The establishment wants to cancel me. They know I don’t take money from PACs, politicians, or corporations, which means nobody tells me what to write. That scares them. They’d love to shut me up. You can make sure they don’t, by becoming a paid subscriber today.

Subscribe now

If you are running for SDEC and haven’t filled out the Lone Star Left endorsement form yet, you can find it here.

The Texas Democratic Party State Convention convenes in Corpus Christi on June 25th, and delegates will elect the party’s executive officers, including the First Vice Chair. That position matters more than most people realize. The First Vice Chair presides over the SDEC when the State Chair is absent, holds a vote on statutory matters alongside the Chair, sits automatically on the Democratic National Committee, and serves as the second-in-command of the entire state party apparatus.

Lone Star Left is endorsing Delia Parker-Mims to fill this role.

Her record is the argument.

Delia Parker-Mims has served as Chair of the Denton County Democratic Party since 2021. Denton County is the seventh most populous county in Texas. Winning there, or even holding ground there, requires strategy, discipline, and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of building a party from the precinct level up.

She has done exactly that, and the numbers back it up.

In the 2024 general election, Denton County was the only county among the seven most populous counties in Texas to increase its Democratic voter turnout. Harris went down. Dallas went down. Tarrant, Bexar, Travis, and Collin, all down. Denton went up. That happened because Delia Parker-Mims built a turnout operation.

Volunteer contacts nearly tripled under her leadership. In 2024, the Denton County Democratic Party made more than 130,000 voter contacts for the presidential election alone, an unprecedented number compared to previous DCDP leadership. Within her first 90 days in office, she launched the “Fight Back Register 50” initiative, a targeted voter registration program that the DCDP describes as the largest and most-targeted voter registration program among county Democratic parties in Texas, reaching 27,000 potential new Democratic voters in 2022.

In 2022, Denton County stood out as the only major county in Texas to increase Democratic votes between the 2018 and 2022 midterms, and it did so again in 2024. That’s what you get when leadership is consistent.

She also put resources where they counted at the municipal level. In 2022, under her direction, the DCDP helped flip the mayoral seat in Flower Mound and helped avert a MAGA takeover of the Lewisville ISD school board.

And in 2024, every single state legislative race in Denton County featured a Democratic candidate, the first time in decades. Delia Parker-Mims helped recruit candidates, inspired them, coached them, and made sure voters across Denton County had an actual choice on their ballots.

Who she is.

Delia Parker-Mims is an SMU-trained attorney with a background in economics. She has spent 25 years practicing family law in Denton County, representing battered women, advocating for mentally ill juveniles, and assisting seniors. She has operated for a quarter century at the intersection of law, poverty, disability, and domestic violence.

Her community involvement runs deep. Board President of Denton County Child Protective Services, board member for Denton County Friends of the Family, board member for North Texas Legal Services, Diversity Committee member for Lewisville ISD, surrogate parent volunteer for special education students, and founder of the Community Connect COVID-19 Response information network. She has run free legal education clinics, a Pro Se Divorce Clinic, sexual harassment awareness training, grandparents’ legal rights workshops, and a program called “In Search of Wonder Woman.”

Delia is someone who has been embedded in this community’s most vulnerable corners for decades.

The job description.

Per the party bylaws, the First Vice Chair must be of a different gender than the State Chair, currently Kendall Scudder. They preside over the SDEC in the Chair’s absence. They are one of only two officers who can vote on statutory matters. They fill automatic positions created for party Vice Chairs, including membership on the DNC. When there’s a vacancy in a party office, they give notice and manage the process. When there’s a petition to remove the State Chair, they give notice of that petition to the SDEC.

This person needs to know how a party organization actually works. They need to understand the mechanics of voter contact, volunteer mobilization, candidate recruitment, and county-level infrastructure, because those are the things the state party needs to be building right now if we’re going to capitalize on the wave opportunity in front of us in 2026 and beyond.

Delia Parker-Mims has done all of it in a county that wasn’t supposed to be moving our way.

An honest assessment of what we need.

A Vice Chair who nobody has heard from outside of the party and makes no impact on the ground is a wasted seat at a moment when Texas Democrats cannot afford wasted seats.

The 2026 cycle is arguably the best opportunity Texas Democrats have had in a generation. Gina Hinojosa is running for Governor. James Talarico is running for US Senate. Down-ballot legislative races across the state are genuinely competitive. The wave is building. What the Texas Democratic Party does right now will determine whether that wave lands or breaks.

The First Vice Chair has to be someone with a track record of doing the actual work.

Delia Parker-Mims has spent five years proving that a Democratic county party in a tough county can grow, can recruit, can mobilize, and can win, even when the odds aren’t friendly.

This is why Lone Star Left is endorsing Delia Parker-Mims for First Vice Chair of the Texas Democratic Party.

If you’re a delegate heading to Corpus Christi on June 25th, we are asking you to vote for Delia Parker-Mims. Because she has the receipts. Denton County went up when every comparable county went down. Volunteers tripled. Candidates ran in every race. A MAGA school board takeover got stopped cold.

That’s the kind of Vice Chair the Texas Democratic Party needs right now. Someone who has already proven she can build what we need to build statewide.

Learn more about Delia Parker-Mims on her website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next five months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Merrie Fox?

Merrie Fox is a woman who spent 31 years inside public schools, teaching, coaching, running buildings, fixing problems, and watching what happens to kids when the adults in charge actually give a damn. She earned her undergraduate degree in Exercise and Sports Science from Southwest Texas State, came back for a master’s in Education Administration from Texas State, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Northcentral University. She knows what good schools look like from the inside, and she knows what happens to them when the Legislature decides they’re a line item instead of a cornerstone.

Her story in this part of Texas starts in 1982, when her family moved to Canyon Lake so her father could escape the air pollution that was killing him. That’s how she first came to understand what this land means and what it costs to protect it. She never left. She lives in New Braunfels now with her wife, Lisa, and their two dogs. They raised two kids here. One became a teacher. One became a paramedic. Both still serve their communities nearby.

After retiring from public education in 2023, Merrie became Executive Director of Circle Arts Theatre in New Braunfels because, apparently, 31 years of public service wasn’t enough and she needed something else to pour herself into. Along the way, she’s volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, First Footing, Family Promise, New Braunfels Angels, and Riverside Pride. She sings in her church choir. She kayaks the Hill Country rivers she’s been fighting to protect her whole adult life.

The district.

Let’s start with the map in this district, because we need to be honest about where we’re starting from.

In 2024, Carrie Isaac beat Sally Duval 71.5% to 28.5%, a 43-point shellacking. Trump carried the district at 69.3% to Harris’s 29.6%. Ted Cruz pulled 66.6%. The SBOE race went 74.2% Republican. There is no gentle way to say this, but HD73 is a deep-red district. Comal County, which makes up the bulk of the district, has been Republican bedrock for decades, and the 16% of western Hays County included here skews Anglo and suburban, not the progressive Hays precincts that have been trending blue.

The district’s population profile tells a related story. It’s 67.4% Anglo, with a Hispanic population of 25.3%, but that 25.3% does not translate to 25.3% of the electorate. Spanish-surname voters account for just 15% of the total registered voters. That gap is where organizing work has to happen.

The district skews older and wealthier than Texas as a whole. Nearly 20% of residents are 65 or older, compared to 13.2% statewide. The per capita income is $52,738, compared with a state average of $39,446. More than half of owner-occupied homes are valued above $500,000. This is not a district of economic anxiety voters who might be peeled off with kitchen-table messaging. This is a district of people who, materially speaking, are doing fine, and who have been voting accordingly.

New Braunfels was the third-fastest-growing city in the United States from 2010 to 2020. That growth has continued. The city currently has a population of 102,000 and is projected to double by 2040, according to Texas Water Development Board projections. That’s a lot of new residents, and new residents, particularly transplants from purple or blue metros, represent a genuine but unproven voting opportunity. Whether those newcomers are Austin liberals who moved for affordability or San Antonio Republicans who moved up the I-35 corridor matters enormously.

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, and where Merrie Fox’s biography intersects with local politics in a way that isn’t just a campaign talking point.

Canyon Lake is currently at 59% capacity and dropping. The Hill Country is in extreme drought, and development pressure is only intensifying water demand across Bexar, Comal, Hays, and Travis counties. The tourism economy that Canyon Lake and the Guadalupe River support is taking a hit right now, and the people feeling it are voters.

This is where a Republican legislator who has spent her short tenure in the Texas Freedom Caucus, voting to defund public schools via vouchers and fighting culture war proxy battles, has a real exposure problem. The people who live on or near that lake don’t care about critical race theory. They care about whether there’s going to be water in it. Carrie Isaac is a Texas Freedom Caucus member who ran on “Faith, Family, and Freedom,” and she has no meaningful answer for constituents whose marinas are bone-dry.

I’m not going to tell you this race is a layup. It isn’t. A 43-point margin doesn’t evaporate in a one-wave election, even a good one. But here’s what a plausible path looks like:

The national environment has to hold. If Democrats are running D+5 or better on the generic ballot into October, that wave will shave margins across the board, including in districts like this one, where the floor starts to shift.

New resident activation is real but underworked. A district that’s adding population at this rate is not a static electorate. The 2024 registration data show 181,220 total registered voters, but with New Braunfels projected to double by 2040, the composition of that file is changing with each cycle.

The water issue could break through the partisan wall in a way that education and abortion can’t, because it’s tangible, it’s local, and it’s happening right now. Republican homeowners who have watched Canyon Lake drop to half capacity while their property values depend on river tourism are having conversations that aren’t partisan.

HD-73 is a stretch in 2026. But it’s a stretch worth making, and Merrie Fox is exactly the kind of candidate who makes stretches viable.

The incumbent.

Incumbent Carrie Issac (R) is the wife of former legislator turned lobbyist, Jason Isaac. Isaac is anti-abortion and a charter school advocate who has described efforts toward inclusive education as critical race theory. She’s been a voucher advocate since before she had a seat, having served as executive director of the Digital Education & Work Initiative of Texas.

Now, the funny thing about Carrie Isaac is that she’s one of the dumbest Republicans in the Texas House, and I don’t say that to be mean or out of Democratic callousness. She’s repeatedly proven that she introduces and votes on bills, which she cannot defend and doesn’t understand. And when it comes to basic legislation, she often needs other Republicans to stand with her and instruct her on how to respond to questions. Case in point:

And that wasn’t a one-off situation:

Maybe she’s a nice person who wants women in Texas to die from ectopic pregnancies and for taxpayer dollars to be funneled into the pockets of the wealthy under the guise of vouchers, but legislating is not for her. And every time she tries, the Democrats humiliate her.

In Merri Fox’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Fox, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

Yes. Minimum wage jobs aren’t only for young people who want some extra spending money. Working 40 hours per week at the current minimum wage yields a whopping $290. That’s $1,160 a month - before taxes. No one deserves to work a full-time job and still not make enough money to cover basic necessities.

Q: Should Texas end tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations?

Tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations are rarely needed to stimulate economic growth in Texas. Therefore, tax incentives should be used sparingly, have limited terms (2-3 years), and require minimum standards for employee and community benefits.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

I strongly oppose vouchers and will make it a priority to defund them in the 90th legislative session. Privatizing any common good redirects outcome expectations from a focus on people to a focus on financial gain. Because public education promotes individual advancement, community well-being, and social equality… and because the recipients of public funds must account for how the use of those funds benefits the public, vouchers must go!

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

Yes! The value of ensuring that every child at school has access to food greatly outweighs the cost to the state because students can’t focus on learning when they’re hungry. Additionally, I believe the state has an obligation to provide meals to students since attendance is compulsory.

Q: Do you support closing or downsizing state prisons and redirecting that funding to community-based alternatives like mental health care, housing, and youth programs?

Yes, I support reducing our reliance on incarceration and investing more in community-based solutions. Funding proactive measures to support people before they are in crisis will create stronger, healthier communities while making more effective use of taxpayer dollars.

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

To me, being a Democrat in 2026 means serving people first and staying focused on the everyday needs of Texans. It means empowering communities and amplifying voices that are too often overlooked in the decisions that shape their lives. At my core, being a Democrat is about making life better for Texans regardless of income, zip code, experience, or ability.

The thing about mountains is that someone has to start climbing them.

Carrie Isaac is a Texas Freedom Caucus freshman who ran on “Faith, Family, and Freedom,” voted to drain money from the same public schools her opponent spent 31 years building, and whose most memorable floor appearances have involved other Republicans having to rescue her from her own legislation. She is not a formidable incumbent. She’s a seat warmer who got lucky on the draw.

And Merrie Fox is not a placeholder. She’s a woman who has spent a lifetime in this community, who knows every corner of the Comal ISD from the inside, who moved to Canyon Lake because her father needed cleaner air and never left, and who went from the principal’s office to a Ph.D. to running a community arts organization, because she can’t seem to stop showing up.

That’s the kind of candidate who can make a mountain look smaller. Help her climb it.

You can find out more about Merrie Fox on her website, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

The Republican Party of Texas is a party of hate and a party of cruelty. They were built in smoky back offices and pulpits in the early 1970s on the Moral Majority and the New Right. Then, they conquered Texas through the shady legal maneuverings of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. The men at the top built an empire of corruption and theft. Theft of our water, theft of our clean air, theft of our labor.

Texas Republicans have long had everything they’ve wanted. For decades, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer. But it’s not enough. They have to keep people voting for them somehow. Dumb down education. Appeal to the most extreme elements. That’s all they have left.

In 1964, the John Birch Society found its moment at the Republican National Convention. Barry Goldwater didn’t fully embrace them. But he didn’t reject them either. When Nelson Rockefeller stood at that podium and named the John Birch Society alongside the Ku Klux Klan as examples of extremism that the party should refuse, the crowd booed him off the stage. Goldwater then declared, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”

Goldwater was a total shit.

The Birchers never went away. And over the next sixty years, what was once considered the lunatic fringe became the Republican mainstream. The “deep state.” The “new world order.” Conspiracies about globalists, infiltrators, and enemies within. It’s the same playbook.

Which brings us to the 2026 Republican Party of Texas Convention.

The “Abolish Abortion” plank failed the final vote in the platform. That’s the one that would have handed the death penalty to any woman who received abortion care. Any woman. A minor. A rape survivor. Doesn’t matter. But don’t mistake that for a victory, because the men who stood on that convention floor and pushed for it are still on the ballot. Including:

• Rep. Bret Money (R-HD02). You can donate to his Democratic opponent, Fatima Muse, HERE.

• Rep. David Lowe (R-HD91). You can donate to his Democratic opponent, Yisak Worku, HERE.

But what did pass on the platform?

Banning IVF. Banning Sharia Law.

In 2026, the Birchers write the Republican Party platform.

Why IVF? Well, because they say this is a person:

But, actually, that ⬆️ is a mouse embryo I found on Google. But if women who are struggling with fertility are not allowed to have IVF in Texas anymore. 1- It will eventually spread to other states, and 2- what kind of repercussions will come from this?

America already has a history of this.

• The Indian Adoption Project, beginning in the early 1950s, adopted Native children out primarily to non-Indian families to reduce reservation populations. By the time Congress finally acted, approximately one-third of all American Indian children had been removed from their homes. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was the legislative response, and the right has been trying to gut it ever since.

• Between 1998 and 2008, nearly 30,000 Guatemalan-born children were adopted by US parents. The US Embassy in Guatemala knew as far back as 1995 that birth mothers’ lives were threatened if they tried to reclaim their children. Guatemala shut it down in 2008.

The Evangelical Christian adoption movement has a documented history of manufacturing an “orphan crisis” to justify removing children from living parents in developing countries. Even Erika Kirk had an orphanage in Romania, which she was later accused of sex trafficking children out of.

Banning Sharia Law?

First of all, they already tried this in the 2015 Legislative session during the last time Muslim panic swept the state of Texas. During that time, Beth Van Duyne, the then-mayor of Irving, was directly responsible for the statewide outrage and upset. This was simialar to the Muslim panic after 9/11. Maybe, not that bad. But the Republicans go back and forth between which marginalized group they hate most each year. This year, it happens to be Muslims.

When you Google “What is Sharia Law,” you get a lot of different answers, so hear it directly from Rep. Salman Bhojani (D-HD92):

From the Republicans’ perspective, it really boils down to ignorance and bigotry. Just like the “Show Me Your Papers” bill. Just like the DEI bans. Same rhyme, different verse.

All the Texas transplants, pretending to be Texans.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we love our transplants. They add to the vibrant culture that makes our state so unique. But nothing chaps my hide more than a bunch of dudes that moved here in their 40s rambling on about how THEY represent Texas values more than ME. Like, sirs, I have a grandfather and a great-uncle in the square the day JFK got shot, and they were both born in Dallas.

And all of these Republicans, the wealthy ones, who came here to get into politics or nepo-baby their way into their daddy’s corporation that came to Texas for the low taxes, they think the Texas spirit is all about taking as much as you can for yourself, while screwing everyone else at the bottom, and hurting anyone different from you.

Senate Majority Leader Tan Parker, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stood at that podium and invoked the Alamo. He talked about faith, family, liberty, and the God-given right of free people to govern themselves. He said Texas is proof that freedom works.

Parker has been rated as one of the most dangerous anti-choice legislators in Texas. He’s endorsed by both Texas Right to Life and Texas Alliance for Life. His legislative priorities in 2025 centered on capital markets packages and making Texas a hub for financial services, because when women are dying from abortion ban complications, and Texas has a maternal mortality rate that rivals that of developing nations, but Parker’s focus is on helping rich people move their money here faster.

The man flew in from Pennsylvania, wrapped himself in the Texas flag, invoked the memory of the men who died at the Alamo, and has spent nearly two decades making life harder for the working Texans he claims to represent.

Same thing with Dannie Goober yesterday.

The rest of the planks we covered mostly passed.

The full platform will be posted on the Republican Party of Texas website in the coming weeks. Read it. Share it. Make sure every voter in your life knows exactly what these people are planning.

Because we already know what’s coming in the 90th Legislative Session. They’ve written it down for us. Frozen embryos have more rights than the mothers who made them. Muslims are the designated enemy of the cycle. A Texas that looks less like the state we love and more like the fever dream of a John Birch Society pamphlet from 1962.

They are telling us exactly who they are.

The question is whether we’re going to let them keep doing it.

We can stop them by flipping the Texas House. Democrats need a net gain of just 14 seats to break Republican control, and the candidates to do it are on the ballot right now.

The line in the sand is at the ballot box.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Undoubtedly, by now, you’ve seen the biggest news of the Republicans’ Convention. Governor Abbott closed his speech by bringing out an elephant, which promptly peed all over the floor. It was performance art. A perfect representation of what the Republican government in Texas has been doing to the people for years.

It’s rumored that some of the people in the front rows could hear Abbott cackle, “Ha! It’s raining,” as the incident occurred.

Attendance for the Republican Party of Texas’ (RPT) Convention was way down. Notably, at one point yesterday, only 38 people were watching the live stream. (And one of them was me, lol.)

Then, if you follow the Texas Democratic Party on social media, you may have seen this meme they shared of Senator Bettencourt’s quote on the polling environment.

The Convention has thus far been a disaster. Today is the final day. I’ll have the report on that tomorrow, which means we’ll be pushing out our Meet the Candidate article this week to Monday (stay tuned). Yesterday, they elected the new Chair of the Republican Party of Texas.

D’Rinda Randall, new Republican Party of Texas Chair.

So, this is really interesting. And it’s also a lot to unpack. First, you have to understand that the RPT elects a new Chair every two years. And by the time their cycle is up, they always have some faction against them, and they get pushed out. Abraham George is out. Before him, it was Allen West. Before him, it was James Dickey. And so on. Typically, Republicans break their own bylaws to elect their favored chair. I’m not sure if that happened this time. My emails are open.

Randall was the Vice Chair under Abraham George. Like with the Democratic Party, the Chair and Vice Chair must be of opposite genders. Randall is the first Republican woman to chair in Texas since 2003. Stick a pin in that, we’ll circle back around.

The Vice Chair who was elected to serve under Randall is David Covey. You may remember that Covey ran a multi-million dollar campaign against Dade Phelan (R-HD21) in 2024, had Trump’s endorsement, and still lost. He was a loser.

Now, it’s important to understand where the Republican Party is with women’s rights in 2026. Not just women’s rights, but with women being seen as people.

Check out this report from CBC News earlier this week at the Erika Kirk Christian National Convention in San Antonio, where a bunch of women said they were willing to give up their right to vote:

Dumb-dumbs. Who even puts that garbage in their head in the first place? The same people who add to the Legislative priorities:

• To impose the death penalty on any woman who receives abortion care, even minors and rape survivors.

• To ban IVF.

• To ban all egg and sperm donation clinics.

It’s all connected.

Don’t you find it strange that at the same time, Republican women are talking about freely giving up their right to vote, the willingness to sacrifice their lives for an ectopic pregnancy, and that all of a sudden, the Republican Party of Texas would elect its first woman in over 20 years?

Of course, the Republican rumor mill is going wild with conspiracies. Before we jump on that bandwagon, we’ll have to see how they can cannibalize each other in the coming months.

The keynote speakers woke up, showed up, and said nothing.

One of yesterday’s keynote speakers was Ken Paxton, and he looked awful. He might have been hungover. He shuffled out on stage, slouching, looking like he just woke up, no excitement, no energy, just, “I’m here.”

The speech itself was a masterclass in saying nothing for eight and a half minutes. Trans panic. Biden. Chuck Schumer. Open borders. The radical left. You’ve heard it. You’ve heard it a thousand times. He called James Telerico “Low T-arico,” “Sixgender Jimmy,” and “Talifreako.” He was like a middle schooler who thinks he’s the funniest kid on the bus.

He didn’t talk about the cost of living. He didn’t talk about gas prices. He didn’t talk about the rising unemployment rate. Or the increasingly difficult access to healthcare.

Paxton, who hails from North Dakota, said the words “Texas values,” then he talked about culture war garbage. It’s hard to believe that anyone takes this man seriously.

Or Dan Patrick, who, besides, said on stage, Talarico was going to hell, came out wearing a black pleather jacket and matching boots.

Of course, it will never beat this jacket ⬇️, but it was a close second.

Black pleather turtleneck and matching boots, in June, in Houston, and explained, unprompted, that it was his “time travel suit.”

Sir, it is 95 degrees outside, and you look like a community theater villain.

He ran two campaign ads on the convention floor. The first one was Paul Revere warning colonists that the British were coming, except the British were James Talarico, an 8th-generation Texan, unlike Danny, who is from Maryland. The second one was the Alamo. Because nothing says “I’m in touch with modern Texas voters” like reaching back to 1836.

Then he recited the Alamo, the lyrics to a Johnny Cash song from 1960. He just said them, without rhythm, not singing them. He stood on that stage in his time-travel turtleneck, performed a Johnny Cash song, and presented it to the delegates of the Republican Party of Texas as a history lesson. It was really weird.

He called Democrats “socialist, leftist, communist, and idiots,” in that order. He declared that the entire transgender rights movement is just a plot to make Republicans argue with each other.

This is the Lieutenant Governor of Texas. This is a man who is one heartbeat from the governorship. This is who shows up in a pleather turtleneck and recites Johnny Cash and condemns his political opponents to eternal damnation in front of a live audience.

Texas values, from the mouth of a Marylander.

But peel back the costume and the lyrics, and you find a frightened man. He spent a big chunk of that speech begging Republicans not to stay home and doing the math out loud. Talarico starts at 45%. He only needs six more points. If Republicans aren’t unified, if rural turnout softens, if the sore losers stay home. Dan Patrick knows exactly what happens.

The man in the time travel suit is scared.

Good.

And speaking of weird.

Mayes Middleton, for those keeping score at home, is a billionaire from Galveston who has purchased every office he has ever held. State rep. State senator. And now, Republican nominee for Attorney General of Texas, because when you have that kind of money, the next rung on the ladder is just another check to write.

You may remember Mayes from my piece on where that money actually came from.

At the Convention, Middleton took the stage and delivered what can only be described as a greatest hits collection of things that are not real problems in Texas. I don’t know what else to expect from nepobaby billionaires who have only ever harmed their own lives. He announced he will investigate George Soros on day one. He announced he will “attack Sharia law” as organized crime.

He compared Nathan Johnson and James Talarico to Santa Anna. Somehow, the Democrats are to the left of Santa Anna. He said that. Out loud. Into a microphone.

And then, because he apparently needed you to know he is a relatable family man, he told a story about his four-year-old daughter calling him “MAGA Mayes” after watching too much TV. He thought that was charming.

His opponent, Nathan Johnson, is a Dallas state senator with a long legislative record. Middleton’s record is a checkbook. But in the Republican Party of Texas in 2026, that’s apparently enough.

The only nepo-baby more out of touch than Mayes Middleton is Bo French. Yes, also a nepo-baby. Republicans love electing men with soft hands.

Bo French is the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, which, if you don’t know, regulates the oil and gas industry. It does not regulate Muslims. It does not regulate DEI. It does not regulate the Green New Deal. It regulates oil and gas.

Bo French does not appear to know this.

He asked the crowd (and this is a direct quote), “Do you want Texas to become a Muslim state?” At a Railroad Commissioner speech. He just needed you to know that was on the table. That was a concern he had about the Railroad Commission.

He cited Genesis. He cited Proverbs 14:34. He explained that God’s command to exercise dominion over the earth is actually a mandate for responsible oil and gas extraction. The Bible, Bo French has determined, is pro-drilling.

The bar was on the floor, right next to the elephant puddle.

Low attendance. A new party chair elected amid swirling conspiracies. A hungover Senate candidate workshopping middle school nicknames. A Lieutenant Governor in a pleather time travel suit who performed Johnny Cash and sent a man to hell. A billionaire who has never earned anything listing things that aren’t real problems. A Railroad Commissioner candidate who is very concerned about the Muslim takeover of oil and gas regulation. And an elephant that peed on the floor while the Governor of Texas watched.

This is a party that is performing. And the performance is getting sloppier, louder, and more desperate by the year, because underneath all of it, Dan Patrick’s math is right. They know how close this is. They know what’s coming. And they have nothing to offer the people of Texas except fear, nicknames, and Johnny Cash lyrics they didn’t write.

Meanwhile, Texans are losing farms and losing access to healthcare. Paying more for everything. And the people responsible for that spent three days in Houston talking about George Soros and Sharia law and what gender God is.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2026 Republican Party of Texas.

They’ve been pissing on you for years and calling it rain. The elephant just finally did it in front of everyone.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

There are two documents on Earth I know to be batshit crazy, The Turner Diaries and the Republican Party of Texas’ platform. The contents of both are very simialar. Going into the first official day of the Republican Party of Texas’ (RPT) 2026 Convention and their permanent committees, it’s a good time to really hone in on and take a gander at the changes they made to their platform. After all, it is their governing blueprint.

But before we get into how coo-coo their platform is, we need to talk about how bananas our Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Blacklock is. No, not bananas. Scary. This dude is scary.

This so-called neutral arbiter of the law stood in front of a party convention crowd and talked about preserving “the flame of Christian civilization.” Blacklock bragged about cutting ties with the American Bar Association because they dared to push DEI policies, which means allowing Black people in law schools. And he defended the court’s ruling upholding the ban on gender-affirming care for minors by essentially arguing that if Texans in 1876 didn’t think of it, it doesn’t exist as a right.

1876.

That’s his standard. A constitutional framework frozen in the year that Custer died at the Little Bighorn and Reconstruction was being actively dismantled.

Then came Senator Bob Hall. (I only clipped the funny parts.)

The audio in the committee was atrocious, so I got more screengrabs than videos, but I did get this one (you’ll have to turn way up). The reason this is so hilarious is that the far-right Christian Nationalists have been actively pushing for a Convention of States for years. David Barton at WallBuilders, in particular, has sunk tons of money into making this a Republican priority in previous years.

Now, the Republicans want it completely off their platform because they think the Marxists will use the opportunity to turn America into a Communist State. Yes, they actually said that they think that, from their own little heads:

They actually wound up keeping that plank. But the discussion was hilarious.

The platform.

Let’s start with 7b, because the audacity is breathtaking. The Republican Party of Texas wants to codify the number of Supreme Court justices into law, specifically to prevent Democrats from ever adding seats. They call it the “Keep Nine Amendment.” What they don’t want to know is that for the last decade, the GOP has done more to manipulate the composition of the Supreme Court than any political party in modern history. Mitch McConnell stole a seat by refusing to hold hearings for Merrick Garland for nearly a year, then rammed Amy Coney Barrett through in the final weeks of an election. They packed the court. They just did it slowly, and with shamelessness instead of legislation. The “Keep Nine Amendment” is about locking in their wins.

• Further reading: The Case For Expanding The Supreme Court

Then there’s 7d. The RPT wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, the one that gives you the direct election of your US Senators. Under their vision, you don’t get to vote for your senators anymore. The state legislature picks them. The same state legislature that has gerrymandered itself into a supermajority. They don’t want a republic. They want an oligarchy.

7e takes aim at the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, limiting citizenship to children with at least one parent who is already a legal US citizen. It was ratified in 1868 specifically to guarantee that this country could never again create a permanent underclass of people born on American soil with no rights and no recourse. The people who wrote it knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they were preventing.

And then there’s 7f. The Republican Party of Texas, the party of the state that was part of Mexico until 1836, that conducted government business in Spanish before it conducted it in English, that wouldn’t exist without the vaqueros and the Tejanos who built it, wants to make English the only official language of the United States.

9a is a NEW PLANK requiring all elected officials in Texas to be natural-born US citizens. Not just citizens. Natural-born citizens. That’s the presidential eligibility standard, applied to every school board member, every county commissioner, every state rep. They’re not even trying to be subtle about what they’re doing. Racism, xenophobia, pick one.

Then 9B, the “Undivided Loyalty” plank, goes further. Any person holding dual citizenship is flatly prohibited from serving in any elected or appointed capacity at any level of Texas state or local government. And they want the Texas Congressional Delegation to push the same prohibition at the federal level.

There was even a moment when they discussed Ted Cruz and declared him safe because, allegedly, he renounced his Canadian citizenship.

They want to ban preK, because they’re stupid.

I don’t know what else to call it. No one there has ever read a research paper or data on the benefits and outcomes of preK programs, because if they did, this wouldn’t be a thing. But it is.

The Republican Party of Texas wants to prohibit publicly subsidized pre-K and kindergarten. They’re calling it the “Nanny State” plank, because in their world, the state providing early childhood education to working families is government overreach, but the state forcing a rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term is just Tuesday.

Let’s be clear about what pre-K actually is in Texas. For hundreds of thousands of kids across this state, disproportionately Black and brown kids, disproportionately poor kids, pre-K is where someone first notices they need glasses, or they’re not hitting developmental milestones, or they haven’t eaten since yesterday. It’s where a teacher is sometimes the first safe adult a child has ever known. For a lot of Texas families, it is a lifeline disguised as finger painting.

The RPT wants to hand all of that to private childcare providers and let the market sort it out.

This isn’t about parental choice. School vouchers were never about parental choice. This is about completing the privatization of public education from cradle to diploma, making sure public dollars flow to private religious institutions with no accountability to taxpayers, no curriculum standards, and no obligation to serve the kids who need it most.

Plank 164B is dressed up as a transparency measure, but don’t let it fool you for a second. The RPT wants to strip the Joint Commission of any oversight authority over Texas state-funded hospitals. The Joint Commission is why your hospital has infection control protocols and doesn’t just freestyle your open-heart surgery. But the RPT isn’t worried about patient safety. They want to strip away every independent check that stands between the state of Texas and the ability to prosecute doctors in state-funded hospitals for providing legal medical care. They’re building a dragnet.

More ignorance and bigotry.

The “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” plank wants the advocacy of Sharia law declared a seditious criminal act, punishable by criminal prosecution, disqualification from public service, denaturalization, and deportation. They want to deport people for their religious beliefs. That is what this says.

Then they want to eliminate or severely restrict programs that allow Muslim workers, students, and clergy to immigrate to Texas legally. A religious test. For the state of Texas. In 2026.

There are approximately 420,000 Muslim Texans. They are your neighbors, your doctors, your coworkers, your kids’ teachers. The RPT just voted to treat them as an enemy combatant class.

Jimmy Blacklock talked about preserving the flame of Christian civilization. This is what that flame looks like when they aim it at someone.

Plank 27 is where the Republican Party of Texas drops all pretense of governing and hands you a wish list written by a freshman economics student who just discovered Ayn Rand.

They want to repeal the federal minimum wage. Dodd-Frank exists because Wall Street crashed the entire global economy in 2008 and took millions of working people down with it. Sarbanes-Oxley, which exists because Enron (a Texas company, by the way) committed one of the largest acts of corporate fraud in American history and wiped out thousands of employees’ retirement savings. The Lacey Act, which prevents trafficking in illegally harvested wildlife and plants. Gone. All of it. Because businesses shall be “minimally regulated at all levels.”

Then they get to state laws. They want to eliminate business licensing. Professional licensing. Mandatory sick leave. Family leaves.

Professional licensing. They want to eliminate the requirement that the person cutting your hair, pulling your tooth, or rewiring your house actually knows what they’re doing.

And then, mandatory sick leave is on this list twice. Once under federal laws to repeal, and once under state laws to eliminate. They hate the idea of your sick ass staying home from work so much they listed it twice.

These are not serious people.

I want to be fair here for a second, because Plank 172 is more complicated than most of what’s in this document.

CPS in Texas has real, documented, serious problems. Children have died in state care. The system is underfunded, understaffed, and has failed kids in both directions, removing children who didn’t need to be removed and leaving children in homes where they were being actively harmed. Nobody who has paid attention to Texas CPS for the last twenty years is going to argue it doesn’t need reform.

But here’s where this plank goes sideways.

Requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt to permanently terminate parental rights sounds like due process until you remember that “beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard we use to send people to prison. The people pushing this plank aren’t interested in protecting children from abuse. They’re interested in making it functionally impossible for the state to intervene in a family regardless of what’s happening inside that home.

And then there’s the provision requiring that upon reunification, a parent’s name be immediately and permanently deleted from the Texas Central Registry with no residual notation or record.

And the people most harmed by it will be the kids.

The RPT’s platform is a fringe document.

This is the official platform of the Republican Party of Texas, adopted by delegates from every corner of this state, cheered for in a convention hall in Houston, and handed to every Republican lawmaker as the roadmap for the 2027 legislative session.

They want to deport people for their religion. They want to eliminate your vote for US Senator. They want to strip hospitals of independent oversight so they can prosecute doctors. They want to defund pre-K and hand your child’s early education to the market. They want loyalty tests for public servants. They want to freeze the Constitution in 1876.

And in November, every Republican candidate on your ballot will have either signed onto this platform or been too cowardly to say otherwise.

This is not a party that has lost its way. This is a party that knows exactly where it’s going. The question is whether Texas goes with it.

Register. Organize. Vote.

The flame of Christian civilization Jimmy Blacklock talked about? We’ve seen what they do with it.

Don’t let them burn it all down.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Yes, I picked clowns as the stock photo for this article, because the Republicans are clowns. But I want to be very clear that some of the things that they are proposing at their Convention are no laughing matter.

Today is the official kick-off of the Republican Party of Texas’ 2026 Convention. And yes, I’m watching it so you don’t have to. I’m clipping and taking notes, and tomorrow I will have a report on today’s events.

Yesterday, their temporary committees met, and I stayed up until 1 am watching what I can only describe as a complete train wreck.

How much of a train wreck? This was from their temporary legislative priorities committee:

What was this woman talking about? Censorship? Apparently, this lady travels around Texas, reading this excerpt at school board meetings as a ploy to get them to burn all their library books.

The Republicans still aren’t catching on.

The Legislative Priorities list is always the most important thing to come out of the RPT Convention, because it’s what the Party pushes for the legislators to pass in the next legislative session. So there’s no guessing work. We know six months ahead of time what Republicans have in store come time to gavel in again.

And I want to point out this one particular video, although there were MANY more just like it:

This man was confused about why the swamp of multi-millionaires in Austin, who don’t know how to govern and have never passed a bill in favor of the working class, isn’t doing more for the working class. He talks about his house being a dump, working two jobs, and his property taxes being through the roof.

But there was never any connection to the fact that his circumstances were a direct result of living under 30 years of Republican governance.

It was actually astounding how many Republicans talked about “solutions” for their problems, which have data and studies behind them that will make their lives worse.

Dubya left too many children behind, and generations are paying for it.

Now, the most horrific part.

Again, we’ll see if it changes in their permanent committees today, tomorrow, and Saturday. But as of right now, these are the Republican Party of Texas’ 2026 legislative priorities:

1. Secure Texas Elections 🙄

2. Stop Islamification of Texas

3. Eliminate Property Taxes

4. Ban Taxpayer Funded Lobbying

5. Protect Texas Kids

6. Safeguard Texas Infrastructure

7. End Government Overreach

8. Education Reform

9. Protect Life

10. Border Enforcement

11. Medical Freedom

12. Reform The Texas House

13. No Gambling

14. Courtroom Integrity

15. Regulate AI

But what does it all mean? First, and foremost, we need to talk about this “Protect Life” bullshit, because they added it to their platform, too.

Here is a clip of Representative Brent Money (R-HD02) using two key phrases, “abolish abortion” and “murder.” That’s important.

Another woman talking about giving the death penalty to women who have abortion care:

A screenshot from the platform:

Another one:

The “Protect Life” plank of the Republican Party’s legislative priorities means:

• They plan to give the death penalty to any woman who receives abortion care, even minors and rape survivors.

• They plan on banning IVF.

• They plan on banning all egg and sperm donation clinics.

It’s unclear whether they immidiately plan on also banning birth control, but we can assume that’s also on the chopping block.

Texas has a maternal mortality rate akin to third-world countries, but in Republicans’ eyes, not enough women have died yet.

Funny thing is, they also want to address the physician shortage in Texas, but there isn’t one genius among them who can figure out why there’s a physician shortage in the first place.

The Islamification of Texas?

What the fuck is that shit? I have no idea. Because when I look all around me, all I see are Evangelical bigots everywhere I turn.

Listen to this 100-year-old white supremacist explain it, from her point of view:

The existential threat to Texas isn’t the grid failing in a freeze, or kids going hungry, or women dying in hospital parking lots because doctors are afraid to treat them. It’s Muslims. 🤦🏻‍♀️ In Texas. Where the last mosque hate crime made the news, and the perpetrator got a slap on the wrist.

These people aren’t scared. They’re not reacting to anything real. They’re just hateful, shriveled up, mean, small-hearted people who have organized their entire political identity around who they despise. There is no policy here. There is no solution. There is nothing but the hot, rancid breath of bigotry.

But here’s where it gets genuinely rich.

The same people screaming about the “Islamification of Texas” turned right around and enshrined support for a foreign nation directly into their party platform, complete with biblical citations as legal justification.

Plank 249 of the Republican Party of Texas platform doesn’t just support Israel. It prohibits a Palestinian state “within the historical borders of Israel” and justifies that position by citing Genesis and the Old Testament. The Bible.

Foreign religious influence in Texas politics is an existential threat, unless it’s their religion, pointed at their preferred country. Then it gets its own platform plank.

Secure Texas Elections? More voter suppression?

Naturally. Did you expect anything else? The Republicans’ goal is to stop as many people from voting as possible. As long as people are voting in Texas, they will invent problems based on conspiracies (likely made up by a little old lady with too much time on her hands and nothing else to do).

They want to make Texas in-person voting only, with only three days of early voting.

Because why would they make it easier for people to vote? The more people who vote, the more people who vote against them.

All of that was at the “pre-Convention.”

I’m glued to the livestreams, and this whole shin-dig runs through Saturday night. By the time they gavel out, we’ll have the complete Republican Party of Texas platform, every plank, every priority, every fever dream they intend to hand to their legislators when the 90th Legislative Session kicks off. They’ll have handed us the roadmap themselves.

This is the warning I send out every two years, and I’ll keep sending it until it sinks in. Everything you just read can be stopped. All of it dies on the vine if enough Texans show up and vote these people out of power.

They are not inevitable. They are not unstoppable. They are a shrinking minority that has held power for thirty years because too many Texans have either given up or never started.

That ends when we decide it ends.

Stay tuned. I’ll have a full report on today’s proceedings tomorrow, and I promise, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Tomorrow, June 10, marks the 85th anniversary of when Bob White was shot in the back of the head in a packed Polk County, Texas, courtroom. His killer paid $500 and was home before dinner. I learned of his story several years ago, and it has never left me. I don’t think you will either.

In 1937, Bob White lived with his wife, Ruby Lee White, in Houston, when his mother asked him to help her on the cotton farm where she was working in Livingston. Needing the money, Bob White agreed and headed up to Polk County. During that sweltering August summer, the wife of a prominent farmer, WS Cochran, claimed to have been raped in her home.

However, there was no evidence. Ruby Cochran told law enforcement that her attacker “was barefooted, that he had a very offensive breath, and was undoubtedly a n*gro.” She was unable to provide any identifying information to the Sheriff about the attacker’s appearance. She didn’t even know the color of his skin. She just assumed it because of her attacker’s bad breath.

Not having any evidence or suspects, the Sheriff went to the farm where Bob White was working and arrested over a dozen Black men. The Texas Rangers also came in from Houston to help.

The men who could provide an alibi were let go, but those without an alibi were lined up and given lines to recite.

Ruby Cochran listened to each one, and then, when Bob White recited the selected words, Ruby Cochran told the Sheriff, “That’s him.” She was sure of it.

A lynch mob had already formed in the town, waiting to kill whoever they thought was the man who raped Ruby Cochran. The Rangers had to stand guard outside the jail to ensure they didn’t storm it.

For a week, the Sheriff should take Bob White out of jail and drive him to another location. The Sheriff tied him to a tree and brutally beat him every day. After a week, Bob White couldn’t withstand it anymore and signed a confession. It was later reported that he signed the confession while tied to the tree. Bob White could not read or write.

Bob White was found guilty and sentenced to death.

The all-white jury deliberated for less than two hours, found Bob White guilty, and sentenced him to death. He appealed the court’s decision.

Both the San Antonio and Houston branches of the NAACP got involved. Bob White was railroaded, and everyone knew it.

His appearance didn’t identify him. There were no fingerprints, bloodhounds didn’t match his scent, and no evidence to tie him to the crime. White appealed his sentence.

Then, in March 1940, the Supreme Court overturned Bob White’s conviction because he was subject to inhumane treatment and a forced confession.

Bob White headed back to court for a retrial in 1941. Unfortunately, the trial never happened. On June 10, 1941, as the jury was being selected for the trial, WS Cochran, the husband of the alleged rape victim, walked up to Bob White and, from about 3 feet away, shot him in the back of the head.

Bob White was railroaded. He was accused of a crime, yet there was no evidence implicating him. The victim didn’t even know the color of the perpetrator’s skin. She said because he had bad breath, he must have been Black.

White maintained his innocence until the Sheriff tied him to a tree and beat him for days, forcing him to sign something he couldn’t even read.

Bob White was protected from lynch mobs multiple times, sentenced to death, and then had his sentence overturned. At the time of his murder, he had already served 5 years in prison for the alleged crime.

WS Cochran shot Bob White in front of a packed courtroom of 300 people. After pulling the trigger, he calmly handed his pistol over to one of the attorneys standing by and then surrendered to the court’s deputy.

Cochran paid the $500 bond and walked out of jail later that afternoon.

Only one week after Cochran killed Bob White, his case went to the grand jury. On June 16, 1941, the grand jury deliberated for only two minutes and found Cochran not guilty. He never even served one night in prison.

Eighty-five years later, the players have changed, but the American justice system is unmistakable.

This week, a South Carolina jury took less time than it takes to eat lunch to decide that a 61-year-old store owner was justified in shooting a 14-year-old Black child in the back.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton didn’t steal anything. Video evidence proved it. But Rick Chow and his son chased that child more than 130 yards from the store and shot him in the back while he ran for his life. Cyrus bled out on the side of the road.

Cyrus’s mother, Nicole Carmack, said what every mother who has ever lost a child to this system has said, “I try to have faith in the justice system, but they have failed Cyrus. They failed my baby.”

His father, Troy Belton, said, “It’s just like you just can’t get justice nowhere.”

The claim that a 14-year-old boy stole four bottles of water was false. The evidence said so. The video said so. Cyrus Carmack-Belton said so with his feet when he tried to run away from two grown men who wanted him dead over nothing.

In 1937, Ruby Cochran decided Bob White was guilty because she didn’t like the way his voice sounded. In 2023, Rick Chow decided Cyrus Carmack-Belton deserved to die over a water bottle he didn’t even take.

Eight decades separate these two cases. The American justice system is working exactly as it was designed.

This week in Brazoria County.

An 18-year-old Latino kid named John Mendoza JR was shot and killed by a Sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop. Mendoza wasn’t armed. He had no criminal history. When the deputy began following him, he drove to his father’s house.

He died there.

The deputy, Kevin Tippit, was fired for “policy violations related to the handling and discharge” of his firearm. The Sheriff carefully noted that the firing was unrelated to criminal liability. The Texas Rangers are investigating. The matter will go to a grand jury.

John Mendoza JR was a management freshman at Texas State University. His RA said everybody on his floor loved him. He’d just been talking about getting a job so he could save up for an apartment next year.

He had plans. He had people who loved him. He drove to his father’s house. And he was killed.

The “system” in Texas.

In 2024, Texas police killed 168 people, a record high. In a six-year investigation, the Texas Tribune found that officers in Texas’ largest cities shot at someone an average of once every three days, killing more than a third of them. People of color were more likely to be shot at, whether they were armed or not.

And what happens to the officers who pull the trigger? Between 2010 and 2015, at least 881 officers were involved in police shootings across Texas’ 36 largest cities. Seven faced criminal charges. None were convicted.

Nationally, fewer than 3% of killings by police result in officers being charged with a crime. Less than 1% results in a conviction. Kevin Tippit, the Brazoria County deputy who shot John Mendoza Jr. in his father’s garage, has been fired. Whether he’ll ever face criminal charges is still to be determined, a decision that will go to a grand jury, just like WS Cochran’s did in 1941.

You already know how those tend to go.

And then there’s the other side of this week’s ledger.

Today, a Collin County jury convicted Karmelo Anthony, a 19-year-old Black teenager, of murder for the 2025 stabbing death of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet. The jury deliberated for three hours. They sentenced him to 35 years.

Both boys were 17 when it happened. Both had plans. Both had people who loved them. Austin Metcalf is dead, and that is a tragedy. His family’s grief is real, and nothing that follows is meant to diminish it.

But we have to be honest about what this week looked like from end to end.

A store owner chased a 14-year-old boy 130 yards and shot him in the back on video. Not guilty.

A deputy shot an unarmed 18-year-old in his father’s garage. Fired. Criminal charges pending, maybe.

A 19-year-old Black teenager goes to prison for 35 years.

Nobody is saying Karmelo Anthony didn’t do what he was convicted of doing. What I’m saying is that the scales of this justice system have never balanced the same way, depending on who’s holding them and who’s standing underneath.

Rick Chow shot a child in the back. WS Cochran shot an innocent man in the head in open court. Both walked.

The system didn’t fail this week. It performed exactly as designed.

And that’s exactly why we can’t just grieve and move on. Grief without action is just more of the same. The way you change a system that was designed to work this way is to fundamentally redesign it, through laws, through legislation, through the people we put in office to write and pass them.

You change the laws by voting. You change the laws by demanding that the people asking for your vote actually give a damn about Bob White, about Cyrus Carmack-Belton, about John Mendoza JR.

Eighty-five years ago tomorrow, Bob White was shot in the back of the head in a Texas courtroom. The killer paid $500 and went home. The grand jury took two minutes.

We’re still waiting on justice for Bob White, for Tamir Rice, for Trayvon Martin. The least we can do is make sure the next generation doesn’t have to tell the same stories.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

I became a political writer the long way around. I was a teenage mom, then a single mom in my twenties, trying to figure out healthcare, childcare, and paychecks in a state that was not interested in helping me with any of that. That experience radicalized me.

Then came years of corporate work. Successful, miserable, and commuting long hours to listen to enough conservative talk radio to push me further left.

In 2012, Sandy Hook broke something open in me. I got involved with Moms Demand Action in Tarrant County during the Open Carry Tarrant County chaos and was recruited to help run Living Blue in Texas. That Facebook community is still going, 90,000 followers, 13 years, completely organic, just me and Dr. Jo still standing from the original crew.

In 2020, with COVID shutting everything down and my husband’s support, I cashed out my 401(k), enrolled in college, and finally became the writer I’d wanted to be since I was a kid. Molly Ivins was always my north star. I’ve got a bachelor’s in History and English now. I am living the dream. The one that took forty years and a pandemic to get to.

I built Lone Star Left around one rule I won’t compromise. No paywalls. Because I remember being that 25-year-old single mom who cared deeply about politics in Texas and couldn’t access political news because she was broke, and information shouldn’t cost money. This publication runs on paid subscriptions alone, no campaign money, no PAC money, no corporate sponsors. Just readers who believe in people-first politics and want to keep this thing going.

If that’s you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s how this stays free for everyone else.

Subscribe now

Hill County found out it had a data center after the land was bought, after the bulldozers arrived, and after the company had already decided what would happen to them.

In November 2025, Nexus Data Centers announced it was building a campus outside Hubbard. They told the county they’d purchased 400 acres. Site preparation was already underway. Then they came back and told the county the actual number was 3,000 acres.

And 3,000 acres still doesn’t tell you what this actually is.

What Nexus filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality describes a proposed 7.2-GW natural gas power plant. This will be the largest single generating facility in Texas history by a factor of two. Twice the size of the WA Parish complex outside Houston. Three times Comanche Peak nuclear. Fifty-five combustion units running continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, burning natural gas to power a data center that will never put a single watt on the grid. A church, a medical clinic, a public park, and a school sit within one mile of the fence line. Hubbard has 1,400 residents.

What this plant will do to the air.

The numbers in Nexus’s own permit application are worth reading.

The entire Hill County air pollution inventory for 2023 totals roughly 9.6 tons of nitrogen oxide per year. Nexus’s worst-case permitted NOx figure is 1,599 tons per year. That single project, on a single parcel, would add 166 times the entire existing NOx inventory of Hill County into an airshed that currently has effectively zero industrial pollution.

Nitrogen oxide is the primary precursor to smog, which causes respiratory disease, triggers asthma attacks, and is dangerous for children, the elderly, and anyone with a lung condition. TCEQ’s own preferred modeling methodology puts the Nexus project over that limit, at 70.86 ppb. Nexus’s own submitted modeling choice produces 69.9 ppb, just barely under. Pick your analyst, pick your outcome. The community living a mile from this facility has no say in which methodology gets used.

Then there’s the carbon. A natural gas combined-cycle plant running at 7 GW burns roughly 70–80 billion cubic feet of gas per year at full buildout, emitting somewhere in the range of 15–20 million metric tons of CO2 annually, comparable to the annual emissions of a mid-sized country. Texas has no carbon pricing. TCEQ’s review process doesn’t require any analysis of climate impact. It just issues the permit.

And the noise? 55 combustion units running continuously, 24/7 industrial lighting, in an area where the nighttime baseline is 20–40 decibels. An unmitigated power block of this scale runs 80–90+ decibels at the equipment. There is no Texas state noise standard for industrial facilities in unincorporated rural areas. No one is responsible for it. Linda Pauley at a Hill County Commissioners Court meeting said, “The noise that this data center generates — what is that going to do with those poor people that live maybe two miles from this data center?”

Texas Republicans made this inevitable.

Texas counties don’t have zoning authority. Texas cities do. This is a deliberate structural choice, encoded in state law over decades, that has left rural communities with no mechanism to shape what gets built next to them.

As UT-Austin land use professor Robert Paterson told the Texas Tribune, “Texas has always viewed counties as rural toddlers that can’t be trusted with full powers.”

Data center developers have now mapped it into their site selection strategy. A Texas Tribune analysis found that nearly half of the 248 planned data centers in Texas are headed for unincorporated areas. They are specifically targeting the places where communities have no power to say no.

That regulatory vacuum was built by thirty years of Republican supermajority governance that treated local control as a threat to business development, stripped county authority at every opportunity, and handed the Texas landscape to whoever could write the biggest check. What the data center industry found in 2025 is the same sweet spot that the oil and gas, CAFO, and fracking industries found before it.

The moratorium they tried.

In February 2026, Hill County commissioners approved a reinvestment zone, the legally required first step to begin tax abatement negotiations with Nexus. Then Nexus withdrew from the tax deal entirely. The project was moving forward with or without the county’s cooperation. County Judge Shane Brassell confirmed this meant the county was “limited in what it can do” since Nexus already owned the land.

On May 12, 2026, Hill County commissioners voted 3–2 to pass the first county-level data center moratorium in Texas history. The moratorium didn’t even touch Nexus, already under construction, already exempt. It only applied to new projects. Commissioner Jim Holcomb said, “The data center folks have found a sweet spot in the state that has limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited code, and they’re coming faster than we can keep up with.”

They knew it was legally risky. The county’s own attorney told them, “You don’t have a legal basis. If you vote to enact this, I believe we will very quickly be in litigation.” Brassell, Holcomb, and Commissioner Larry Crumpton voted yes anyway. That took courage. What happened next was the point.

The State’s response was immediate.

The same day Hill County voted, Heritage Foundation-aligned Senator Paul Bettencourt sent a letter to Attorney General Ken Paxton asking him to “investigate” any counties implementing moratoriums and “explore any necessary legal actions.” A preemptive threat was delivered the same day a rural county dared to try to protect itself.

This is how Republican governance in Texas actually works. When a county in the path of corporate development tries to slow things down, the Republican cavalry arrives to help the developers.

Fourteen days later, RCM Hill LLC, a developer behind a separate proposed 1,235 MW campus in Hill County called Project Aquila, filed a federal lawsuit against Hill County, Judge Brassell, and the two commissioners who voted for the moratorium, seeking $100 million in damages. RCM Hill doesn’t even own land in the county yet. The lawsuit argued the moratorium jeopardized the project’s ERCOT interconnection status and a $61.75 million capacity deposit due July 24. Investors, the company claimed, lost confidence once the moratorium clouded the project’s legal standing.

Resident Tim Lyness told the commissioners court, “I couldn’t imagine being sued for $100 million from some carpetbagger who doesn’t even own land in our county. It’s BS.”

It is BS. It’s also exactly how this system was designed to function. Corporations first. People last. Just as Republicans wanted.

Twenty-three days.

The moratorium lasted twenty-three days.

On June 4, all five commissioners voted unanimously to rescind it. After the vote, one commissioner said, “Unfortunately, we tried.” Commissioner Scotty Hawkins then resigned from his seat the same day, without explanation.

What replaced the moratorium is a checklist. Developers must now disclose expected water use, traffic impacts, noise levels, and economic effects. The checklist itself acknowledges that data center projects “require a level of technical review beyond the expertise and resources available within county government.” There is no mechanism in the checklist to deny a project based on any of that information.

Nexus is still under construction. First phase expected online by the end of 2026. The residents living a mile from 55 continuously running combustion turbines didn’t get a vote, didn’t get a hearing that mattered, and don’t have a state government that will protect them.

They got a checklist.

What you Can Do

• The TCEQ air permit for the Nexus Hubbard Power plant (Permits 183046, PSDTX1700, GHGPSDTX269) is still under review. Comment now at tceq.texas.gov. Affected persons can request a contested case hearing, the only formal mechanism for community input that carries legal weight.

• Contact your state legislators. Counties need the authority to regulate industrial development. That requires legislation. That requires pressure.

• Share this story. Hill County is not alone. Hood County, Hays County, and dozens of unincorporated rural communities across Texas are facing the same calculus right now. The industry found the sweet spot. The only way to close it is to make leaving it open politically expensive.

This article is part of an ongoing series on data centers, water rights, and corporate power in Texas. Previous pieces:

• How Republicans Built An Industrial Boom Without The Water

• Texas: The Land Of No Water And Power

• Abilene Is Paying The Price For Texas’ Billionaire Giveaways

• Did Anyone Ask Lockhart?

• Project Matador: The Biggest Billionaire Giveaway In Texas History

• In Reeves County, The Poorest Kids Pay For Microsoft’s AI And Chevron’s Emissions

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next five months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Pooja Sethi?

Pooja Sethi has been inside the machine. As Chief of Staff to Representative Vikki Goodwin in HD47, she spent nearly four years in the Texas Legislature doing the unglamorous work that actually moves legislation, including shaping strategy, driving policy development, advancing constituent advocacy, and showing up when the cameras aren’t on.

Before the Capitol, she was an immigration attorney with Catholic Charities, representing families tangled up in a system designed to grind them down.

She’s also the former Chair of the Travis County Democratic Party. Over 150 elected officials and precinct chairs across Travis County have endorsed her campaign.

Her community ties run deep and wide. The past President of the Indian American Coalition of Central Texas, board member at the Austin Artists Project, and serving on Planned Parenthood Texas, Emerge Texas, the City of Austin’s Asian American Quality of Life Commission, and the ACC Regional Board. She’s shown up at constituent coffees every single month in HD47, because that’s apparently just who she is.

When she wins in November, Pooja Sethi will be the first Asian Democratic woman, the first Indian American, and the first Hindu ever to serve in the Texas Legislature.

The district.

This is a safe blue seat. Sethi starts with a floor in the high 50s and a ceiling that goes higher with strong turnout infrastructure, which, given that she literally built Travis County’s organizing operation, Sethi is pretty much a shoo-in.

This is a high-education, high-income, majority-Anglo district in western Travis County. Bee Cave, Lakeway, and West Austin. 63% Anglo, 69% of residents 25+ hold a bachelor’s degree or higher (statewide: 33%). Per capita income is $76,703, compared with a state average of $39,446. Three-quarters of owner-occupied homes are worth $500K+. Average home value is $805K. This is not a working-class district.

The Asian population at 14.6% is more than double the state share (6.3%), relevant given Sethi’s background and community ties.

The district is 34% remote workers, more than double the state rate. Highly educated, tech/professional/finance-heavy workforce. These are people who care about schools, traffic safety, grid reliability, and reproductive rights, which maps almost exactly onto Sethi’s priority list.

The incumbent.

This is/was Vikki Goodwin’s seat. However, she’s running for Lt. Governor, leaving HD47 open.

Pooja Sethi, as Goodwin’s Chief of Staff and former Travis County Democratic Party Chair, is the most obvious and natural successor.

In Pooja Seethi’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Sethi, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

Yes, in Rep. Goodwin’s office, we had filed legislation on this every cycle, and I plan to continue to do so.

Q: Should Texas end tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations?

Yes. Large corporations should not receive massive tax subsidies and abatements while working families struggle with rising costs and underfunded public services. Those resources should be invested back into our communities, schools, infrastructure, and health care.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

Yes. We spent all of last session fighting against vouchers, and I will continue to do so. I also oppose charter schools. Our tax dollars need to go towards our public schools, which have trustees that we elect.

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

Yes, no child should go hungry at school because their family is struggling financially. I strongly support free school meals for all K-12 students, and cutting summer lunch programs is unacceptable when so many Texas families are already dealing with rising costs.

Q: Would you support redirecting state subsidies from fossil fuels to fund community-owned solar, wind, and battery projects in low-income and rural areas?

Yes, Texas should be investing in the future, not continuing to hand out subsidies to fossil fuel companies while communities struggle with high energy costs and grid failures. I support redirecting those investments toward community-owned solar, wind, battery storage, microgrids, and expanded net metering.

Q: Should Texas stop funding Operation Lone Star and redirect that money to border community infrastructure and services?

Yes. I have been saying this for years. Immigration can be handled responsibly and humanely if we invest in more immigration judges, more case workers, better border infrastructure, and partnerships with nonprofits and local communities. We should process claims faster, allow people to work legally while their cases move forward, and stop forcing families to sit in detention centers for months or years.

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

It means fighting for affordability, healthcare, and our schools. Honestly, it means fighting for our lives.

Texas needs more Pooja Sethis.

Attorneys who’ve sat across from families in detention centers. Organizers who built the infrastructure before they needed it for themselves. People who know exactly how the sausage gets made in Austin and have spent years making sure it doesn’t poison everyone.

HD47 will be fine in November. That’s not the point. The point is that the Texas Legislature is about to get someone who has been fighting these battles from inside the building for four years, who knows every procedural trap, and who is done watching cruelty win.

History gets made in November. Make sure you’re part of it.

You can find out more about Pooja Sethi on her website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

As the tumbleweeds turn, the world is on fire, and the centrists in DC are doing the absolute dumbest things imaginable. Today, they aren’t even liberals, they’re reactionary centrists (and that’s being nice).

First and foremost, if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on in Lebanon, when America attacked Iran in February, we enabled Israel to attack Lebanon. Israel has already done immense amounts of damage, killing over 3,000 people and displacing over a million.

*Lone Star Left is an anti-war publication.*

Yesterday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a measure to limit the Trump administration’s authority in Lebanon. 117 Democrats sided with Republicans to vote against this measure, and continue allowing Mr. Poopy Pants President, who may or may not have had a stroke this week, to destroy the world economy, murder people in the Middle East, and give Israel free rein to our military.

Out of the 13 Texas Congressional Democrats, FIVE of them sided with Trump, war, and military contractors.

Of course, the usual suspects:

• Henry Cuellar

• Vicente Gonzalez

• Lizzie Fletcher

• Julie Johnson

• Marc Veasey

Considering Johnson and Veasey are both on their way out, I expect their masks to come off completely from now until November. And don’t let the door hit you.

And about giving Israel free rein to our military, House Democrats didn’t do much better there either. On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee voted down Rep. Ro Khanna’s amendment to strip Section 224 from the 2027 NDAA, a provision that would formally embed Israel into the US defense and intelligence apparatus under the name “United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” Only Khanna and Rep. Sara Jacobs voted for the amendment.

Even voices on the right are alarmed. Joe Kent, writing in Responsible Statecraft, called Section 224 a national security nightmare that would give Israel “unprecedented access to US technology development and data fusion.”

It doesn’t stop there.

Because there’s more from our South Texas Conservative friend, Vicente Gonzalez.

This same week, Gonzalez joined three other Democrats to hand Republicans the votes they needed to cut the WIC program, which is food assistance for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children. The bill passed 213-210. Without those four Democrats, it fails. Full stop.

The cuts slash $141 million from fruit and vegetable benefits. For nursing mothers, that benefit drops from $52 to $13. For young children, from $26 to $10.

Vicente Gonzalez represents one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. His constituents are majority Latino, majority working class, and disproportionately reliant on exactly the kind of nutrition assistance he just voted to gut. The Rio Grande Valley has some of the highest rates of food insecurity in Texas.

Gonzalez already voted against limiting Trump’s war powers in Lebanon this week. Now he’s voting to take food out of the mouths of pregnant women and toddlers in his own district.

Meanwhile, Texas Republicans are hyper-focused on Maine. 🤔

I spend most of my Texas time focused on my Texas business, but when Greg Abbott’s fancy-pants consultant, Dave Carney, is spending his time talking about the Democratic candidate from Maine, I stop and raise an eyebrow.

Now, don’t get me wrong, all this October surprise stuff is bad business, especially when it’s so far away from October. But I can’t vote in Maine, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have any readers in Maine, but I’m well aware of Dave Carney’s reach and influence in Texas.

Why would Greg Abbott’s top consultant want Texas Republicans talking about Graham Platner?

After all, Ken Paxton is guilty of all the same things.

And there it is. If they get Texas Republicans talking about Platner enough, they can frame him as the worst Senate candidate of the cycle, not Ken Paxton. It gives Paxton a leg up. It’s the Republicans’ favorite game of “whataboutism.”

But I’m just here minding my Texas business.

It’s getting heated in Frisco.

You know that white nationalist, who was beaten to a pulp in Minneapolis a few months back, and who has been traveling the country telling everyone he hates brown people? Jake Lang. Yeah, that fucker. He’s been frequenting city council meetings in North Texas this last year to complain about non-white people existing:

Trigger-warning:

This weekend, locals in Frisco held an “anti-Redneck rally” where they were accosted by about a dozen armed men, mostly in masks, who carried bacon and tore the Indian flag. And Jake Lang was arrested.

These morons are so dumb, they don’t even know the difference between Hindu and Muslim.

Here was the truck they brought with them:

It should be noted that “This Is Texas Freedom Force” was there. This group has been labeled an extremist militia by the FBI and was present in San Antonio in May 2020 at the Alamo when white nationalists pointed weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters, and faced zero consequences for it.

But here’s the thing.

The racists in Frisco think they’re winning. They showed up to city council meetings demanding fewer Indian neighbors. They tore the Indian flag. They brought bacon. They got their boy Trump to crack down on H-1B visas and make it damn near impossible for skilled workers to stay. They played themselves.

Because those Indian families they hate so much? They were 70% of new home buyers in the suburbs north of Dallas. That number has already cratered below 30%. There’s a developer sitting on 125 unsold properties right now. Home prices in Collin County are already down 9% year over year, more than twice the broader Dallas metro decline.

That’s the beginning.

And when that housing bubble pops, don’t think for a second the pain stays contained to a few unsold McMansions. The furniture stores go. The contractors go. The restaurants go. The tax base craters. The schools feel it. Every business that was built on the spending power of those families, the racists screamed out of city council meetings, is going to feel it in their bottom line.

Trump and his white nationalist friends in Washington killed the H-1B pipeline, froze visa petitions, and made legal immigrants too terrified to buy a house. The Frisco dipshits, with their bacon and torn flags, cheered them on. And now the entire economic engine that made North Dallas one of the fastest-growing regions in America is seizing up.

They ran off the people who were building this economy. On purpose. With help from the highest levels of government.

The racists won’t be happy when the economy turns to shit. But they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves, and the white supremacists they put in the White House to do it.

The world is on fire.

Lebanon is burning. Pregnant women in the Rio Grande Valley are going to have less food. North Dallas will have an economic hangover that lasts a decade. And white nationalists are showing up armed to city council meetings in the suburbs while the FBI-labeled militia that cheered them on faces zero consequences.

And what are the centrists in Washington doing?

Voting with Republicans to keep the war going. Voting to gut food assistance for babies. Voting to hand Netanyahu a permanent seat inside the American defense apparatus.

This is not a both-sides problem. One side is setting the world on fire. The other side keeps handing them the matches.

Texas progressives, we have work to do. The 2026 cycle is here. The candidates are on the ballot. The districts are winnable.

Remember their names. Remember their votes. This is why we have to get more progressives in office.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

If you haven’t heard already, National Democrats (DLCC) announced yesterday that they plan to flip 12 Texas House seats. We actually need 14 to flip the Texas House, but we’ll get to that. Here were the targets, from the Texas Tribune:

They include HD41, HD70, and HD74 as Democratic holds. Which, fine, but in this election, in this environment, they’d probably be fine. But they get the extra support, and it helps turnout at the top of the ticket.

Then there was the Texans for Lawsuit Reform analysis, published by the right-leaning Texas Bullpen, which showed which seats they thought would flip if Republicans underperformed by 7% or by 9%.

Then, also from the Texas Bullpen, yesterday, the GOP’s summit in Austin, one attendee said, “Anything R+12 is in danger.”

Glorious, isn’t it?

The seats that overlap. The BIG targets.

We’re just doing this chronologically.

HD34: Denise Villalobos vs. Stephanie Guerrero Sáenz. If the Election Gods are listening right now, please head down to Nueces County, because Sáenz needs so much help. This is literally the most flippable seat in the state, in a county that is also likely to flip if it gets organized, and she still hasn’t launched her campaign yet. In the most important election year of our lives. In the most flippable seat in Texas. I have no idea what the game plan is for this seat, but if the DLCC is really planning on getting behind it, someone needs to get down there and make sure the opportunity isn’t squandered.

HD37: Janie Lopez vs. Oziel “Ozzy” Ochoa. Ochoa is going to be another progressive voice for us in Austin, and has an education background and platform that will be favorable in this district. He’s a lifelong Harlingen resident with deep community roots and 17 years of experience in public education as a teacher, coach, administrator, and principal. I’ll have to dig up Janie Lopez’s old campaigning videos, of her driving up and down neighborhoods, screaming out of her car window, “Vote for Janie.” That’s always been hilarious to me.

HD61: Keresa Richardson vs. Brittany Black. Keresa Richardson is nuttier than a soup sandwich. Last legislative session, I tracked which Republicans had signed which pledges (i.e., Texit, Abolish Abortion, No Dem Chairs, ect), and she was the only Republican who signed EVERY SINGLE ONE. She’s never heard a conspiracy theory or racist dog whistle that she didn’t want to be a part of. Her entire brand is built on being the loyal MAGA choice in a Collin County district that keeps getting less white and more educated every cycle. Black previously filed to run for Congress as a Republican before switching parties. A wrinkle she’s called a mistake. Democrats see it as possibly competitive due to backlash over the closures of several local schools, which they blame on Republicans, and continued population growth in northern Collin County. The TLR analysis puts Richardson underwater, with a 9% GOP underperformance.

HD67: Jeff Leach vs. Jordan Wheatley. Leach the leech. He’s been fending off Democratic challengers in this Collin County district since 2018 and keeps winning. Jordan Wheatley will now get his shot at one of the more entrenched Republican incumbents on the target list. The TLR analysis says Leach goes underwater at 9% GOP underperformance, which means this is purely a wave-dependent seat. The demographic profile, highly educated, heavily Asian-American suburbs, is the right long-term picture. But Wheatley needs both the environment and serious money to make this happen.

HD112: Angie Chen Button vs. Zach Herbert. This is the white whale of Dallas-area suburban politics. Button has survived every wave since 2018 in a Garland/Richardson district that keeps trending Democratic and keeps not quite flipping. The district is 54.7% Anglo, but with a substantial Asian-American population, and the kind of educated suburban profile where Paxton as the top of the ticket is genuinely toxic. If there’s one seat on this list where a strong candidate and a favorable environment collide, this is it.

HD118: Jorge Borrego vs. Kristian Carranza. Lujan ceded reelection to run for Congress, making this an open seat. Kristian Carranza, the Democratic nominee from 2024 who lost to Lujan by only 4 points, is running again. Jorge Borrego won a competitive Republican primary, defeating two other candidates. This is a majority-Hispanic south San Antonio district where Beto would have won by 5 points in 2018. Carranza already knows the district, has the name recognition, and has a rematch story to tell.

HD121: Marc LaHood vs. Zach Dunn. LaHood is the far-right guy who knocked out a moderate Republican in 2024, specifically over school vouchers, which means the business wing of his own party doesn’t love him, and he drew a primary challenger this cycle backed by Texans for Lawsuit Reform. LaHood won anyway. Zach Dunn is a prosecutor in the Family Violence Division at the Bexar County DA’s office, and a prosecutorial record that plays well in a San Antonio suburban district that Trump only carried by 5 points. This race has real potential.

HD133: Mano DeAyala vs. Josh Wallenstein. DeAyala won his own primary runoff by just 51-49 this cycle, barely surviving. That kind of near-death primary experience going into a tough general environment is not a great place to be. Wallenstein is a small-business owner and ethics attorney who has spent his career protecting taxpayers and fighting corruption, which maps perfectly onto the anti-Paxton message that will drive this entire cycle. This is a west Houston district that’s nearly 50/50 Anglo-non-Anglo, with 14% Asian-American, and has exactly the kind of educated suburban profile where the environment works for Democrats.

HD138: Lacey Hull vs. Tyler Smith. This west Houston district is 41% Hispanic, 10% Black, with a non-Anglo majority that keeps growing. Hull won by 14 points in 2024, which sounds comfortable until you remember that was a Trump year with a presidential race driving Republican turnout. Tyler Smith gives Democrats an offensive play in the Houston area in HD-138, a seat that belongs on any real target list. Hull’s margin in 2024 was built on Trump turnout that won’t be there in November. Smith needs to be on every Houston-area Dem’s radar.

Those ⬆️ are the nine seats that overlap between the DLCC targets and the seats the TLR appears to be worried about.

What about the other DCLL targets that TLR didn’t mention as a concern, and why aren’t they concerned?

There are three districts. HD52, HD94, and HD108. We’re going to speculate that the TLR analysis is modeling based on Republican Optimum Voting Strength. Essentially, what these districts look like at full GOP mobilization. Their model is tuned to structural partisanship, not candidate-specific or environment-specific factors.

HD52 and HD94 both have Republican incumbents or nominees who have historically run ahead of the top of the ticket. Harris Davila and a Tinderholt-built GOP machine in HD94. TLR’s model likely treats that as a structural cushion that requires more than a 9% shift to overcome.

HD108 is a different story. TLR’s allies in the business community like Morgan Meyer. He chairs Ways and Means. He’s their guy. They’re not going to ring an alarm bell about a seat held by one of their most valuable committee assets.

The DLCC, by contrast, is looking at candidate quality, fundraising potential, and environmental factors that a partisan structural model doesn’t capture. That’s why these three are on their list but not TLR’s panic list, and it’s also why you shouldn’t read TLR’s silence on these seats as proof they’re safe.

HD52: Caroline Harris Davila vs. Chris Jimenez. Harris Davila holds the seat that James Talarico himself once occupied, which makes flipping it both poetic justice and strategically important. She’s Dan Patrick’s chief of staff’s wife, a hard-right MAGA loyalist in a Round Rock/Georgetown district that is among the fastest-growing and fastest-changing in the state. Trump carried it by 8 points in 2024, but the Senate race margin was only 3 points, which is the tell. The DLCC sees this as flippable. The TLR analysis doesn’t have her in their danger zone at either 7% or 9% underperformance. But in a 9%+ wave environment, with Paxton at the top of the ticket and no Trump to drive MAGA turnout, the math gets uncomfortable for her fast.

HD94: Cheryl Bean vs. Katie O’Brien Duzan. Tinderholt’s open seat in Tarrant County. Bean won the Republican primary outright with 53.8%, defeating Texans for Vaccine Choice founder Jackie Schlegel and three other candidates. The Republican baseline here was built on one of the most extreme members of the Texas House, a guy who once filed a bill to make abortion punishable by death. Trump carried the district by 10 points in 2024, and the Republican incumbent won by 11. The DLCC put it on the list. Tarrant County has been trending Democratic, and we expect Democrats across the county to overperform in November.

HD108: Morgan Meyer vs. Allison Mitchell. This is the seat that nearly flipped in 2018. Meyer won with 50.1% of the vote, a margin of 0.2 percentage points. Democrats have come close numerous times, but haven’t succeeded. It’s 75.6% Anglo, highly educated, old-money Dallas establishment Republican territory. Meyer survived his own 2024 Republican primary against a challenger who came after him specifically for his role as a House Manager in the Paxton impeachment trial. Meyer won that with only 51% of the vote. Meyer is already radioactive with the MAGA base for voting to impeach Paxton, and now Paxton is at the top of the ticket. The TLR analysis doesn’t flag this one either, probably because the old-money establishment vote has consistently propped Meyer up even as MAGA erodes his base from the right. But the internal contradiction of his position, too moderate for MAGA, not moderate enough for Democrats, makes this genuinely interesting in 2026.

That’s the 12 DLCC targets, but there are six more seats that the TLR is worried about that the DLCC isn’t targeting.

What are those five seats TLR is shaking in their boots over, but the DC Democrats haven’t noticed yet? And why?

This is my speculation. TLR is a Texas organization with Texas-specific modeling. They know these districts from the inside. They’re running simulations based on precinct-level Republican voting behavior, and their model indicates that with a 9% GOP underperformance, the structural floor of these seats, all of which are in high-growth, demographically shifting corridors, isn’t where it used to be.

The DLCC, by contrast, is a national organization making resource allocation decisions. They’re looking at candidate infrastructure, fundraising capacity, and proven electoral competitiveness, races where they can point to a near-miss and justify the investment. Most of these six seats don’t have a recent near-miss on the books. They look safe on a national spreadsheet.

And in this case, I’m siding with the GOP monsters on their assessment. Because even though they’re not on our side, they know Texas better than DC Democrats, and so do I. And Republicans should be worried about these seats.

The DLCC could still add them to their list later.

HD20: Terry Wilson vs. Matthias-Jonah Early. Wilson represents a chunk of Williamson County, the same fast-growing Austin exurb territory that keeps producing surprises. The TLR analysis puts Wilson underwater at 9% underperformance. Early is the Democratic challenger, though there’s not much public profile on him yet. This is a stretch target, but in a county where the Austin migration story keeps rewriting the political math every two years, you don’t dismiss Williamson County seats casually. The DLCC simply isn’t paying attention here, yet.

HD55: Hillary Hickland vs. Amelia Rabroker. Hickland is a Moms for Liberty nut on a crusade against dildoes. Bell County is 45.9% Anglo, nearly 23% Black, 25.8% Hispanic, with a massive military population that has historically swung based on economic conditions and federal policy. Hickland won by a comfortable margin in 2024, but the TLR analysis flags her as 9% GOP underperformance, suggesting their model sees structural softness here. The DLCC isn’t looking here, and that’s probably a mistake.

HD66: Matt Shaheen vs. Sandeep Srivastava. Shaheen is a Plano Republican who has held this Collin County seat since 2014 and keeps surviving. The district is 55.3% Anglo with a massive Asian-American population of 20.4%, which is the highest Asian-American share of any district on either target list. Trump carried it by 14 points in 2024, but the Senate race gap was only 9 points. Srivastava is the Democratic challenger, and his name recognition alone in a heavily South Asian district could matter more than the DLCC’s models account for. The TLR analysis puts Shaheen underwater at 9% underperformance. This is exactly the kind of district where a wave plus the right candidate bio can produce an upset that nobody saw coming.

HD89: Candy Noble vs. Angie Carraway. Noble is a Collin County incumbent who has held this seat since 2018 and has been largely comfortable in it. But the district covers the same northern Collin County territory that keeps getting more diverse, more educated, and less reliably Republican every cycle. The DLCC hasn’t targeted this seat, possibly because Noble’s margins have looked comfortable on paper. But comfortable margins in rapidly changing Collin County are often a lagging indicator rather than a predictor.

HD132: Mike Schofield vs. Sara McGee. Schofield is a west Houston Harris County Republican in a district that is 43.1% Anglo, 28.5% Hispanic, 14.1% Black, a majority-minority district that Schofield keeps winning through sheer personal vote strength and low Democratic turnout. This may be the single most demographically misaligned seat held by a Republican on their entire list. The DLCC isn’t targeting it, probably because Schofield has consistently outrun his district’s demographics, and there’s no high-profile candidate investment here yet. But if Harris County Democrats are running up the score countywide, which the environment suggests they will, Schofield’s personal-vote cushion gets tested hard.

So, you add those five districts the TLR is scared of to the 12 districts the DLCC is targeting, and that gives us 17 plump and juicy red districts ready to flip blue. That sure enough covers 14 seats and gives us a few seats’ worth of breathing room in case any of those candidates turn out to be duds.

The receipts are there, and for once, they’re coming from both sides of the aisle.

When DC Democrats, Texas Republican insiders, and a tort reform lobby that has spent decades propping up the Texas GOP majority are all running the same basic calculation and arriving at the same basic answer, you pay attention.

Fourteen seats. One majority. Thirty years of one-party rule in the Texas House are on the line.

We’ve been told Texas isn’t ready. We’ve been told to wait. We’ve been told the map is too hard, the money too scarce, the voters too checked out. The Republicans running these internal analyses clearly didn’t get that memo. They’re scared, and they should be.

Now the question is whether we show up organized, funded, and ready to take it in every single one of these districts, from Corpus Christi to Collin County to the west Houston suburbs.

The Election Gods are listening. Are we?

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Over 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. One in four can’t afford their prescription drugs. More than half a million people go bankrupt from medical debt every year. And more than 60,000 die because they can’t afford to see a doctor. That’s America, right now, in 2026. The wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.

In April, 2025, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Rep. Debbie Dingell, and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2025 in both chambers of Congress. It currently has 114 cosponsors in the House. That’s more than half the House Democratic caucus putting their name on the most important piece of domestic legislation in a generation. What’s missing is the majority.

If the 2026 wave materializes the way the data and the political environment suggest it can, Democrats will walk into January 2027 with a real shot at governing, and governing boldly. This is not a moment to play small. When we flip the House, we don’t get to pick one thing to fight for. We walk, and we chew gum. We deliver for working families on all of it, and near the top of that list is universal healthcare.

Best-estimate modeling shows that Medicare for All would save roughly $450 billion and 68,000 lives every year. Trillions of dollars over a decade, lifted out of the pockets of insurance executives and pharmaceutical shareholders and put back into the lives of families who have been rationing insulin, skipping mammograms, and going bankrupt over ambulance bills while CEOs collect nine-figure bonuses for denying their claims.

This is the moment. And when Democrats have the numbers to pass it, they have a moral obligation to do exactly that.

So the question for Texas is personal. Texas, with the highest uninsured rate in the country, has more to gain from universal healthcare than almost any other state in the union. Which means Texas voters need to know exactly who they’re sending to Washington, what those people believe about healthcare, and whether they’ll be a yes vote when it counts.

This article is about that.

We’re going to cover three groups:

1. The Texas Democrats currently in Congress have already signed on to the Medicare for All Act.

2. The Texas incumbents who haven’t, and who need to hear from you.

3. And the 2026 candidates running on it, who should be expected to sign the moment they’re sworn in.

Your vote is a down payment on someone’s life. Make it count.

The current Texas signees, and the shakeups coming.

The good news is that seven out of the thirteen members of the Texas Democratic Congressional Delegation have already signed on to this bill. The bad news is that four of them won’t be in Congress next year. So, for Texas Democrats to do their part to get the votes for this bill, which will be a generational accomplishment, we need to replace those four votes AND add to them.

Ultimately, even if this bill doesn’t pass in the 120th Congress, every cosponsor is a statement of values and a binding commitment. The next time Democrats have the numbers, we need a Texas delegation that shows up ready.

Currently:

However, in the next Congressional session, this list will be shorter:

Those four members are leaving Congress, mostly because of the Republicans’ gerrymandering shenanigans, and musical chairs didn’t work out. Congressman Marc Veasey is also leaving Congress, but he never signed onto this bill.

The first question we should ask is which sitting Democratic members haven’t signed on to this bill, and why?

Before I looked this bill up again tonight, I could have sworn that Congressman Joaquin Castro was already a cosponsor. A few years ago, Castro was interviewed by the San Antonio Express-News, where he openly called for Universal Health Care, saying, “Quality, affordable health care is a human right that shouldn’t only be afforded to the privileged.”

Many of us have heard speeches Castro has given, regarding his bout with cancer, and the unbelievable costs associated with treatment. Castro is also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Why hasn’t he signed onto this bill yet? I think, if you’re his constituent, you should probably call his office and ask.

Then there is Sylvia Garcia, not exactly a staunch progressive, but she’s always leaned a little to the left. Now, mind you, I’m writing this article without looking at anyone’s campaign finance related to the health insurance industry. Let’s just assume that not hopping on this bill was an oversight.

Lizzie Fletcher. The Liberal Queen of Exxon, and everyone gets mad at me because she’s a warrior for women and the LGBTQ+ community, but I haven’t given her a lot of grace because she’s deep in bed with the fossil fuel industry. People can totally change, though. If I were her constituent, I would call her office and say, “Please sign onto this bill.”

Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. More uninsured Texans live in their two districts than in most places in Texas, but neither will agree to this bill without a suitcase of cash in unmarked bills attached. We should be looking for their 2028 replacements right now.

With enough pressure, Castro and Garcia may sign onto the M4A bill now or next session. The rest? I wouldn’t count on it.

Headed to Congress.

First, let’s talk about the sure things.

• TX30: Rev. Dr. Freddie Haynes. As a Justice Democrat, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’ll sign on to this bill right away.

TX33 Colin Allred. Now, Allred spent this last primary election running on a “new-and-improved progressive world view,” his primary opponent, Julie Johnson, did sign on to this bill. If Allred really has turned over a new leaf and is committed to the working class in Texas, then committing to this legislation now would go a long way, and signing it upon being sworn in would help him rebuild trust with Texas progressives.

The DCCC is expecting we’ll flip TX15 and TX35. That’s Bobby Pulido and Johnny Garcia. Honestly, their politics are going to be simialar to Cuellar and Gonzalez. This should tell you a lot about the DCCC’s priorities, considering how many seats the Republicans likely dummymandered with their racist maps.

From my Meet the Candidate series, here are the candidates who have directly told me that they would support universal, publicly funded healthcare:

• TX05: Chelsey Hockett

• TX06: Danny Minton

• TX11: Claire Reynolds

• TX19: Kyle Rable

• TX21: Kristin Hook

• TX22: Marquette Greene-Scott

• TX24: Kevin Burge

• TX27: Tanya Lloyd

• TX31: Justin Early

We have a lot of progressive Democrats on the Texas ticket this year, running on generational issues like universal healthcare. And the DCCC is backing the only two guys who aren’t running on it. 🙄 I’m not trying to hide my annoyance.

But I haven’t written a Meet the Candidate article about every candidate yet, or met everyone running for office. So, I searched through their websites, and here are the other Texas Democratic Congressional candidates who support universal healthcare:

• TX08: Laura Jones

• TX12: Heli Rodriguez Prilliman

• TX13: Mark Nair

• TX23: Katy Padilla Stout

• TX26: Steven Shook

• TX38: Melissa McDonough

We just need to pause for a moment and recognize that SIXTEEN Texas Democrats are running on the Congressional ticket who support universal healthcare.

Meanwhile, California Democrats selected in their primary for governor a guy with more corporate sponsorships than a NASCAR driver. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Now, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Just because all of those candidates are running doesn’t mean they’ll all win. But for sure, Republicans dummymandered the maps, and several of these districts will flip this year.

If we’re looking at a huge wave in November (fingers-crossed), looking at the numbers, including the Hispanic swing left, we could flip as many as ten as these seats. If we do, that would be monumental, for the GOP’s stupid dummymandering, but also toward taking a step forward to universal healthcare.

The math is simple. The moral case is airtight. The only thing missing is the political will.

Every other wealthy country on earth has figured this out. Every single one of them decided, at some point, that letting people die because they can’t afford a doctor is not an acceptable feature of a civilized society. The United States is still having that argument. Sixty thousand people a year are losing it.

Texas doesn’t have to wait for the rest of the country to lead. We can send a delegation to Washington that shows up on day one, ready to vote yes. We can replace the incumbents who’ve been too comfortable, too cozy with the insurance industry, or too cautious to say what they actually believe. We can elect the candidates on this list who’ve already said healthcare is a human right, and they’ll fight for it.

Medical deserts result from the closure of hospitals in rural Texas. Families in the Rio Grande Valley are rationing insulin. Parents in Houston are choosing between their kids’ prescriptions and their rent. It’s the lived reality of millions of Texans, in a state that has refused to expand Medicaid, refused to protect its most vulnerable residents, and watched the human cost pile up for thirty years of Republican rule.

That ends when we decide it ends.

If you believe America should finally catch up to the rest of the developed world, if you believe 60,000 lives a year are worth fighting for, that medical debt shouldn’t follow a family into bankruptcy, that a cancer diagnosis shouldn’t mean financial ruin, then support these candidates. Donate. Volunteer. Knock doors. And in November, vote like someone’s life depends on it.

Because it does.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Who I Am and Why I’m Here.

My name is Stevie. I am a Texan, an accidental political content creator, and someone who is deeply, unapologetically passionate about saving this state.

To be clear about something upfront: I am not a writer. I am just someone who has a lot to say, and people keep listening, so I keep going.

What radicalized me was serving as an election judge for the first time in 2020 and then watching the lies about that election spread in real time. I had just seen with my own eyes how elections actually work, how seriously the people running them take their responsibility, and then had to watch that entire system get smeared and lied about to serve a political agenda. It changed something in me permanently. I was so alarmed that I called my sister and asked her to start looking for property abroad. Luckily, she had just finished doing just that, so I didn’t have to worry about her and her girls. After that, I did my first phone bank. Then my first block walk. I volunteered with RideShare2Vote, helping get voters to the polls. I volunteered with the Texas Democratic Party’s Voter Protection hotline. I continue to do all of these things, and I am not stopping.

After being laid off in April of 2025 due to federal funding cuts, I made a conscious decision to use that time to start making TikTok videos in the summer of 2025. Since 2020, I thought that the politicos would eventually start fighting back in the media against the Harris County GOP. They never did.

My original goal was to get in front of the lies being told about our Harris County judges and start preparing people for what I knew was coming in the 2026 midterms. But as I was doing that, I realized nobody was talking about the constitutional amendments election I knew was coming that November. I looked them up. I was alarmed. I knew Texans would support them without fully understanding what was actually in them. I tried to get an organizer friend to help spread the word. He turned it right back around on me and told me to publish a Substack about it myself. So I did.

In September 2025, I published Why I’m Voting No on Every Constitutional Amendment. Then I kept going, publishing several more pieces about the amendments and the connections I could see playing out in other conservative states and throughout history. The response was overwhelming. Texans started emailing me wanting to know more. Texans reached out again. Not just voters, but candidates, electeds, journalists, and organizers. So here I am. Still unemployed. Still running my mouth and not stopping anytime soon.

Through my videos and TikTok lives, I have shown people what it actually looks like to phone bank, block walk, and poll greet. I have gotten Texans to do all three for the first time. The whole point is to show people how easy it is to get involved and that we do not have to let conservatives and their donors happen to us. We truly have the power. People have told me they appreciate the way I break down what is happening in politics(now and historically). In the media, into something that every day Texans can actually use.

Michelle Davis is one of the people who has been in this fight alongside me. We connected around 2020 or 2021 on Twitter, back when the platform had yet to fall into Elon Musk’s hands. We have been political friends ever since, and I am honored that Lone Star Left invited me to expand on her excellent piece about what Harris County means to this state in 2026.

Because I want it on record: Harris County is the crown jewel. If we lose it, we lose Texas. If we lose Texas, we lose the country. That is not hyperbole.

The Numbers Don’t Lie.

Michelle is right that nearly one in five Texas Democrats lives in Harris County. I want you to sit with that number. And then I want you to look at this table, because it tells a story that should both inspire you and keep you up at night.

Look at those County Judge margins. We won in 2018 by 1.49 points. We won in 2022 by 1.36 points. Those are cliff-hanger wins that required EVERYTHING we had. Presidential cycles lift us. Midterm cycles expose us. And 2026 is a midterm. Probably the most important midterms in our lifetime for various reasons.

Anyone who looks at this county and says, “It’s blue, we’re fine,” has not been paying attention. Harris County is trending our way, but it is NOT a lock. It never has been, and it will not be in 2026.

To be clear, Harris County does not stand alone. Tarrant County, Dallas County, Travis, and Bexar County round out the powerhouses of Democratic voting strength in Texas. Those four counties together form the backbone of any statewide Democratic strategy. But Harris County is in a league of its own. Harris County’s Democratic voter base is roughly double that of Dallas County, the second largest. When Harris County turns out, everything moves. When Harris County stays home, nothing else in the state can compensate for it. Harris County’s turnout is KEY for statewide executive offices.

Dr. Letitia Plummer Is Our Candidate for Harris County Judge. Know Who She Is Up Against.

With Lina Hidalgo stepping away, Dr. Letitia Plummer is the candidate who should be and needs to be our next Harris County Judge. She is the daughter of a Zanzibar-born Yemeni-Indian and Persian mother and an African American father. She is also a Muslim. But most importantly, she represents exactly what Harris County is: a cornucopia of Americans. She is a progressive who is exactly the kind of leader Harris County deserves. She is brilliant, rooted in this community, and has not taken a single dollar from people looking to do business with the county. No pay to play. No establishment backing. She is running this race on her own terms, much like Lina Hidalgo did when she refused to play the same old games that Harris County politics had been built on for decades. The establishment did not hand Lina Hidalgo that seat, and they are not handing Dr. Plummer anything either.

That means we have to show up for her ourselves. Go to drletitiaplummer.com and make a donation. It does not have to be large. Five dollars. Ten dollars. Whatever you can. We are going to win this thing without the donor class and without the establishment clearing the path. That is how it has to be, and honestly, that is exactly the kind of leadership worth fighting hardest for.

Her Republican opponent is Orlando Sanchez.

Orlando Sanchez is a Latino man with a Spanish surname running in a county with a massive and growing Latino voter base. Some voters, including some who lean Democratic, will see that name on a ballot and make an assumption. It is a reality of how name recognition and identity work in down-ballot races where most voters have limited information. We have to be honest about that, and we have to get out ahead of it.

Sanchez was born in Cuba. His family fled after the revolution. It is worth understanding what that history typically means politically: Cuban exile families who fled after 1959 were overwhelmingly from the upper and professional classes, people who had wealth, property, and status under the Batista regime and who lost it when the revolution dismantled that social order. That background has shaped Cuban-American political identity for generations, producing one of the most reliably conservative voting blocs in the country. Orlando Sanchez’s political record and his alignment with the Texas Republican Party are entirely consistent with that history.

Dr. Plummer’s opponent is not a moderate Latino voice who just happens to be on the other ticket. He is a conservative with deep ties to the same Republican infrastructure that has been working to dismantle Harris County’s Democratic institutions for years. Voters deserve to know that.

And Dr. Plummer will face attacks that go beyond policy. She is a Muslim woman, and “sharia law” has become the new Republican dog whistle in Texas. It is a cynical, racist, Islamophobic smear strategy, and it is already being prepped. She will also face accusations of anti-semitism from members of her own party. As a side note, I attended her Primary Run-Off watch party with MANY Jewish community members.

Do not be surprised by the pending attacks. The same machine that went after Lina Hidalgo is warming up for Dr. Plummer, and we have to be louder, faster, and more organized than we were before.

The Money Behind the Attacks.

Here is something that does not get discussed enough: the major Republican donors fueling the attacks on Harris County have enormous business interests here. Harris County is their market, their workforce, their infrastructure. They profit from everything this county has built, and they are simultaneously funding the effort to dismantle its Democratic leadership and the will of the people.

The Houston Chronicle has documented this extensively. Their 2024 investigation into Harris County donors and their 2025 follow-up on Houston political donors show, in stark detail, who is writing the checks, and those same names appear on major RNC donor lists. They are not just funding local races. They are funding the national infrastructure designed to keep Texas red and keep Harris County from becoming what it has the power to become.

This is why our county leadership must stay Democratic. This is why our county and judicial seats must stay Democratic. Our courts are the last line of defense against a legislature and a governor who have spent years passing laws designed to suppress votes, restrict rights, and punish communities like ours. When our judges go, those protections go with them.

Abbott has announced he plans to spend most of his $106 million war chest in Harris County. Every dollar he spends here is a dollar not spent elsewhere in Texas. His obsession with this county is both a threat and, as Michelle points out, a sign of panic. He knows the math is not on his side. But panic money can still do damage, and we cannot take it lightly.

What You Can Do Right Now, From Anywhere.

This is where I push back hard on the idea that Harris County is someone else’s problem. If you are a progressive anywhere in this country, what happens in Harris County in November 2026 is your fight. Because as Texas goes, so goes the nation, and the road to Texas runs directly through this county.

Here is what you can do right now, no matter where you live:

These organizations are doing the real, daily work on the ground in Harris County. Sign up for their email lists so you know when volunteer opportunities open up, both in person and remote. Send a donation, and make it recurring if you can. You do not need to give $5,000. A $5 one-time donation helps. A $5 monthly donation helps more. A single remote phone bank shift from your living room in any state helps. Connecting with people you know in Harris County and telling them to vote the whole ballot helps.

Every single thing you do adds up.

• Houston Progressive Caucus -- houstonprogressives.com

• Houston Black American Democrats -- houstonblackdems.org

• Houston Justice -- houjustice.org

• Pure Justice -- purejustice.org

• Texas Organizing Project -- organizetexas.org

Talk to the people YOU know in Harris County. Send them my content. Invite them to join my SWAY Voting Group. Remind them to vote the WHOLE ballot, not just the top of the ticket. Down-ballot races decide who sits on our courts, who runs our county government, and who stands between our communities and the worst of what Abbott and Trump have planned.

Do not assume. Do not look at the presidential numbers and conclude that everything down ballot is fine. The County Judge race runs on a different turnout model, in a different year, against a well-funded, coordinated opposition that has already announced it is going all in.

The Bottom Line.

Abbott is spending historic money to flip this county. The same donors funding his campaign are doing business in our backyard. Our courts are under attack. Dr. Plummer will face a character assassination campaign built on racism and Islamophobia. Her opponent will benefit from name confusion in a majority-Latino county. And we are heading into a midterm cycle where Democratic turnout historically drops.

None of this is hopeless. I believe we can win, and win decisively. But ONLY if we treat this with the urgency it deserves. And this rings true for every major county.

Harris County is the crown jewel. And it is absolutely winnable, with fighters who will not fold to Abbott, to Trump, or to the conservative donor class that wants to use this county for profit while stripping it of its power.

Get in the fight. The whole state is watching. The whole country should be.

Keep Reading: The Full StevieSaidForNow Reading List

If you want to understand how we got here and what we are up against, here is the body of work I have been building. Start anywhere.

Harris County Is the Prize, and Gutting Public Trust Has Been the Plan for Years -- The attacks on Lina Hidalgo, the smear campaigns, and the deceptive “journalism,” like Fox 26’s Breaking Bod segment, were not the work of concerned citizens. They were a coordinated, well-funded operation designed to rot public trust from the inside, so that people would stop believing in their own local government. Our courts and jails have been weaponized to pressure Texans into signing away their rights while the right-wing media machine cheers it on.

Why Andy Kahan Should Not Be Celebrated -- How the same forces use familiar faces and manufactured credibility to inch the Overton window on criminal justice quietly to the right, right under our noses.

The Party Built on Lies: How Karl Rove Shaped the Playbook Being Used Against Us -- What is happening to Harris County right now did not come out of nowhere. Karl Rove helped build the blueprint for the coordinated disinformation, the manufactured scandals, and the media infrastructure designed to destroy public trust in Democratic governance. Understanding that history makes what we are watching today much easier to read.

Why Lina Hidalgo Is Warning Harris County -- About Kim Ogg and the way she was used as a vehicle to go after Hidalgo and Democratic governance in Harris County from inside the party. A case study in how these operations work and why we have to stay clear-eyed about who is actually fighting for us.

Are We Being Set Up for the Next One? -- There is a recognizable, worldwide, American-induced cycle here, and if we do not name it and interrupt it, we will keep getting caught by it.

To Houston, Harris County, and Texas -- This one is personal. It is a direct message to our community about what is at stake, what is being threatened, and why we cannot afford to sit this out. If you only read one piece from this list, make it this one.

The Next Texas Legislature Starts Now: How Your Legislators Voted -- The 2027 legislative session is already being built right now during the interim. This piece breaks down how your Texas legislators voted and why it matters for what is coming next. The decisions being made in quiet committee rooms today will land on our communities in two years. You need to know who is responsible.

My dream is to become a Black, female Karl Rove. Yes, that Karl Rove. He is my arch nemesis, alongside Paul Bettencourt and Trump. The difference is that I intend to use those powers for good, for all of us. If that sounds like your kind of fight, come find me. I am everywhere.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I haven’t been keeping up with all of the legislative interim hearings happening in Austin. One, I figured I could get to them later since the Legislature won’t meet again until January. And two, I don’t expect Republicans to hold the Texas House in November (fingers crossed).

However, I did sit down to watch the Senate interim hearing on healthcare costs in Texas. And besides the fact that Republicans are blatantly ignorant about how to run a government and government solutions, the GOP Committee members wasted no time letting their depraved and malevolent positions be known. Particularly, Senator Lois Kolkhorst.

Committee Chair Lois Kolkhorst opened the hearing by doing her best impression of someone who gives a damn about healthcare costs. And honestly? Some of what she said wasn’t wrong. PBMs are a black box. Hospital pricing is deliberately opaque. The system is rigged against regular people. Fine. True.

But here’s the thing, Lois Kolkhorst has chaired the Senate Health and Human Services Committee for years. She controls nearly $80 billion in healthcare spending. She showed up to this hearing waving around a notebook full of every healthcare bill she’s carried over the years, lamenting that nothing ever changed.

That notebook is her record, her failure. She built that notebook.

She’s performing outrage at a fire she’s been feeding for a decade.

And then there’s the vaccine thing. While she’s been chairing the most powerful health committee in Texas, she’s been platforming Robert Malone and Peter McCullough (documented peddlers of vaccine misinformation) in her own committee hearings.

Lois Kolkhorst spent years undermining public health infrastructure in this state.

• Kolkhorst co-sponsored making Ivermectin an over-the-counter drug.

• And she co-sponsored a bill that blocks doctors from refusing organ donations from unvaccinated patients.

• She voted against expanding CHIPs for low-income children.

• She voted against allowing general contractors to be eligible for workers’ compensation.

• Kolkhorst voted to ban the HPV vaccine for pre-teens.

Healthcare costs are substantially driven by preventable illness. You cannot spend your tenure as the state’s top health legislator sowing distrust in medicine and then cosplay as a crusader against rising healthcare costs. Those two things are not compatible.

And when she finally gets around to solutions? Health savings accounts. Flexible plans. That’s not bending the cost curve. That’s handing sick people a coupon and telling them good luck.

Oh, and she sat through this entire hearing dripping in diamonds and gold. Just so you know who she’s fighting for.

But let’s talk about what Lois Kolkhorst has actually done to Texas women’s health, because this is where it stops being ironic and starts being deadly.

In 2011, Kolkhorst voted to slash family planning funding in Texas by 66%.

82 family planning clinics across the state were forced to close. These weren’t just abortion providers. They were the entry point into the healthcare system for millions of Texas women. Cancer screenings. Birth control. STD testing. Gone.

What happened next was not subtle.

Texas maternal mortality rate went from 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 38.7 in 2012. It nearly doubled in two years. Researchers published those findings in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology and described the spike as difficult to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval.” No other state in the country saw anything close to it. Texas maternal mortality reached, in their words, “levels not seen in other U.S. states.”

Black women bore the worst of it, accounting for 11% of Texas births but nearly 29% of pregnancy-related deaths.

Lois Kolkhorst has chaired the Senate Health and Human Services Committee throughout its time.

Lois Kolkhorst is someone who had the power to protect Texas women, chose not to, and hundreds of Black and brown mothers died. That blood is on her hands. Directly. Unmistakably. Hers.

She didn’t just watch this happen. She had the gavel. She controlled the committee that oversees the agencies responsible for maternal health in this state. And when the data came out, the Legislature “mostly punted.”

So when Lois Kolkhorst sits at the head of that committee table in her gold and diamonds, waving her notebook and asking why healthcare costs keep rising, understand what you’re looking at. You’re looking at someone who made Texas one of the most dangerous places in the developed world to have a baby, and is now performing concerned about the bill.

And it’s not just women Kolkhorst has failed.

At another hearing last year, a behavioral health physician sat before her committee and laid it out in plain language. Private psychiatric care costs $50,000 a month. There’s a 540-bed waitlist. The healthcare system has no financial incentive to build out mental health infrastructure because there are no profit margins. And then he said that suicide rates are going to hit levels we’ve never seen before because there is simply nowhere for kids to go.

Kolkhorst’s response was to talk about her whiteboard, her DOGE project with Senator Nichols, and to tell everyone to take a deep breath because the Trump administration is being confirmed as we speak, and everything is going to be okay. Fast-forward to Summer 2026, it’s not okay.

A doctor just told her that her children are going to die. She responded with “Trump is my daddy.”

She’s not confused about how the system works. She just doesn’t care.

Which brings us to how any of this is even possible. How does someone with this record end up chairing the most powerful health committee in the Texas Senate?

Dan Patrick put her there.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has reappointed Lois Kolkhorst as Chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee after session after session, handing her control of nearly $80 billion in healthcare spending and oversight of every health agency in Texas. This is the same Dan Patrick who, during COVID, said that grandparents should be willing to die to protect the economy. The same Dan Patrick who has spent his entire career in Texas politics burning institutions down and calling it conservatism.

Kolkhorst is Dan Patrick’s instrument. Every failed bill, every gutted clinic, every Black mother who died, that’s a policy choice that Patrick blessed, session after session, by putting her name on that committee gavel.

When you’re trying to understand how Texas healthcare got this broken, you don’t just look at Kolkhorst. You look at who keeps rewarding her for breaking it.

And in November, her seat (SD18) is on the ballot.

Senate District 18 stretches across 19 counties, from Fort Bend to Victoria to the rural Hispanic counties along the coast. Democrat Erica Gillum is running against her. And before anyone says it’s not flippable, understand what the political environment looks like right now. Beef is nearly $10 a pound. Gas is $4 a gallon. Taylor Rehmet just flipped a Texas Senate seat that Trump won by 17 points. The wave is real and building.

But waves don’t flip seats by themselves. Here’s what actually has to happen:

Fort Bend turnout has to be massive. 45% of SD18 live in Fort Bend County, the majority non-Anglo, heavily Asian American and Black, and trending hard blue. Gillum needs to run 10+ points better than Allred’s 2024 numbers there. That means real GOTV infrastructure on the ground.

Hispanic counties have to move. Gonzales, Calhoun, Victoria, and Refugio, all majority or near-majority Hispanic voting age population, all historically underperforming. If the economic environment is genuinely moving Hispanic voters left, these are the counties where it shows up in SD18. Without movement here, the math doesn’t work. Period.

Waller County has to be worked. 73% of Waller County lies within this district. 28% Black population. It has been left on the table in every past cycle. A coordinated campaign has to actually show up there this time.

Someone has to make Kolkhorst spend her $3.1 million. A major outside group has to get into this race. Erica Gillum cannot win an air war she’s not fighting. Kolkhorst sitting on that war chest unopposed is a death sentence for this campaign.

Gillum’s campaign has to wake up.

Right now. The clock is not her friend. She needs her name to be known in Fort Bend’s Asian-American and Black communities. She needs to be in Victoria and Gonzales. She needs to raise money, as the race depends on it. A candidate who isn’t generating energy in her own base counties loses this race, no matter how good the environment is statewide.

The national environment has to hold through November. Special elections run on Democratic enthusiasm and Republican complacency. November general elections don’t. Full Republican turnout changes the math. The wave has to be still cresting when polls close.

All six of those things have to happen. Missing any one of them probably kills it.

But here’s why it matters beyond the electoral math. Lois Kolkhorst is not just a bad politician. She is someone who has used two decades of political power to make Texas a more dangerous place to be poor, to be a woman, to be Black or brown, and to be sick.

Women died because of her votes.

Children are going without mental healthcare because she responded to a doctor’s warning with a Trump talking point.

And she’s going to keep doing it for as long as she holds that gavel.

Erica Gillum needs your help. She needs donations. She needs volunteers. She needs every Democrat in SD18 to treat this race like it’s the most important one on the ballot, because for the women of Texas, it might be.

Lois Kolkhorst has been killing Texas women with policy for two decades. November is the chance to make her stop.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next five months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Keenen Colbert?

Keenen Colbert is an Abilene native, a Texas State University grad, and a Marine Corps veteran who spent more than eight years in uniform, long enough to earn both Non-Commissioned and Commissioned Officer status. His decorations include the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. He’s the real deal.

Now he’s taking that same energy into SD2, running on a platform that hits the issues working Texans actually lose sleep over. School funding, healthcare costs, and a cost of living that’s been eating people alive. Colbert has no wealthy backers, no lobbyist money, no insider pedigree. Just a guy who grew up in Texas public schools and watched what happens when politicians stop showing up for the people who elected them.

The district.

We can flip this district this year. Keenen Colbert can flip this district this year.

In 2024, Trump carried SD2 59.3% to Harris’s 39.0%. That’s about 405,000 total votes cast in the district, with roughly a 163,000-vote gap. That sounds brutal until you look at the registration numbers.

SD2 in 2024 had only a 64.3% turnout, meaning 225,950 registered voters stayed home in a presidential year with a competitive US Senate race at the top of the ticket. In 2022, the last midterm, turnout was 44%.

That is not a locked Republican electorate. That is an enormous pool of non-participating voters in a district where the Democratic base, Dallas County, Latino communities in Navarro and Kaufman, and younger suburban voters, skews heavily toward the people least likely to show up in off-year elections without a serious ground game behind them.

The registration gap makes it sharper. Only 14.7% of voters with Spanish surnames in a district that’s 28% Hispanic by population. That’s an organizing opportunity. Colbert doesn’t need to convert Republicans. He needs to find the people who are already there, already agree with him, and just haven’t had a reason to show up yet.

Meanwhile, Hall survived his primary with 78.7%, not a disaster, but not a senator with his base locked down either. His opponent pulled over 16,000 Republican primary votes against an incumbent. And in 2018, a midterm wave, Kendall Scudder held Hall to 59.4% with no money and minimal infrastructure. That was nearly a 20-point swing from Hall’s 2014 baseline. History says this district moves when the environment moves. The environment is moving.

SD2 is a weird coalition district. Look at what’s actually in it:

• Dallas County (16% of the district population). This is Colbert’s strongest territory. The Dallas portion of SD2 is 64% non-Anglo, 34.9% Hispanic, majority-minority, and Democratic-leaning. In 2024, SD2’s slice of HD113 went 54.3% Democratic.

• Rockwall County (100%, 107,000 people). 65% Anglo, historically Republican, but a fast-growing Dallas exurb. These are suburban commuters, homeowners, parents of school-age kids. They care about property taxes, school quality, and cost of living. They’re not ideological warriors. This is the persuasion target.

• Kaufman County (100%, 145,000 people). 54% Anglo, 41% non-Anglo, growing. More rural than Rockwall, but not deep-red rural. Has some swing potential if Democrats show up.

• Collin County (9% of the district). Expensive real estate, educated suburbanites. The small sliver in SD2 is probably ticket-splitter country. Small in numbers, but the type of voter who breaks away from Hall on school vouchers and healthcare costs.

• Van Zandt County (100%). 80.6% Anglo, deep red, forget it. Run up the score elsewhere.

• Navarro County (100%). 51% Anglo, 43% non-Anglo. Latino and Black voters who are under-registered and under-mobilized. Real upside if there’s a ground game.

What will it actually take to win?

In a wave environment, and we should have a wave environment in November, here’s the math that makes SD2 competitive:

Colbert needs to run up the score in the Dallas County portion. Every point of Democratic overperformance there translates directly. He needs Navarro and Kaufman to show up. Those are non-Anglo communities with untapped potential for registration and voting. And he needs Rockwall to move even 4–5 points from 2022, because that county has 107,000 people and the exact demographic profile of a place that gets fed up with voucher politics and rising property insurance.

I would expect to see Colbert frequently partnering with campaign events with Congressional candidate Chelsey Hockett, and House candidates Orlando Lopez and Zach Herbert.

The incumbent.

Bob Hall has represented SD2 since 2015. In eleven years, his constituents have gotten culture war, conspiracy theories, and a voting record that reads like a checklist of things working Texans actually need him to stop doing.

Hall arrived in Austin as a Tea Party true believer who, on the record, believed bike paths were a United Nations plot, that Obama was using public schools for “communist indoctrination,” and that Satan controlled his own Republican predecessor in SD2. His colleagues in the Senate literally gave him a tin foil hat for his desk.

It hasn’t gotten any more normal from there. In 2021, testifying on a sex education bill, Hall told a witness that the abortion industry invented comprehensive sex ed to create a “supply line of young women for abortions.” Texas Monthly flagged it at the time as having “no relation at all to reality.” The man sits on the Health and Human Services Committee.

On education, Hall’s record is unambiguous. He voted against a $10,000 teacher pay raise amendment in 2023. He’s been repeatedly endorsed by the Texas Home School Coalition PAC, which exists to funnel public money away from public schools. He voted to attach a voucher program to the school funding bill that same session. The House killed it, but Hall’s position was never in doubt.

On the grid, the record is equally damning, just in a different direction. Hall was warning about electromagnetic pulse attacks and geomagnetic storms for years before Uri. His colleagues gave him that tin foil hat in 2017.

And to think Republicans not only voted for this man, but also re-elected him. 😱

When Uri hit in February 2021, and millions of Texans froze in their homes, Hall claimed vindication. But none of his grid legislation became law. Not once in eleven years. He was the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction, and he couldn’t get a single substantive grid protection bill across the finish line. People died.

That’s who SD2 has had representing them for eleven years. A guy who talks constantly, votes against teachers and public schools, and has nothing to show for a decade of sitting on the committees that were supposed to be fixing the problems he kept warning about.

Keenen Colbert is a Marine who earned his rank. Bob Hall is a senator who never earned the trust his constituents placed in him.

In Kennen Colbert’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Colbert, based on previous reader polls, along with his answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

Absolutely! Raising the minimum wage is long overdue for Texans. $7 an hour simply isn’t a livable wage for anyone working full-time trying to support themselves, and our minimum wage needs to adjust to that. Any Texan who works full-time in this state should be able to afford a roof over their head, food for their stomach, and to see a doctor if they get sick.

Q: Should Texas end tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations?

Yes! Large corporations can afford to pay their fair share in taxes, and it’s time that our tax code for corporations ensures that.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

As a lifelong Texan who received his education solely through public schools, I wholeheartedly oppose efforts to privatize public education. I would support ending our current school voucher program completely to ensure that public funds are going to public schools.

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

YES! Regardless of income, no student should have to go hungry while at school. Period.

Q: Should Texas end tax breaks and regulatory loopholes for oil and gas companies, including exemptions from emissions reporting and waste disposal standards?

YES! Oil and gas companies do not need Tax breaks. They can afford to pay their share in taxes as well as follow all rules and regulations for their industry.

Q: Would you support redirecting state subsidies from fossil fuels to fund community-owned solar, wind, and battery projects in low-income and rural areas?

Absolutely. Leaning towards renewable resources is the way of the future. Redirecting state subsidies to community-owned projects like solar and wind would literally give power to the people.

Q: Do you support publicly financed elections to reduce corporate and PAC influence?

ABSOLUTELY! Elected officials work for the public, not PACs or corporate donors. I would support the finances behind elections to reflect such intent in order to better ensure that candidates and incumbents remain focused on who it is they truly work for.

Bonus Question: How do you plan to engage and energize young and working-class voters?

I plan on meeting young people where they are and speaking with them, not at them. Young people are paying attention to politics, and the working class is feeling pressure. They need to see that there are going people on the ballot fighting for their future and ready to remain engaged

SD2 is flippable.

The numbers say so. The environment says so. And Keenen Colbert, a Marine veteran with no lobbyist money and no patience for the kind of politics Bob Hall has been running for eleven years, is exactly the kind of candidate who can do it.

Keenen Colbert is ready. The question is whether SD2 is.

You can find out more about Keenen Colbert on his website, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Note: This article is longer than my usual, but this story is too important not to tell.

On Tuesday night, Mayes Middleton won the Republican primary runoff for Texas Attorney General. He will now face Democratic State Senator Nathan Johnson in November. The winner of that race becomes the top law enforcement officer in the second-largest state in America, the person who decides which laws get enforced, which corporations get investigated, and which civil rights get protected.

Middleton won because he spent more than $16 million of his own money to blanket Texas airwaves, calling himself “MAGA Mayes” and promising to be the ideological successor to Ken Paxton, a man who used the AG’s office as a personal political weapon for a decade.

That fortune didn’t come from the bootstrapped Texas grit that Republicans love to mythologize. It came from oil. And before the oil, it came from cattle. And before the cattle, it came from a slave plantation on Bayou d’Inde in southwest Louisiana, where a man named Henry K. Moss built a small empire on the labor of people he legally owned on free land.

Mayes Middleton is a seventh-generation Texan. He says this like it’s a credential. And in some rooms in this state, it still is. But when a white Texas Republican brags about being a seventh-generation Texan, the correct question isn’t “How long your family has been here?” The correct question is “What were they doing while they were here, and who paid for it?”

To understand who Mayes Middleton is, you have to go back almost 200 years, to a stretch of southwest Louisiana wetland called Bayou d’Inde, where a man named Henry K. Moss arrived from Georgia, claimed land that wasn’t his to claim, and built a fortune that has never stopped growing. The people who built it for him were never compensated. Their descendants were poisoned. And the man who inherited that fortune just won the Republican nomination for Attorney General of Texas.

That’s a direct line. And we’re going to trace every inch of it.

If you’re new here, hyperlinks lead to sources.

Henry Kirkland Moss was born in 1796 in Lincoln County, Georgia.

He was a white man in the American South when being a white man in the American South was the most valuable thing a person could be. He migrated to southwest Louisiana, to a stretch of land along Bayou d’Inde in what is now Calcasieu Parish, and he got there the way most wealthy white men got anywhere in early America, on the back of a colonial land system that handed territory to the right people and called it opportunity, a Spanish Land Grant.

He built a tannery. He ran cattle. He farmed. And he did all of it using enslaved people. That was how wealth was built in the American South, and Henry Moss was very good at building wealth. According to the 1860 slave census, Henry Moss owned 57 enslaved human beings. He was, by the historical record, the largest white slaveholder in southwest Louisiana.

The hundreds of acres Henry Moss controlled along Bayou d’Inde were Indigenous land. At the same time, the people who had lived on it for centuries were entirely erased from the transaction. Henry Moss got his land for free from the Spanish, who gave it to him because that is what colonial governments do. They convert stolen land into private wealth.

But Henry K. Moss was no pioneer. He was a slaveholder with a free land grant.

When the Confederacy lost, and the United States government legally forced Henry Moss to free the people he had enslaved, he gave them a small parcel of land nearby, a strip of earth along the Old Spanish Trail, about two miles north of his bayou. The freed people took it because what else were they to do when they had nothing, and someone offered them something? They built homes. They planted crops. They raised families. They named the place after the man who had enslaved them, because that, too, is how America works.

They called it Mossville.

Henry K. Moss died in January 1875. He died a wealthy man. The wealth did not die with him.

It’s important to understand what happened to the people of Mossville.

The people of Mossville did what Black communities across the American South did after emancipation.

Over the next century, Mossville grew into a genuine community. At its peak, more than 800 families called it home. It was, according to historians, one of the earliest free Black settlements in the entire American South, a place where people who had been legally classified as property built schools, churches, businesses, and a life.

Then the oil industry moved in.

Starting in the 1940s, petrochemical companies began surrounding Mossville with industrial facilities. Around it. Encircling it, the way you encircle something you intend to consume. By the time anyone was paying attention, more than a dozen chemical plants had been built within the community’s boundaries. Children got sick. Adults got sick. People died young, and nobody in Baton Rouge or Washington asked too many questions about why, because the people dying were Black and poor.

The region became part of what researchers and journalists now call Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, dense with petrochemical facilities and, not coincidentally, with Black communities. The fact that these plants were built here, in these communities, and not in the neighborhoods where the executives who ran them lived, is not a coincidence either.

It has always been a policy. Environmental racism, and Mossville is one of the most documented examples of it in the United States.

In 2012, a South African petrochemical company called Sasol announced plans to build the largest chemical complex of its kind in the Western Hemisphere directly on Mossville’s doorstep. The Louisiana state government, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the correct response was to give Sasol $115 million in public money to buy out the residents.

Most residents took the money. What choice did they have? They were being poisoned. The government wasn’t coming to help them. The corporation had already won. So they took what they were offered, packed up everything they had built over 150 years, and left the land that had been given to their ancestors as a parting gift from the man who enslaved them.

The community is gone now. A 2019 PBS documentary, Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, caught the last residents on film before the end. It is worth watching, but it isn’t an easy watch.

Henry K. Moss built his fortune on Bayou d’Inde using enslaved labor. When he was forced to free those people, he gave them a scrap of land nearby. That land became Mossville. The same oil and petrochemical industry that made the Moss family fortune grow for another hundred years, the industry that funded the political career of the man at the center of this story, is the industry that poisoned Mossville, surrounded it, and ultimately erased it.

That is a documented, linear, American fact.

Now we follow the money.

Henry K. Moss ➡️ Erastus Moss

Henry Moss had several children. One of them was a son named Erastus, born December 23, 1831, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Henry’s son, raised on the plantation, heir to everything his father built. Before the Civil War, while his father was still running the slave operation on Bayou d’Inde, Erastus migrated east into Texas. He settled in Chambers County.

By the time Erastus Moss appears in the historical record, he controls somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 acres. That figure comes from his own grandson’s written account of him. He ran cattle across all of it. He ran a general store. He became the first mail carrier of Double Bayou, delivering mail on horseback from Smith Point to Beaumont, a two-day trip each way. He was, by every measure, one of the dominant figures in early Chambers County. It should be noted that Erastus Moss also owned human beings.

The Texas Historical Commission knows his name. There is a structure in Anahuac, Texas, that the Commission’s own survey photographs and catalogs as the Moss-Middleton Ranch House. This physical landmark still bears the names of both families and sits on land that traces directly back to this man and his father’s slave fortune.

You do not accumulate 30,000 acres of Texas land on a mail carrier’s salary. The capital that seeded Erastus Moss’s Texas empire came from Louisiana. It came from the free land in Bayou d’Inde. It came from the labor of 57 enslaved people who never saw a dollar of it.

Erastus Moss ➡️ Archie Middleton

This is where the Moss fortune becomes the Middleton fortune, and it happens the way so much of American history happens.

Erastus Moss had a daughter. Her name was Mary Ellen Moss, and everyone called her Molly. Molly married a man named David Middleton, and in February 1877, the smallpox epidemic swept through Chambers County. The historical record is precise about what happened at the Moss and Middleton households that month. A contemporary journal entry from Double Bayou reads: “Mollie Middleton died.” A physician’s letter from the same week documents two to four cases at the Erastus Moss home. David Middleton died, too. Both of them, gone within days of each other, leaving behind a fifteen-month-old boy named Archie.

Everyone expected him to die, but he didn’t.

Erastus Moss took the baby in and raised him on the ranch. The 1880 federal census for Chambers County, Texas, lists Archie Middleton, age four, living in Erastus Moss’s household.

When Archie grew up, he inherited. The Encyclopedia of Texas describes Archie D. Middleton as “widely known throughout this section as a man whose practical knowledge of stockraising has played an important part in the development of the ranching industry in his locality”. It states plainly that when he reached maturity, he took over management of the ranch he had inherited. The same ranch. The same land. The same fortune, now wearing a different last name.

In 1904, Archie married Effie Clarice Mayes, daughter of a substantial Wallisville rancher. In 1906, he built a mansion on a hill in Wallisville, a beautiful southern-style home that still stands. He also had oil. The Gulf Coast was producing it by then, and men who already owned large tracts of coastal land were positioned to profit from what was underneath it. Archie Middleton was one of those men.

Archie Middleton ➡️ Randall Middleton

Archie and Effie’s son, Randall Mayes Middleton, was born June 30, 1906, in Chambers County, Texas. He inherited the ranch. He inherited the oil interests. He inherited the political connections that had been accumulating alongside the land and the money for two generations. He was prominent enough in Texas that when he died in 1961, the Texas House of Representatives adopted a memorial resolution in his honor, introduced by Rep. Billy Walker. The Texas House does not adopt memorial resolutions for ordinary people. It adopts them for people who mattered, and in Texas, in 1961, the people who mattered were the people who owned things.

Randall Middleton ➡️ John Gregg Middleton

Randall’s son, John Gregg Middleton, inherited the family holdings and, in 1972, founded Middleton Oil Company, an independent oil and gas operation that would grow to more than 65 operational wells across South Texas and the Gulf Coast. John was a civic pillar of Chambers County, including the city council, the board of the local bank, and the board of the country club. Governor Bill Clements, the first Republican elected to statewide office in Texas since Reconstruction, appointed him to the Trinity River Authority. He was, by every measure, exactly what generations of accumulated wealth produce. A man of standing, of influence, of connections, in a state that rewards all three.

John Gregg Middleton died in 2013.

He had one child.

John Middleton ➡️ David “Mayes” Middleton

Mayes Middleton inherited everything. The oil company. The ranch. The mineral holdings across Chambers, Jefferson, Kimble, Liberty, and Webb Counties. The cattle operations. The land. All of it, every acre, every well, every dollar, that traces in an unbroken line back through John to Randall to Archie to Erastus to Henry K. Moss, who built the original fortune on Bayou d’Inde using 57 people he owned on that Spanish land grant.

That is the chain. Six generations. Two centuries. One unbroken transfer of wealth, from a slave plantation in Louisiana to the Republican nominee for Attorney General of Texas.

Mayes Middleton was born into it. And he is using it to buy his way into the most powerful law enforcement office in the state.

So what does a man do when he inherits a fortune built on enslaved labor, grows it on oil money, and decides he wants more?

In Texas, apparently, he buys a political movement.

First, he bought the infrastructure.

Before Mayes Middleton ever ran for office, he spent years making sure the Texas Republican Party was sufficiently radicalized to produce someone like him. Between 2008 and 2015, he and two other oil executives (Tim Dunn and Farris Wikles) donated millions to Empower Texans PAC. This dark money operation painted itself as a conservative advocacy group but functioned as a wrecking ball aimed at any Texas Republican who wasn’t extreme enough. Middleton wrote the checks and sat on the board of the Empower Texans Foundation.

Empower Texans, led by its pompous director Michael Quinn Sullivan, spent years primarying moderate Republicans, flooding Texas House races with dark money, and pulling the entire party rightward. It worked. The Texas House Freedom Caucus launched in 2017, and three-quarters of its founding members had received donations from Middleton. He would eventually financially support all but one of them. Middleton singlehandedly built and funded the Freedom Caucus.

He also served on the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (the Texas counterpart to the Heritage Foundation). He served on the executive committee of the Texas Business Leadership Council. These are the institutions that write the policy agenda that Texas Republicans then pass into law.

Then, he bought his first race.

In 2017, when Chambers County was trying to pass a bond measure to build a new jail, the existing one was overcrowded, run-down, and lacked adequate bathrooms. Mayes Middleton showed up at commissioner hearings to fight it. Not because he cared about jail conditions. Because the bond would have raised property taxes, and Mayes Middleton does not like paying taxes. He offered to donate 27 acres of his own land to the county as an alternative site. The gesture sounds generous until you realize he would have written it off, and that the entire point was to protect his tax bill.

He told the Baytown Sun in May 2017, “The taxpayers come first, the government comes second.” By taxpayers, he meant himself. By government, he meant the human beings sitting in an overcrowded, crumbling jail.

That same summer, he announced he was running for Texas House District 23, primarying the sitting Republican incumbent, Wayne Faircloth. His campaign platform was “defending life, liberty, and private property against big government,” which, translated, means protecting the interests of people who already have property from the people who don’t. He won.

In his first term in the Texas House, Middleton co-sponsored the “Preborn Nondiscrimination Act,” which banned abortion in cases of fetal abnormality. If you find out during your pregnancy that your fetus has a condition incompatible with life, Texas, thanks in part to Mayes Middleton, says you must continue that pregnancy anyway. He co-sponsored SB1978, which protected individuals and organizations that discriminate against LGBTQ people under the cover of religious liberty. He voted to fund Choose Life grant programs, taxpayer money directed to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers that target low-income women with fear and shame, while opposing Medicaid expansion, food assistance, and every other program that would actually support the babies he was so determined to see born.

He voted against decriminalizing marijuana possession. In Chambers County, the county he claims as home, the county he bragged about being a seventh-generation resident of, Black residents are 9.3 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white residents. It’s the highest racial statewide arrest disparity for cannabis. Mayes Middleton knew this. And he voted to keep the law that produces that disparity exactly as it was.

In December 2020, while Texas was recording 20,000 new COVID cases per day and 250 Texans were dying every single day, Middleton was on a Texas Freedom Caucus video calling for the state to reopen. This was the same political moment when Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick went on Fox News to suggest that elderly people should be willing to sacrifice their lives for the economy. Middleton was right there with it.

When he moved to the Texas Senate, he didn’t moderate. He accelerated. He authored the bathroom bill, legislation targeting transgender people’s access to restrooms. When trans activists showed up at the Capitol to protest, he turned the protest into a campaign ad, declaring himself the candidate “kicking perverted men out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms.” He has described himself throughout this AG campaign as “MAGA Mayes.”

Mayes Middleton has never worried about whether he could pay his electric bill, afford a doctor, or put food on the table. He has never lived in a neighborhood that a chemical company decided was acceptable collateral damage. He has never been one of the 11% of residents in his own district who live in poverty, or one of the 16% who have no health insurance. He has never been a Black man in Chambers County, watching the marijuana arrest statistics and understanding exactly what they mean.

The insulation that allows him to vote the way he votes, to look at 250 Texans dying per day and think reopen the economy, to look at a crumbling jail and think my tax bill, to look at a pregnant woman with a fetal abnormality and think not my problem to solve, that insulation was purchased. It was purchased with money from slavery and colonization, maintained with oil money, and protected with dark money.

And now, having spent years building the machinery that produces this kind of politics, he wants to run the office with the most power to enforce it.

The caucacity.

Mayes Middleton won the Republican primary runoff for Texas Attorney General. He did it by spending more than $16 million of his own money and positioning himself as the rightful heir to Ken Paxton’s tenure.

Middleton has no meaningful prosecutorial experience. It didn’t matter because Mayes Middleton wasn’t running on qualifications. He was running on money and proximity to Trump, and in the 2026 Texas Republican primary, that was enough.

He is now the Republican nominee. He will face Democratic State Senator Nathan Johnson in November.

On one side, a man whose family wealth originates in a Louisiana slave plantation, who inherited an oil fortune built on land seized from Indigenous people and labor stolen from Black people, who used that fortune to radicalize the Texas Republican Party, buy himself a legislative seat, vote against the interests of his own constituents at every turn, and spend $16 million to purchase the Republican nomination for the most powerful law enforcement position in Texas.

On the other side, Nathan Johnson, a State Senator from Dallas who has spent his career focused on criminal justice reform, healthcare access, and the kind of unglamorous legislative work that doesn’t get you a $16 million war chest but does get you a record worth defending.

Henry K. Moss arrived in Louisiana with nothing but whiteness and the colonial dream of converting whiteness into land.

He enslaved 57 people. He built a fortune. He died wealthy. His son Erastus crossed into Texas with that fortune and turned it into 30,000 acres of coastal prairie in Chambers County. Erastus’s grandson Archie inherited it after surviving a smallpox epidemic that killed both his parents before he was old enough to walk. Archie’s son, Randall, was prominent enough to be memorialized by the Texas House of Representatives. Randall’s son John founded an oil company. John’s son, Mayes, inherited all of it. Every acre, every well, every dollar. And used it to buy himself a seat in the Texas legislature, fund the radicalization of the Texas Republican Party, and just this week, purchase the Republican nomination for Attorney General of Texas.

That is the chain. Unbroken. Two hundred years. Slavery to oil to political power.

And the people who built the original fortune? The 57 enslaved people who worked Henry Moss’s tannery, cattle operation, and farmland on Bayou d’Inde? Their descendants built Mossville. They survived 150 years of American racism. And then the oil and petrochemical industry, the same industry that made the Moss-Middleton fortune grow for another century, moved in, surrounded them, and poisoned their air and water. When a South African corporation needed their land, the state of Louisiana gave that corporation $115 million in public money to buy them out.

The Middleton family got the generational wealth. The people they enslaved got Cancer Alley.

This is not a story about ancient history. The consequences of what Henry K. Moss built are still being lived, by the descendants of Mossville who were displaced, by the residents of Chambers County who are uninsured and in poverty, by every Black Texan who has been arrested for marijuana in a county where they are 9.3 times more likely to be stopped than their white neighbors, by every low-income woman who has been steered into a crisis pregnancy center with taxpayer money. At the same time, Medicaid expansion remained blocked, by every worker who was told to go back to their job in December 2020 while 250 Texans a day were dying of COVID.

Mayes Middleton didn’t cause all of that alone. But he has voted for and funded all of it, and built the political infrastructure that produces it. And he did it from behind the insulation that two centuries of wealth built on stolen labor and stolen land, and never once felt the consequences of it personally.

That is white supremacy. Not the hood-wearing kind that people use to tell themselves this isn’t about them. The kind that lives in land grants and inheritance law and tax abatements and dark money PACs and legislative votes and the quiet, compounding interest of never having to start from nothing because someone else was forced to build everything you started with.

That is what is on the ballot in November.

His opponent is Nathan Johnson, Democratic State Senator from Dallas. Johnson has spent his career on criminal justice reform and healthcare access, the exact things Middleton has spent his career dismantling. The election is in November 2026. The winner becomes the Attorney General of Texas. The person who decides which laws get enforced, which communities get protected, and which corporations get to keep doing what they’re doing without consequence.

We know what Mayes Middleton will do with that office. He has told us. His family history has told us. His voting record has told us. His $16 million campaign ad buy has told us.

Be angry. You should be angry. A fortune built on slavery is about to be used to purchase the legal apparatus of the largest red state in America, and the people who will pay the price for that are the same people who have always paid the price. The poor, the uninsured, the Black, the brown, the working, the ones who never had a grandfather’s oil company to inherit.

But anger without action is just grief with nowhere to go.

So here is what you do with it.

You donate to Nathan Johnson’s campaign. You volunteer. You register people to vote. You share this piece with everyone you know in Texas, and some people you know outside of it, because the Texas AG race has national consequences.

You tell people who Mayes Middleton is. Not the version on the campaign mailer. The real version. The one that starts on a slave plantation on Bayou d’Inde and ends with a man who has never struggled a day in his life asking for the power to decide how the law applies to people who struggle every day.

The chain that built Mayes Middleton’s fortune is two hundred years old, and it has never been broken.

November is our chance to break what comes next.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

There has never been a November like this one for Harris County.

One in five Texas Democrats lives here. The county judge seat is open for the first time in years. Multiple Texas House seats are within reach. And the governor of Texas, who is sitting on a nine-figure war chest, has personally declared Harris County his top target.

Greg Abbott launched his reelection campaign in Houston. He knows where Texas is decided, and so do we.

The numbers that make Harris County ground zero.

Let’s talk about what Harris County actually means to Texas Democrats, because the numbers are staggering.

18.82% of all Texas Democrats live in Harris County. That means when Harris County turns out, the entire statewide map shifts. When Harris County stays home, the entire statewide map suffers. It’s that simple, and it’s that consequential.

Look at the midterm baseline. In 2018, the last great Democratic midterm in Texas, Harris County delivered at a level that nearly carried Beto O’Rourke across the finish line statewide. And in 2022, even in a rougher cycle for Texas Democrats, Harris County remained the single most reliable source of Democratic votes in the state. Republican turnout in Harris County has weakened over the last decade. Democratic turnout has held.

Here’s what that means for November. If Harris County Democrats turn out at or above 2018 levels, and there is every reason to believe they will, in this political environment, with these candidates on the ballot, we’re looking at somewhere between 750,000 and 850,000 Democratic votes coming out of one county alone. That number doesn’t just help Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico. It forces Abbott to spend money defending ground he thought was safe. It stretches Republican resources across a map they weren’t planning to defend. It changes the math everywhere.

Harris County is the floor on which everything else is built in the effort to flip Texas blue.

Abbott’s $106 million bonfire.

Greg Abbott has $106 million in his campaign account. He announced, out loud, that he plans to spend most of it in Harris County. He wants field directors in all 24 Texas House districts in the county. He wants to knock on the doors of Republicans who don’t vote, turn out voters who supported Trump in 2024, and make Harris County “dark red.”

In 2026. In this political environment. 😂

Greg Abbott has chosen to make his big, expensive stand in a majority-minority county that is nearly 70% non-white, in a year when Hispanic voters are swinging back hard to the left, in a cycle where both he and Donald Trump are underwater in the polls. Democrats are expected to overperform statewide by double digits. He is going to spend eight figures trying to reverse a decade-long demographic tide in a single election cycle.

Good for him.

Not because it isn’t a threat worth taking seriously at the organizing level, but because every dollar Abbott spends in Harris County is a dollar he isn’t spending in the Rio Grande Valley, in the suburbs of Dallas, or propping up vulnerable Republican incumbents in the Texas House. His obsession with this county is, in a very real sense, a gift to Democrats everywhere else on the map, the other 81%.

There’s a reason Republicans lost all three seats in CyFair ISD in 2025. There’s a reason Abbott had to launch his campaign in Houston, instead of somewhere safe. Harris County is a panic move.

Truth be told, Republicans, especially Abbott, panic before every election. They’ve been worried about losing Texas for the last decade. And if you’re familiar with all of the voter suppression bills that have become law in Texas, you get it. They have many reasons to be scared. Democrats have outnumbered them in Texas for many years.

Abbott’s $106 million is real. But the math has not been kind to Greg Abbott in Harris County for a very long time. He might not be able to buy his way out of the hole here.

Dr. Letitia Plummer will be the next Harris County Judge.

Lina Hidalgo is not seeking reelection. For Democrats, that means defending one of the most important offices in Texas, the county judge of the third-largest county in America.

The county judge runs the Commissioners Court, controls the county budget, and serves as the head of emergency management for a region that has lived through Harvey, Imelda, and Beryl. Getting this right matters. Getting this wrong has consequences that show up in people’s lives in very concrete ways.

Democrats got it right.

Letitia Plummer won the Democratic nomination. She came from behind in a runoff against former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, a well-funded frontrunner who led by double digits in the polls just weeks before election day. Plummer closed the gap and won with 51% of the vote. That’s a candidate who built real support from real people, ground up.

Y’all know that I was the biggest Lina Hidalgo fan-girl for the longest time. Knowing that Plummer will be her replacement is the kind of thing that makes you exhale. Maybe after Texas turns blue, Plummer can pick up on some of Judge Hidalgo’s unfinished progressive promises, which Republicans foiled.

Plummer is a practicing dentist, a two-term Houston City Council member, and someone who has spent her career focused on the things Harris County residents actually worry about. She describes herself as the progressive voice this county needs. Given what’s on the line in November, she’s exactly who should be on the ballot.

She’ll face Republican Orlando Sanchez, who won his primary runoff decisively. Sanchez is not a pushover, and Abbott’s money will be behind him. But Plummer is running in a blue county, in a blue year, with a grassroots coalition that just proved it can win a race it wasn’t supposed to win.

Harris County has been in good hands under Lina Hidalgo. It’s about to be in good hands again.

The Texas House seats we can flip.

Abbott said out loud that he wants to oust all seven Democratic state reps currently holding office in Harris County. That’s a cute goal. But they’re all in super-safe blue districts, thanks to the GOP’s gerrymandering, and there’s no amount of money he can throw to change that. He’d literally have to depress the vote substantially to win any of those districts.

What if we flip seats in the other direction?

There are four Harris County, Texas House races worth watching this November closely, ranging from near-certain flips to genuine wave-seat opportunities. Here’s where things stand.

HD138: Tyler Smith vs. Lacey Hull

This is the one. HD138 is majority-minority, with Hispanic residents making up over 41% of the population, Asian residents at roughly 12%, and Black residents at about 10%. It’s been held by Republicans only because of poor Democratic performance in 2022 and 2024, including the temporary rightward shift in the Hispanic vote. That shift is reversing. In 2024, Lacey Hull won 57-43, and Trump carried the district 53-45, but Colin Allred still pulled 47% here in the Senate race, and the district consistently outperforms statewide Democratic averages.

This district is demographically ready to flip. Tyler Smith, a former Biden Presidential Fellow, Obama Foundation Leaders Program graduate, and deputy regional director for Everytown for Gun Safety, is exactly the kind of candidate who can close that gap. Learn more about Tyler Smith here.

HD133: Josh Wallenstein vs. Mano DeAyala

HD133 was the seat with no Democratic candidate in 2024. That’s been fixed. The district is nearly 50% white, with 19% Hispanic, 16% Black, and 14% Asian, a diverse, educated, inner-loop Houston district that Republicans have held largely by default. Josh Wallenstein is a Stanford Law-trained compliance attorney who’s made lowering costs and strengthening schools the center of his campaign. In a strong Democratic year, in a district that’s never really been tested with a serious candidate, this one is worth watching closely. Learn more about Josh Wallenstein here.

HD127: Michelle Williams vs. Charles Cunningham

Michelle Williams is a veteran educator with nearly 30 years of experience and the president of the Houston Education Association, and she’s running directly against the man who helped write the state education policies she’s spent her career fighting. HD127 covers Humble, Kingwood, and Atascocita, and Williams is only the second Democrat to run there in 12 years. But she sees the district’s shifting demographics, with a growing Black and Latino population, as an opening. In a year where public education, vouchers, and HISD’s state takeover are all live issues, Williams is a candidate with a story tailor-made for this moment. HD127 is the strongest “next one up” in Harris beyond the top targets, with over 52% non-Anglo residents, 27.7% Hispanic, and 19.3% Black, making it less likely to be a classic white-flight suburban fortress. Learn more about Michelle Williams here.

HD132: Sara McGee vs. Mike Schofield

Sara McGee grew up in Katy, raised two kids as a single mom, and spent four decades in this district before deciding to run the day her Republican representative called her a liar about the real harms of Texas’ abortion bans. She’s run a small-dollar, ground-game campaign against Mike Schofield, a career insider who helped write the voter ID playbook and has voted against public school funding at every opportunity.

HD132 is diverse. 59% people of color, with significant Hispanic, Black, and Asian populations, and the kitchen-table issues here, housing costs, property taxes, and underfunded schools, are exactly what McGee runs on. This is a wave-seat, not a likely-seat. But a wave will happen this year. Learn more about Sara McGee here.

There are other House seats in Harris County with Democrats running, which shouldn’t be counted out. I won’t call those seats impossible, but I will call them longer shots. Those include HD126, HD128, HD129, HD130, and HD150.

However, we need to flip 14 seats to flip the Texas House. I would be looking at those four, particularly as part of those 14. Four races. Four candidates. Abbott wants to play offense in Harris County. So do we.

What it’s actually going to take.

A favorable political environment, which we will have this year, is not a victory alone. It’s an opportunity. And opportunities in Texas have long been squandered by underinvestment, poor coordination, and the assumption that a good year will do the organizing for you.

Here’s what actually moves the number in Harris County.

Turnout. Everything else is noise. Harris County has 2.6 million registered voters. The difference between a good Democratic night and a great one is activation. The people who need to vote in November already largely agree with us. They just need a reason to show up, a door knocked, a ride to the polls, or a neighbor who asked. That’s the literal mechanism by which Harris County goes from 600,000 Democratic votes to 850,000.

The precinct chair infrastructure is the backbone. Harris County has roughly 1,100 election precincts. As of earlier this year, Democrats had just over 550 precinct chairs filled. That means nearly half the county’s precincts have no one whose job it is to talk to their neighbors before November. The new Harris County Democratic Party Chair, Traci Gibson, ran on increasing the number of precinct chairs and has been working hard to make that happen.

Abbott’s campaign has already announced it will have field directors in all 24 Texas House districts in the county. They are going to knock on doors in precincts where Democrats have no one home. That cannot stand. If you live in Harris County and your precinct doesn’t have a chair, that job is yours.

• Find out if your Harris County precinct needs a chair and fill out an application here.

The Hispanic vote is the variable that changes everything across the county. The 2024 rightward shift among Hispanic voters was real and temporary. Trump’s second term has done the persuasion work that no campaign ad could. Polling shows Hispanic voters swinging back hard to the left. In a majority-minority county where Latino residents make up the largest demographic group, that swing doesn’t just help the top of the ticket. It ripples down through every competitive House race on the ballot.

The top of the ticket matters more than people think. Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico are driving turnout in Harris County. Every door knocked for Hinojosa is a door knocked for Tyler Smith in HD138. Every phone bank shift for Talarico helps Josh Wallenstein in HD133. The races are connected. The infrastructure is shared. A rising tide in Harris County lifts every boat on the ballot.

The 2018 model showed us what’s possible when all of it comes together, the candidates, the infrastructure, the environment, and the turnout. We came within a handful of points of making history. The environment in 2026 is better. The candidates are strong. The infrastructure is more developed than it’s ever been.

The only question left is whether we show up.

Greg Abbott is about to spend eight figures trying to hold back a tide that has been rising for a decade.

He knows what the numbers say. That’s why he’s scared. That’s why he launched his campaign in Harris County.

But money doesn’t knock on doors. Money doesn’t sit in a church pew in Sunnyside and ask a neighbor if they’ve made their voting plan. Money doesn’t show up in a union hall in Deer Park and make the case for why this cycle is different. People do that.

Harris County has 2.7 million registered voters. Nearly one in five Texas Democrats lives here. The candidates are strong. The environment is the best it’s been since 2018. The infrastructure is being built right now, precinct by precinct.

What it needs is you.

If you live in Harris County, find out if your precinct has a chair. If it doesn’t, that’s your job now. If it does, volunteer for one of the many Democratic candidates on the ballot. Knock on ten doors. Make ten calls. Talk to your neighbors.

Texas flips because neighbors talk to neighbors until the people writing the laws finally look like the people living under them.

Abbott picked the wrong county. Make sure he knows it.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Before we get into it, the three races they called late last night (or early this morning, whether you went to bed at a reasonable hour or not).

Bo French won the Republican Railroad Commissioner runoff, further proving that Republicans are irredeemable. Of course, the Railroad Commission is responsible for regulating the fossil fuels in Texas, so the most logical move by the GOP is to elect the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan for that role. They’re trying to lose, and they may have their way.

Thurman Bartie won the (D) runoff for TX14. It’s on the SoS website, but the AP hasn’t called it yet. After our guy didn’t make it through the primary, I didn’t follow this race much. However, I’m really hopeful about some of the activity and numbers I’m seeing from Jefferson County. This has long been a Democratic stronghold, slipping into reddish territory in recent years due to low voter turnout. Jefferson County is the key to flipping multiple seats. We’ll do a deep dive soon.

Tiffany Perkinz won the (D) runoff for SBOE09 by about 500 votes. She’s going to have to work hard the rest of the year to win that split over, because in November she’ll be up against MAGA-extremist, January 6th Insurrectionist, Julie Pickren. And we need to get her out of our State Board of Education.

Click here if you missed the rest of the races we discussed yesterday.

Texas Democrats continue their leftward sway as we move toward the Convention and into the general election.

Depending on how long you’ve been subscribed to Lone Star Left, you may have seen me write about this topic more than once:

• The Most Progressive Democratic Party in America Is in Texas

• How Texas Democrats Are Leading The Resistance (While Some Are Selling Out)

• Texas Democrats Vs. National Democrats: Who’s More Progressive?

• Shifting The Paradigm: Texas Democrats Move Left

Texas Democrats, as a whole, our party, our voters, our candidates, have increasingly gotten more progressive over the last few years. I would most attribute it to the launch and the work of the Texas Progressive Caucus, to all the work that Clayton Tucker did, and now to the new President, Angel Viator Smith, for making this the biggest and fastest-growing caucus in Texas.

The Texas Progressive Caucus is the only caucus I belong to, just because I believe in so much of what they do.

I’ve demonstrated to you that Texas is actually full of radicals by talking about our Platform, and some of the voting choices or bills introduced, about how we now have two Justice Democrats. And recently, I had the chance to ask Kendall Scudder to validate my view that Texas Democrats lean left relative to our non-Texas cohorts.

He responded, “Texas has this history of populism/progressivism. It’s run through our blood.”

And he’s right.

, our candidate for Agriculture Commissioner, by the way, wrote about this a few years ago.

Clayton’s Substack

Progressive resurgence from the birthplace of the progressive movement

Did you know that here in Lampasas, just a few miles from my family farm, is where the Populist movement got its start? I’m proud to be part of that long history of farmers and ranchers who’ve led the fight against monopoly control of our food system and supported local cooperatives to provide independence from greedy financiers and suppliers. It was fi…

Read more

2 years ago · 119 likes · 34 comments · Clayton Tucker

In this article ⬆️, Tucker talks about the Farmers Alliance, the founding organization of the Populist movement, which held its first meeting just outside Lampasas, near his family farm. That movement spread to 43 states before being crushed by bankers and monopolists, but its ideas survived and evolved into the Progressive Era and eventually the New Deal.

He closes it with how the fight isn’t over. And he’s right.

FYI, I’ve endorsed Clayton Tucker because childhood hunger in Texas is an important issue to me, and the Agriculture Commissioner can make a big dent in it. And Clayton Tucker has plans to do just that.

Why do I believe that Texans, of all walks, have taken on progressive populism?

Because we’ve had to.

There’s something about living in a state this big, this hot, and this hard that strips away pretense. When your power goes out in a February freeze, and your neighbor’s pipes burst too, you don’t ask who they voted for before you help them. When the insurance company abandons you after a hurricane, you figure out real quick that the rugged individualism they sold you was always a lie. Community is survival in Texas. It always has been.

Texas progressivism was born in the dirt. It came from farmers who watched railroad monopolies bleed them dry and decided to organize instead of suffer alone. It came from workers in the refineries and the fields who knew that the only thing standing between them and exploitation was each other. That tradition runs deeper than the last thirty years of Republican rule would have you believe.

It came from the women in San Antonio’s pecan factories, who in 1938 walked off the job by the thousands. The Pecan Shellers’ Strike brought roughly 12,000 workers (mostly Mexican and Mexican-American women earning pennies a day) into the streets in what became one of the largest labor actions in Texas history. The city’s response was tear gas, mass arrests, and intimidation. They threw hundreds of strikers in jail. The bosses didn’t even bother pretending it wasn’t about race and class.

Leading them was Emma Tenayuca, a San Antonio native who was barely in her mid-twenties at the time. She’d been organizing since she was a teenager, and she understood that your labor is your leverage. The strikers won a modest wage increase before the factory owners mechanized the entire operation to make sure it could never happen again. Same as it ever was.

And it came from the farmworkers of the Rio Grande Valley, who in the summer of 1966 decided that if Austin wouldn’t come to them, they would go to Austin. Melon workers, earning less than 50 cents an hour with no minimum-wage protections, began a 490-mile march from the Valley to the Capitol, walking through the brutal South Texas heat in the middle of summer.

They carried the Virgin of Guadalupe alongside the United Farm Workers flag. They called it La Marcha. By the time they reached the Capitol steps on Labor Day, they had captured the attention of the entire state. Governor John Connally, rather than meet them, drove out to New Braunfels to intercept the march and tell them to go home. They kept walking.

By the time they reached the Capitol steps on Labor Day, over 15,000 people had joined them. The march didn’t win them the minimum wage that year, but as Rebecca Flores, former director of Texas United Farm Workers, later said, “It was the spark that initiated the Chicano movement here in the state of Texas.”

I want to tell you that Republicans are all we have to worry about.

For years, Texas Democrats had the luxury of the establishment staying out of our state. Now that it looks like Texas is about to flip, that is no longer the case. Some of these establishment groups are connected to DNC adjacent groups that focus on messaging.

How will we see that play out at the Convention?

How will we see that play out in November?

I couldn’t tell you. I will be making endorsements at the Convention in June, but unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it this year. I’m hoping they livestream the committees and, at the very least, the main meetings.

I’ve always said that the Platform is a good temperature gauge not only of where we are ideologically but also of what our priorities are. So, I’m really hoping to see this year’s Platform continue its progressive trend, especially in healthcare and childcare.

But November? We’re going to be okay.

We’re FINALLY through the primaries, and progressives had a lot of wins.

Y’all, did you hear? Dr. Letitia Plummer, Lone Star Left’s endorsement, won the Democratic Judge runoff for Harris County. Which means she’ll replace Judge Lina Hidalgo when she retires. This is a big win. Congratulations to both Dr. Plumer and Harris County.

As far as the Senate race goes, I know there are still a lot of hurt feelings, but until we get money out of politics, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and restore Voting Rights to all, we have to play the hand we’re dealt.

Gina Hinojosa can win, or she can come close. She’s a progressive, we can trust her and rely on her. Her biggest climb will be money. In Taylor Rehmet’s race, the Republicans outspent him six-to-one. Currently, Abbott has about 100-to-1 cash on hand.

Talarico, Hinojosa, Lt. Governor candidate Vikki Goodwin, Comptroller candidate Sarah Eckhardt, Agriculture Commissioner candidate Clayton Tucker, and Railroad Commissioner candidate Jon Rosenthal are all solidly progressive.

So, to understand that our statewide slate is almost completely a progressive slate. That’s kind of a big deal.

But what about down-ballot?

We got big scores here, too! I am not going to go through everyone, but some shoutouts are well deserved.

In Congress:

• Christian Menefee won. Al Green is an icon, and we will always love and cherish him. We are super excited to see what great things Menefee brings us to the next Congress.

• Rev. Dr. Pastor Freddie Haynes is going to be my Congressperson, and I am over the moon about that. Texas’ second Justice Democrat, after Geg Casar.

We’ll talk about the numbers for Congress again soon, now that we have candidates on both sides. Republicans did a massive dummymander. We’re going to hit them where it hurts.

In the Texas House:

We’re going to flip it this year. I don’t know about the Texas Senate. We’ll talk about it more later. But, like with our statewide slate, progressives also saw a lot of big wins.

Talarico, Hinojosa, Goodwin, and Rosenthal all came from the Texas House. And they’re each being replaced by a progressive counterpart, Samantha Lopez Resendez, Montserrat Garibay, Pooja Sethi, and Odus Evbagharu.

These are all safe-blue seats. And there isn’t one person on this list ⬆️ who I’m not ga-ga over. So, the Texas House isn’t losing progressives. It’s actually replacing a few and gaining a whole lot more.

Bobby Guerrera (D-HD41), Ray Lopez (D-125), and Alma Allen (D-131) all retired this year, and every single one of their endorsements lost. And we’ll now usher in three new progressive House members in these safe blue seats. Julio Salinas, Adrian Reyna, and Staci Childs.

But what’s most important is that we flip 14 House seats this year. We can do that. This year. Later, we’ll go over which seats and which organizations are targeting (and why they’re targeting those in particular). We’re going to flip more than 14. And we have solid progressives across the state who will wind up in the Texas House next year. Stay tuned, and we’ll talk about it more over the summer.

Flipping the Texas House is key to ending Republican destruction in Texas.

I do this because I grew up in Texas.

Because I watched what happened when the power went out, and the pipes froze, and the governor blamed windmills. Because I’ve seen what thirty years of one-party rule does to a state with this much potential and this many people who deserve better. Because I believe, down to my bones, that Texas is not a red state. It’s a non-voting state. And when people vote, things change.

But if I’m being honest with you, it’s bigger than that.

I do this because of Emma Tenayuca. Because of the farmworkers who walked 490 miles in the South Texas summer. Because of the pecan shellers in San Antonio and every Texan who ever looked at a system designed to grind them down and decided to organize instead of surrender.

I focus on progressive politics because I believe that a government that works for working people is not a radical idea. It’s the oldest Texas idea there is.

That means when we talk about who Texas is, we’re talking about all of it, the refineries and the pecan factories, the farms and the food deserts, the communities that have been told for generations that their vote doesn’t matter.

It does.

Texas is not going to flip because of a single candidate or a single election cycle. It’s going to flip because of a movement, one built on the same foundation that’s always powered this state’s best moments and the stubborn belief that ordinary people, organized and determined, can outlast any monopoly, any machine, any amount of money.

We’ve done it before. We’re going to do it again.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Note: There are a few races we’re still waiting on the results for, but it’s already late. We’ll catch up on those three tomorrow.

At some point, the charitable explanation runs out. Texas Republicans were told, repeatedly, who Ken Paxton is, by his own party’s House members who impeached him, by the women he betrayed, by the donors he allegedly shook down. They voted for him anyway.

This is a party that looked at a man credibly accused of fraud, corruption, and abuse of power, saw the enemies he’s made among the people they hate, and said, “Good enough.” The “values voter” was always a fiction. What was real was always the grievance, against Black voters, against trans kids, against immigrants, against women who won’t comply. Paxton delivers on all of it, and that’s the whole platform.

And Paxton won the Republican Senate runoff.

He’s not even from Texas. He’s from North Dakota. And I bet you most of the people who voted for him are from California and call themselves “Commie-fornia Refugees.”

It’ll be a fun five months until the election.

Mayes Middleton won the Republican Attorney General runoff. Tonight, when he drinks his nightly elixir of fetal endicrines, before going to sleep upside-down in a cave somewhere, he’ll surely tell himself, “Money well spent.”

Bo French? Still counting.

There were a bunch of Republican down-ballot races, too. If you’re interested in those races, you can see more election results here.

The Democratic runoffs.

Nathan Johnson wins the Democratic Attorney General runoff race. Senator Johnson has been a good debater in the Texas Senate, which is why I know he’s probably a great attorney and will make a good Attorney General. His biggest challenge in the future will be going up against Middleton’s mountains of cash. Middleton is a soulless oil billionaire, willing to spend his fortune to gain power. It could wind up being an expensive race.

Vikki Goodwin wins the Democratic Lt. Governor runoff race. Goodwin is more suited for this role than just about anyone. She has the knowledge and deep understanding of this seat that few people really grasp. But elections are rarely won on knowledge. If they were, no Republican would ever win. Goodwin’s biggest challenge will be winning the hearts and minds of the Democrats, whose first choice was someone else.

Yolanda Prince won TX01 by wide margins. We talked about this recently because of the difference I saw between organizers in that district and online. Always listen to organizers on the ground. This will be a hard district to flip in November, but we’ll absolutely talk about it again.

Chelsey Hockett won TX05. This district is absolutely flippable, but there will be some challenges. Hockett has been an extremely hard-working candidate and has built meaningful coalitions across this district. She can pull it off, but it’s going to take a lot of work.

TX14? Still counting.

Casey Shepard won TX17. Milah Flores actually dropped out of the race a few months ago. I don’t remember if I mentioned it, but I meant to. I haven’t met Shepard yet, but I’ve heard good things. This is Pete Sessions’ district. Right off the top of my head, I don’t think this is a targeted district, but it’s definitely on the table this year.

Christian Menefee won TX18. And immidiately put out the classiest press release ever.

Congressman Al Green is an icon. This is a safe blue seat. Menefee will return to the 120th Congress.

Kevin Burge won TX24. Get ready to say goodbye to Beth Van Duyne, also known as “Xenophobic Barbie.” This is an easily flippable seat if Burge puts in the work from now until November. The people of TX24 have had it with Van Duyne’s philandering, racist ways. And since Texas is expecting a wave election come November, her goose is as good as cooked. We’ll all be glad when she loses.

Colin Allred won TX33. Good for him. Y’all know I haven’t been his biggest fan, but I have been impressed by how he’s come around and moved left on several key issues in recent months. I also haven’t liked how dirty the Julie Johnson campaign seemed willing to play this last week. That doesn’t mean the battle is over for Dallas, but it’s probably a move in the right direction, especially if Allred is willing to change his positions on the issues the base cares about most.

Johnny Garcia won TX35. Despite being a cop and an establishment guy, he’s landed the endorsement of like every Democrat in the country by now. This was a weird election. But we can flip it. And a centrist is much better than a fascist. I know, not by much, but at least he won’t spend his days on Fox News crying about “the others.” The Republican winner of the TX35 runoff, Carlos De La Cruz, is Monica De La Cruz’s brother. Need I say more? Like, what are the chances that Congresswoman De La Cruz is corrupt and against the people, and that her brother isn’t the same?

Allison Bush won SBOE05. This was the one election I wasn’t paying attention to. Sorry.

SBOE09? Still counting.

Oziel “Ozzie” Ochoa JR won HD37. Lone Star Left endorsed Ochoa, and we’re expecting him to beat Janie Lopez (R) in this easily flippable district in November, being one of the 14 crucial flips we need to flip the Texas House, and another progressive voice in Austin.

Julio Salinas, another one of Lone Star Left’s endorsements, won in HD41. This is a huge milestone for the progressive movement in Texas, which has been working to gain a foothold in the Rio Grande Valley for several years. This is a blue seat, which is expected to stay blue.

Montserrat Garibay won HD49. Garibay will be filling Gina Hinojosa’s old seat come January, and carrying on the legacy of progressivism in this safe blue district.

Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin won HD97. This is another seat that can be flipped if Llewellyn McLaughlin can put in the work from now until November.

Venton Jones won HD100. This really wasn’t a surprise, given the political landscape and the demographics of this district. Jones swept this election by 86%.

Adrian Reyna won HD125. Y’all, I’m over the moon. This is another big win for progressives in Texas and another one of Lone Star Left’s endorsements. Sometime in the coming days, we’ll have to revisit all of the races and see how many progressive voices are headed to Austin next year. It’s going to be glorious.

Staci Childs won HD131. This is a safe blue seat, and Childs, who is coming to the House from the SBOE, will be headed to the 90th Legislative Session. This is a big win for the people of Texas and for education.

Darlene Breaux won HD149, beating out long-term incumbent Hubert Vo. This is a safe blue seat, so Breaux will be headed to the Texas House in January.

There are dozens of other races across the state that we haven’t touched on here.

County commissioners and judges. If your county had a runoff tonight, check your local results. Those down-ballot races matter more to your daily life than most people realize, and the people running them deserve your attention even when the cameras are pointed elsewhere.

But stepping back from the individual races, tonight tells a story. Texas Democrats have a deep, talented bench heading into November, progressives winning primaries, good candidates in competitive districts, and a Senate nominee in James Talarico who gives this party a real shot at something historic. Meanwhile, Republicans are busy nominating a man the Texas House tried to remove from office, backed by a president who sees in Paxton a kindred spirit.

They think that’s a strength. Come November, James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa will show them what strength actually looks like.

It’s going to be a fun five months. Let’s get to work.

Share

Subscribe now

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Tomorrow is election day in the Texas Democratic (and Republican) primary runoff elections. So, if you didn’t early vote, please make sure to vote tomorrow. There are two Democratic statewide races and multiple down-ballot races, so everyone has something on their ticket.

While Democrats had a higher turnout during the primary than Republicans, expect that to flip for the runoffs. The right absolutely has the enthusiasm factor going with the Cornyn vs. Paxton race. Unfortunately, I’m expecting Paxton to win. MAGA’s brains are rotted to the core. They somehow see $4-a-gallon gas and a government run by the Epstein class as a win. It’s up to the rest of society, whose brains haven’t rotted out, to save ourselves from them. Which is why Talarico will win in November, and along with that will be dozens of down-ballot flips.

Expect to hear from me late tomorrow, after the polls close, and we get the results back. Then, we won’t have to worry about elections again until… municipal runoffs.

But today isn’t about elections.

Today is Memorial Day.

Before we talk about what Memorial Day means in 2026, let’s talk about where it actually came from, because most Americans have never heard the real story.

posted a video in 2024 covering an extraordinary piece of buried American history, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we need to be talking about right now. Well worth the watch.

In the spring of 1865, the Civil War had just ended, and Charleston, SC, lay in ruins. During the war, Confederate forces had converted the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an open-air prison camp for captured Union soldiers. More than 257 Union prisoners died there and were buried in mass graves by retreating Confederate forces.

When Charleston fell, and the Confederates evacuated, it was the city’s newly freed Black residents who stayed. And one of the first things they did with their freedom was honor the dead. Black ministers and northern missionaries led an effort to reinter the bodies and build a fence around a newly established cemetery. Over the entrance, workmen inscribed the words “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, on May 1, 1865, thousands of Freedmen gathered at the cemetery to honor those soldiers. Freedmen schoolchildren led the procession with flowers. Black ministers presided over the parade while three thousand Black children sang “John Brown’s Body.” Nearly 10,000 people were present. It was the first Memorial Day.

That history was buried, like so much of American history. On purpose, and with malice, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Why does this matter today?

Because the story of Memorial Day’s true origins is the story of America’s original sin, the story of the Lost Cause, and so many other pieces of American history. Black Americans did the profound, dignified, patriotic work of holding this country together, only to be written out of the history they created.

That erasure project has a new address. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order mandating the removal of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government. On March 27, 2025, he followed it with Executive Order 14253, titled, with characteristic cynicism, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The order targeted the Smithsonian Institution directly, ordering the removal of what it called “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its museums, which, in practice, meant exhibits about racism, slavery, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. The order singled out Independence National Historical Park for staff trainings on institutional racism, and the Department of the Interior had already removed Independence Hall’s slavery exhibit, including a memorial to people enslaved by George Washington at the site of his Philadelphia residence.

Then they came for the war dead. Arlington National Cemetery purged its website of historical pages about Black, Hispanic, and female veterans.

The Pentagon went even further. Following the removal of an article honoring Jackie Robinson’s military service, a Black Medal of Honor recipient, and numerous other pages highlighting contributions by women and minority groups, a Pentagon spokesperson blamed artificial intelligence for “accidental” takedowns. But it wasn’t an accident that the letters “DEI” were automatically added to the URLs of the pages that went dark. The Air Force briefly removed videos of the Tuskegee Airmen from basic military training to review them for DEI compliance. In the Netherlands, two panels commemorating Black soldiers at the American military cemetery in Margraten were removed.

And then, in June 2025, the National Park Service placed signs at parks asking visitors to use QR codes to report any “negative history” they encounter. They are literally asking the public to snitch on history.

This is the Lost Cause, repackaged for the 21st century. It is the same project that buried the story of the first Memorial Day for over a century. And it is being done, deliberately, to shape what future Americans believe about who this country belongs to.

The Trump Administration is a white supremacist administration.

Every act of white supremacy they partake in is overt and blatant. The overturning of the Voting Rights Act is only the latest example.

The freedmen who organized the first Memorial Day in 1865 were exercising their newly won citizenship. Within a decade, Reconstruction was crushed, and citizenship was stripped away for nearly a century. We are watching the architecture of that suppression get rebuilt, and I hope enough of us are paying attention.

And here’s what all Americans need to understand. Even if you aren’t Black, you are not a spectator. You’re already on the list, especially if you’re a woman. If you belong to the LGBTQ+ community. If you live in poverty. If you’re a single parent. If you aren’t a Christian. If you speak out against the current administration.

White supremacy as a governing philosophy doesn’t just harm Black Americans. It requires the degradation of everyone else to function. The same movement that is banning books about the Martyrs of the Race Course is the movement that is slashing Medicaid, gutting Social Security, handing your tax dollars to billionaires, and selling your kids’ futures to private equity. The same rotted-brain MAGA apparatus that thinks Paxton winning is a victory for them is the one that has made their groceries more expensive, their healthcare less accessible, and their children’s schools more underfunded.

Memorial Day shouldn’t just be about barbecues and car dealership sales.

It should be about remembering who actually built, defended, and loved this country, including the people who were never given full credit for doing so. The people who, the moment they were free, spent ten days digging up a mass grave with their bare hands to give strangers a dignified burial. The people who marched 10,000 strong, with flowers, and sang. The people whose story was buried for over a century because the truth of it was too powerful for white supremacy to survive.

They remembered. It’s our turn.

Go watch ’s video. And tomorrow, go vote.

Share

Subscribe now

• May 26, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)

• May 26, 2026: Election day! (Democratic primary runoff elections)

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow me on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.