GOP dashes Democratic hopes of bellwether win in Fort Bend

Tuesday’s election in Texas House District 28 drew a larger turnout than any House special election runoff since at least 1992, perhaps ever.

Democrat Eliz Markowitz had ample resources arrayed on her behalf against Gary Gates, a self-funding, perennial losing candidate. Democrats, from near and far, including Beto O’Rourke who took up virtual residence in the Fort Bend County district in recent weeks, touted it as a bellwether election that could kick-start efforts to wrest control of the Texas House in 2020 and change the face of American politics.

But as soon polls closed at 7, the early vote totals told the story. Gates was on his way to a smashing 16-point victory for the vacant state House seat in the Houston suburbs, twice the margin by which then-state Rep. John Zerwas, R-Richmond, a popular and powerful incumbent, won a seventh term in 2018.

By night’s end, Gates, with 17,457 votes, defeated Markowitz, who had 12,617 votes, 58% to 42%,

Gates will fill the unexpired term of Zerwas, who stepped down in midsummer. A rematch for a full term will take place in November.

The contest in Fort Bend, where O’Rourke lost in his 2018 bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by 3.14 points, was the 16th best prospect on a list of GOP-held Texas House seats unveiled by Texas Democrats on Monday. The list contains 22 seats that Democrats are targeting in hopes of flipping the nine they need to gain control of the House and the speakership ahead of redistricting in the next session.

Markowitz’s defeat was also a setback for O’Rourke, whose surprisingly strong run against Cruz has become the yardstick of success for heightened Democratic ambitions in Texas in 2020, but whose deep personal involvement in recent weeks working on behalf of Markowitz and drawing volunteers from across the state and the nation to Fort Bend County might have proved a mixed blessing at best.

In the special election in November, Markowitz placed first with 39.1%, but she had been the lone Democrat facing six Republicans seeking to fill the seat.

Gates was always the favorite to win the runoff. But Markowitz became a cause célèbre for Democrats in Texas and nationally, and party and allied groups went all in.

Too far in, according to Gates’ consultant Craig Murphy, who said they nationalized the campaign in ways unproductive for Democrats in what is still a Republican district.

Murphy said O’Rourke’s obvious presence, as well as campaign appearances on behalf of Markowitz by former presidential candidate Julián Castro and presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, and endorsements by two other presidential candidates — former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren — rubbed voters the wrong way.

During early voting, Murphy said the campaign would hear from voters who griped “they had enough of these people coming in — all these liberal presidential candidates have thrown their support behind her — telling them what to do.”

Markowitz, he said, got lost in the shuffle.

“She was just a sacrificial lamb. Yeah, they told her it was going to be great,” Murphy said. “And then she came to the realization, she was the last to know it, that it was going to be a blowout.”

Focus on November

The hype eroded Markowitz’s ability to keep the focus local.

“The challenge in this race and others is for well-intended people who want to help to actually help and not make things more difficult,” said Democratic strategist Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project.

Justin Nelson, the Democrat who came almost as close to defeating Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2018 as O’Rourke came to beating Cruz, saw an upside in all the energy that had been deployed on Markowitz’s behalf.

“I think the one huge lesson is that there is enthusiasm here, that people are focused on winning the Texas House ,and the battle will continue to November for who is going to control it,” said Nelson, an Austin attorney, who is co-chairing the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee.

On a Facebook livestream while driving back to El Paso from Fort Bend County late Tuesday — which opened with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” playing on a Houston radio station — O’Rourke said that while “the night’s not going the way we would have wanted it to,” Markowitz, at her election night party, “turned right around and bucked us all up and reminded us that the big election is November. She’s on the ballot again. November, of course, is going to have a much higher turnout, which bodes well for her, and she’s got this army of volunteers, myself included.”

"Special elections are weird,” said Josh Blank, research director for the University of Texas Politics Project. “Under normal circumstances, Democrats have no business winning this district, which is pretty far down their list of targets, and this election in no way foretells what we’re going to see in the 2020 general election.”

Yet, he said, “you got both parties spending untold sums of money. You got presidential candidates dropping in to stump for a state House candidate who is trying to fill the unexpired term of a member in a nonsession year. Basically the winner gets to use a letterhead until the next session.”

“So, you know, I think both parties are going to do their best to either overplay their victory or underplay their defeat,” Blank said.

That said, Gates’ win was a big symbolic victory for Texas Republicans, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, and for Gates’ own shoe-leather campaign.

A successful, self-made businessman who injected $1.5 million of his own money into the race, Gates personally knocked on 17,823 doors, only interrupting his 150-door-a-day regimen for a few days in October to compete in the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.

Markowitz, who in 2018 ran for a seat on the State Board of Education and lost by 19 points, got into the race before Zerwas said he was stepping down, transforming his growing and changing district into a proving ground for both parties ahead of a momentous political year.

Murphy said the result bodes ill for Democrats’ prospects of turning the House — as well as for O’Rourke, who has said that goal will be the focus of his campaign efforts in 2020, and who seized on District 28 as an ideal place to start.

The Beto effect

GOP polling found O’Rourke, after his failed presidential bid last year, to be deeply unpopular in the district. Abbott’s political operation, in a series of campaign videos, did all it could to remind voters that O’Rourke, during his presidential run, had called for confiscating assault weapons and suggested stripping churches of their tax-exempt status if they opposed same-sex marriage.

Beto is looking for allies in his war on religious liberty.

Fort Bend County voters can say "no." Vote early today: https://t.co/hgkZr02UG4 #txlege #hd28 #fortbend pic.twitter.com/1PRXVdflHP

— Texans for Abbott (@AbbottCampaign) January 23, 2020

“And there's many districts that are identical to this one, and that's what they have to win,” Murphy said.

Dave Carney, Abbott’s political strategist, who flew in from his home in New Hampshire to be at Gates’ celebration, said he hoped, for the GOP’s sake, that O’Rourke is not discouraged by Tuesday’s results and that he redoubles his efforts on behalf of Democratic House candidates across Texas.

For Republicans, Carney said, “it would be a tragedy if he learned his lesson.”

But, as he hurtled back toward El Paso late Tuesday, O’Rourke said: “This is just the beginning, If this shit was easy, we’d be done already. But this shit is really, really hard, and so we just have to stay after it.”