican incumbents running for re-election. Others he had targeted retired, so he got thirteen pro-voucher votes this spring. That’s more than enough to surpass the 11-vote margin of defeat the voucher bill suffered last year, when members voted 84 to 63 to kill it. In late May, after the runoff elections were over, Abbott declared his revenge tour victorious. “The Texas legislature now has enough votes to pass School Choice,” he posted on X. “Congratulations to all of tonight’s winners. Together, we will ensure the best future for our children.”
Indeed, the governor has much to celebrate, but he appears to be taking for granted an important event on the calendar: the general election in November, when many of the victorious Republicans will face their rivals. While the state’s long-dysfunctional Democratic Party has not won a statewide election in three decades, and though Republicans painstakingly gerrymandered the state’s legislative districts in 2021 to protect nearly all of their current seats, the map is still not completely safe for the Republican Party. Two Democratic candidates are running in districts that former President Donald Trump would have lost in 2020 under the new district lines, and five are running in districts that he would have won by less than five percentage points. If even three of those seven can defeat the Republican incumbents, Democrats could jeopardize Abbott’s pro-voucher majority—assuming, of course, that no elected officials change their minds on the issue in 2025 and that Democrats don’t lose seats elsewhere. Democrats hold a seat that Trump would have won in 2020 under current district boundaries: House District 80, where Democratic state Rep. Tracy King of Uvalde is retiring. The party also has a seat where Trump would have been five points behind Biden: House District 74, anchored in Eagle Pass, and represented by Democrat Eddie Morales Jr.
President Joe Biden is deeply unpopular in Texas and the Republican brand remains strong, but political consultants from both parties believe Democrats have a realistic chance of wresting some of those seven seats from Republicans. Most battleground races take place in suburban districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a rapidly growing and diversifying area where Democrats have made gains over the past decade. Others are in the suburbs of Austin, the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio.
Many Democratic organizers see their best opportunity in Alamo City, where progressive community organizer Kristen Carranza is vying to unseat state Rep. John Luján, a pro-voucher Republican who represents the suburbs south and east of San Antonio. Democrats had long held the seat before Luján, a firefighter and former sheriff’s deputy, flipped it during a 2021 special election and took it in 2022. Under the new district lines, Trump would have lost there by nearly three points percentages. Carranza believes that she can win back the seat by hitting Luján with the vouchers. As she campaigns, she says she knows many blue-collar workers who have some ties to education: they are related to a teacher or have children enrolled in public school. “The first thing they ask you in San Antonio is what high school you went to,” she said. “We are very loyal to our public schools here, so public schools will always be number one for district voters here.”
Approximately one hundred miles to the north, Harris Dávila’s district offers another primary objective. Democrats held the seat for four years, before the maps were redrawn to favor Republicans in 2021 (the seat’s former representative, James Talarico of Austin, moved to a bluer district and won there). Still, Harris Dávila’s new district is not everything. that red: Trump would have only won it by about four percentage points. Such a narrow partisan divide might have encouraged a moderate Republican to seek the seat, but Harris Davila, who did not respond to an interview request, is not one of them. He was one of 23 House Republicans who voted against the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton and is among the most socially conservative of his group. She supports vouchers, worked for the senator who wrote the abortion rewards bill that passed in 2021, and praised the U.S. Supreme Court after it struck down the constitutional right to the procedure. Birkholz, like Carranza in San Antonio, presents herself as an advocate for public schools: Her campaign website prominently features her husband, who works as a public school psychologist.
Statewide, the main challenge for Democrats will be that many Republican incumbents are more popular than Trump, particularly those in the North Texas suburbs. Neither Luján nor Harris Dávila ever shared the ticket with the former president, but Republican state representatives Morgan Meyer of University Park and Angie Chen Button of Richardson did. In 2020, Trump lost state House districts by fourteen and nine percentage points, respectively. Meyer and Button scored narrow victories over their Democratic opponents that year. The districts were redrawn so that Trump would have won both, albeit barely. This year, both Republicans had Democratic challengers: Elizabeth Ginsburg, a lawyer who lost to Meyer by twelve percentage points in 2022, is running again, while former Miss Texas Averie Bishop is vying for Button’s seat.
Matthew Wilson, an associate professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said the demographics of those North Texas districts, particularly Meyer and Button, are not favorable for Trump. Many residents are wealthy and college-educated, and their politics are more palatable to centrist conservatives. “These voters don’t respond very well to Trump’s bombastic, exaggerated style and dislike Trump’s combative approach to politics,” Wilson said. “They prefer more traditional Republicans, like Bush.”
Democrats are hoping the abortion rights issue will help them even among the most traditionally conservative voters in November. In 2021, Meyer and Button voted in favor of both the abortion bounty bill and a law that effectively banned the procedure in Texas when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Those votes are unpopular: Only 15 percent of likely 2022 Texas voters supported banning abortion, a finding polls have repeatedly found, and suburban women, in particular, view access to the procedure as a key issue. But both Button and Meyer prevailed in 2022 after that vote. “Many voters, whatever their preference on abortion (rights), didn’t necessarily take it as their primary consideration when voting,” Wilson says. “The challenge for Democrats is to get people to vote pro-choice and then translate that into support for specific candidates.”
If abortion rights issues alone cannot motivate voters, in Round Rock, Birkholz believes education is Democrats’ strongest issue in this election. “We have huge coalitions of teachers and parents saying, ‘We care about our public schools,’” Birkholz said. “On the other hand, it is only the billionaires who are driving the issue. “That’s where I see hope.”
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