February 21, 2021

Texas Democrats Use Their Organizing Power for Disaster Relief

They’re helping Texans devastated by the storms, and drawing quite a contrast with Sen. Ted Cruz.

A Houston Food Bank volunteer directs traffic during a food distribution event at NRG Park in Houston on February 21, 2021.Marie D. De Jesús/Houston Chronicle via AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In the wake of a devastating winter storm that has left nearly 70 Texans dead and millions without access to clean water, former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke has hosted phone banks to make 784,000 wellness calls to Texas seniors, organized door-to-door neighborhood check-ins for those who can’t be reached, and raised $1 million to provide food, shelter, and water to Texans in need. His Twitter timeline is a laundry list of resources for Texans who are still reeling from the storm’s impact.

More than two years have passed since O’Rourke vacated his House seat in to challenge Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who defeated O’Rourke in the 2018 midterms in the closest U.S. Senate race Texas had seen in four decades. But O’Rourke and other Texas Democrats have been mobilizing their political resources on behalf of struggling Texans, also looking to draw a sharp contrast to GOP rivals.

Cruz faced withering criticism for traveling to Cancun with his family on Wednesday as storms ravaged the state and crippled infrastructure, despite some political posturing from him on Twitter and a subsequent video apology for his ill-advised family vacation. Photos of Cruz loading a case of plastic water bottles into his car (caption “#TexasStrong”) were roundly mocked on social media.

Other Texas Democrats have followed O’Rourke’s lead. Jessica Cisneros, a South Texas immigration attorney who waged a progressive primary challenge against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) last year, has been trying to connect her hometown of Laredo with aid. Julian Castro, a former HUD secretary and short-lived Democratic candidate for president in 2016, lent the email list from shis PAC, People First Future, to raise more than $350,000 for Feeding Texas, a state-based hunger-relief charity.

Democrats have increasingly eyed the Lone Star State as ripe for political gains. After O’Rourke’s strong showing statewide against Cruz in 2018, election analysts declared Texas a swing state for the first time in decades, and Joe Biden spent more money campaigning in the state than any other Democratic presidential candidate in recent history. Though Texas has seen a handful of House seats flip from red to blue over the last few election cycles, most Democratic challenges have failed. But in the process, Texas Democrats have built enviable email lists and strong organizing networks.

Texas Democrats who do hold office have joined in the post-storm efforts, too. Houston-based Reps. Sylvia Garcia, Al Green, and Sheila Jackson Lee joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to volunteer at a local food bank on Saturday. In addition to coming to the state, Ocasio-Cortez has raised more than $4 million for Texas relief efforts over the past week.

Beyond the humanitarian mission for Texas Democrats, their political one appears to have been made that much easier by Cruz and his self-inflicted messaging mess. After the Republican senator criticized the sky-high electricity bills that power companies charged Texans in the aftermath of the storms, Cisneros asked what Cruz was prepared to do about it. “What legislators are you personally calling to lobby on this?” she tweeted. “What is your call to action? What are you doing with your influence and power besides running to Cancun?”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate