Expensive special election for suburban Houston race could be bellwether in battle for Texas House in 2020

KATY — Whoever wins the election for a suburban Houston statehouse district on Tuesday will represent the area for only nine months and almost certainly will never cast a vote in the Legislature unless they’re re-elected in November’s general election.

But the election to fill the vacancy left by longtime Republican lawmaker John Zerwas in House District 28 has taken on epic proportions as a potential bellwether in Democrats’ push to win control of the Texas House for the first time in two decades.

“It’s going to be a measure of enthusiasm,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. “Is your side able to turn out the electorate or not? [Because] that’s what the electorate is going to be like in 2020.”

Democrats, eager for early momentum, are pouring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from national groups to their candidate, educator Eliz Markowitz. Three of the party’s presidential hopefuls–Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg–have thrown their support behind her. And native sons Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro have stumped for her in the district.

O’Rourke has called on his legion of followers to help block walk for Markowitz and visited the district multiple times on her behalf, including this weekend for a final push before Tuesday’s election.

Republican Gary Gates, a businessman who is a perennial candidate in the area’s local elections, has spent $1.5 million of his own money and has the support of GOP leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Land Commissioner George P. Bush and Sen. John Cornyn. In a sign of how seriously Abbott takes the race, his campaign sent its own volunteers to the district to block walk and phone bank for Gates.

So why all this trouble for a special election whose winner will have to almost immediately begin campaigning to win the seat again in November?

“It’s the symbolism,” Jones said. “It would help Democrats with the narrative that Texas is turning purple.”

After gaining 12 seats in the House in 2018, Democrats need only a net gain of nine seats in this year’s election to take the majority.

House District 28 in Fort Bend County provides a good laboratory for the Democrats’ strategy. Like many of the seats they are targeting, it is traditionally Republican but has a growing and increasingly diverse population that Democrats hope they can turn out.

To that end, Markowitz’s campaign visited the Masjid Aqsa Katy Islamic Center on the last day of early voting to talk to potential voters after the traditional Friday prayers. The center is in the heart of the district and its overflowing parking lot and service – some worshipers had to pray outside on a tarp – tell the story of the district’s fast-growing and diversifying population.

Hanif Mohammad, the center’s associate director, said the center is nonpartisan and does not endorse candidates but allows them to come speak to their community and try to engage them politically.

“This year seems different, a lot of people wanted to approach,” he said. “Maybe because it’s a new place and we got a lot more people. Maybe they see an opportunity.”

Democrats are also heartened by the high early voting totals. More than 16,000 people cast their ballots during four days of early voting last week compared to about 14,000 early votes during the November race, which ran for two weeks.

Markowitz said the high voter turnout “shows a groundswell of support for our message” in the district. In particular, she said she was excited by the number of young and diverse voters that had supported her campaign.

Republicans, however, are confident in their ability to hold the seat. Markowitz may have been the top vote-getter in November with 39% of the votes, but that vote was split between 6 Republican candidates whose backers, they say, will throw their support behind Gates in the runoff.

“It is not the district they’re describing to people nationally,” said Craig Murphy, a political consultant for Gates. “They’re potentially creating a situation where they have egg on their face on election night after telling everyone that Texas can be taken. The Democrats made a very, very foolish decision to raise the stakes on this district.”

Gates’ camp said their polling showed a 2-to-1 advantage in their favor during early voting on most days.

Still, attention and cash continues to flow into the district. National Democratic group Forward Majority, which is focused on flipping Republican state legislatures, says it has spent more than $400,000 to aid Markowitz’s campaign, including a TV ad that resurfaced allegations from 2000 that Gates, who adopted 11 children, abused some of his kids. A judge had Gates’ 13 kids removed from his home saying they were in “immediate danger.”

The children were returned to the home a few days later and state child welfare investigators eventually dropped the case but Gates waged a years-long legal battle to hold Child Protective Services accountable. The agency later made changes that made it harder for them to remove kids from their homes.

Republicans have hit back against Markowitz. Abbott’s campaign produced a video ad tying her to O’Rourke’s gun control policies in the presidential campaign, which Gates’ campaign says is among Markowitz’s highest negatives in their in-district polling.

Late Friday, as O’Rourke showed up to the same polling location as Gates, the Republican candidate seemed unaffected. He continued talking to voters – many of whom knew him by name – as they entered and left the polling location as O’Rourke and his supporters cheered for first time voters casting their ballots for Markowitz and encouraged them to share their selfies online to tell more voters about the election.

“I’m just praying for Bernie Sanders to come,” Gates said. “They haven’t looked at the damage that does to them, especially with Beto coming to take your guns. They don’t get that. This is a Republican district.”

Heading into Tuesday’s election which will mark the first real fight in this year’s battle for the Texas House, both sides understand the unexpected magnitude of the election.

“There’s not an hour that goes by in which people don’t say that this is the most important race in the country,” Markowitz said. “This election is so important because it sets the tone for the rest of 2020.”

Gates said all the attention the Democrats have brought to the race has galvanized Republicans.

“If they were able to flip this seat, golly – the bragging rights! We all understand the stakes,” Gates said. “In hindsight they might say on Tuesday, ‘Maybe we should have focused on flipping a different district.’”