Dems Give Up On HD 92

I admit that I have been remiss in discussing local races for the upcoming November elections. Today, I decided I was going to fix that. Since I live in House District 92, I figured I would start there. The current State Rep. for District 92 is republican Todd Smith from my home city of Euless. But who is the democrat running for this office?

To find out who the democratic candidate was for House District 92, I went to the Texas Democratic Party website. To my surprise, they did not list a candidate for District 92! I thought surely this was a mistake. I then went to the Tarrant County Democratic Party website. It was not a mistake. The democrats do not have a candidate in House District 92.

I have been told by my democratic friends that they are ready to take back Texas from the right-wing nuts who run the Republican Party. But how can this be? How can a party be serious about winning back the state if they can't even find candidates for all the open races?

I admit that District 92 is a heavily republican district. It used to be democratic, but many northern republicans have moved into northeast Tarrant County in the last few years. Recently, it has been voting about 65% republican. Is this a good reason for the democrats to ignore this district?

Our state legislature is not real popular right now. After a multitude of special sessions, they have passed a new school finance bill, but it is seriously flawed and probably will have to be revisited in the next regular session. The bill will fall short of fully funding schools by around $5 billion. With each failure, the people of Texas get angrier. This anger may help democrats in many districts.

But here in District 92, we have no choice. No matter how disappointed and angry we are with the republicans, we must accept that we will be represented by a right-wing republican, because the democrats have given up on us.

This is one of the main problems with the Democratic Party. They don't want to put time, money, and effort into a race they stand a good chance of losing. Maybe they could learn from the Texas Republican Party. For many years, they were the minority party in Texas, but they kept fielding candidates. They knew they could not win a race if they didn't have a candidate in the race. In the long-run, this attitude has paid-off for them. How long will it take the democrats to learn this lesson?

Howard Dean has urged democrats to field and fund candidates for all open races. Too bad the democrats in Texas aren't listening. They may be blowing a golden opportunity.