Just Happened To Catch This On The News Earlier Today -- Nothing About The Bakken -- It's All Politics -- Texas Politics -- January 29, 2020

Link here, still not behind a paywall, over at The Atlantic.

Democrats always knew it was going to be hard to turn Texas blue in 2020.

This week, they received a painful reminder of just how tough it’ll be. Republicans last night swamped Democrats in what one progressive group had hyped as “the most important special election since the midterms,” winning by 16 points a key state legislative race that both parties viewed as a test run for the much-bigger campaign this fall.

The defeat, particularly by such a wide margin, was a setback for Democrats, who poured nearly $1 million into the election. It also signaled the reinvigoration of the Texas GOP. Republicans were caught napping in 2016 and 2018, giving Democrats hope that they could put the country’s largest GOP stronghold in play this year. But the party came back to life in this race, well exceeding Democrats’ substantial investment.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other top Republicans threw their support behind the GOP candidate Gary Gates, who spent more than $1.5 million of his own money in the campaign. The millions spent in total were a whopping sum for an election decided by just 30,000 people—a turnout of 20 percent—to fill just one of 150 seats in the Texas state House.

After cutting into the margins of the Republican majority in the chamber in 2018, Democrats need to flip just nine seats to win control this fall and loosen the GOP’s long-held grip on the state government. They had hoped to get a head start on that bid by nabbing this open GOP seat.

“Democrats were convinced they could buy Texas. But tonight they learned Texans aren’t buying the nonsense the Democrats are selling,” said Austin Chambers, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, the national-party group dedicated to state legislative races.

“Texans sent a message loud and clear to the liberals in Washington: ‘We’re going to keep Texas Texas.’”The seemingly small stakes of a local campaign in the Houston suburbs had nevertheless captured the attention of the Democratic Party’s top presidential candidates, who used the race to demonstrate their commitment to Democrats’ broader goal of recapturing power in the states and making Texas truly competitive in 2020.

The Democratic candidate Eliz Markowitz won endorsements from Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bloomberg. Former Representative Beto O’Rourke, who nearly carried the district in his close Senate race in 2018, campaigned aggressively for Markowitz after dropping his own White House bid in the fall. Yet she not only failed to match O’Rourke’s performance two years ago against Senator Ted Cruz; she fell short of the 43 percent of the vote that Hillary Clinton earned in the district in 2016.