Flipping the U.S. House

How a Border City Ballot Measure Campaign Could Help Flip the House

Ground Game Texas is showing the value of promoting local progressive initiatives.  

The model of using local policy campaigns to engage people who might not otherwise vote is especially important in red states like Texas where a lot of Democrats or Democratic-leaning people don't vote because they don't think their votes matter. 

By Mike Siegel, Political Director, Ground Game Texas

“Do you want a city government that listens to regular people? If so, please sign our petition!” Ground Game Texas organizers are gathering one signature at a time to add a campaign finance measure to the ballot in the border town of McAllen, Texas. 

Ground Game Texas is an advocacy organization based in Austin. Our theory—proven in several election cycles so far—is that putting popular issues on the ballot during a general election can both win important policy reforms and boost turnout for Democratic candidates.

Right now we are petitioning in several cities. 

In McAllen this fall, voters can influence two key Congressional races. On the east side of town, city voters will be voting in Congressional District 34, a national priority for Democrats who want to protect Vicente Gonzalez from a GOP challenger. And on the west side, voters will be choosing between Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, and her Democratic challenger Michelle Vallejo. Having a popular policy on the ballot in McAllen could add several thousand votes for Gonzalez and Vallejo and play an integral role in holding one seat and winning another. We have a strong chance of winning. McAllen is the most populous city in Hidalgo County, which is the Democratic anchor of the four county region known as the Rio Grande Valley. In this border city of 140,000, our data director has found over 8,200 strong Democrats who did not vote in 2020, including nearly 2,000 newly-registered young voters. If we can motivate a third of these people to vote, that could be the margin of victory of protecting one Democrat and adding one more to the House. 

Ground Game Texas has run over a dozen campaigns with great success. In six cities, including Austin, we won on ballot measures that drastically reduced citations and arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession. The voters approved these measures by margins ranging from 64% to 85%. Participation of key constituencies also improved when marijuana was on the ballot. In college towns like San Marcos (home of Texas State University) and Denton (University of North Texas), we added hundreds of new voters in the 18-24 age bracket. 

During the 2024 election cycle, we are swinging big, trying to add tens of thousands of Dallas votes through a marijuana ballot measure campaign. Our work in McAllen needed a different approach. 

We selected campaign finance reform as an issue after consulting with community allies and polling hundreds of McAllen voters.  An issue that has come up again and again is the idea of corruption. Many voters have lost faith in government. Our recent poll showed that 81% of McAllen voters, across all parties, support campaign finance reform as a way to combat corruption. We hope to harness this grassroots support for reform in November, and let voters know which candidates are willing to fight against big money in our politics. 

As of this writing, our team of six organizers has crossed 2,000 signatures gathered, on the path towards our goal of 7,000 by May. We’ll be working non-stop to get to our goal. (If you’re interested in helping, please reach out! We can incorporate out-of-state volunteers with our “signature verification process,” whereby we use the voter file to make sure we’ve collected enough signatures from currently-registered local voters.)

There are no shortcuts to political change in Texas, but there is a clear path ahead. We need to talk to voters about issues that matter to them and show that elections matter. Juntos, sí se puede — the struggle continues! 

---

Mike Siegel is the Political Director and co-founder, with Julie Oliver, of Ground Game Texas, a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on organizing year-round on popular, progressive issues. To learn more about the work and campaigns, please visit www.groundgametexas.org. You can also reach out to Mike directly at mike@groundgametexas.org. Ground Game welcomes collaboration, especially among fellow Texas progressives! Also, if you’d like to donate, you can contribute here.

For more on organizing in Texas, check out this recent article by Beto O’Rourke. He describes founding Powered by People in late 2019 in an effort to bring Texans together toward the common goal of electing good, moral leaders who will stop this state’s slide towards cruelty, corruption, and authoritarianism. Read about the reach of the “distributed organizing” model.