A group backed by billionaire financier George Soros plans to spend millions in an effort to move Texans to vote for Democratic candidates in the reliably red state, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Texas Majority PAC, a political action committee backed by Soros, plans to launch Blue Texas initiative alongside the Texas Democratic Party. The initiative hopes to organize tens of thousands of volunteers, recruit candidates and increase voter turnout.
Texas Democrats have failed to win a statewide office since 1994. In 2024, Sen. Ted Cruz won re-election by double digits and President Donald Trump won the Texas by more than 13 points. That came after Joe Biden only lost Texas by about 5.6 points.
Democrats had previously hoped that the state’s growing Hispanic population would lead to Texas becoming the next state they could pick off. But in 2024, support for the Democrats collapsed in heavily Hispanic areas in the Rio Grande Valley.
“If a win is on the table in 2026, we don’t want to leave it there by not being organized,” Katherine Fischer, deputy executive director of Texas Majority PAC, told The Journal.
The loss in 2024 came despite the Texas Majority PAC, the state Democratic Party and county parties under the Blue Texas umbrella spending $35 million.
Democrats face major uphill battles in the 2026 midterm elections. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will likely run for a fourth term and likely win re-election handily.
But the state party believes they have a chance to compete in the state’s upcoming Senate race. Sen. John Cornyn, who has held Texas’s senior seat since 2002, faces a primary challenge from Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general.
Paxton is considered a pro-Trump right-wing figure, having attempted to dismiss the 2020 presidential election results in 2020 in swing states. He also spoke at the White House Ellipse on January 6, 2021 before the riot at the US Capitol, in which he did not participate.
The Republican-controlled state House of Representatives voted to impeach Paxton for alleged corruption, though the Texas Senate later acquitted him.
Polling shows Paxton beating Cornyn handily, but he would be more vulnerable to Colin Allred, the Democrat whom Sen. Ted Cruz beat last year.
“There is no choice for Texas or for anyone else in the country who wants to see a Democrat in the White House after 2032 but to find a pathway through Texas,” Fischer said.
But Texas Democrats notched an early victory of the weekend when Gina Ortiz Jones, a party-affiliated candidate, beat Rolando Pablos, a Republican-affiliated candidate, to become San Antonio’s next mayor in the city’s nonpartisan election.
Ortiz Jones will be the first openly lesbian mayor of San Antonio. She had previously run for Congress twice and lost, first in 2018 to former congressman Will Hurd and a second time in 2020 to current Rep. Tony Gonzales.
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