Things are starting to heat up in Texas

Democrats need only win five seats to regain control of the lower chamber for the first time since 2002, when Republicans gained 13 seats with the helped of Tom Delay.

According to the public finance reports, Democrats have more campaign cash on hand in 14 of the top 20 House races, and experts believe that there is a significant enthusiasm gap between the two parties.

Thinking of all that, it should come as no surprise that the GOP is starting to get desperate.

Vince Leibowitz, a blogger at Capitol Annex, has set up a map to track all the legislative districts into which big time GOP donors and political action committees affiliated with Republican Speaker Tom Craddick are pouring cash. These guys are investing thousands and thousands of dollars to these protect seats.

Tim Kleinschmidt, a Republican candidate for House District 17, has received more than $30,000 from these characters. But he's still really be worried.

Back in August, Rachel Farris -- another local blogger -- volunteered to canvas for Kleinschmidt's Democratic opponent, Donnie Dippel. Afterward they posed in front of her car, which has an "OBAMA" license plate. Kleinschmidt ripped that copyrighted image off of Rachel's website, cropped her out of the picture, and created a mail piece to attack Dippel.

If that's the best the Republicans have, I feel pretty good about our chances on Election Day.

We've mentioned the saga of Mean Rachel and Rep. Elliott Naishtat's website before. Rep. Naishtat has even commented on our blog.

We're proud to report that yesterday her effort to get her local legislator wired took a big step forward:

In Step 1 of getting Elliott Naishtat to start a website with DLCCWeb, I had to find out if Representative Naishtat was even on ActBlue for the contributions page. He is, however the results were dismal. One supporter and $25 dollars raised across all of ActBlue?

So I have set up a page to show him that people think he needs a website. The goal is 100 -- one hundred people, not dollars. Because it's not about the amount of money he needs to raise, it's about the amount of people he needs to connect with. I'm asking everyone today to take a moment to donate any amount to the Wired4Naishtat fund, and I'm kicking it off with my one vote.

She's also asking votes to vote on the domain name that the campaign should use. Personally, I'm a fan of keeping it simple: ElliottNaishtat.com is perfect.

There isn't a state in the country with a better group of online activists than Texas. The more attention I pay to their work, the more impressed I become.

First, you've got the individual efforts of many, many talented bloggers. There are a lot of states that would be fortunate to have a single, progressive site as good as Capitol Annex, Burnt Orange Report, Off the Kuff, or Greg's Opinion (a list heavily biased by the folks I read regularly but by no means exclusive). That's not even counting relatively newer bloggers who are engaging in the state (folks like Rachel -- who actually wrote an open letter to her state rep, offering to set him up with a DLCCWeb-powered site).

Second, these folks have organized an alliance to unify the efforts of bloggers and netroots activists in the state to promote progressive ideas and candidates. They promote each others' posts, raise money for candidates, organize offline events, and have developed an advertising network.

Third, they have formed a political action committee with one important goal:

During the 2008 election cycle, the TexBlog PAC will work toward winning 5 additional seats in the Texas House, allowing Democrats to elect a Democratic Speaker. A net gain of 5 house seats will put an end to the Republican claim of unilateral power and bring back the democratic process to the people’s House.

By contributing to progressive candidates, fostering the energy of the netroots, supporting party infrastructure, registering new voters, funding civic education programs, and assisting like-minded grassroots activists, the TexBlog PAC will help elect progressive candidates in 2008 and beyond. We will pave the path to a brighter tomorrow by putting Democrats back in charge of our state government.

Obviously, that's a mission that's near and dear to our hearts at the DLCC.

And yesterday, Vince from Capitol Annex shot me note to let me know about a new project that he and some of the other bloggers from the state had just launched: TexRepublicans.com (how they managed to come into possession of that particular URL, I'll never know, but I love it). These guys have collected research on GOP legislative candidates throughout the state and offered it up for all the world to see.

Some of the facts they've found are truly astounding. Rep. Betty Brown, for instance, actually sponsored a bill to legalize the sale of horse meat for human consumption. Rep. John Davis has spent thousands of dollars from campaign funds on personal expenditures without reporting the spending to Texas Ethics Commissions. Then there is Rep. Bill Zedler, who allowed Texans for a Republican Majority, a group founded by Tom DeLay to pay thousands of dollars in his legal bills.

I really can't say enough for this kind of activism. Winning back the Texas House isn't going to be an easy task this cycle, but support like this helps to make it easier.

Coverage thus far of the down-ballot races in Texas has been interesting. Democrats in the state only need to pick up five seats in the state to claim a majority in the Texas House, so we're paying close attention.

So far, national media has focused on the Obama effect, and his campaign's pledge to hire organizers for the state.

Bloggers like the guys at Burnt Orange Report and Vince at Capitol Annex have reported more about the possibilities of a Democratic victory, straight up. They've even organized a political action committee to make that possibility a reality (about which, I have lots to say, but that's another post).

This story from the Houston Chronicle, though, takes a sort of middle tack. It starts out with this:

One hundred days before the Nov. 4 election, Democratic and Republican political insiders are pondering whether Obama can lose states such as Texas and still make a difference in targeted congressional, county and legislative races by inspiring voter turnout.

But it turns out, that's not really what the insiders said when asked. Sure they think about the presidential, but they're pretty excited about the local races for their own merits:

Democrats in Texas "are very much energized, pretty much across the state," said Democratic political consultant Dan McClung of Houston. "It's not just national politics. It's state politics and county politics that have Democrats energized."

Texas Republican Party Political Director Hans Klingler said fights over partisan control of Harris and Dallas counties are as exciting for party activists as the presidential contest.

"As important as to what happens at the presidential races at the top of the ticket is what the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are going to do at the bottom-of-the-ticket races at the courthouse level," Klingler said.

That's sort of exactly how I feel.

I'm sitting in an event for the Texas candidates here at Netroots Nation, and two great legislative candidates are sitting on the panel:

Joe Jaworski is a running for the 11th Senate District. He previously served as a member of the Galveston City Council, where he was mayor pro-tem in his last term. On Tuesday, he announced that he had raised more than $801,000 from 1,267 individual contributors so far in this campaign. Jaworski's campaign reports district has the highest Democratic performance of any Republican-held district in the state.

Sherrie Matula is running for House District 129. She is an educator and community activist who ran a very strong campaign for the same seat in 2006. On Wednesday, she announced that she had raised nearly $127,000, leaving her with more cash on hand than her GOP opponent, who is the incumbent. Her campaign is also running a very successful field operation -- she has knocked on more than 2,000 doors since June 1.

In 2003, the Republican-dominated legislature in Texas gave the state university governing boards the ability to set tuition rates for their respective schools. Since then, tuition is up an average of 112 percent across the system. At the University of Texas at Austin -- the state’s flagship institution -- tuition is up 164 percent, and the full cost of a four year education is more than $100,000. Obviously, the students who are hardest hit by these added costs are those from middle-income families, and a cost explosion like this runs the risk of putting the best public schools out of reach.

In a state like Texas, which has a projected budget surplus, renewing a commitment to higher education can be awfully good politics. To that end, I really like the movement to regain control of tuition regulation being led by Rep. Garnet Coleman -- a DLCC board member.

Over the past two weeks, he’s given interviews like this one to newspapers across the state and written an op-ed for The Austin American-Statesman calling for the legislature to reassume authority over the universities. Democrats in the State Senate also grilled school representatives about the tuition increases in a hearing at the end of May.

As we saw with the Democratic legislature in Maryland, this isn’t an impossible task -- increasing funding for higher education in a time where enrollment is on the rise can help keep the costs for students down.