When a Democratic candidate or initiative loses, the knee-jerk reaction is to blame it on Democrats for not turning out to vote.
Houston's Equal Rights Ordinance was not one of those cases.
Combined, the three major Democratic candidates (technically Houston municipal races are nonpartisan) received around 56 percent of the votes cast in the mayoral race. Democrats turned out to vote.
This wasn't about the LGBT community, either. Not even trans, really. At least only tangentially.
This was about male sexual predators posing as women and entering women's restrooms to sexually assault women. According to the anti-HERO minions, HERO would have made this legal. (It wouldn't. It WOULD have allowed transwomen to use the women's restroom. But then that's not what the anti-HERO campaign focused on.) If the anti-HERO campaign is to be believed, there is a giant mass of sexual predators just waiting to don wigs and dresses so that they can enter women's restrooms. (There isn't. Other cities that have the exact same ordinance have not had this problem, but perhaps there is something special about Houston where we have an inordinate number of people like this.)
The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance did not fail because Democrats failed to show up. It did not fail because a majority of Houstonians do not believe that the LGBT community should have basic human rights.
It failed because of a disgusting right-wing campaign funded by the usual assholes (Steven Hotze, self-made kingmaker of the Republican Party, and Bob McNair, owner of the NFL's worst franchise and financier of the "FairTax" movement to make taxes more regressive) that turned this into a referendum on whether men should be allowed to use women's restrooms. Of course men shouldn't be allowed to use women's restrooms!
Only... that was not at all what this was about. But you never would have known that if you'd asked the voters.