Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey gave many somber warnings to Republicans in Austin on Tuesday evening, but Congressional retirements were not among them.

Here’s what the Chairman was worried about as he presented the Red Alert initiative to amp up voter turnout and activism ahead of the 2020 election to the Travis County Republican Party: National Democratic and liberal operatives are on the ground hoping to expand on the last election’s victories; in 2018, two of 21 Dallas-Fort Worth-area Republican state Senate seats were lost, and 12 of 95 state House Republican seats were lost in Dallas, Houston, and Austin metro areas; Republicans lost 31 of the 32 Texas Court of Appeals seats, namely in urban areas; and on the federal scene, Texans lost two of the 25 Republican-held Congressional seats.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz‘s performance is another cause for alarm: having won by 16 percentage points in 2012, and expanding that lead to 27 points in 2014, his lead dipped down to an anemic 2.6 percent.

But Dickey is not worried about a hyped up wave of Congressional Republican retirements being a sign of things to come. The number of Texas Congressmen who have retired — six, so far — is even with this time in 2017. Better, according to Dickey: all of the vacated seats were retained by the Republican Party in the 2018 election.

Though the existential panic portrayed by mainstream media political analysts is unwarranted (Texas Congressional Republicans “bolting” was the choice of words for the Dallas Morning News in early August), Dickey urged Republicans to double up on efforts to recruit new voters and use new voter app technology to reach friends and neighbors to bring them to the polls. Though Texas Republicans only suffered those two aforementioned Congressional losses in 2018 and kept the retiree’s seats red, nine races were won by slim margins (see Dickey’s chart below).

This is Part 2 of a series on Dickey’s Red Alert plan. See Part 1 here.

Graphic courtesy of James Dickey. To see his entire slideshow visit bit.ly/RedAlertTexas.