I'll admit that I didn't pay much (i.e., any) attention to David Alameel's campaign for the United States Senate this year. Frankly, after the Democratic primary led to a runoff between Alameel (a multimillionaire dentist who had supported Cornyn in previous cycles) and Kesha Rogers (a Lyndon LaRouche activist who wanted to impeach Obama and industrialize the moon) it was hard to take that side of the ticket seriously. But I would like to call readers' attention to the speech Alameel gave on election night, after losing to John Cornyn by a 27 point margin, in which he called for "an uprising" in the Democratic party. (The issue came up during the Q&A section of the Texas Observer's post-election panel last night; audio is available here, for those who are interested.)

He devoted the first half of his speech to settling scores with the state Democratic party, arguing that they had actively undermined his campaign, first by supporting another candidate in the primary (presumably El Paso attorney Maxey Scherr rather than Rogers, as Kevin Diaz notes at the Houston Chronicle), and later by ignoring him altogether. Those accusations are hard to substantiate. It is true that he lost by a bigger margin than the other statewide Democratic candidates, even those whose campaigns were similarly low-profile. As Jim Hogan observed, his campaign for agriculture commissioner did about as well as Wendy Davis's, even though he only spent $4,000 and didn't hold any events. On the other hand Alameel was the only Democrat running in a top-tier race against an incumbent, and as mentioned, there were plenty of reasons to ignore the Senate race this year. 

While skeptical of Alameel's arguments that the Democratic Party (and Battleground Texas, which he seems to treat as the same organization) hurt his candidacy specifically, though, he did make a provocative argument later in the speech:

These self-serving elites have failed us for over 20 years and they have the arrogance to assume that they can tell us what to think and what to do? Well, from here on, we’re going to tell them what to do.

The endless poverty in the Black and Latino communities, which are desperate for help, have been ignored by our party.

And I assure you that talking to them about abortion & gay marriage, or paying a short visit during election time, is not the answer for their struggle, and they remain totally uninspired.

With regard to social issues, Alameel may be overstating the case. Exit polls found that 66% of white women voted for Greg Abbott, compared to 39% of Hispanic women; that jars with the Republican argument that Hispanic voters, being disproportionately Catholic, are predisposed to be pro-life voters. As for gay marriage, as Eva Longoria recently observed, Hispanics in Texas tend to be young, and young people, regardless of ethnicity, widely support marriage equality. And Democrats will probably bristle at Alameel's sweeping assertion that they don't care about poverty. Many of them do; it's probably fair to say that Democrats are more concerned about poverty than Republicans are.

However, Alameel's gesturing at something that his party should take seriously, even if they don't consider him part of their party. After years of one-party rule Texas Democrats are well-established as the people who aren't Republicans--not necessarily a bad look, in light of certain Republicans. What the Democrats themselves are for, and what they would do if in power, is much murkier. Alameel's specific point, that Democrats haven't shown enough concern over economic issues is valid. That was certainly the case this year. Wendy Davis spent a day--one day--focused on raising the minimum wage, before turning her attention back to her upcoming book tour. Meanwhile, on election day, voters in Alaska, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Arkansas voted to raise the minimum wage in their states. There are so many factors behind this year's Democratic clobbering that it would be silly to point to any one thing as the cause. But if the Democrat at the top of the ticket had run a more substantive campaign, perhaps she would have narrowed the gap a bit--it's hard to see how it could have made things worse--and left the party in a stronger position for election cycles to come.   

UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, Jay Root over at the Texas Tribune reported about a January 6th memo warning Davis's campaign manager that the candidate's failure to set out a message meant that she was being portrayed as a generic national (aka liberal) Democrat, which risked damaging both the candidate and the party.