Houston suburbs could flip the Texas House

For Dems, local seats are pivotal to winning majority of chamber

Former state Rep. Mike Schofield felt so confident in 2018 that the voters in his northwest Houston suburban district would give him a third term that he left about $140,000 unspent in his campaign account and dedicated much of his time to helping other Republican candidates.

He ended up losing the House District 132 seat to Democrat Gina Calanni by 113 votes in a race that he says he never anticipated to be so close.

Now Schofield is up for a rematch with Calanni. This time, he says, he and other Republicans are ready.

“I spent a good chunk of September and October last time trying to get the judges re-elected,” Schofield told the Houston Chronicle editorial board as he launched his campaign earlier this year. “The first lesson I learned was what they tell you when you get on the plane: Put on your own oxygen mask first. So, I will have a Schofield-centric campaign and we will work to get everybody else across the finishline after we get there.”

Democrats emboldened by close races in 2018 and by President Donald Trump’s flagging approval in the suburbs have even bigger ambitions in the Houston area in 2020, taking aim at a handful of traditionally bright red districts long thought to be out of reach.

Both parties acknowledge the high stakes involved in this year’s battle for the lower chamber, Democrats’ only chance to gain leverage before the 2021 legislative session, when lawmakers will redraw the state’s political maps. Republicans, who also control the Texas Senate and governor’s mansion, hold an8367 advantage in the House after losing 12 seats in 2018.

The Democrats are unlikely to capture a House majority without picking up at least a few seats in the Houston area, party officials and political analysts said. Abhi Rahman, a spokesman for the Texas Democrat--

ic Party, said the party’s “path to thema jority runs directly through Houston and the Houston suburbs.”

“Flipping the Texas House is the top strategic imperative for the Texas Democratic Party,” Rahman said in a statement. “Texas is changing rapidly and urban areas and suburbs across the state are trending Democratic. Suburbanites are sick of Donald Trump’s actions and Republicans’ inability to manage crisis situations.”

Atop the list of Democratic targets is state Rep. Sarah Davis, a moderate Republican who won re-election last cycle by 6 percentage points even as U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke carried her highly educated and affluent Houston district by 21 points. Also in the top tier is House District 138, the west Houston seat where Republican state Rep. Dwayne Bohac is not seeking re-election after he won by 47 votes in 2018.

Republicans, meanwhile, are playing offense in two neighboring west Houston seats that flipped to Democrats in 2018. In the Katy area, Schofield is seeking to reclaim control of House District 132 while next door, Democratic state Rep. Jon Rosenthal is defending his seat against Republican Justin Ray, the former mayor of Jersey Village.

Democrats have placed a handful of other seats intheir crosshairs, such as House

Districts 26 and 28 in Fort Bend County and House District 126 in northwest Harris County.

Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West said he expects GOP candidates will win suburban districts by “clearly articulating and delineating the detrimental effects of the progressive socialist left’s vision for Texas and Houston.” He cited the Green New Deal resolution and Democrats’ gun control policies as examples.

The Texas House battlefield is centered almost entirely in the suburbs this year, and recent polling suggests Trump’s support has dipped in those areas.

Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said a “massive suburban defection” of white voters with college degrees was behind a Quinnipiac University poll result last month that found Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Trump were virtually tied in Texas. In its latest Texas poll, Trump held an edge, 50-45.

Trump’s struggles in the suburbs are being driven not just by educated white voters but also by an “influx of very dramatic demographic change” that is making it harder to assemble a winning coalition without support from racial and ethnic minority voters, said University of Houston political science professor Jeronimo Cortina.

Health care and Trump

Democrats in these suburban districts are largely sticking with what worked in 2018 — outrage against Trump and promises of better access to health care. They believe the pandemic has strengthened their appeal on both fronts.

Democrat Ann Johnson, who is running against Davis, says that voters in the district’s Bellaire, West University Place and west Houston suburbs are fed up with Republican leadership’s response to the pandemic and the health care policy decisions that have left an estimated 18.4 percent of Texans without health insurance, twice the national average.

Democrat Hillary Clinton won House District 134 over Trump by 15 percentage points in 2016.

Both Johnson and Davis are campaigning on their support for expanding Medicaid and protecting coverage of pre-existing conditions, though Johnson has cast doubt on Davis’ health care voting record, noting that she previously opposed the Affordable Care Act, moved to table a Medicaid expansion amendment in 2017 and missed the vote on Medicaid expansion last year. Davis has said she would have supported Medicaid expansion in the 2019 legislative session and that her position on Obamacare has evolved.

Johnson said Davis has won Democratic support in past elections for her support of abortion rights.

Davis said her path to victory will be paved, as it has been the past four elections, by focusing on the issues that are important to voters regardless of party — namely women’s health and public education. “As our State Representative, I’ve always worked hard to provide our district with the kind of strong, independent voice that speaks to our shared values and ignores partisan political distractions,” she said in a statement. “Whether you think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or something in between, I consider it my duty to represent you at Texas Legislature.”

Another seat Democrats are targeting to flip is in House District 138, where Democrat Akilah Bacy and Republican Lacey Hull are competing. There, Clinton beat Trump by a tenth of a percentage point.

Bacy, a former prosecutor, has spoken out against Abbott and Trump’s handling of the pandemic.

“COVID-19 did not ‘spiral out of control’ in Texas,” she wrote on Twitter in June, arguing that Abbott “unleashed it with a full understanding of the consequences. Now, we are all dealing with the consequences of his and the Republican Party’s poor, selfish and ineffective leadership.”

Abbott has endorsed Hull, a former Republican precinct chair, calling her a “proven conservative and tireless defender of Texas values,” and in February held a rally for her.

Democrats have for months made Abbott’s quick reopening of Texas — and the state’s corresponding midsummer COVID-19 outbreak — a focal point in their campaigns. Republicans, for their part, have pointed to the state’s declining hospitalization rate and number of new infections as evidence that Abbott’s policies, such as the statewide mask mandate, have been effective. But much will depend on how

Texas is faring in October.

Democrats’ path to a House majority also will narrow significantly if they fail to retain control of the seats they picked up in 2018 — including those flipped by Calanni and Rosenthal in west Harris County.

Calanni attributed her close win last cycle in large part to her commitment to issues thatmatter to suburban voters: health care and education. Last session, she was a co-author of House Bill 3, the public education reform bill that changed the way school funding is calculated.

“You’re seeing a lot more college-educated people moving out to the suburbs along with a lot of women, single moms like myself,” Calanni said. “We’re wanting to buy a home, wewant tohave a nice place to raise our family, we want to send them to good schools, and those are all issues that are more Democratic issues. And that’s why we flipped those 12 seats in 2018.”

Schofield, who is running on his record as Abbott’s “point man” on the Texas voter ID law, known as the toughest in the nation, did not respond to several requests for comment.

In 2016, Trump carried House districts 132 and138 by 4 percentage points and 2 percentage points, respectively.

Bound to Trump

Cortina said Republicans may struggle to separate themselves from Trump, which he said would be necessary if the president loses their districts. “Especially on the downthe-ballot races, people might not be very well-informed, and people will tend to generalize: ‘Oh, he or she is a Republican, therefore they must be a Trump supporter,’ ” Cortina said. Ray, the Republican nominee vying to unseat Rosenthal, said he is focusing his campaign on meat-and-potatoes issues: public school funding, public safety and ensuring that residents “are not being taxed to death.”

“When it comes to the president’s policies and the president’s re-election, we’re going to focus on local issues. We’re not going to get pulled into national issues,” Ray said. “The Democrats will try to nationalize this election, and we’re not going to do that because that’s not what the community needs from their state representative.”

Ray argued that Rosenthal has established an overly liberal voting record that contradicts his pledge to represent the district down the middle, pointing to his endorsement from the proBernie Sanders group Our Revolution Texas and a Rice University ranking that placed him as the fifth-most liberal member of the House.

Rosenthal acknowledged that he runs on a “bold progressive platform,” but he said that has not prevented him from being “pragmatic” and working with GOP lawmakers, a process he compared to his job as an engineer in the oil and gas industry.

As for the election, Rosenthal said he is cautiously optimistic. “Turnout for presidential elections traditionally favors Democrats,” he said. “But of course, in the environment we’re in, kind of all bets are off. It’s an uncertain landscape.”