HINOJOSA FACES CHALLENGE FOR STATE DEMO CHAIR

(Current state party leader Gilberto Hinojosa has indicated he isn’t going anywhere. But that hasn’t stopped open discussion about leadership of the party with several months until convention delegates vote on the position.)

By Patrick Svitek

Texas Tribune

The race to chair the Texas Democratic Party is heating up early as the state's Democrats contemplate their future after a disappointing 2020 election — and ahead of a challenging 2022 election.

The current state party leader is Gilberto Hinojosa, who has held the job since 2012 and has indicated he is not going anywhere. But that has not stopped early interest in the race, which will be determined by delegates to the state party's biennial convention next summer.

Kim Olson, the former candidate for agriculture commissioner and Congress, announced Sunday she is running to lead the party, saying the "promise of a Blue Texas has so far fallen short of expectations." Meanwhile, Carroll G. Robinson, chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats, is considering a campaign for the job and plans to make an announcement in January. And other names have been discussed as potential candidates with still several months to go before the election.

The stakes are considerable. Texas Democrats have been regrouping after a 2020 election during which they thought they were poised for their biggest breakthrough in recent memory, but they came up woefully short. As they have been licking their wounds, they have had to stare down a daunting 2022 election, with a national environment that is not in their favor and state Republicans using the redistricting process to cement GOP majorities in Austin and Washington, D.C.

"We need a course correction because what we are doing has not yielded a statewide win. Period," Olson said in an interview.

She launched her campaign with some 250 endorsements. The endorsers feature 35 county party chairs, including from some of the most populous counties in the state — Tarrant, Denton, Fort Bend and Galveston. The list also includes several members of the State Democratic Executive Committee and a host of Democratic candidates from 2018 and 2020.

Hinojosa was on the hot seat after the 2020 election. A group of State Democratic Executive Committee members wrote him to demand change at the party, and he assembled a committee to do a "deep dive" on what wrong that November. The party released an autopsy in February that concluded Republicans beat them in turnout and partly blamed Democrats' underwhelming results on their decision to suspend in-person campaigning because of the coronavirus pandemic.