Texas Majority PAC 2024 Report

Texas Majority PAC (TMP) was founded in December 2022 by three veterans of Texas campaigns–Jason Lee, Katherine Fischer, and Crystal Zermeño. We have one simple goal: to permanently flip Texas blue, thus releasing our state from Republican control and delivering two Democratic Senate seats and 40 Democratic Electoral College votes. This will effectively end the possibility of a Republican-controlled Senate or White House for generations. This report outlines TMP’s work to date and our goals through the end of the 2024 election cycle.

Our analysis of existing data shows that we must turn out 1 million new Democrats to flip Texas permanently by 2032. Demographic change is helping, but it won’t be enough on its own. We need to build political infrastructure in key regions of Texas to get us the rest of the way there.

“Political infrastructure” means different things to different people. According to the extensive science on voter behavior, there are only a few things we can do to make someone more likely to vote–have the right kind of conversation in person or over the phone, send them certain types of mail, and serve them certain types of ads. So to us, political infrastructure means training staff and building programs that are capable of turning out millions of Democrats using these effective methods.

Fortunately, we aren’t starting from scratch. TMP is building on electoral work done over the last decade by labor unions, grassroots organizations, donors, candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Wendy Davis, and thousands of volunteers who are fighting for a Democratic Texas. Our goal isn’t to invent something brand new but to dramatically scale the state’s existing voter turnout programs.

These programs require lots of skilled people and lots of money. TMP provides talented teams with the level of funding and support required for them to run large-scale voter turnout programs. Our partner organizations operate in Harris, Dallas, Collin, Tarrant, Williamson, Hays, Bexar, Hidalgo, Cameron, and El Paso Counties. TMP and our donor partners are currently supporting the following organizations with six- or seven-figure grants to:

• Texas Organizing Project PAC
• First Tuesday PAC
• Fair Shot Texas PAC
• Bexar County Democrats PAC
• Cameron County Democratic Party/Cameron County Democrats PAC
• Williamson County and Hays County Democratic Parties/Central Texas Democrats PAC
• Dallas County Democratic Party/Dallas County Democrats PAC
• El Paso County Democratic Party/El Paso Democratic Unity PAC
• Hidalgo County Democratic Party/Hidalgo County Democrats PAC

Bolded PACs are organizations that work in close coordination with the county parties in their regions. Some of our first grants in 2023 went to those county parties. We chose county parties as a place for a significant portion of our investment because we believe that a strong Democratic Party is necessary to flip the state. They’re also an ideal vehicle to build teams: county parties exist year-round, they always support the Democratic ticket, and volunteers naturally show up at their door because they carry the branding of the Democratic Party.

Thanks to new legal precedent, GPACs and county parties can now work together in close coordination, but for a number of reasons it’s easier for GPACs to run paid and volunteer field programs. So earlier this year, a number of county party staff we’d been funding left their parties to establish PACs that work in close coordination with their party but are legally separate entities that direct and control their own programs. Our investments currently flow into those PACs.

The majority of these organizations were selected for funding in summer of 2023. Every TMP grantee was expected to use their first grant to:

• Hire core staff like Executive Directors, Organizing Directors, Organizers, Coordinated Campaign Directors, etc. Different organizations had different staffing needs, but TMP grantees were required to make at least one core hire by December 2023.
• Produce a comprehensive campaign plan and budget by December 2023.
• Hire staff consistently over the course of 2024 to ensure their program has time to scale, and isn’t staffing up just a few weeks or months out from Election Day.

Additionally, all county parties were expected to:

• Run a year-round volunteer organizing program, launching no later than January 2024.
• Run county coordinated campaigns where all coordinated-side field partners meet regularly to develop a division of labor (e.g. one partner’s paid canvass knocks in north Bexar County, another in South), share their data in legally permissible ways, and monitor their collective progress towards goal in the field.

Now as we head into GOTV, all TMP partners are expected to use a significant amount of their grant to run a paid canvass program that supports the entire Democratic ticket. Partners are focused on driving up Democratic turnout by targeting people who will support Democrats if they vote, but may not vote at all unless someone comes to their door. Organizations running volunteer programs (bolded PACs plus the Bexar County Democrats PAC) are directing volunteers to knock on doors, make calls, and write letters to unlikely voters as well.

Texas Majority PAC Program Support

For organizations that have historically had the funding to run high-quality, large-scale programming, like the Texas Organizing Project, First Tuesday PAC, and Fair Shot Texas PAC, TMP funding helped them add capacity to their existing programs. For the county parties, all of whom have been woefully under-funded, this investment was game-changing. Some county parties hired full-time staff for the first time ever. Some hired staff 8 months earlier than they normally would. All hired more staff than they’ve ever had and launched volunteer programs many months earlier than in previous cycles.

Running bigger and longer operations requires more than just money, which is why TMP hired a full-time staff of 20 in August 2023 to support our partners. Our team of experienced organizers, who embed full-time in partner offices for extended periods, add capacity to and help structure effective volunteer programs. Our senior staff work closely with each partner’s senior leadership to help them write plans, manage budgets, hire and train staff, and solve problems. Our senior staff also set goals and review each partner’s progress with them on a weekly basis. This helps TMP determine whether and to what degree our partners receive continued funding.

We also provide a number of centralized services to TMP partners. Our data team creates maps and dashboards to track work, and trains partner staff to build effective universes and collect data properly. We pay for our partners to receive legal services from Elias Law Group and compliance services from MBA Consulting Group to ensure that everyone navigates this complex legal environment properly. We conduct, pay for, and disseminate research like polling, focus groups, and data analysis. All TMP partner volunteer programs use an auto-dialer system for their phone banking programs that TMP pays for and manages. Our team of distributed organizers makes calls and sends texts to recruit volunteers into partner programs. Finally, TMP negotiates cost-sharing agreements with vendors. To date, we’ve negotiated deals with a phone/text platform, a printer, and a paid canvass vendor, bringing costs down for all partners who use these vendors by 10-20%. They’ve redirected their saved money back into their volunteer and paid canvass programs to turn out more voters.

We facilitate coordination across the state, creating and sharing maps, targeting, tracking mechanisms, and dashboards for the statewide paid field program. These tools are shared to partners and candidates that participate in county coordinated campaigns, whether or not they receive funding from TMP.

TMP Partner Performance: 2024 vs. 2022

This chart compares the collective work of our partners in the 2024 cycle through September 2024 with their collective work in the same period of time in the 2022 cycle.

	2024	2022	Increase
Staff Hired	973	154	6.3x
Doors Knocked	996,585	382,785	2.6x
Active Volunteers1	5,702	637	9x
Money Raised	$15 million	$9 million	1.7x
New Democrats Identified2	125,473	41,279	3x

Our partners’ growth in these categories has greatly exceeded our expectations, proving the value of our project. In a flip year, Texas will need thousands of experienced staff and volunteers who knock on millions of doors, raise millions of dollars, and turn out new Democratic voters. At TMP, we judge our success in part on whether we see growth in these categories year-over-year.

TMP’s contributions and those of our donors have been worth much more than their face value: even excluding TMP and our donor partner’s contributions, these organizations have collectively raised about $1 million more than they had at the same point in 2022. They have used our investment to hire fundraisers or other staff that have given leadership more time to raise money. Investments of this size also signal to other donors that they can trust their money will be spent responsibly by these organizations. Each TMP dollar contributed creates more than one dollar of outcome.

Goals for Fall 2024 and Judging TMP’s Success

In a close election, everything matters. We need to send mail, run ads, knock doors, and call and text voters. But because TMP is a long-term project, we decided to build the thing that takes the most time and effort first: field. In a state as big as Texas, field programs must knock on millions of doors to have an impact on election outcomes. To get to that scale we need tens of thousands of volunteers and thousands of full-time staffers housed in year-round programs that keep them engaged and employed, and we need a corps of experienced senior staff in the key regions of our state. We set goals according to what scale our program must reach in order to be impactful this year and to effectively build for the future. We will judge our success by whether or not we hit these goals.

TMP-funded organizations have knocked on almost 1 million doors so far this cycle. By Election Day, we will:

• Knock 750,000 more doors
• Identify 150,000 new voters and have conversations with them about voting for Vice President Harris, Representative Allred, and other Democrats
• Have 1,000 paid staff across the state
• Have 3,000 volunteers who complete at least one voter contact shift during GOTV

We will also judge our success by the outcome of a few elections. There are three races we are particularly interested in: holding Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s seat (TX-34), holding Senator Morgan LaMantia’s seat (SD-27), and flipping HD-118 by electing Kristian Carranza. We are investing a significant amount of money in Hidalgo, Cameron, and Bexar Counties in large part because of those races. Every single walkable precinct in HD-118, and Hidalgo and Cameron Counties will be knocked by a TMP partner. We are also keeping a close eye on Rep. Colin Allred’s Senate race. Even a program as large as ours is unlikely to decide the outcome of a statewide race in Texas unless it comes down to a very small margin. Our goal is to meaningfully contribute to Rep. Allred's final margin, whether he wins or loses, while building the foundation for victory in future election cycles.

If we are successful, we should also see increased turnout in Bexar, Dallas, Harris, and El Paso counties, and Tarrant and Williamson Counties should go blue. Increased turnout could just naturally happen, though. After Election Day, we will compare the voters that TMP partners contacted to those with similar geographic, demographic, and voter propensity characteristics that were not contacted to determine whether our program had an impact on outcomes. We will publish this analysis and our 2024 program numbers after November.

Conclusion

Based on the successes we’ve seen thus far, we’re excited to see our partners run bigger GOTV programs this year than they ever have before. We’re extremely grateful to our donors who have made this work possible, and to our partners who are working tirelessly to prove that Texas is worthy of continued investment.

Massive programs have occurred in Texas before, most notably Beto O’Rourke’s campaigns in 2018 and 2022. TMP’s co-founders and most of our staff are Beto alumni, and many of the volunteers we work with today became engaged for the first time via one of those campaigns. But after those campaigns ended, it wasn’t clear to staff or volunteers where they could go to continue doing the work required to flip the state. Texas needs a statewide voter mobilization program that runs year-round and doesn’t rely entirely on the top of ticket candidate to finance and run it. Not only will this lead to more voter contact during GOTV, it will also be extremely beneficial for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. This year, we hope to show potential statewide candidates that there is a structure they can plug into–one that comes with hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers who are ready to get to work for them immediately after the primary. Statewide candidates will no longer be solely responsible for financing and managing the statewide field program–which is extremely costly, requires a huge management staff, and takes well over a year to get to the scale required to make a difference in a state this big.

We are excited to add to Texas’ legacy of effective voter mobilization and electoral progress via a long-term, well-resourced institution that is laser-focused on winning statewide races. We intend to be in this fight for the next decade, providing resources and support year-round to the teams who will turn Texas blue once and for all.

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