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A coalition of the biggest Democratic groups in Texas on Tuesday unveiled a new effort to pool their resources to help candidates with overhead costs that can devour campaign coffers, build a data hub to analyze stats that can instruct those camps, and centralize volunteers who can be surged to focus on any given race across the state as contests get down to the wire.

Behind the idea is the Texas Democratic Party; Texas Majority PAC, perhaps the best-funded Democratic group in the state; Powered by People, the group founded by former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke; and the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee.

Those in charge of the coordinated campaign are betting big — $30 million to start, per party leaders — that the investment can boost candidates in November’s midterm elections and beyond. The state party, in collaboration with Texas Majority PAC, already recruited candidates for every federal and state race on the ballot for the first time in modern Texas history.

Kendall Scudder, the Texas Democratic Party chair, said the new effort, called Texas Together, will revolutionize how state parties coordinate and run campaigns well past November.

“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.”

The last time President Donald Trump was in the White House for a midterm election, Democrats toppled GOP incumbents off county commissioners courts, judicial benches and city halls throughout Texas. O’Rourke almost unseated U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in that 2018 election.

Already, Democrats have found encouragement in recent elections that suggest some of the voting blocs — like Latinos and independents — who were crucial in returning Trump to Washington might have buyer’s remorse. After Trump promised to lower costs and launch a deportation effort targeting hardened criminals, the economy remains tight and the president’s immigration crackdown has generated backlash over deadly encounters involving federal agents and reports that the administration is deporting undocumented people regardless of criminal history.

To see what the Democratic partnership might look like in practice, Texas Majority PAC’s executive director, Katherine Fischer, pointed to Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s recent upset win in a special election for Texas’ red-leaning Senate District 9.

When the PAC got involved last summer to help Rehmet, they created a centralized organizing machine under a lone batch of staffers, who directed volunteers as needed. In the two months preceding a January runoff election between Rehmet and conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss, volunteers made some 1.5 million calls — some of them hundreds of miles away from the Fort Worth area that SD-9 envelops, Fischer said.

A similar playbook was applied last year to school board elections for Cypress Fairbanks ISD, the state’s third largest district.

Rehmet won resoundingly and two socially conservative candidates lost their elections in Cy Fair.

“The model is to create a machine that exists indefinitely,” said Fischer, who was the organizing director for O’Rourke’s losing 2022 gubernatorial campaign. “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.”

In 2018, Texas Democrats flipped a dozen seats in the Texas House and two in the state Senate. The involvement of the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee — House Democrats’ campaign arm — suggests that shuffling the partisan makeup at the Capitol, where Republicans hold an 88-62 majority in the House, will be among the priorities of the coordinated campaign.

The collaboration is just the latest pitch from Texas Democrats that they deserve investment.

In 2013, a group called Battleground Texas launched with a goal of proving the state was purple, not reliably red. The effort led to decisive losses in the 2014 election, which gave rise to the state’s current crop of GOP leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Despite O’Rourke’s near-win in 2018, Democrats have been unimpressed with their own performance in every election since. O’Rourke lost his gubernatorial contest by double digits, while Trump and Cruz won their respective races in 2024 with wide margins that erased doubts about the state’s competitiveness that cycle.

Following the 2024 presidential election, the previous party chair stepped down and the state party’s governing board elected Scudder.

Scudder and Fischer see an opportunity to “legitimately compete,” and with a new structure. According to Scudder, the last time the party built a system similar to the coordinated campaign was in 2018 for O’Rourke’s campaign.

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Alejandro Serrano writes about Texas politics and government, with a focus on immigration and education issues. Since joining the Tribune, he has helped investigate the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, lived...