Texas, D.C. Democrats Raise Funds and the Roof at Johnson-Jordan Dinner
If you had any doubt that Texas is IN PLAY in 2020, let Tom Perez and Gilberto Hinojosa clarify your mind. The chairs of the Democratic National Committee and Texas Democratic Party, respectively, fired up electeds, donors and activists at the TDP’s annual Johnson-Jordan Dinner Saturday night (Oct. 5).
Perez, Hinojosa, and everyone else with a microphone filled the JW Marriott ballroom air with repetitions of now familiar mantras - “the largest battleground state,” “flip the Texas House,” “38 electoral votes,” “not the ATM anymore!” and more. The MC for the event, Fort Bend County Court-at-Law Judge Toni Wallace, observed near evening’s end that if they’d started a drinking game with those phrases, “we’d all be feeling pretty good right now.” (Murmured in the back, in the press row: “We’d all be dead right now.”)
So yes, y’all, this appears to be really happening. When asked point-blank if the DNC lets resources flow to (or stay in) Texas instead of to Ohio or North Carolina or pick-your-purple-state, Perez told reporters, “We’ve already [since 2017, when Perez took the DNC reins] increased our investment here well above what has ever been done before. I think there’s opportunity everywhere here. We weren’t waiting until October 2020 to have an a-ha moment that we might be able to win in Texas.”
Hinojosa added that “We’ve gotten more money from the national party this year than under the last three [DNC chairs] put together.” (Those would be Debbie Wasserman Schulz, Tim Kaine, and Howard Dean.) The TDP chair noted other signs of the DNC’s commitment to the state: the September presidential debate in Houston, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s opening a full-time office here - its first of the 2020 cycle - and, indeed, a DNC chair attending the TDP’s signature fundraising event “for the first time in memory.”
Read more: https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2019-10-06/texas-d-c-dems-raise-funds-and-the-roof-at-johnson-jordan-dinner/