How to Lose a County For 30 Years: A Democrat’s Guide to Rural Abandonment
Part III – Performance Politics and Real Infrastructure
In the previous installments, which focused on North Texas and included interviews with Karmyn Seaberg, Chair of the Randall County Democratic Party; Sonya Letson, Chair of the Armstrong County Democratic Party; Chelsea Streeter, Chair of the Wichita County Democratic Party; Sean Birkenfeld, Chair of the Panhandle Democrats; and Kendall Scudder, Chair of the Texas State Democratic Party, this guide traced how counties are lost first through absence and then through strategy. Across the region, local infrastructure thinned, chairs and precinct systems disappeared, and participation began to feel inconsequential. That vacuum was then formalized into a trade: rural losses were tolerated in pursuit of suburban gains, national branding replaced local definition, and policy capacity narrowed into messaging. What remains is the final step, when performance politics substitutes for real infrastructure and mobilization is treated as a replacement for construction rather than a complement to it.
Step Six: Why Build When You Can Just Mobilize?
What has begun to change in North Texas is not ideology, but presence. After decades of operating largely out of Austin, the state Democratic party has started to decentralize its footprint — opening regional offices, visiting counties long treated as unwinnable and viewing rural organizing as something other than a seasonal gesture.
At the local level, organizers described rebuilding trust through visible civic participation more than persuasion. Letson described attending public meetings, writing and posting about them and offering to speak — less as a campaign tactic than as a way to signal that someone was there. Streeter described leading with service: “we show up with food drives and school supply stuff first,” she said. “Then we talk about what matters to them.” Seaberg described rebuilding as incremental and personal. “It’s been one person at a time that you find and you bring them into your fold,” she said.
Progress, organizers stressed, had to be measured modestly. Birkenfeld said moving a county from 28% Democratic support to 32% mattered because it reflected renewed participation rather than persuasion at scale. Filling vacant precinct chair positions mattered because, as he put it, “you can’t build anything if no one’s there.”
At the same time, leaders were clear about what increased presence has not yet solved. In many counties, rebuilding depends almost entirely on first-time organizers learning on the job. Institutional memory is thin. Training pipelines are limited. The pool of experienced political talent available to rural and deep-red counties remains small. Showing up creates space for engagement, but it does not automatically produce the staff, strategists or policy expertise needed to translate presence into durable capacity.
If the diagnosis of disengagement is correct, presence is the necessary first step. But the next step is harder: building an institutional back end capable of producing mechanisms — not just messages — so local organizers can answer the questions voters ask with something more than rebuttal.
The decline of Democratic presence in places like North Texas is no longer just a regional failure; it is a looming existential threat to the party’s national viability. According to projections, the 2030 Census is expected to trigger a profound shift in the Electoral College, transferring approximately a dozen electoral votes from the traditional ‘Blue Wall’ states like Illinois and Pennsylvania to rapidly growing Republican strongholds like Texas and Florida. That shift further tightens an already narrow historical margin in the Electoral College. Since Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845, only three Democrats — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — have won the presidency without carrying the state. Clinton did so in a three-way race that split the Republican vote. Obama won amid the 2008 financial crisis. And Biden prevailed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the backlash to Donald Trump’s first administration. Those victories were products of specific national disruptions, not evidence of a durable coalition that can be relied upon in today’s more polarized and geographically concentrated electorate.
The modern Democratic path to 270 — which currently hinges on the Great Lakes region — will be mathematically insufficient by 2032. If current trends hold, a Democrat could sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still fall short of the presidency. This reality demands a shift in strategy away from the transactional ‘sugar-high’ of cycle-dependent mobilization and toward the sustained institution-building required to compete in the next decade. Without a sustained presence that can narrow the margins in rural and exurban counties today, the party risks being structurally locked out of the White House and the Senate for a generation.
Case Study Resolution: Voters Showed Up; The Party Still Hasn’t
The Amarillo vote makes the broader dynamic legible, not as an outlier, but as a clear example of a pattern visible across rural and exurban Texas. The proposed “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” ordinance, a locally enforced anti-abortion measure designed to create civil penalties for those who assist with abortion access, asked voters during the 2024 general election to authorize a concrete enforcement scheme with direct community consequences. When that choice was placed in front of them, many weighed it on its own terms and rejected it decisively, even as they maintained overwhelming partisan alignment at the national level.
The outcome was not contradictory. It reflected what can happen when disengagement is interrupted by a decision that is specific, visible and local. The vote did not hinge on partisan identity or national alignment. It bypassed those markers. Voters were asked to weigh a particular mechanism and its implications for their community, and many did so without reference to broader ideological battles that typically define national politics.
Amarillo did not suddenly become a bastion for progressivism, and it did not abandon its political identity. What changed was the structure of the choice. When the question was legible and grounded in local impact, participation emerged even in a deeply Republican context, a dynamic that increasingly defines how voters engage with local governance today.That result does not resolve the challenges facing Democrats in rural North Texas. It does not substitute for sustained presence, institutional rebuilding or building the organizational capacity necessary to convert episodic engagement into lasting infrastructure. But it does clarify what has been missing. The Amarillo vote shows that where disengagement has been the dominant condition, moments of local, non-symbolic decision-making can still activate participation. The opportunity exists now, even if the infrastructure to sustain it remains incomplete.
A Plausible Path Forward for Texas Democrats
Decades of strategic retreat, organizational neglect and nationalized decision-making hollowed out Democratic infrastructure across much of Texas. The changes set in motion following Kendall Scudder’s election as state chair in 2024 are real and meaningful, marking the first steps toward rebuilding a presence that had nearly vanished outside a handful of metropolitan areas.
However, rebuilding presence alone does not resolve the deeper failure that weakened Democratic organizing across rural and deep-red Texas. That failure reflects both an organizational mismatch — between how Democrats organize and how political credibility is actually earned — and a policy posture that can appear disconnected from Texas’s sense of identity, history and traditions. Without addressing both, renewed activity could remain episodic rather than durable.
Organizers are not expecting immediate flips in deeply Republican counties. Letson noted, “I’m under no illusions that I could flip my county… but we can increase the number of votes given to Democrats on a statewide ticket.” That incremental growth signals institutional recovery through better data, more volunteers and candidates willing to run again.
Several approaches could build on that incremental progress. One possibility would be to invest more directly in county parties, regional organizations, and candidates running in strong Republican districts, treating them as ongoing infrastructure rather than temporary vehicles for a single cycle. Direct contributions at both the local and state level could allow these organizations to keep offices open, hire staff, train volunteers and remain visible between elections. In some cases, investing a few hundred thousand dollars across multiple local organizations or campaigns can build more lasting institutional presence than spending an additional million dollars on a competitive primary in a safely blue state, because those investments create durable capacity in places where little currently exists.
Another approach would define a “Texas Democrat” more clearly as a candidate who shares the broader Democratic coalition’s goals while maintaining visible independence from the national party when nationally popular positions conflict with widely held Texan sensibilities. That independence would function less as branding and more as a credibility signal. The approach would be rooted in Texas’s shared civic traditions and expressed in a way that reflects how those traditions can evolve without being dismissed or replaced.
A further possibility would involve shifting emphasis from episodic mobilization toward sustained construction. Greater attention to precinct chairs, volunteer training, data accuracy and candidate pipelines could reshape how progress is measured. Instead of focusing primarily on immediate flips, success might be evaluated through vote-share growth, volunteer capacity, and the durability of local institutions.
None of these approaches guarantees success. It is entirely possible that some — or all — would prove insufficient. Texas remains structurally difficult terrain that is extremely nuanced, and polarization has narrowed the political space in ways that complicate coalition-building. Rebuilding durable political power for Democrats will require the courage to not use familiar playbooks and a willingness to innovate in ways that neither national models nor prior Texas cycles have fully tested.
If there is a consistent theme, it is not that any single strategy offers a solution. It is that recovery, if it occurs, will likely depend on sustained presence, institutional patience and a version of innovation that grows from Texas’s own political traditions rather than attempting to override them.
Image from Michael Cuviello / Amarillo Globe-News