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A four-year-long investigation into "extremely serious" and "deeply troubling" actions by Australian troops during the Afghanistan war has ended, with the formal findings handed to Defence Chief General Angus Campbell and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds.

"I intend to speak about the key findings once I have read and reflected on the report," General Campbell said in a statement.

"Welfare and other support services are available to those affected by the Afghanistan Inquiry."

Sources have told the ABC the final report recommends further action, such as criminal prosecutions or military sanctions, for around 10 incidents involving between 15 and 20 people.

In 2016 the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) began examining allegations of unlawful killings and other possible breaches of the law of armed conflict committed mainly by elite soldiers during their lengthy military engagement.

The ABC's Afghan Files stories in 2017 gave an unprecedented insight into the operations of Australia's elite special forces, detailing incidents of troops killing unarmed men and children and concerns about a "warrior culture" among soldiers.

Since that time, New South Wales Justice Paul Brereton, a Major General in the Army Reserve, has interviewed hundreds of witnesses behind closed doors and his secretive inquiry has even gathered evidence overseas.

Earlier this year the IGADF revealed 55 separate potential breaches of the laws of armed conflict by Australia's Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) had been identified between 2005 and 2016.

The IGADF noted its inquiry was not focused on decisions made during the "heat of battle" but rather the treatment of individuals who were clearly non-combatants or who were no longer combatants.

Senior Army figures estimate that during the 12-year Afghanistan deployment, Australian personnel are believed to have killed over 5,000 individuals who were mainly suspected Taliban fighters, but also numerous innocent civilians.

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Last month, Chief of Army Lieutenant General Rick Burr wrote to members of the force warning that allegations contained in the IGADF report were "extremely serious and deeply troubling".

"They do not reflect who we aspire to be. We will act on the findings when they are presented to the Chief of the Defence Force," he wrote.

Sweeping changes to Australia's Special Forces, particularly the SASR, are now being considered by Army and the Government, following the completion of the Brereton inquiry.

Defence insiders believe the changes are aimed at breaking down systemic cultural issues within the special forces teams.

At the same time as the IGADF has conducted its closed-door inquiry, a series of explosive reports about the conduct of troops have made very public the extent of the allegations against Australian soldiers.

Earlier this year the ABC's Four Corners program broadcast video showing a Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) soldier shooting an unarmed Afghan man three times in the chest and head while he cowered on the ground in 2012.

Just days after the "serious and disturbing" revelations the SAS member known as "Soldier C" was suspended from duty, and the Defence Minister referred the matter to the AFP Commissioner.

In 2016, Commando Kevin Frost became the first Special Forces soldier to go public with allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, including his own involvement in the unlawful execution of a prisoner of war.

Sergeant Frost, who had encouraged other members of the ADF to come forward to the IGADF inquiry, was found dead in Western Australia last year.

In September this year the Federal Court was told of a separate war crime investigation involving Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, who was decorated for his service with the SAS in Afghanistan.

For years, the secrets about what the SAS did in the valleys, fields and mud villages of Afghanistan have remained hidden. Until now.

Central to the allegations against the former soldier is a claim that while in Uruzgan Province in September 2012, he was involved in the murder of a handcuffed Afghan civilian named Ali Jan, who he kicked off a cliff.

Mr Roberts-Smith strenuously denies the allegations and is pursuing a defamation claim against various news outlets who published the claims in 2018.

Hundreds of secret ADF documents leaked to the ABC in 2017 detailed the clandestine operations of Australia's elite special forces in Afghanistan, including incidents of troops killing unarmed men and children.

Two years later AFP officers raided the ABC's Sydney headquarters over the stories known as the Afghan Files, but eventually decided that journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clarke would not be prosecuted for their reporting.

In 2015, then special operations commander Major General Jeff Sengleman had become concerned about rumours and persistent allegations within the notoriously secretive Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) and 2nd Commando Regiment.

He commissioned Canberra-based sociologist Dr Samantha Crompvoets to write a report on Special Operations Command Culture Interactions, which then uncovered allegations of "unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations" by elite soldiers.

Major General Sengleman reported the findings to then-chief of army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, who agreed in 2016 to approach the IGADF to conduct a scoping inquiry.

Speaking at a Defence conference that year, Major General Sengleman gave an indication of the high level of operational tempo for Australia's Special Forces during their 12 years in Afghanistan.

"Thousands of combat missions, almost half of the combat deaths, 13 per cent of my deployed force sustained physical combat injuries".

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'Deeply troubling' Afghanistan war crimes report handed to Defence Chief as Government prepares response - ABC News

It's a bright, warm afternoon in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Oliver Percovich is standing by a fountain.

Local children in shorts and sandals line up around its concrete edge, waiting for their turn.

Light from the sinking sun filters through the fingers of the pine trees that ring the area, dancing across the faces of the children who have already slid in.

A group of young boys is getting impatient; arms crossed over their chests, kneeling and whispering and pointing.

Below them, half a dozen girls from the nearby apartment complexes -- pale, brutalist blocks built by the Russians in the 1990s -- glide around, laughing and learning each other's names.

But there's no water to be found.

Instead, the sounds of trickles and splashes are replaced by the soft rattle and scraping of skateboards. Percovich watches on as the children take turns slipping into the empty, grey bowl and roll around on the boards he's provided them.

It's 2008, a year after Percovich arrived in Afghanistan. Having quit his job as a researcher in emergency management at Melbourne's RMIT university, the Aussie followed his partner to Kabul and set about looking for work. In the interim, broke and unemployed, he decided to get to know his new home a little better by riding his skateboard through the local streets.

This is where the idea for Skateistan began.

"The interactions with kids on the streets of Kabul was really interesting," Percovich told ESPN. "A lot of them were there because their parents worked out that kids could earn more money begging than anyone else in the family, so any time there's a foreigner on the streets of Kabul, you have a whole lot of kids that come up and ask them for money.

"I was the wrong person to ask for money because I didn't have any. I just had a skateboard.

"What was interesting was girls were also asking for money. I would turn it around and say, 'well, do you want to try my skateboard?' in my extremely broken Dari. That sparked something in me because I didn't see girls playing soccer or flying kites or playing cricket or doing the things that the boys were doing.

"Women are not riding bicycles, women aren't driving cars, there's no women serving you in a shop. It was a shock to me. As much as I'd read about Afghanistan before going there -- and I kind of knew the situation -- but the reality [was still a shock]. And then, all of a sudden, these little girls are trying out my skateboard. That was the first light-bulb moment."

Percovich began to run small skateboarding activities for local children, finding any space he could in parks or schools where they could learn to ride safely. But it was in the empty fountain where he realised that his sessions were having a more profound impact on its participants than he had ever imagined.

"The real 'eureka' moment for me was just noticing the interactions between the children," he said.

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"The girls were incredible in terms of making friends across these ethnicities and across these socio-economic divisions. One day, they all held hands and started to dance around in the fountain and sing songs and I was just like, 'wow.' Through skateboarding, these kids have come together that wouldn't normally come together. They're interacting with each other. They don't care what background they come from.

"It was incredibly powerful. I basically saw the Afghanistan of the future."

Twelve years on, Skateistan has become one of the biggest international non-profit organisations in the sporting space. From that small fountain in Kabul, the award-winning NGO now boasts four indoor skate schools -- with a fifth soon to be built in Bamyan, a rural area of Afghanistan -- across three different countries, with their global headquarters in Berlin.

Over 2,500 children between the ages of five and 17 attend the facilities each week, half of whom are girls, due to a quota system. To quell the anxieties of families sending their girls to schools in dangerous areas, Skateistan organises home visits and offers free transport and security for all female students.

It costs more, Percovich says, but it's a necessary sacrifice the organisation makes to redress the historical inequalities that disproportionately affect women and girls.

"At the start, we had space for 360 students, so we made half of those spaces available just for girls. We were able to register about 160 girls, so we still had 20 spaces left, but there was something like 300 boys on the waiting list. I just capped it at whatever the girls' numbers were.

"I'm a very clear quota person. I said, right at the start, 'there aren't equal opportunities for girls to do sports in Afghanistan, so I'm going to give the girls three times as much time on the skateboard than the boys.'

"That's what has to happen to create that change, to shift the scales. If it takes 80% of our resources to get 50% girls into the program, that's what has to happen."

More than just learning to ride skateboards, though, Skateistan has become a space that also provides more formal educational opportunities for children whose formative years were interrupted by war, poverty, and dislocation. Importantly, this aspect of the organisation evolved after listening to and addressing the needs of the children themselves.

"What was missing was those first years of education," Percovich said, "so we came up with our 'Back To School' program, which was an accelerated learning program that covered three years of regular primary school in one year. Then we had a Memorandum of Understanding with the education department to recognise those studies and allow the children straight into the fourth grade.

"But our ideas around education were about what the potential of creativity in education is. That whole region of the world really utilises rote learning; simple repetition of what the teacher is saying, a lot of memorisation, and not a lot of creative or critical thinking.

"So it was really about developing the voices as loud as possible, as well as possible - especially for the girls. The focus was 'Skate and Create'; we did one hour of skateboarding and one hour of creativity-based activities in the classroom.

"That creativity part is very much embedded in skateboarding as well: there's no right or wrong way to ride a skateboard. There are no rules; you can do it any which way you want. And I think that's very much at the heart of what we do: we want to teach the children to think for themselves, to make mistakes, to fall down and be okay with it and get back up again. To open their minds to what they could actually do.

"It's so interesting to see young girls -- especially in Kabul -- enter the program, walking into the facility with their head down, looking at their feet, not being able to interact with other people or the environment. You can tell that they're extremely subservient at home; they literally don't have a voice.

"To see that growth through skateboarding ... they drop in on a ramp after a couple of weeks and they've done something they never thought would be possible. And then, straight away in the classroom, they're putting up their hands, ready to ask questions. There's a confidence-building part and there's a no-rules part as well."

Navigating the gender, class, and cultural barriers facing girls in Afghanistan was difficult for a white Western man. But Percovich's background in development meant he understood the importance of engaging with local communities and ensuring they played a central role in decision-making.

"It was very much me being in the background as much as possible, then pulling out foreigners as fast as possible from the overall set-up once we felt like we had the stability that was necessary," he explained.

"It was listening instead of prescribing, 'what I think is best for you.' It's more, 'you know the context, you know the problems, how can we be here to help?'

"So it's more of a scaffold; it's more, 'here is a support network, what would you like to do with it?'"

That handing over of administrative responsibilities has also allowed more women to become involved in the higher levels of Skateistan. Women now make up over half of the organisation's global workforce, and occupy the majority of higher-ranking roles. This includes Zainab Hussaini, who's now the country manager for Afghanistan's three skate schools in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and, soon, Bamyan - where she's from and which she recommended as the fifth school.

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"When I first joined Skateistan, I found that [it] was a safe place," Hussaini told ESPN from her office in Mazar-e-Sharif. "Safer than the public schools, because Skateistan was providing free transport for girls and connecting to the family directly. It was trying to speak with fathers and mothers to convince them that what we are teaching the students here and how our lessons will affect their children [is okay].

"Most of the families are not allowing their girls to be, for example, part of the football federation or a football team in Afghanistan, travelling outside to practice in a ground or a court that the boys are [using]. So Skateistan is making an opportunity for the girls, for women, to participate in sport activities in a very safe way.

"The boys and girls are coming in separate days. The coaches are female for female students and male for male students. We are following Afghanistan's rules -- the government's rules -- in our lessons, even in our sports sessions, to make sure the parents are confident that this is a good place for your child.

"Everything is free, they have a safe space, and when they feel there is nothing threatening them, they can learn better. There's something here for everyone."

Now a mother herself, Hussaini reflects on how much Afghanistan has changed in the last 20 years, and how important women and girls are to the future of the country.

"There were lots of issues, especially with girls in public schools," she said. "Most girls were not allowed to go to school because of the traditional way of the male of the family's thinking, and sometimes the traditional way of their mothers and grandmothers as well.

"The other problem was, when a girl graduated from high school, she was not allowed to go to university because boys and girls are sitting together and learning. It was taboo during the Taliban regime. It was right after the Taliban regime that the girls got this chance to go to universities and sit together with men in a room and learn the same subjects the men are learning.

"But people are changing their minds. The people today found that we have to change; the ways that we were following many years ago was not the right way. A country can be developed by improving girls and women. We cannot say that women and girls are not part of our community; developing them, improving them, we will be seeing the improvement [of Afghanistan] faster."

Hussaini herself recognises the role that sport and physical activity plays in empowering women and girls in this part of the world. In 2015, with the help of Skateistan, Hussaini became the first Afghan woman to run a marathon in the country. At the start, she was the only one. The following year, over 100 girls were running beside her.

"I strongly believe that sport is an important part of peace," Hussaini said. "Sport can bring peace. In the past, the people were talking about the next generation, and we were the next generation. Today, you can see that the next generation is bringing change.

"Sometimes limitations let people grow and find the right way. We don't have to just sit and say, 'yes, we're a poor country, we're insecure'; we have to use these opportunities, even if it's not for everyone. We can use the opportunity and spread it to other girls and women. We need to be ready to help others; you need to grow other people beside [you].

"Sport is a tool for bringing change. I hope, in the future, a day comes that we do not speak about women and girls in sport as a taboo; that, 'oh, wow, this woman is very strong because she's running a marathon in Afghanistan.'

"It should be something common and it should be something normal that a woman is running beside a man or that a team of females playing soccer is respected like a boy who is playing soccer. I hope for that future and I'm sure that it will come."

Skateboarding has now become one of the most popular sports in Afghanistan for women and girls. Some of its graduates have gone on to become leaders within Skateistan itself, passing on their own knowledge and experiences to those frightened young girls who, like them, shuffled into its facilities with their heads down and voices silent.

Emerging from the wreckage of the War On Terror, Skateistan is proof of the role sport can and should play in helping rebuild a society - namely, by empowering its people and giving them the resources to rebuild it themselves.

As global sport reckons with its new capabilities and responsibilities in a post-COVID-19 world, Skateistan offers a model of how sport can be used to create genuine, generational change in the lives of its participants.

It is not the thing in itself that makes sport valuable; rather, it's what sport leads to -- self-confidence, community, education, and the broadening of one's horizons -- that makes it a springboard from which a more equal, inclusive world can be created. Sometimes, as Skateistan shows, all it takes is a skateboard, an empty fountain, and an idea.

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Skateistan - The non-profit using skateboarding to empower women in Afghanistan - ESPN.co.uk

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For four years he commanded their unflinching loyalty. They protected him from impeachment, tacitly approved as children at the border were prised from their parents and placed in cages, and looked the other way as peacefully protesting Americans were gassed for a photo opportunity.

Now, in the death throes of Donald Trumps presidency, as the president refuses to concede the election to Joe Biden, Republicans who once stood shoulder to shoulder with the man who reshaped their political party to his will are scrambling to distance themselves from his unfounded claims that the election is being stolen from him.

Outrageous, uncalled for and a terrible mistake, the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, said of Trumps erratic pursuit of his false allegations; very disturbing, according to the Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey; and reckless in the words of the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

This breaking of ranks by growing numbers of senators, congressmen, governors and other elected officials coming only after Trumps cause appeared lost heralds a looming battle for the future direction of the Republican party with its figurehead gone from the stage.

Those now openly critical after years of silence must weigh up the consequences of speaking out while there remain loyalists inside the party determined to carry the banner of Trumpism into the 2024 election and beyond. That faction includes Republican senators such as Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, a staunch Trump ally who has urged the president to fight on, exhaust all options in his futile effort to prove widespread election fraud.

Trumpism will remain because he is such a wildly popular figure among their base. But, you know, its always been pragmatic for many Republicans, said Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the bestseller How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Theres some portion of the Republican party supporting him mainly because hes Trump, and hes owning the libs and saying racist things. And then another group is supporting him because hes pushing through the hardest-right policies.

I expect the Republican party will prioritise whatever mechanism they need to dominate the courts, to keep suppressing the vote, to make sure that they can, as a minority party, remain in control of the levers of government.

Stanley questioned the timing of those who appear to be breaking free from Trump by speaking out now.

The Republican party has been doing this anti-democratic thing since well before Trump, he said.

Theyve been acting like the Democrats are not legitimate, and they have no responsibility to co-govern with the Democrats and their sole purpose is to get the Democrats out and rule as a minority party.

I mean, weve had four years of this. When people do what is minimally expected that doesnt mean you should be filled with praise for them Norms have been so broken that were asking whether we should praise people when the president is obviously trying to rig and steal the election.

It remains to be seen if more moderate senior Republicans who have been critical of Trump, such as Mitt Romney, senator for Utah, will hold sway when the party plots its course for the Biden presidency.

Romney released a sternly worded statement on Friday that said Trumps assertions the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen were wrong. [It] damages the cause of freedom here and around the world, weakens the institutions that lie at the foundation of the Republic, and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions, he wrote.

Other Republican figures are still on board the Trump train, even as it jumps the rails, including the fiercely loyal DeSantis, Cruz, Cotton, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham and apologists such as Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trumps personal lawyer widely ridiculed for his appearance in the recent Borat movie.

All have backed the presidents false claims of malfeasance publicly, overlooking the fact they were made without evidence.

Those are the most dangerous politicians we have. They have placed zero value on democracy, Stanley, the Yale professor, said.

Some of them, like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, you know, might be more dangerous in various respects than Trump.

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After Trump: first shots fired in battle for Republican party's future - The Guardian

"There is no abandoning Trump and his imprint on the party. There are ways to adapt it and make our message more tenable to folks. But I don't think it is realistic to pretend he wasn't President for four years," one GOP House aide told CNN.

"I'm here tonight to stand with President Trump," Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Thursday night on Fox News.

"The election results are out of control. It's like the whistle has blown, the game is over, and the players have gone home, but the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team's side of the scoreboard," tweeted Tommy Tuberville, who won a US Senate seat in Alabama on Tuesday.

Trump's narrow loss makes it harder for Republicans to completely walk away from a President whose unpredictability tormented them at times but whose loyal following boosted them in races across the country this week.

"I think what Trump's primary message was, the forgotten men and women, America first, in coal country or manufacturing, that is something that every elected official ought to take a look at," Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, told CNN. "He ran and said this is who I am. He is the same person today as he was when he came down that escalator," in making his announcement in June 2015 that he would run for president.

Trump's popularity may not have saved him in the end, but it did deliver wins for Republicans across the country. Democrats won a razor-thin presidential contest, but Republicans managed to win back a handful of seats in the House, and looked poised to maintain the Senate and make some inroads with minority communities that could make it much harder for the GOP moderates and Trump critics to dismiss the President's message, strategy and legacy outright. Instead of abandoning Trump's unorthodox policies on trade, tough line on immigration or direct focus on working-class voters, Republicans are already grappling with the reality that Trump has forever changed the party.

A Republican-led Senate and Democratic White House would provide Republicans an opportunity to work with Biden. But it also would give them a stopgap, a firewall and a way to dramatically contrast themselves with the Democrats' agenda. Leadership jockeying on Capitol Hill will consume the lame duck session, but Republicans will also have to decide how to confront Biden's presidency -- whether to embrace areas of bipartisanship or firmly hold the line against Biden implementing his vision for the country.

Left in Trump's wake are a handful of governors, congressional leaders and GOP senators who will spend the next weeks and months dissecting where the party and, depending on their aspirations, they themselves go next.

For Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida who ran against Trump in the primary in 2016, the lessons of 2020 came early as he watched returns pouring in from his home in Miami-Dade County. A son of Cuban immigrants who once saw comprehensive immigration revisions as the path to expanding the GOP's reach, he watched as President-elect Biden significantly underperformed where Hillary Clinton had been just four years ago. Clinton had beat Trump by roughly 30 points in the heavily Latino county in 2016. In 2020, Biden was on a path to win by just 7 points. Trump, a President whose language about immigrants, obsession with a border wall and policies had been seen by pundits as setting the GOP back with Latino voters for decades, made inroads -- at least in some places. Two Democratic congresswomen in South Florida -- Donna Shalala and Debbie Muscarsel-Powell -- were also defeated by Republicans.

"We have spent many years in this country thinking ethnicity is the leading political identity of many Americans, and what we are learning is that their status as working-class Americas becomes their identity. That doesn't mean the other issues are irrelevant, but they go side by side," Rubio said.

If Republicans are to win the White House again, Rubio argues, the party should build on what Trump created with a multi-ethnic coalition and a focus on the economy that can appeal to the working class. Rubio says Republicans should also try to win back some of the suburban voters "who may be repelled by some of the harder edges of the messaging."

"That hunger and thirst for political leaders who focus on those issues is not going to change," Rubio said. "The question is whether someone not named Donald Trump is able to do what he has done."

Pushed on if he would run in 2024 for president, Rubio demurred: "I think I have learned over the years that sometimes you cannot decide whether you want to cross a bridge until you know how many bridges there are as your options. Obviously I have run for president before. I wouldn't rule it out in the future."

For some Republicans who have watched as the party has been overtaken by Trump over the last several years, Trump's loss comes with an opportunity -- a chance to turn the page and return to expanding the coalition of voters Republicans can get in an election.

"Dust off the old autopsy," former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican who retired from the Senate during Trump's presidency, told CNN in a extensive interview, referring to the Republican National Committee's 2013 report on what went wrong in the 2012 election and how to appeal to a broader swath of voters, especially minorities and women. "Anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy. Globalism is here to stay and we have to deal with it."

But even Flake acknowledges that Republicans have months and years of soul searching ahead.

"There is going to be a big segment that does think President Trump had the right message and he was flawed. You will have some like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz try to pick up that mantle," Flake said, referring to senators from Arkansas and Texas. "But I just hope that Republicans as a whole realize that Trump is a dead end. There is no there there. You can only own the libs and get a certain percentage of the voters."

Some conservatives on Capitol Hill disagree.

"I am not that nuts about the tweets because you are always asking me to defend them, and I don't want to, but we needed someone like him because what most conservatives do share is a revulsion to the deep state, the swamp, and if anything resonated with people it was his message of draining the swamp," Johnson said.

For Republicans, the immediate work of defining their party without the Twitter-obsessed, plain-speaking commander in chief will be carried out by their congressional leaders.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell retained his Senate seat handily Tuesday night in Kentucky and is widely expected to remain at the helm of the GOP conference in the US Senate. In his acceptance speech, McConnell didn't mention Trump specifically, but did forecast the importance of the working-class vote to Republicans.

"I look out for middle America," McConnell noted.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, meanwhile, used his news conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday to boast about Trump's successes for the party.

"President Trump had a very strong night last night. His vision for our country expanded our party," McCarthy touted. "His efforts in reaching out to every demographic has positively changed the future of the GOP."

Exactly what that future looks like, however, remains to be seen.

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Trump might have lost but his legacy lives on with congressional Republicans - CNN

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Editors note: This story contains explicit language.

A little over a week before Election Day, Tony Gonzales campaign got internal poll results that caught its attention.

The Republican candidate was up 5 percentage points in the 23rd Congressional District, the perennial battleground where U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, is retiring. Gonzales team was feeling good about his chances, but a 5-point win or anything close to it would be significant in a district decided by much smaller margins for the past few election cycles.

That poll turned out to be pretty accurate. Gonzales defeated the Democratic nominee, Gina Ortiz Jones, by 4 percentage points after she finished just 926 votes behind Hurd two years ago.

It was one of many bright spots Tuesday for Republicans in Texas and an example of relatively reliable polling to boot.

Not every campaign was as fortunate, though. Democrats woke up Wednesday morning questioning long-held assumptions about the most consequential Texas election in a generation the polling that had let them down, the turnout increase that didnt seem as friendly to them as anticipated, the expectations that were raised sky-high.

After Texas Republicans were caught sleeping two years ago, they say it was Democrats who walked into a buzzsaw this time a more battle-ready, unified GOP.

I think they thoroughly underestimated the desire to fight and the sophistication of not just the candidates and the consulting class but also these groups who are committed to a conservative agenda, said Matt Brownfield, a GOP strategist who worked on multiple races in the fight for the state House majority. They just underestimated us tremendously.

The Texas Democratic Party spent the cycle touting Texas as the biggest battleground state, and while the state attracted battleground-level attention and investment, Democrats ended up with few wins to show for it. President Donald Trump won the state by 6 percentage points, narrower than his 2016 margin but wider than many polls had suggested. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, easily dispatched a late Democratic spending surge and won reelection by 10 points. After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted 10 GOP-held U.S. House seats, Democrats were winning none of them as of Friday. And Democrats hopes of flipping the Texas House collapsed, with the balance of power largely unchanged heading into January.

On Tuesday afternoon, the state Democratic Party chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, issued a statement maintaining that the party called Texas the biggest battleground, not the biggest blue state.

We have tough questions to ask ourselves, Hinojosa said. There are significant challenges before us, and new solutions are required.

At the top of the ticket, Democrats had hoped for a much closer presidential race if not the state going blue in a presidential race for the first time since 1976. Bidens 6-point margin was especially disappointing given his striking underperformance along the border and particularly in South Texas.

That had ramifications down the ballot, which had races drawing money from across the nation. A national Democratic operative who worked on the battle for the Texas House said their sides strategy was predicated on a much stronger Biden performance statewide closer to Beto ORourkes 3-point deficit against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. The operative spoke on the condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to speak candidly about internal party strategies.

Like elsewhere in the country, Democrats were misled by polls in Texas.

While polls should be treated as a snapshot in time and not a prediction of the final outcome, many Democratic surveys even some that were conducted close to the election were far off. Less than two weeks before Election Day, a Democratic poll of the 3rd Congressional District found the Republican incumbent, Rep. Van Taylor of Plano, trailing by 2 points. He won Tuesday by 12.

Statewide, public polls were also more generous to Democrats, with the final RealClearPolitics polling average giving Trump only a 1-point edge in Texas.

Chris Wilson, a Republican pollster with wide experience in Texas, said polling in Texas may have failed to take into account the complexity of Hispanic voters, among other things.

In states like Texas, you need to really manage your sample well to make sure youre not just getting enough Hispanics, but getting enough of the right Hispanic subgroups by national origin and by socioeconomics, he said.

In the case of Gonzales, his pollster, Nicole McCleskey of Public Opinion Strategies, had been surveying the Hispanic-majority district since Hurds first race in 2014. She said that especially in the 23rd District, it is important not to consider Hispanic voters as a monolith and they can be very different in Bexar County versus the districts western rural expanse, for example.

It was not just bad polling fueling Democratic optimism. Many saw the massive number of people voting early as a sign of a blue wave rising.

Early voting turnout ended up at 9.7 million, more than the entire 2016 election. Voters with Republican primary history outnumbered those with Democratic primary history, though both sides were far more interested in the sizable group of new voters and which way they would break.

Derek Ryan, a Republican data analyst, said Texas had 2.9 million voters who registered after the 2018 election, and 1.6 million of them voted early. He had thought that if Republicans were lucky, those 1.6 million would break 60-40 for Democrats. On Thursday, though, he said it was clear that the split was far tighter.

The turnout was an especially satisfying development for Republicans who have long heard Democrats claim that Texas is not a red state but a nonvoting state.

Well, I think we fuckin blew that bullshit up yesterday when over 11 million people voted and they still lost and they lost everywhere, Dave Carney, Gov. Greg Abbotts top political strategist, told reporters Wednesday.

Republicans also argued Democrats were foolish to hold off on resuming door-knocking due to the coronavirus. While some Democrats dismissed that concern ahead of the election, others have openly grappled with it since Tuesday.

I cant help but imagine what we could have done if we were not restrained by the pandemic from knocking on doors, Beto ORourke wrote to supporters Wednesday in an email.

ORourke was prolific in the battle for the state House much to Republicans delight. Abbotts campaign ran highly targeted digital ads tying candidates to ORourkes positions, and the strategy was not without data to back it up ORourkes favorability rating was consistently underwater in statewide polling throughout the cycle.

When it came to issues, there was arguably none that Republicans bet bigger on than law enforcement. Abbott became obsessed with the defund the police movement after Austin cut its departments budget by a third, and Republicans throughout the ballot worked strenuously to tie their Democratic opponents to the cause which takes many forms even if they had not declared support for it.

A fierce national debate over criminal justice reform escalated this year after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, leading some advocates to call for shifts in police funding. Republicans campaigned heavily on the issue, saying it shows a lack of Democratic support for law enforcement.

"If we lose the argument on whether [a Democratic candidate] wants to defund the police, we still win, said Craig Murphy, a Republican consultant who was involved in the Texas House battle. Because if the issue is whether you support the police or not, then Im going with the Republican.

Reluctant to let the Republicans dictate the terms of the conversation, some Democratic candidates declined to push back on the police-related attacks in a meaningful way. One exception was Wendy Davis, the Democratic challenger to U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, who aired a direct-to-camera TV ad in which she said, We need criminal justice reform, but I dont support defunding the police. Still, Roy persisted with claims she wanted to defund the police, including in his final TV ad, and won by a better-than-expected 7 points.

Cornyn also seized on the issue in his campaigns TV ads, and a pro-Cornyn super PAC scrambled to shore him up in the final days by airing a commercial exclusively about law enforcement in mainly rural markets.

In his bid for a fourth term, Cornyn was determined to prevent a close race like the states junior senator, Cruz, faced against ORourke in 2018. That vigilance reassured Texas Republicans throughout the cycle, even as they wearily watched poll after poll come out showing Trump struggling in Texas.

Still, Cornyn ran into some late turbulence. His Democratic opponent, MJ Hegar, saw a fundraising boom after she won her July primary runoff, and once early voting began, a coalition of national Democratic super PACs came together to dump eight figures into the race.

Cornyn ultimately won by a wider margin than Trump.

Cornyns campaign knew he faced at least two challenges in the general election: low name ID and running with a president who was struggling in Texas. That is why he went on TV relatively early Aug. 14, over three weeks before Hegar did with positive ads targeted at a constituency that had soured on Trump: suburban women. The soft-focus commercials also provided an implicit stylistic contrast with the bombastic Trump, showing Cornyn wearing a mask the value of which Trump has fluctuated on and presenting him as a low-key, tactful statesman.

Asked after his victory speech if he felt he had to build an independent brand given Trumps perceived Texas troubles, Cornyn said he was proud to work with this president and reiterated they have had disagreements but that he prefers to deal with them privately.

While Cornyn brought relief to the GOP at the top of the ticket, the states Republicans had always had more work cut out for them farther down the ballot.

Fresh off flipping two U.S. House seats here in 2018, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stormed into Texas early in the cycle, establishing an office in Austin and vowing to make the state the linchpin to the partys strategy to expand its House majority. The DCCC ultimately assembled a target list of 10 GOP-held districts across the state.

As of Thursday, Democrats were within 5 points in only two of those races. The closest is in the 24th District, where Democrat Candace Valenzuela has not conceded to Republican Beth Van Duyne, who leads by over a point.

I was disappointed that we didnt win some seats in Texas, Ill be very honest about that, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Friday.

In a statement, a DCCC spokesperson, Avery Jaffe, highlighted how Democrats successfully defended the two Texas seats they picked up in 2018 and put the GOP on defense this cycle, spreading Republicans paper-thin by forcing them to spend millions on historically conservative seats.

At the end of the day, the margins in most of the DCCC-targeted districts were closer to those of Trump in each district four years ago versus ORourke two years ago. That spoke to a broader bet that Democrats had made down-ballot that ORourkes margin in legislative districts was something of a baseline heading into Tuesday.

These were all Republican districts, and they all ended up behaving like Republican districts, said Bob Salera, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Then there was the state House fight, where Democrats needed a net gain of nine seats to capture the majority and are staring down a net gain of zero.

Like the congressional races, Democrats relied on faulty polling for their optimism. In mid-August, Hinojosa, the state party chair, said internal polling showed Democrats leading in 18 out of 20 battleground state House races.

As of Friday, the party was on track to pick up only one seat, that of Rep. Sarah Davis, R-West University Place, and lose a seat, that of freshman Rep. Gina Calanni, D-Katy. A third contest the reelection campaign of Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson remained too close to call.

Austin Chambers, the head of the Republican State Leadership Committee, told reporters Wednesday that the group was absolutely overjoyed with the Texas results given that both sides spent more on the chamber than any other in the country.

Like the DCCC, the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee was left Thursday touting its defense victories the reelection of 11 out of 12 freshmen and emphasizing the expensive battle they forced Republicans to fight. That shows they know its a competitive chamber and will continue to be one, said Andrew Reagan, the HDCCs executive director.

Reagan was not the only Democrat seeking to keep the tough election in perspective Thursday. In an interview, Monica Alcantara, chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party, noted that there was a time when the party would not even consider putting up a candidate in a place like state House District 121, where Rep. Steve Allison, R-San Antonio, won by 7 on Tuesday.

Its just we need more work to do, Alcantara said, but I think were heading in the right direction.

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Texas Republicans were ready to fight back in 2020 elections - The Texas Tribune