By his count, Jonathan Gracia has knocked on more than 5,000 doors during this election cycle in and around the border cities of Harlingen and Brownsville, Texas.
Mr. Gracia, a criminal defense lawyer and a candidate for the Texas House, has been talking to independent voters and those “on the edge” as he tries to flip a seat for Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley, where Republicans have been gaining ground.
He can afford to focus on those in the middle because canvassers elsewhere in the county have been targeting the huge number of Texas Democrats who do not reliably vote.
Those complementary efforts in the Rio Grande Valley are part of a network of overlapping Democratic political operations taking place across the nation’s most populous Republican-controlled state, backed in part by $10 million from the billionaire Democratic donor George Soros.
Earlier this year, organizers and strategists were not hopeful that the perennial Democratic dream of flipping Texas blue — as it was in the 1990s, before Republicans began dominating in rural areas and small towns — could come true this year. Many of those working behind the scenes were playing a longer game. Much of the organizing going on now, particularly in the Soros-backed groups, had been aimed at building databases and voter outreach networks to win soon, if not necessarily this year.
“Sometime in the next four to eight years,” said Katherine Fischer, who has been leading a new political action committee, Texas Majority PAC, that is the main vehicle for the Soros contributions.
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