The picture, so perfectly composed, takes on a certain unreality: James Talarico, Texas’s first incoming Democratic senator in over 30 years, sitting across from incoming Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa (the first since 1990), clinking Whataburger cups at around 1 a.m. while onlookers cheer. “First stop post-win,” the caption reads. To me, it already looks like an old photo, the kind you see in grade school textbooks, where some long-gone hero, whose name and gist is in the glossary, beams in triumph—a momentous life that could happen then, but not now. It captures something optimistic and frankly foreign to Texas Democratic politics in my lifetime.
The best-case scenario promulgated by much of the pundit class was Talarico narrowly snatching victory from his opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Hinojosa valiantly crashing against the cold certitude of incumbent Governor Greg Abbott’s five-to-one spending advantage. Instead, Texas Democrats made history. They swept every single statewide office. They’re on track to control the state House for the first time since 2002 and flip all four of the Texas Supreme Court seats that were up for the taking this year, rewriting what’s possible in the Lone Star State overnight.
At Cactus Cove, a West Houston bar where area Democrats gathered, the night’s early tenor was uncertain. Everyone knew the odds—or at least, they had learned through each painful loss over the years that hope was a dangerous thing to have. Then came the results from the East Coast time zone: South Carolina, perhaps one of the most prototypically Southern states begrudgingly roped back into the Union, looked poised to select a Democratic senator for the first time since 1998. If they can do it, why can’t we?
As reality set in, people took to the streets. Cars parked outside the state Capitol in Austin and laid on their horns, waving the Texas flag. In the Rio Grande Valley, folks gathered in a strip mall parking lot for what’s called la pitada, an impromptu parade usually saved for Dallas Cowboys wins, hoisting large Hinojosa banners over a nearby pedestrian bridge. (Hinojosa, Texas’s first Latina governor, was born and raised in the Valley: puro pinche 956.) Tarrant County, the largest urban Republican stronghold in the state (Fort Worth), flipped both up- and downballot. Ditto Collin County, Paxton’s suburban Dallas home base.
In Houston, thousands of voters planted their “I voted” stickers on the memorial site where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by an ICE agent. This was regime change—it was not bloodless, lest we forget—which even those who hoped for it hardly expected to happen this way: slowly, then all at once.
No doubt Texas Democrats can thank national tailwinds for a good portion of their success last night, but Texas Republicans also had to contend with the slow erosion of people’s quality of life under their watch for the past 30-plus years. From the 1990s onward, they were the beneficiaries of a truly globalized economy: Allied with oil magnates, crossbred with neoconservative hegemony in Washington, and drawing boundless corporate investments at the expense of people’s everyday existence, all while blaming immigrants of basically every nationality for their own utter malfeasance.
Elon Musk burned at least $212 million to keep it that way (while reportedly seeking to purchase an entire state park). Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey Yass spent $12 million-plus to privatize Texas’s school system. The oil industry has for years “deferred” environmental fines while engorging itself on state grants, effectively reshuffling money back to itself, all under the auspices of GOP leaders.
Ken Paxton was in many ways the poster boy of this generalized—metastasized—corruption. The top of the ticket deserves most of the blame here; beyond his seeming inability to recoup his primary opponent’s country club Republican base, he also ran a “swagless” campaign, per Texas Monthly. But Abbott was part and parcel of the late Texas GOP, the sun around which apparatchiks obediently revolved. On my way to Cactus Cove last night, my rideshare driver was preoccupied by recurring calls from her aunt, who was trying to help her pay her electric bill, which she’d already restructured to pay in chunks. “It’s those new data centers,” she told me, exasperated—which Abbott had welcomed with open arms, no questions asked, until the backlash had reached a fever pitch. (Evidently, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI’s endorsements for his “guardrails” on the industry didn’t win voters over.)
In truth, parts of the Texas GOP are now likely eager to cosplay as resistance fighters. It was becoming played out, the establishment constantly pretending to “fight” the establishment, year after year. Whatever comes post-MAGA, be it the proto-Rhodesian fringe à la Bo French, or something closer to Abbottism—selective populism with a plutocratic bent—Republicans will likely maintain a majority in the state Senate, and the right’s online media apparatus will, with renewed zeal, showcase just how ugly and conspiratorial it can be.
Life will be hell for Hinojosa and her fellow statewides. She and Talarico’s 32-ounce Whataburger drinks had better have been strong. The moment will last forever in photos, but one day it’ll only be a page in a textbook.
