During Xaq Webb’s years of radical optimism, he thought little of the Texas Democratic Party. It didn’t take a genius to see reforms were needed. At least this was his perspective from the outside—early on as a lowly precinct chair, then working with the Texas contingent of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. But by March 2023, he’d been around the block; maybe it was time to make changes from the inside. He took a job with TDP as “operations director,” a senior-level bureaucrat of bureaucrats, what he called a “catchall” role, which entailed financial processing, campaign compliance reporting, and HR functions. “My estimation [before becoming staff] was that it was a well-functioning organization that was misunderstood,” he told me. “Of course, when I joined, I realized it wasn’t functioning as well as I was led to believe. But I think I was right that it was misunderstood.”
After 2022’s not-so-red-wave midterms, in which Texas Republicans flipped just one of three congressional seats they targeted that cycle, one might have hoped this meant TDP was on the right track. Then came 2024. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by nearly 14 points in the state, more than double his margin over Joe Biden in 2020. In the aftermath, not unlike insiders at the Democratic National Committee, Webb’s central concern was the debt the party had saddled during the bloodbath. But the bloodbath wasn’t over: Democrats on the outside wanted heads to roll.
For years, reformers had tried and failed to oust TDP chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, a former county judge from the Rio Grande Valley, who held the position for more than a decade. The 2024 backlash forced his resignation. His interim replacement, elected by TDP’s governing board in late March 2025, was Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old from Sulphur Springs, outside Dallas. He’d previously made a name for himself as TDP’s vice chair for finance. This July, he described himself to me as “a bull in a china shop.”
Webb and his co-workers—the old regime—were the proverbial china. On his first Monday as chairman, Scudder and a couple of consultants entered the Austin office and began interviewing staffers about the organization’s structure. Soon, a Dallas-based employment attorney began visiting, too. There was talk of “belt-tightening” and layoffs. The first to go, on April 7, was Monique Alcala, executive director since August 2023. This blindsided Webb, who had previously been involved in employment decisions. On April 16, he requested a formal clarification of his job description, which he says was never provided. Though his role was technically classified as “management,” his responsibilities had been reduced such that he chose to register with the staff union. He was terminated, and his last day was June 26. Finally, in September, Scudder announced that TDP’s central hub would be moving to Dallas, in addition to creating several satellite offices in Houston, Amarillo, and Eagle Pass, down along the border. The move prompted what The Texas Tribune called an “exodus of top staff.”
Critics claimed the move was intended to bring party operations closer to Scudder’s home base. But to Scudder, this initiative was making good on the promise that TDP would operate differently moving forward. “This is a strategic initiative to increase party presence across the state, and conversations are ongoing about future locations,” he said in a September 2025 press release.
“I knew if I only had one year as chairman, I was going to make it count for something,” Scudder told me, “and all the people who elected me to do something knew exactly what they were electing me to do.” He declined to discuss specific personnel matters, but added, “There was nobody sitting around in Texas thinking, ‘Man, if Dems would just stay the course, we’ll have some really great successes.’” If the party wanted to turn the state blue, the thinking goes, they’d have to leave their creature comforts in Austin and begin anew. (Meanwhile, four of TDP’s top five statewide candidates are from Austin.)
When problems arise, activists on lower rungs of the ladder are quick to blame the nominal leader of the state party, usually for said state party’s lackluster performance, candidates, or platform. But the actual job of a state party chair, like Ken Martin’s with the DNC, is basically infrastructural: administering primaries, data operations, voter registration—yawn. Still, Scudder has taken a more active, front-facing role this time around, presenting himself in media and online as a statewide leader at a time when Texas Democrats, frankly, have none.
The Lone Star State was once a Democratic stronghold, but no Democrat has won a statewide office here since 1994, the longest losing streak of any state party in the United States. Indeed, for the party faithful—a messy coalition of activists, politicians, donors, paraparty groups, and the party organization itself—reclaiming Texas, or at least nudging it toward a true purple, has been their task for more than three decades. And with each attempt to overcome their fate, each promise to reconnect with voters—to tack to the center, coordinate campaigns, build in the off years, win the “argument,” or let changing demographics work their magic—they’ve always seemed to tumble back to where they started.
Some moments have been closer than others: In 2008, they came within two seats of winning a majority in the state House, and Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run, in which he came less than 3 points away from ousting Ted Cruz, is often still discussed the wistful way one might recall their first beer. Today, with 37-year-old seminarian James Talarico seeking a suddenly open Senate seat, the dream is that he might succeed where Beto failed.
Talarico holds a “slightly stronger position” than O’Rourke in 2018, according to polling by the Texas Politics Project, a nonpartisan research group boasting Texas’s longest-running and most extensive public polling archive. Overall, more voters in April viewed Talarico favorably than said the same of O’Rourke at any time in 2018. Meanwhile, among Republicans, the job approval rate for Talarico’s opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, hovers at a far weaker margin than did Ted Cruz’s—around 59 to Cruz’s 74 percent—largely because Cruz reached the general practically uncontested, while Paxton duked it out with longtime Senator John Cornyn (to say nothing of the numerous scandals that have pockmarked his career).
“The objective evidence is that it looks very close, but as soon as you step away from the Senate race, I think it gets more complicated,” said James Henson, founder and executive director of the Texas Politics Project. “If you look at the margins in the other statewide races that we poll, particularly in the governor’s race, the Republican advantage in those races is between 5 and 7 points, with [Republican Governor Greg] Abbott at 5 points in our August polling.” Abbott—and, as of mid-January, his more than $105 million war chest—is the Texas Republicans’ center of gravity. If Democrats can make the other statewide races (especially the governor’s) more competitive, Abbott may have to adjust his plans to spend heavily helping downballot Republicans, which would send cascading effects around the state. (In late August, his campaign planned to pour $65 million into upwards of “31 target seats” between now and Election Day, according to The Texas Bullpen.)
Thus, in some small way, part of that Sisyphean task has fallen on Scudder’s lap. The Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, state Representative Gina Hinojosa (daughter of former chairman Hinojosa), is campaigning fiercely but on a comparatively lean budget, meaning the Democrats’ $30 million coordinated campaign infrastructure—a collaboration between TDP; O’Rourke’s Powered by People PAC; the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee; and Texas Majority PAC, a George Soros–backed vehicle with exceedingly deep coffers—will have to pull some weight.
It’s dull, logistical work: pooling resources to help with overhead costs, negotiating with vendors, building a “data hub,” centralizing volunteer operations. Compared to the other partnered entities, TDP is far less fiscally healthy and often dismissed by electeds, who have grown used to enduring a useless political organization from a bygone age. But TDP has a grand and terrible history, the kind that lives fitfully in the present. Within this year’s coordinated campaign structure, it stands alone as an entity represented by grassroots-elected party delegates, after all.
Democrats have been promised a new era for their party before; this is neither the first coordinated campaign nor the first chairman with big plans, and looking to history for easy solutions to present-day problems can be its own kind of snake oil. Still, Texas is projected to gain around four congressional seats by 2030, only a handful away from surpassing California. If Democrats are to remain relevant nationally, they’ll need to figure out how to win Texas—or at least some of it—whether they’d like to or not.
Maybe it goes without saying that every political party also entails a battle over who it’s “for.” “A political party is an organized attempt to get control of the government,” as political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once wrote, and for the majority of TDP’s history, it was an organized attempt to keep landowning Anglos in charge. Democrats, nationally, began taking interest in Texas before it gained statehood in December 1845, largely out of self-interest—to ensure another slave state entered the fold (the president at the time, James K. Polk, was a Southerner who aggressively sought to expand slavery). And after the Civil War, it was Texas Democrats who snuffed out the promise of Reconstruction, forming a true one-party state by and for white conservatives and (sometimes) white liberals.
It would last, through racial terror and political co-optation, into the 1970s. The governor was TDP’s “chief executive”—further melding it with the state machinery—and mandatory “loyalty” pledges were sometimes required to quell dissent or purge “bolters” (Democrats who voted for another party’s candidate). In the Rio Grande Valley, party bosses would sometimes pay voters’ poll taxes, but only if it suited them politically. As David Griscom recently showed in The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South, the populist movement was born in Texas, and later, its Socialist Party was among the largest in the country. Democrats killed both—the former by stripping its policy platform for parts, the latter through good old-fashioned state repression.
As a result, TDP was the “big tent” of trust and antitrust, farmer and banker, lumber baron and union employee. There was some debate as to whether a one-party state was in fact a multiparty structure, because many factions lived inside the TDP. And in 1901, after the discovery of oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont in East Texas, it became the party of Big Oil, too.
That alliance translated into federal political power. By the 1930s, any legislation dealing with agriculture and rural electrification, defense, the judiciary, financial regulation, and commerce could be approved or killed in committee by a Texas Democrat. For example, one oil lobbyist bragged that, on Washington’s Birthday in 1935, Texas Democrats had managed to pass a bill consolidating their state’s control over the petroleum trade—from committee through the Oval Office—in a single day. He told The Dallas Morning News that he’d never seen D.C. move that fast, “especially on a holiday.” As a bloc, they initially embraced the New Deal, but on their terms, siphoning hundreds of millions in federal dollars to their home state while demanding “sovereignty” from the feds, largely to protect their whites-only electorate and the oil industry. As political scientist V.O. Key Jr. wrote in 1949: “Texas has developed the most bitter intra-Democratic fight along New Deal and anti–New Deal lines in the South.” In 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt lamented that Texans were “running the government of the United States more largely than any other state.”
FDR was enormously popular among regular Texans, but the New Deal’s reforms proved loathsome to the state’s political elite—particularly within the energy sector, which was happy to accept federal support but, as ever, hostile to regulations. When FDR captured the nomination for his third presidential term in 1940, a contingent of Texas oilmen and financiers, who had been propelled to global dominance by the New Deal regime, turned against TDP and supported the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie; Roosevelt later remarked that his well-moneyed critics “should be asked directly just which of the remedies” that “Dr. New Deal” had prescribed should be “taken away from the patient.”
The World War II economy would double down on this dynamic: Industry was booming, and many Texans benefited from Democratic rule, largely through federal largesse, but with greater wealth came greater means to protect it. (Oil-rich Houston became known as the “city the Depression missed.”) At the same time, increased industry meant increased labor union activity—which was, for conservatives, a racially coded issue. Texas Democrats had outright banned nonwhite participation in Democratic primaries in 1923, but in 1944, the NAACP under Thurgood Marshall had won a Supreme Court case repealing the Texas law. Now, if Latino farmers along the Rio Grande or Black oil workers on the Gulf Coast could demand pay parity and protections on the job, what would stop them from pushing for representation in government?
Texas’s FDR-aligned activists were mostly quiet about race at this juncture, fearing that a backlash would push them further from the halls of power. But while that contingent strengthened its relationships with national liberal groups, Texas’s plutocrats curried favor with the nation’s conservative movement. In 1948, oil magnate Hugh Roy Cullen organized a rally in Houston for Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign; Cullen was also the largest individual donor to U.S. politicians in 1952 and 1954. Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy, architect of the Red Scare, made frequent fundraising trips to Texas, including to Dallas—among the first areas where Texas Republicans saw gains—and was known as “Texas’s third U.S. senator.” Democratic Governor Allan Shivers, an ally to the oil industry, once even presented McCarthy with a “certificate” of Texas citizenship, along with a $6,000 Cadillac.
Meanwhile, Texas governors began formalizing their influence on TDP to quash local enemies and buck the national party. In 1950, for instance, Governor Shivers purged the party’s governing board and stacked it with so-called Shivercrats. Then he (and the party organization) “bolted”—exactly what generations of Democrats had worked to avoid—endorsing Republican Dwight Eisenhower for president. The next governor, Price Daniel, fostered the idea of “institutionalizing” the party, enlarging the staff headquarters in Austin (he hired the first executive director, a Shivers alum) to serve as “unofficial right arm” in his political and legislative matters, including political appointments. (Most of the executive committee and state party officers were the governor’s major donors.)
TDP’s liberal faction valiantly fought the conservative establishment during those years. Frankie Carter Randolph, the daughter of a lumber baron, helped bankroll an ecosystem of grassroots organizations—including the Texas Observer, the beating heart of Texas liberalism—which allied with labor and civil rights groups. (“De facto Mrs. Randolph was the publisher, whether de jure I was or not,” Ronnie Dugger, the Observer’s founding editor, told an interviewer in 1970.) Randolph also supported Ralph Yarborough, a New Deal liberal who ran for governor against Shivers twice and became a senator in 1957, relying on the Rooseveltian coalition that much of TDP spurned.
Yarborough feuded with much of Texas’s establishment, including his fellow senator at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson. The prevailing view among Texas liberals was that LBJ couldn’t be trusted. But going into the 1960s, the future vice president cannily secured the support of the liberal and loyalist (as opposed to conservative) wings of the party. Randolph and Dugger argued bitterly over her support for LBJ at the time; in Dugger’s view, “Johnson’s kind of power is an opportunist power that abandons the poor when his own career’s at stake and reverts to the cause of the poor when it’s useful to his career…. Amoral. Occasionally with moral results.”
Party formalization was a major step toward today’s professionalized party operations, and the civil rights era further pushed the party toward an administrative, rather than political, role. The goal, of course, was to ensure proportional representation among its members. Power within the Democratic Party had historically trickled upward from the states, because state parties chose how to select their delegates in presidential years. After its disastrous 1968 convention in Chicago, the Democratic National Committee created the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which eventually outlined reforms “opening” the nomination process. As political scientist Daniel Schlozman recently wrote, “State parties lost their most important job, and the DNC began to oversee the elaborate rules that translate primaries and caucuses into delegates at the national convention.”
To John Bryant, the two-time Texas state rep, this was “where we became a real, actual Democratic Party.” He joined in 1968, as a college student, after witnessing the liberal delegation at TDP’s state convention walk out in protest over proportional representation. But former Governor Preston Smith, a conservative Democrat who held the office from 1969 to 1973, disagreed, telling one researcher, “If the McGovern reforms had not been passed, we wouldn’t have a Republican Governor today.” In other words, opening up the party portended white conservatives’ drift to the GOP.
There’s some truth to both claims. The plutocrats who’d long steered TDP had no real interest in democracy, and for the first time in state history, TDP had adopted internal rules mandating democratic representation. Liberal organizers had gone from passively hoping demographic changes would flip the party in their direction (prefiguring the 2010s’ “demographics as destiny” refrain) to performing the slow, heroic, precinct-to-precinct work of party-building. But because state parties no longer mattered much, and TDP could no longer structurally guarantee a local decision-making monopoly, conservative financiers eventually sought partners elsewhere.
The most common explanation for Texas’s current blood-red makeup is that civil rights reforms killed the Democratic Party. They certainly played a role in its demise, but there were cracks in the foundation well before the 1960s, and it took until the 1990s for the party to truly crumble. So, what of the intervening years?
Although Republicans were making modest gains, TDP was still strong for most of the 1970s. The Democratic governor retained the power to select the party chairman, but the state committee and its officers were elected through delegates, representing a larger constituency than ever before. In this period, the party played an active role in recruiting and elevating Black and Latino candidates to Congress and the state legislature. “It became a much more diverse operation,” said Jim Hightower, a former Yarborough staffer and self-described populist who, as agriculture commissioner from 1983 to 1991, was one of the Texas Democrats’ last statewide officeholders. He added that “the party itself became more important” for brokering deals among candidates and developing statewide slates, though one researcher noted that elected officials’ participation within the state party apparatus had begun to decline.
Meanwhile, the electorate was changing. Within the next few decades, Texas went from a majority rural state to one of the most heavily urbanized in the country. As the Rust Belt, well, rusted, the 1970s oil boom brought tens of thousands of residents from other states in search of work (out-of-state workers, it’s worth mentioning, without generational ties to TDP). At the same time, automation hit the oil and shipping industries, sending shock waves through the unionized faction of the party, and the suburbs sprawled, creating segregated enclaves for the white-collar middle class.
Political majorities are constructed—they don’t materialize out of thin air. But coalitions, “built around increasingly obsolescent combinations of trade and labor, decay,” wrote Thomas Ferguson, research director at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. And in their place, new coalitions arise. This new coalition of oilfield wildcatters and white-collar middle managers was primed to vote Republican.
Members of the Texas GOP may have had the wind at their backs, but their dominance wasn’t preordained. Their genius in this era was their ability to meld their donors’ country club proclivities with regular people’s frustrations surrounding a frequently corrupt 100-year-old regime. (One might even call it a “popular front.”) Matters only got worse in 1978, after Democrats suffered an upset loss in the governor’s race. For the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican—the oil entrepreneur Bill Clements—held the “crown jewel” of Texas politics, meaning for the first time in history, TDP’s chairman would not be chosen by the governor. TDP’s foremost attachment to the state was finally severed.
Bob Slagle, a boisterous, gum-chewing attorney and former Lyndon B. Johnson staffer, was the first independently elected party chairman in TDP’s history. He held the position, which had no salary, from 1980 to 1995—three years longer than Scudder’s predecessor, Gilberto Hinojosa—and his tenure basically marked the peak of true two-party competition in Texas. He soon parted ways with his executive director, Garry Mauro, who went on to serve four terms as Texas land commissioner (Mauro was also first to computerize TDP’s voter lists). “For the first three-quarters of this century,” Slagle wrote in a 1990 campaign letter, “only rarely did a Chairman acknowledge the interest of the party itself or that of any Democratic candidate or officeholder other than the Governor.” True to his LBJ roots, Slagle capably occupied the center lane, coordinating candidate slates representing folks from his left to his right, “the radicals with the establishment,” as Hightower told me. He was a champion for voter registration programs and played a major role in redistricting fights, supporting the creation of minority opportunity districts. The hope was that the party could become a vehicle for all of its members—at least nominally following the “big tent” strategy of the New Deal era.
As leaders the world over recently learned, holding onto power amid a historic economic crisis—in Texas’s case, the 1980s oil crash—is no small feat, and Texas Democrats, during the Reagan Revolution, maintained control over most statewide offices and the legislature. At the same time, however, TDP suffered a “record number of defections to the Republican Party,” per the Texas Observer, indicating the steady groundwork the GOP was focused on at the time. As David Griscom writes, “The GOP built a sizable and influential organization, encouraging grassroots supporters, women, and young people inspired by Ronald Reagan to do much of the party’s” spadework. In essence, they followed Frankie Carter Randolph’s precinct-by-precinct model of change.
Randolph died in 1972, “tired and pretty much withdrawn,” as Dugger once said, having watched the nationwide reaction to the Vietnam War, and “the discovery by the American personality that something more than ordinary electoral politics was going to be necessary to reform the system.” And while the party had opened up, the relative decline in officeholders’ participation in intraparty politics meant that, paradoxically, Slagle faced few tests against his leadership. The irony was that Texas underwent democratization at a moment when both parties were hollowing out, becoming more of a tool for moving money and aggregating data than a functional part of civic life.
Nineteen ninety-four—the year George W. Bush was elected governor, ousting liberal Democrat Ann Richards—was bad enough. But by 2003, Republicans held both legislative chambers and every executive office in the state. And with this newfound majority, they redrew the congressional maps and ensured their supremacy for decades to come. All told, Texas had maintained true two-party competition for about as long as Family Guy has been on TV.
Once again, heads had to roll, and Slagle’s tenure, much like Hinojosa’s in 2024, came to a rather unceremonious end. Rumors swirled of his ouster and potential replacements, and in June 1995, Slagle announced his intention to step aside at next year’s convention. Around three months later, several prominent statewide Democrats decided they’d waited long enough. They published an open letter calling for his resignation “in order that we may all begin planning for the future.”
Slagle refused, saying he didn’t believe there was a consensus among the “rank-and-file party leaders,” and adding that it would be wrong for statewide electeds to “impose” a new chairman. “There certainly appears to be a consensus on Mr. Slagle,” said Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor at the time, and one of the letter’s signatories. By December, Bullock and several other elected officials got their pick for the next chairman: former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Bill White, who’d proved himself a prolific fundraiser during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. When push came to shove, the electeds still got their way—even as they distanced themselves from the party’s other operations.
Among the Democratic operatives I spoke to who were active at the time, there were varying theories about what happened. Democrats “decided to abandon grassroots campaigning,” Hightower said, while John Bryant blamed the insidious rise of Fox News. But to Glen Maxey, a Texas state legislator from 1991 to 2003 and TDP’s legislative director in the 2010s, “The Texas Democratic Party killed itself.” The story, to him, came down to data, and which party modernized first. In Red State: An Insider’s Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics, Wayne Thorburn, formerly the Texas GOP’s executive director, wrote that “the expansion of the Republican organization and candidate recruitment combined with the weakness of the Democratic organization” led to the collapse of two-party competition. Karl Rove, the state’s dominant political consultant of the era, mastered a micro-macro voter targeting system: direct mail aimed at micro-constituencies with a common interest and a voting history, and fomenting mass media hysterics to draw the general public’s attention to his client.
“Texas is a huge state. It costs millions of dollars to maintain voter files for all 254 counties,” Maxey said. At the time, groups had to go county by county to acquire and develop those records, but to save money (large donors increasingly aligned with the state GOP), they “were only going into the swing districts across the state.” Incumbents in safe districts were left to their own devices, and it was in their self-interest to avoid high voter turnouts. Even as Democrats suffered further losses, this dynamic hasn’t really changed. Post-primary, the work slows if it doesn’t stop completely. Maxey recalled asking a party officer near the border to help with a get-out-the-vote campaign in 2014, and their response was, essentially, Why should I? Meanwhile, Republicans “identified and registered new suburban voters before they had even removed their California license plates,” the Texas Observer wrote in 1995.
The data deficit hurt statewide candidates the most, and once Texas’s executive branch had gone red, TDP was well and truly adrift. “You had no leaders,” said Matt Angle, a veteran Democratic operative and founder of the Lone Star Project PAC. “We haven’t had an alpha elected official in Texas who could kind of call balls and strikes or break ties.… If you look around the country at the places where you have a strong Democratic Party, I don’t think there’s an example in which you don’t have a relatively strong statewide elected Democrat.”
To be completely fair to Slagle, the data game led by right-wingers like Karl Rove soon caught the rest of the country by surprise, too. But for someone who advocated for get-out-the-vote measures, as Slagle did, it does seem like a failure from on high to remain competitive in that arena. More broadly, though, as political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld wrote in 2024, modern American political parties maintain a distinctive combination of “activity and incapacity.” While they keep busy administering primaries, fundraising, and organizing voter data, they are “unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives”; they “tilt toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones” and are, in essence, “swarming networks of unattached paraparty groups, without popular accountability.” In Texas, that lack of presence was acutely felt, and that lack of accountability fostered a sense of distrust that lives on today. Looking back, one gets the sense that Slagle was active but incapable. He was still probably better than what came next.
For decades now, various well-endowed groups have promised to build upon the coordinated campaigns of the Slagle years. Memories being short, sometimes they’ve claimed they were the first. The “Dream Team” of 2002 was a coordinated effort to draw a diverse set of voters to the polls (yes, that’s the year Democrats lost both legislative chambers); Battleground Texas in 2013, led by former Obama aide (and future Lyft exec) Jeremy Bird, similarly crashed against the rocks; and Colin Allred’s “Texas Offense” initiative was about as threadbare as his NFL career. At root, the idea is a good one, but coordinating across 254 counties and 20 media markets, without much coherent gravitational force besides money and data, is a tall tree to climb.
Compared to the late ’90s and early aughts, things have certainly improved. Back then, Texas was mostly treated as an ATM for big national campaigns (though no Democrat appeared interested in becoming Texas’s “third U.S. senator,” à la Joe McCarthy), and TDP rapidly cycled through chair after chair, each promising to tackle the party’s debts or regain support among conservatives—what Kendall Scudder rightly mocked as a “maybe-they’ll-take-us-to-prom-this-year” ethos.
“It’s really hard to compare anybody after Slagle to Slagle,” Matt Angle said. After all, Slagle had statewide electeds to work with. The closest, at least in tenure length, is Hinojosa, and to his credit, Hinojosa presided over a period of institutional stability not seen within TDP for a long time. Yet, while he may have righted the ship, his vision for what the party could be was rather limited. He seemed to rest too much faith in the state’s growing Latino electorate. We know how that went.
Meanwhile, Scudder’s mandate seems secure. At TDP’s convention in Corpus Christi in June, its delegates overwhelmingly elected him to remain chairman. He paid off the debt that former operations director Xaq Webb was worried about, albeit in a manner Webb has publicly contested, and for the first time in modern state history, a Texas Democrat is running in every state and federal race this cycle. He also helped triple TDP’s sustaining member program. “We need to probably triple it again,” Scudder acknowledged, but “it’s made it a lot easier for us to make payroll each month.”
Probably his boldest move came in late May, when he called for Democratic state representatives to drop their support for Republican Speaker Dustin Burrows. In early 2025, 49 out of 62 Democrats crossed party lines to support Burrows over Representative David Cook, who had the votes of most GOP members, including the most conservative bloc. The calculus was simple: Democrats could make individual deals with Burrows to earn an ally and pass a few bills while avoiding the worst of far-right control. Instead, the Burrows-led House went on to pass a wave of conservative priorities; Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who presides over the Texas state Senate, called that year’s legislative session the “most conservative and successful” in the chambers’ history.
“The Democratic members whose votes gave him the gavel must now acknowledge the consequences of that decision and must be held to account,” Scudder’s resolution said. “There is no precedent for that in the Texas Democratic Party,” said John Bryant. Elected leaders may resent it, but “the primary voters, the people that make up the party and contribute to it, are tired of go-along-to-get-along nominees” who are “making their own private deals with the Republican speaker because they want to pass their insignificant bills.” As a minority bloc, they’re stronger together, Bryant said, and the public wants to “see us fighting effectively.” Scudder added: “It shouldn’t be controversial to hear the Democratic chair say they don’t like the Republican speaker.” Limited as he may be by the position itself, he’s shown genuine interest in casting aside the way things are supposed to be done in order to do what he thinks is needed.
Republicans have searched far and wide for someone to blame for the state’s many ills this cycle, but having spent decades at the helm—indulging years of industrial plunder along the coast, and more recently fueling the data center buildout through an alliance with Big Oil—it’s become harder to find a scapegoat.
In late July, polling from Fox News, of all places, showed Gina Hinojosa just 1 point behind Abbott. Hinojosa has hammered Abbott on charges of corruption, pointing to his vocal support for school privatization and, until recently, the data center boom. Fifty-six percent of Texas voters say they oppose the construction of data centers in their community, and over the past six years, the majority of Texans have felt the economy is worse off than the year before, suggesting that rapacious growth—the kind Texas is known for—may be falling out of favor with the public. Meanwhile, in one poll, Talarico crossed the 50 percent threshold in his race against Ken Paxton. If economics are any indicator, this could be a moment like the 1970s, when one coalition decays to be replaced by another.
Not for nothing, Talarico has, like O’Rourke, somewhat sidestepped the typical Democratic label; it can’t be coincidental that both campaigns shirked the usual blue yard signs for a more neutral-looking black-and-white. In June, just before TDP’s convention in Corpus Christi, the Texas Politics Project found about 52 percent of party voters still found the Democratic brand unfavorable. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly 40 percent found the party “not liberal enough,” compared to just 10 percent who found it “too liberal.” Meanwhile, Republicans have broadcast that “historically reliable GOP voters are showing signs of disengagement,” with “suburban districts” in particular “feeling this most acutely.”
Talarico has already raised more money at this stage of the race than any general election candidate in Texas within the past decade. Those deep pockets translate into potential downballot power. “Being willing and able to leverage the money that they have … gives them an opportunity to have an outside say,” Angle told me. Talarico has become, as Abbott is for the GOP, the party’s center of gravity; it’s his party, whether he wants the label or not.
If he wins, he’ll remain that center of gravity while further interfacing with the national party’s donor base. And Scudder will be known as the party chairman who retook Texas, even if he was one of many with their hands on the steering wheel. “He will be judged by races won and races lost,” Angle added. “I don’t think he’ll get blamed if Talarico loses, but if Talarico does well, and then we don’t pick up other stuff, if any incumbents lose who shouldn’t lose, he’ll get probably an unfair share of the blame.”
Scudder, for his part, said he ran “fully expecting this to be a career graveyard.” He’s overtly aware of what others might say once his term is in the past tense. That he was the last unpaid chair? That he moved party operations outside Austin? He hopes to be the “infrastructure” chair, the one who creates the “muscle memory” needed to win—and keep winning.
“What I have told people pretty consistently in the last year is that the number one way you know someone’s not doing the job of party chair in Texas is if they hold it,” he said. That is, the longer you keep it, the less likely you are to be doing it well. “It is a really tough job,” he added. Such is his fate.
