🎶It’s His Party and He’ll…🎶

Every time Texas Democrats have a bad election (read: every two years), blame reasonably finds its way to a person whose title suggests quite a lot of culpability—the chair of something called the Texas Democratic Party. 

In reality, this person has little control over what most critics are likely focused on: the selection of individual candidates and their ensuing policy preferences and general quality. Nor does he (lately, it has been a he) hold much sway over the forces that seem to swing modern elections. Presidential politics, the rapidity of human aging, hemispheric economic inequality, Joe Rogan. 

What the state party chair does is tend the infrastructure that underlies a cycle’s more news-making aspects—administering the party’s primary elections, data operations, voter registration efforts, and other nuts and bolts. He may also attempt to set a messaging tone for the party, though, again, with minimal control over candidates and generally a duty to support nominees regardless of ideology.