This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three 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 Laura Jones?

Laura Jones is not new to this. This is her third time running against Morgan Luttrell TX08, and if you’re wondering why, the answer is that somebody has to.

She’s a lifelong Texan, born and raised in Houston. Army mom. Small business owner. She’s chaired the San Jacinto County Democrats and worked as a Field Director for Senate District 3 under the TDP’s Rural Caucus.

Her platform unmistakenly Tesas progressive, raise the minimum wage and tie it to the cost of living. Medicare for All. Tax the billionaires and corporations.

It’s the kind of platform that I would call common sense. Jones is asking Texas to work for the people who actually live here.

The district.

Republicans redrew this district in last year’s mid-decade redistricting scramble, the one aimed at squeezing five extra GOP seats out of the state before a single vote got cast. TX08 came out the other side as a new animal. All of Waller County, 46% of Montgomery, 38% of Walker, and 8% of Harris. Morgan Luttrell, who beat Laura Jones twice in the old lines, isn’t running here again. The Republican nominee this time is Jessica Steinmann, who came out of a crowded primary to take his place. New district, new opponent.

Here’s the demographic profile. Anglo 38.8%. Everybody else, 61.2%. Hispanic residents make up 34.1% of the district and Black residents another 18.6%. Among voting-age population specifically, it’s 42% Anglo, 58% everyone else, with Hispanic voters at 31.3%. This is a majority-minority district. Republicans drew it that way on purpose and then bet they could still win it.

The partisan math, 39.3% Democratic, 58.8% Republican.

But “not a toss-up” and “not worth fighting for” are two different sentences, and here’s why.

Turnout in this district has real headroom. In the last midterm, 2022, only 45% of registered voters showed up. Presidential year 2024 hit 62%. That’s a seventeen-point gap between who’s registered and who actually turns out. Every point of that gap is organizing territory.

And the registration numbers next to the population numbers. Spanish-surname voters make up just 18% of registered voters in TX08, in a district where Hispanic residents are 34% of the total population and 31% of voting age. That gap between who lives here and who’s on the rolls is a to-do list.

Now for the environment, because context is important.

Trump nationally is sitting at a net negative 19, underwater in Texas specifically, and his handling of the state’s own mid-decade redistricting scheme he demanded polls net negative even among the people it was drawn to help.

And then there’s the Hispanic vote, which is doing something Republicans did not plan for when they drew these maps assuming 2024 was the new normal. A UnidosUS poll this year has Latino voters statewide backing the generic Democratic House candidate 54 to 27. In February, Democrats flipped a deep-red Tarrant County state Senate seat on the strength of a Hispanic vote swing, nearly 80 percent of Hispanic voters in that runoff going Democratic. That’s a trend line, and Texas Republicans built their entire five-seat redistricting gambit betting the opposite trend would hold.

So here’s the honest version. TX08 is not the district Democrats flip on hope alone. The composite lean is real and it’s steep. But it is a district built on assumptions that are aging badly in real time, in an environment where the governor is underwater, the president is underwater, and the demographic group that was supposed to cement Republican gains is swinging back the other direction faster than anybody in Austin predicted.

Flipping TX08 this year means three things. It means closing a real gap. It means treating the eighteen-point registration gap between Hispanic population and Hispanic voter rolls as the single biggest lever in the district. And it means banking on a wave that hasn’t happened yet.

That’s the district Laura Jones is running in. Not the one from 2022. Not the one from 2024.

The Republican.

Unfortunately, Jessica Steinmann, the Republican running in this district is a woman of very limited vocabulary. Her entire website basically reads as, “Trump, Trump, Trumppity, Trump, My Daddy, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.”

Yesterday, POLITICO released an article taling about how GOP veterans are increasingly alarmed how they cannot find any young, qualified staff. That young people now in the Republican Party have taken on the identity of “groypers,” white nationalist, MAGA-types, and have drifted even further right than people like Ted Cruz.

We’ve seen these white nationalist, MAGA-types at much higher levels than staffers. We’ve seen them in the Texas Legislature and in Congress. And multiple issues on Jessica Steinmann’s issue page have a white nationalist agenda.

In Laura Jones’ own words.

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

Q: Do you support a Green New Deal or similar large-scale federal climate action plan?

Yes. TX-08 families are already paying the price for federal inaction — hotter summers, strained power grids, harder storms on the Gulf Coast, water infrastructure that can’t keep up. I support bold federal climate investment, but it has to work for working people: clean energy jobs, resilient infrastructure, and real protection for union workers, farmers, and energy workers in the transition — not just Washington talking points. This isn’t about politics. It’s about whether our kids inherit a livable future.

Q: Do you support universal, publicly funded healthcare (i.e., Medicare for All or a similar single-payer system)?

Yes — this one’s easy since you’ve already confirmed Medicare for All support on prior endorsement surveys. Here’s a draft in your voice:

I absolutely support Medicare for All. Every Texan deserves healthcare that doesn’t depend on your job, your zip code, or how much money you have — not another watered-down half-measure. In TX-08, I’ve talked to too many families skipping medications or avoiding the doctor because they can’t afford it. That’s not freedom, that’s fear. Healthcare is a right, not a privilege for the few who can pay for it.

Q: Would you support major tax reform, including raising taxes on billionaires and large corporations?

Absolutely! It’s time billionaires and large corporations paid their fair share instead of working families carrying the load. That means major tax reform — closing corporate loopholes and raising taxes on billionaires — to actually pay for Medicare for All and the social safety nets this administration has spent years defunding. We can’t keep asking working families to sacrifice while billionaires skip the bill. It’s time to invest in healthcare, schools, and the people who actually keep this country running.

Q: Do you support federal student debt cancellation and tuition-free public college?

Yes! I support federal student debt cancellation and tuition-free public college. My platform goes further — a real commitment to free education from early childhood all the way through trade school or community college. Every kid deserves a real shot, whether that’s a four-year degree, a trade certification, or an associate’s degree, without being buried in debt before their life even starts. Education should build futures, not financial prisons.

Q: Do you support ending U.S. military aid to countries with ongoing human rights abuses, including Israel and Egypt?

Yes. Human rights can’t be negotiable, and they shouldn’t come with a US taxpayer subsidy attached — that includes Israel and Egypt. I support ending military aid to any government engaged in ongoing human rights abuses. Our tax dollars should reflect our values, not prop up abuses abroad while communities here in TX-08 are told there’s no money left for healthcare, schools, or infrastructure. Accountability has to apply everywhere, not just when it’s politically convenient.

Q: Do you support expanding the Supreme Court or instituting term limits for justices?

Both. No single person can stay objective for decades while the world changes around them because priorities shift, and lifetime power on the Court doesn’t reflect that reality. On top of that, money, corruption, and undisclosed gifts have eroded public trust in an institution that’s supposed to be above politics. I support term limits for Supreme Court justices so no one appointment shapes generations of law unchecked, and I support expanding the Court to restore balance after years of political maneuvering to stack it. This isn’t about picking winners, it’s about accountability and restoring faith in a Court that answers to the Constitution, not to donors or favors.

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

In 2026, being a Democrat means fighting for the people. It means rebuilding our systems so they actually work by rooting out systemic racism, closing the loopholes that let corruption and dark money buy politicians, and building something better than what we’ve been left with. Right now, we don’t need more centrists. We don’t need more moderates willing to compromise with a regime that’s playing games with people’s lives while getting richer off the suffering of everyday Americans. We need fighters and accountability has to mean something — for everyone, regardless of skin color or social status. That’s not radical, it’s overdue and that’s just what this moment demands.

TX08 was drawn by Republicans who bet everything on 2024 being permanent.

A demographic profile that’s majority-minority by design, with a partisan lean that’s real but not immovable. A registration gap eighteen points wide just sitting there. And an opponent whose entire public platform reads like a fan letter to the führer, running on issues that echo the same white nationalist currents POLITICO spent four thousand words warning Republicans about in their own staff.

Laura Jones is running on Medicare for All because she’s watched families in this district skip medication they need. Climate action because Gulf Coast summers don’t care about your politics. Court reform because lifetime appointments and undisclosed gifts don’t restore faith in anything.

This is a district Democrats win by doing the unglamorous math. Register the voters who are already here, turn out the ones who skip midterms, and trust that a governor and a president underwater in Texas aren’t accidents either. TX08 is a long shot. It is not a lost cause. Those are different things, and this cycle, the difference is worth fighting over.

You can learn more about Laura Jones on her website, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

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This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three 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 Erica Gillum?

Erica Gillum is a lifelong Texan, a businesswoman, realtor, real estate coach, and investor. She spent the last two decades building something out of not much.

She grew up watching her father, a fourth-generation small businessman. He served as Mayor of Hempstead in 1983 and later sat on the Waller County Commissioners Court. Gillum took the same path decades later, landing on Hempstead City Council in 2020 and moving into the mayor’s office in 2022, where she stayed until 2024.

While she was there, Gillum secured over $9 million in drainage and infrastructure. A deal with H-E-B guaranteed a quarter of the new distribution center jobs go to residents. Caterpillar Mustang landed in Hempstead on her watch, which she credits for strengthening the city’s tax base.

Gillum leans hard into faith and self-reliance as campaign language. The line she keeps coming back to is that the real divide in this country isn’t left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. And right now, in this moment, that’s what speaks most to working Texans.

The district.

Senate District 18 is enormous. It’s 18 counties stitched together from the Gulf Coast up through the Brenham prairie and into the western edge of the Houston sprawl. You could drive from Port Lavaca to the outskirts of Katy and never leave it.

This district has two very different economies living inside one Senate seat. Small farming and ranching counties that have voted red for a generation, and a fast-growing exurban slice of Fort Bend County that looks nothing like them.

The population is 62% people of color. Hispanic residents make up 30.6%, Black residents 17.3%, Asian residents 13.3%. On paper, that’s a majority-minority district. On the ground, it doesn’t vote like one, and we’ll get to why.

Homeownership runs at 66.7%, ten points above the state average. Poverty sits at 10.6%, well under the state’s average. It’s a district of homeowners, small business owners, and retirees. 15.1% of the district is 65 or older, compared to 13.4% statewide.

Here’s the county breakdown that actually explains the politics. The district’s single largest population center is 45% of Fort Bend County. That slice is 73.8% non-Anglo. It is also the only real growth engine in the district, with 30% of its housing built since 2010. If Democrats have a future in SD18, it lives in that Fort Bend wedge, not in the rural counties.

Victoria County, the second-biggest chunk at 91,319 people, is 43.1% Anglo and 47% Hispanic, and Hispanic voters along this stretch of the coast have been trending red for years. However, many campaigns and groups are hoping to swing them back left this year. The small counties run 60% to 73% Anglo and vote accordingly. Waller County, Gillum’s home turf and 73% inside the district, is 63.2% non-Anglo with the highest Black population share in SD18 at 28%. That’s Gillum’s actual base, and it’s a small one against the sheer size of everything else.

2024 general election, in District 18, Trump beat Harris 62.6% to 35.3%. Cruz beat Allred 59.7 to 37.8. Every appellate and Supreme Court race on the ballot broke for the Republican by 29 to 30 points. This district votes red from the top of the ballot to the bottom.

Now the flip math. Harris got 148,753 votes in this district in 2024. Trump got 263,788. A gap of 115,035 votes on a turnout of 421,232. Closing that in one cycle takes a genuinely historic swing, not a good year.

Here’s why that’s worth taking seriously anyway. In 2024, Trump won 55% of the Latino vote statewide. That shift is reversing, fast. And it’s not just polling. When Taylor Rehmet flipped SD9 in that January special election, a district Trump carried by 17 points, nearly 80% of the Hispanic voters who turned out voted for him. That’s a swing of roughly 26% off 2024.

That’s the ballgame for the coastal Hispanic counties sitting inside SD18. All counties that broke hard for Trump two years ago. If even half of the SD9 swing shows up here in November, that’s tens of thousands of votes moving back into play in a district where the Democratic floor has been mostly the same for a decade.

It still doesn’t flip the seat by itself. But stacked on top of the Fort Bend wedge and a Waller County operation that actually shows up, it starts to look like the first real dent Democrats have put in this seat in years.

And there’s a piece of this that isn’t just demographic drift. Lois Kolkhorst has a record on maternal health that directly harms a large portion of this district.

Erica Gillum is not favored to win SD18 in November. But what's different about this cycle is that the pieces required for a real dent, the Fort Bend wedge, a Hispanic vote in genuine motion, an incumbent with a terrible record, are all actually present at the same time. We should be treating this as a base-building cycle worth real investment.

The incumbent.

There isn’t one positive thing Lois Kolkhorst has ever done for Texas. Not ever. She was named one of the “Worst Legislators” in Texas by Texas Monthly magazine in 2017. And has made a career out of legislating favors for billionaires, cutting the social safety net for children living in poverty, and taking on a radical anti-Earth agenda.

Worst of all, Kolkhorst is one of the people most responsible for the piles of dead women stacking up in our state. In 2011, Kolkhorst voted to slash Texas family planning funding by 66%. Eighty-two clinics closed their doors. These weren’t abortion clinics, whatever the talking points want you to believe. They were the front door into healthcare for millions of Texas women. Cancer screenings. Birth control. STD testing.

Then the bodies started showing up in the data.

Texas maternal mortality 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 the findings in Obstetrics and Gynecology and said flat out they couldn’t explain a spike like that “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval.” No other state came close. Texas hit numbers researchers said weren’t seen anywhere else in the country.

Black women paid for it hardest. They made up 11% of Texas births and nearly 29% of the pregnancy-related deaths.

Lois Kolkhorst has chaired the Senate Health and Human Services Committee this entire time. She controls nearly $80 billion in healthcare spending and oversight of every health agency in this state. She had the gavel when the clinics closed. She had the gavel when the data came out. She has the gavel right now.

This is a story about a woman who voted to gut the healthcare access of poor and working-class women, watched hundreds of them die because of it, and kept her committee chairmanship anyway. The Legislature, in its own words, mostly punted. Kolkhorst didn’t. She kept showing up, kept getting reappointed, kept voting the same way.

A body count with a Senate seal on it. And come November, she’s asking the women of District 18 to send her back to Austin to keep doing it.

In Erica Gillum’s own words.

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

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

Most definitely! Yes. Too many Texans who work full-time still can’t afford the basics. With the cost of living rising while wages have remained stagnant, no one who works hard every day should have to choose between paying rent, buying groceries, or seeing a doctor. I also support a thoughtful implementation that gives small businesses time to adjust.

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

Yes. I oppose school vouchers that divert public dollars away from our public schools. Education is personal to me; my daughter is an educator, my mother retired from education, and my father is a retired college professor. I’ve spent a lifetime hearing both the successes and the frustrations of our schools. We should fully fund public education, raise teacher pay, and invest in the resources every student and classroom needs to succeed.

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

Yes, End tax breaks that don’t create jobs or investment, and reinvest those dollars in infrastructure, workforce training, and energy innovation. Close outdated loopholes on emissions reporting and waste disposal so taxpayers aren’t left paying for pollution or abandoned wells. That’s a pro-business, pro-taxpayer approach that rewards responsible companies, protects communities, and strengthens Texas’s economy over the long term.

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. It’s time to stop pouring billions into a system that too often fails to make our communities safer. Downsize prisons where it’s safe to do so and redirect those resources to mental health care, addiction treatment, affordable housing, youth programs, quality education, and job training. When we invest in people instead of just punishment, we reduce crime, strengthen communities, and create lasting public safety. That’s a smarter use of taxpayer dollars.

Q: Do you support repealing all abortion bans and codifying the right to abortion in state law?

I respect the value and dignity of every human life. I also believe the best way to reduce abortion is through prevention, not punishment. That means expanding access to education, contraception, quality healthcare, and the resources families need to thrive.

At the same time, I believe decisions about pregnancy are deeply personal and should be made by individuals, their families, and their healthcare providers, not the government. We can value life while respecting personal freedom.

My goal is to support policies that prevent unintended pregnancies, strengthen families, improve maternal and child health, and protect the right of every person to make their own healthcare decisions.

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

First, I won’t pretend to understand their struggles from a distance. I am a working-class voter myself, so I have known what it feels like to worry about paying the bills, affording healthcare, buying groceries, or wondering whether homeownership will ever be within reach. These aren’t political talking points to me; they’re everyday realities.

When it comes to young voters, we have to stop talking at them and start talking with them. Too often, people assume they know what young people need instead of inviting them into the conversation. My commitment is to listen first, to be transparent, and to meet young people where they are.

That means showing up on college campuses, trade schools, job fairs, and community events. It means engaging student organizations and speaking with graduating seniors about civic engagement and the policies that will shape their future. It also means reaching them where they already communicate, through social media and digital platforms, in ways that are informative, honest, and engaging.

Young people need to understand that the decisions made today directly affect their future. Whether it’s the cost of college and trade schools, housing affordability, healthcare access, women’s rights, voting rights, or the funding of public education, these issues aren’t problems for someone else; they will shape the opportunities available to this generation.

For working-class families, my message is simple: I see you because I am one of you. Our working class includes teachers, nurses, doctors, pharmacy technicians, medical assistants, retail workers, office staff, construction workers, first responders, and countless others who keep our communities running every day. These are the people who make our economy work, yet too many feel like government has forgotten them.

People deserve to understand how government decisions affect their daily lives, from the price of groceries and gas to healthcare costs, housing, utility bills, and the ability to support their families without having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Politics often fails because it doesn’t connect policy to people’s everyday lives. My goal is to change that. Every decision made in government has a real impact on someone’s paycheck, someone’s rent, someone’s healthcare, or someone’s child’s future. We have to communicate those connections clearly and honestly.

Most importantly, I want people to know they have someone fighting for them every single day. While you’re working, raising your children, paying your bills, and trying to build a better future, I want you to know your representative is working just as hard on your behalf.

That is how we rebuild trust. We listen. We show up. We tell the truth. We stay engaged. And we never forget that public office is about serving the people, not serving ourselves.

Erica Gillum is running on a question nobody in Austin bothers asking working people anymore. Who is this government actually for?

On one side, a Realtor and former mayor from Hempstead who knows what it’s like to worry about rent. On the other, a Senator who wears diamonds to hearings where she votes against the people, wondering if they can afford their next prescription, and who has chaired the committee overseeing Texas’s maternal mortality crisis for the entire time it’s been the worst in the country.

Nobody should tell you Erica Gillum is favored to win this seat in November. She isn’t, and I won’t do false hope. But the math here is moving for the first time in a decade. The Hispanic vote along this coastline is genuinely up for grabs, and Fort Bend keeps growing whether Lois Kolkhorst likes it or not.

If you live in District 18, or know someone who does, Gillum needs volunteers, and she needs money, and she needs both before Kolkhorst’s $3.1 million war chest gets spent on ads nobody in this district can counter. If you don’t live here, share this piece. Somebody in Victoria or Gonzales or Waller needs to hear that a Democrat is finally showing up asking for their vote.

You can find out more about Erica Gillum on her website, Facebook, or TikTok.

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• 94 days until the November election!

• Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:

• 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.

Dannie Goober (stage name, Dan Patrick) was once a famed shock jock radio host in his home state of Maryland. Then, around his mid-40s, he moved to Texas, did what all good grifters do, and got involved in Republican politics. There used to be a word for that. For wealthy men who packed up their belongings and headed South to buy their way into politics. We used to call them carpetbaggers. I’m not quite sure why we stopped, because if there ever were a carpetbagger, our Lt. Governor would certainly be one.

Now, in his late 70s, he dresses like a jackass and tells people, “This is my time-traveler suit.” Then he pretends to tell people stories about Texas, but it’s actually just Johnny Cash lyrics. Seriously, it was caught on video:

And with all of the chaos happening in Texas (sometimes caused by this ⬆️ man), it’s easy to forget that he’s one of the most powerful people in our government.

Jackasses in time-traveler suits can still run your life.

Patrick’s actual job is President of the Senate, or the Presiding officer. He has control over three levers that decide whether a bill lives or dies before a single senator ever votes on it.

The first lever is referral. Every bill that gets filed in the Texas Senate goes to a committee, and Patrick decides which one. Send a bill to a friendly committee, and it gets a hearing. Send it to a committee stacked with senators who’d rather eat glass than pass it, and it dies.

The second lever is the calendar. Even a bill that survives committee needs floor time, and Patrick controls what gets scheduled and what doesn’t.

And the third lever is committee chairs. He appoints them. Every one. Which means the senators running those committees owe their gavels to him personally, and they know it.

Put those three things together, and you get the actual machine. Patrick decides what gets a green light and what dies.

Look at what’s actually passed over the last decade. The bathroom bill fights. The voucher pushes. The near-total abortion ban. The grid “fixes” after Uri that fixed basically nothing. Every one of those bills cleared Patrick’s desk before it ever got near Abbott’s. The Governor signs. Patrick decides what he gets to sign. If you want to know where Texas law actually gets made, quit staring at the corner office and start staring at the guy quoting Johnny Cash in the fringe yellow jacket.

Want to know the funny part about it? None of that power is written into the Texas Constitution. Read Article 4. The Constitution gives the Lt. Governor exactly two things. Preside over the Senate, and break a tie if one happens. That’s it.

Everything else gets handed to him fresh at the start of every single session, by a vote of the Senate itself, adopting its own rules. Patrick isn’t constitutionally powerful. He’s powerful because a majority of Republicans keep voting to hand him the keys every two years. Different Senate, different vote, different rules. Stick a pin in that. We’re coming back to it.

Now put a US Senator next to that and watch how small they get. If Talarico beats Paxton in November and heads to Washington as one of a hundred votes, in the minority party, with no chairmanship, no committee to run, no bill he can kill with a signature. He can vote. He can give a hell of a floor speech. He cannot touch a single line of the Texas Education Code, the Texas Penal Code, or the Texas Election Code.

Everything that actually governs Texans day to day, from what gets taught in classrooms to who can get an abortion to whether your lights stay on in a freeze, runs through Austin. Not DC. And in Austin, one man decides what gets a hearing and what dies.

Why do Texans know Talarico’s numbers off the top of their heads, but barely know the Lt. Governor’s race exists?

Money. It’s really as simple as that. A poll out this week has Talarico up five, 45 to 40, his biggest lead of the cycle, and it’s got Paxton bleeding independents by double digits. Every outlet from the Trib to Fox News is treating this as one of the handful of races that decides whether Republicans keep their Senate majority nationally.

None of that is wrong, exactly. It’s just not aimed at the governing body that has the most impact on your daily life.

A US Senate seat gets national coverage because it’s counted on a national scoreboard. Fifty-one seats, fifty-two seats, who’s got the gavel in DC. That scoreboard exists. It matters for judges and the farm bill and whether Texas gets steamrolled on federal funding fights, and I’m not telling you to stop caring about it. It’s still an important race.

But that national scoreboard has absolutely nothing to do with who decides whether Texas passes another abortion restriction, guts the grid again, or hands another billion dollars to voucher schools. That decision happens in a building in Austin, run by a man cosplaying a Texan, or a time traveler, or trash (it’s hard to tell). He’s up against Vikki Goodwin.

Attention and power are not the same thing, and Texas might be the cleanest proof of that mismatch in the entire country. We’ve got a state legislative office with more command over daily life in this state than a US Senate seat will ever carry, and it’s running practically dark while $68 million dollars (Talarico) and every national outlet in the country obsess over a race that, win or lose, changes nothing about who controls the classroom, the clinic, or the power grid come January.

The Texas Constitution, Article 4, Section 16, gives the Lt. Governor power to preside over the Senate and break a tie if one happens.

That’s the whole constitutional job. Everything else people call “the second most powerful office in Texas” isn’t in the Constitution at all.

Here’s how it works, and there are three separate categories, so stay with me.

Constitutional. Untouchable. No Senate vote can change it. Presiding officer. Tie-break vote. A vote on every question when the Senate sits as Committee of the Whole. First in line if the Governor dies, resigns, or gets removed. Acting Governor any time the Governor leaves the state. A seat on the five-member Legislative Redistricting Board, which draws the maps if the Legislature can’t agree on its own. It’s written into the founding document and stays put no matter who runs the Senate.

Statutory. Survives a hostile Senate, because changing it takes an actual law, not a floor vote. The Lt. Governor co-chairs the Legislative Budget Board with the Speaker, and appoints three of its ten members. The LBB writes the fiscal notes, certifies the budget, and controls what happens with the state’s money between sessions. Stripping that away requires a bill passed by both the House and Senate and signed by the Governor. Which means if Democrats hold the House, and we’re all praying they do, this one survives regardless of what the Senate does.

Senate Rules. Gone in one afternoon, whenever the majority feels like it. This is the referral power. The calendar power. The committee chair appointments. All of it exists because the Senate votes fresh, every regular session, to hand it to whoever’s presiding. Same rule that gives it can take it away, same day, same vote.

In 2015, his first session, he got the Senate to drop the vote threshold for bringing a bill to the floor from two-thirds (21 votes) down to three-fifths (19 votes). Watered down the minority’s ability to block anything. Then in 2021, he went further. After Republicans lost a seat and dropped to exactly 18 members, the Senate lowered the threshold again, this time to 18 votes. Eighteen senators, eighteen Republicans, passed 18 to 13, a number picked to match his own caucus exactly so Democrats couldn’t block a single thing even if every one of them showed up and voted as a bloc.

Which is exactly why none of that protects you if Democrats take the Lt. Governor’s office and Republicans keep the Senate. That same mechanism- majority votes- rules get rewritten, works against a Democrat exactly as efficiently as it’s worked for Patrick for a decade.

Let’s say Vikki Goodwin wins in November.

Patrick’s cosplay gets boxed up and shipped back to Maryland where it belongs, and Democrats take the office for the first time since Bob Bullock. Meanwhile, the Senate itself stays exactly where it’s been for two decades. We’re not going to flip the Senate this session. Highly unlikely. We may flip two seats, even three if we’re lucky, but that’s still not enough.

On day one of the next session, the Senate convenes, and that Republican majority adopts a rules resolution stripping the presiding officer of everything Patrick spent a decade building. It’s a simple majority resolution, the same tool Patrick himself used to build the machine, now aimed straight back at whoever’s sitting in his chair.

What survives, because it’s constitutional or statutory, the Legislative Budget Board co-chairmanship, real leverage over how the state’s money gets certified and spent between sessions, protected because stripping it requires an actual law that House Democrats can block. The Legislative Redistricting Board seat, which puts a Democrat in the room when Texas draws its next set of maps after the 2030 census, a seat that matters enormously for the entire decade after this one. Succession to the Governor’s office, and acting governor authority anytime the governor crosses state lines. And the bully pulpit, statewide elected, press access, the ability to say something publicly that forces a response.

Flipping Lt. Gov under a still-red Senate is a structural and symbolic win. It means Patrick’s machine stops being Patrick’s machine.

A Republican Lt. Gov paired with a Republican Senate is an unchecked chokepoint over every single bill that moves through that chamber for two straight years.

What does one more Talarico vote in the US Senate actually stop, if he wins? Not one thing in Texas. He doesn’t touch the Texas Penal Code, doesn’t touch the Education Code, doesn’t touch a single line of what happens in Austin. Best case, he’s a good vote on judges and a loud voice on the floor.

Ending Patrick specifically matters. He isn’t some replaceable cog. The man has spent a decade building relationships with individual senators, learning who owes him, who’s scared of him, who needs him for their next primary. Whip capacity like that doesn’t transfer to whoever else picks up the gavel. You start from zero. Take Patrick off that dais and even a Republican successor is running a weaker, less efficient version of the same machine for at least a session or two while they rebuild what he spent ten years assembling.

And then there’s 2031. That Legislative Redistricting Board seat, the one that only kicks in if the Legislature deadlocks on its own maps. It’s a direct hand on the next decade of both chambers, House and Senate, drawn after the 2030 census, the maps every single legislative race in this state runs on until 2041. A Democrat on that board is worth more to the long-term shape of Texas politics than a Senate term’s worth of federal votes on bills that were never going to touch Texas law in the first place. You’re fighting for who draws the lines that decide the next five sessions after that.

The Lt. Governor’s office carries more raw power over what happens to Texans than a Senate seat carries over anything Texas-specific, full stop.

And even in the worst case, where Democrats win the office, but Republicans keep the Senate, you’re still putting a Democrat on the redistricting board before the next map fight, still denying the GOP a weapon they’ve used without opposition since 2015. It’s still more than one more vote in the minority in a building four hundred miles from where your rights actually get decided.

You can find out more about Vikki Goodwin on her website.

Make sure to follow all of her socials, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky.

She also needs volunteers and donations.

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This week, (TPOR) dropped a poll with a few of the top-of-the-ticket races. This poll looks mighty favorable for Democrats, and the Republicans online are saying to “take it with a grain of salt, because it’s Luke Warford’s company.”

Y’all remember Luke Warford. He ran for Railroad Commissioner in 2022. Since then, he’s been working behind the scenes on polling. Now, he’s running for the Chair position of the Travis County Democratic Party. And that’s a whole other shit-show of a story, to tell you the truth, I only know bits and pieces of. From my understanding, Chair Jessica Cohen was pushed out by the elites of the County Party regarding a thirty-year-old arrest.

Regardless of what Republicans say, we should trust the TPOR poll because they are trying to build a reputation as a trustworthy polling company in Texas. And why fudge that for one poll?

Talarico vs. Paxton.

The TPOR poll has Talarico leading Paxton 45% to 40%.

That’s up from a Texas Politics Project Poll in June that had Paxton leading Talarico 43% to 42%.

And as long as we’re on the subject of Republicans, we should talk about the betting markets. Because it’s what most of them are relying on now, Kalshi, more than Polymarket, because Kalshi has spent a lot of money on advertising through right-wing influencers.

Kalshi has Paxton leading Talarico 53% to 47%.

And Polymarket has Paxton leading Talarico 53% to 49%.

So what does it all mean?

TPOR has Talarico up 5. UT/Texas Politics Project has Paxton up 1. Neither number is outside the other poll’s margin of error. Anybody telling you this race is “decided” in either direction, on the strength of one poll, is selling you something.

But before we hang our hat on the TPOR number, let’s look under the hood. TPOR’s own poll from May had Paxton winning non-college-educated voters by 21 points. Two months later, in this poll, Talarico wins that same group by 9. That’s a 30-point swing in a bloc that has been rock-solid Republican in Texas for a decade. Ted Cruz won non-college voters by 18 in 2024. He still won them by 6 in 2018, the year Beto came within three points statewide. A number that big, that fast, in a group that stable, deserves a raised eyebrow. It could be real. Realignment on affordability this cycle and TPOR’s crosstabs on cost-of-living trust are consistent with it.

Now, the betting markets. Kalshi and Polymarket are not polls. They measure where money is willing to bet. Low liquidity means a handful of big bettors can move the number more than a thousand ordinary voters could. And Kalshi in particular has been buying its way into right-wing influencer feeds, which means the “market” a lot of Republicans are quoting at you is partly a marketing campaign. Treat those 53-47 and 53-49 numbers as sentiment among people willing to put money on a Republican-coded platform, not as a competing poll.

And just for fun, I asked the Magic8ball if Talarico would win. It said, “Without a doubt.”

Hinojosa vs. Abbott.

Someone asked me in the comments the other day if I thought Gina Hinojosa could win. My response was, “Maybe.” The Governor’s race is a lot more complicated than the Senate race, mostly due to Abbott’s unlimited campaign cash. And when I say “unlimited,” I really mean “unlimited.” At any point in time, Abbott could call one of his billionaire donors and promise land, a government contract, or some favor, and wind up with a few million in his coffers. And he has plenty of billionaire buddies who are well aware of his decades-long pay-to-play schemes.

Money is the biggest roadblock in this race, but Abbott’s favorability is working against him. In June, the Texas Politics Project had Abbott’s approval rating at 46% approve vs. 45% disapprove. That’s up from October 2025, when his approval rating was just 39%.

This week, the TPOR poll had Abbott leading Hinojosa 45% to 42%, within the margin of error.

This is a move in the right direction. In June, a Texas Politics Project Poll showed Abbott leading Hinojosa 47% to 40%.

I think that Hinojosa is picking up steam, for sure, and she could win. But Democrats really need to show out in numbers in November like never before.

Johnson vs. Middleton.

This was the last TPOR poll that was done this week, and why they only picked these top three statewide races, and not the rest, I couldn’t tell you, but this race is particularly interesting. Nathan Johnson is very qualified to be our next Attorney General. Mayes Middleton is very qualified to be middle management in a Satanic Cabal. Middleton will spend a fortune trying to get elected, because he can’t get elected through the grassroots, and he has the money to throw around.

This week, the TPOR poll had Middleton leading Johnson 39% to 38%.

In June, a Texas Politics Project Poll showed Middleton leading Johnson 41% to 39%.

I’m definitely feeling good about the AG’s race for Democrats. Most people in Texas, even some Republicans, are fed up with billionaires (like Middleton) jacking up the cost of living while playing culture wars and sucking up all of our water. Plus, I asked the Magic8ball if Nathan Johnson would win in November, and it said, “Most likely.”

Goodwin vs. Patrick.

TPOR only put out polls for the last three races, so for the rest of the statewide races, I’m looking at older polls, but I didn’t think it was fair to talk about some and not others.

Soon, we have to talk about how important this seat is. Because if we flip the House, but not the Senate, we could still get a lot accomplished if we oust Dan Patrick and put Vikki Goodwin in this seat. Some people don’t know this, but the Lt. Governor is the most powerful person in the state of Texas when it comes to lawmaking. More powerful than the Governor, even.

In June, a Texas Politics Project Poll showed Patrick leading Goodwin 43% to 36%, which is way above the margin of error.

Five months is plenty of time to make up a 7-point deficit. I think the biggest challenge for Vikki Goodwin is that not enough people know what the Lt. Governor is or does. However, I’ve seen her campaigning all over the state. And if Democrats overperform in November by double digits, maybe it will be enough.

The rest.

Last week, Texas Monthly published an article calling Bo French a fascist in its headline. Which, I absolutely love seeing the mainstream calling a spaid a spaid. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any public polling for Jon Rosenthal vs. Bo French.

In that regard, I also haven’t seen any polling regarding Clayton Tucker vs. Nate Sheets or Ben Flores vs. Dawn Buckingham.

Where’s that at, ?

Between us, I’m feeling bullish about both Jon Rosenthal and Clayton Tucker.

Every top-of-ticket race in Texas is inside single digits right now, and half of them are inside the margin of error.

Talarico’s up in one poll, down a point in another. Hinojosa closed her gap by four points in two months. Johnson’s a coin flip. Goodwin’s got work to do, but we still have time, and Texans don’t know what a Lieutenant Governor does until one of them tries to burn the state down, which Dan Patrick has done frequently.

So knock on the damn doors. Make the damn calls. Give the five bucks if that’s what you’ve got. The polls tell you this is winnable. And it happens because you got off your ass.

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Yesterday, we spoke about some of the bigger fundraisers in the Texas House races. Today, I wanted to look at some of the fundraising numbers in the Congressional races. Yes, the Republicans gave us a dummymander, and they’re going to screw themselves in the long run. But how bad is it right now, and who’s actually raising the money to take advantage of it?

For each district, turnout numbers matter, demographics matter, and like it or not, money matters too. Depending on who you ask, a Congressional campaign has to raise several hundred thousand dollars to be taken seriously. I don’t know what that exact number is, though I’ve asked around and was told anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000.

So, like we did yesterday, I thought it would be fun to look at the DCCC’s target seats, the other seats which may be dummymandered, and some other possible big fundraisers.

The DCCC’s list.

Of all the seats in Texas that may be dummymandered, I find it suspicious that the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) picked the two seats with the most moderate, corporately aligned Democrats running for them. Until I looked on the About Page of the DCCC’s website and saw it was all led by corporate-aligned Democrats.

So, just know, with all of the progressives running for Congress in Texas, not supporting ANY of them was a choice.

The two seats they are supporting:

• TX15

• TX35

Bobby Pulido is running for TX15. He has a lot of star power, he’s super popular, and he’s probably going to win. Republicans were expecting to hold on to the border this year. They won’t. As of 6/30/26, Pulido has raised $2,833,608.15.

Johnny Garcia is running for TX35. Republicans only gave themselves a +4-point cushion in this district, which is 54% Hispanic. With both Trump and Abbott being so far underwater with this voting bloc, in a wave election, it’s probably not going to be enough to cut it. As of 6/30/26, Garcia has raised $923,561.41.

Other seats Republicans could lose.

There’s no guarantee that Democrats will win these seats. The factors that matter include how much Democrats overperform, how far left the Hispanic vote swings, and how much money the candidate raised to make their campaign actually viable.

I am not including the candidates who’ve raised less than $200,000.

Katy Stout Padilla is running for TX23. Republicans only have an +8-point advantage here. This district is 57% Hispanic. And it’s a border district, where Talarico is spending a lot of money to flip back blue (that helps). Also, the Republican candidate is a South Carolina-native and Nazi-sympathizer (not hyperbole) who moved to Texas for the sole purpose of running for Congress. As of 6/30/26, Stout Padilla has raised $470,799.69.

Some longer shots.

If Republicans wind up facing a total bloodbath in November (which I light a candle and pray for daily), perhaps we can flip one or more of the seats below. It’s going to take a bloodbath, and the candidates working their asses off. But it’s worth taking a look at.

Caitlin Rourk is running for TX10. Republicans have an +18-point advantage in this seat, and even though this seat is 63% white, it covers a quarter of Travis County. As of 6/30/26, Rourk has raised $363,958.97.

Kristin Hook is running for TX21. This is a 43% minority district, including 32% Hispanic. Targeting those votes is going to matter a lot for this campaign. Republicans have a +21-point advantage here, so the size of the wave will have to be big, and the Bexar and Hays County portions of this district will really have to show out. As of 6/30/26, Hook has raised $241,265.06.

Kevin Burge is running for TX24. Beth Van Duyne is the incumbent. She’s a literal monster, and Republicans tried to secure her seat with a +20-point advantage. It is going to be a harder seat to win, it’s the whiter, suburban part of DFW, but it’s not entirely impossible. Julie Johnson is threatening to run for this seat in 2028 if Burge doesn’t take it (so, let’s light an extra candle for his win). As of 6/30/26, Burge has raised $209,859.75

Surprising fundraisers.

The previous seats we talked about were “long shots,” but these Democratic candidates are pulling in some big numbers and working hard to flip their districts, and they’re notable enough to talk about.

Shaun Finnie is running for TX02. I don’t recall if we’ve ever discussed Finnie before. He’s an oil and gas guy, coming in with his own money, and he wants to expand the ACA, rather than implement universal healthcare. But that’s still better than the Republican running, which is Steve Toth, the pool boy from New York. Republicans gave themselves a +26-point advantage in this district. However, the demographics of this Harris County district are interesting, 53% Anglo, 26% Hispanic, 12% Black, 7% Asian. As of 6/30/26, Finnie has raised $765,947.65, but he has $2,729,676.76 on hand, due to a $1,961,000 personal loan.

Evan Hunt is running for TX03. This district is genuinely interesting. It’s in Collin County, just like several of the House seats we spoke about yesterday, and Republicans have spent years bending over backward to hold on to districts there, which is why this district has a +22 Republican advantage. However, I don’t think they could have predicted the rapidly shifting demographics in Collin County. Will that impact this race in November? When Republicans drew these maps last year, this district was 58% Anglo, 17% Hispanic, 11% Black, and 11% Asian. As of 6/30/26, Hunt has raised $371,505.53.

Republicans redrew this map to buy themselves five more seats and built themselves five headaches.

That’s what a dummymander does. Perfect for a Legislature full of dummies catering to the whim of the King of Dummies. You can’t manufacture five safe Republican districts from a state that would be blue if it was fair. They already redrew the districts thin, and thinner, and thinner, eventually they will crack.

We know the DCCC is only officially playing offense in two of them, TX15 and TX35, and both candidates are proving them right so far. Bobby Pulido and Johnny Garcia have raised the kind of money that says they’re taking this seriously, and the demographics in both districts say the Republicans who drew this map underestimated exactly how far underwater Trump and Abbott are with Hispanic voters.

We know the “long shot” seats are expensive. It’s going to take a real bloodbath in November to flip any of them. They’re raising real money in seats where six months ago nobody outside their own kitchen table thought they had a shot.

And we know the two “surprising” ones, TX02 and TX03, prove something Republicans really didn’t see coming.

Nothing is a guarantee.

Money doesn’t vote. Turnout does. But candidates who can’t raise money don’t get the chance to find out if turnout breaks their way, and every single person on this list cleared that bar.

Texas Republicans built a map to save themselves. What they actually built was a stress test. We’re about to find out how much weight it can hold.

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There are 99 days left until the election, which means it’s really creeping up on us, but once November 3 comes and goes, the next two months will wiz by. Texas’ 90th Legislative Session will convene on January 12, 2027. And the 120th Congressional Session will begin on January 3, 2027.

For those of you who haven’t been following me for two years or longer, I absolutely live for the Legislative Sessions. It’s my Super Bowl season. I watch all 140 days and report back to y’all on what fresh hell the Republicans are putting us through this time, including as many clips as I can.

Last year, I noticed that everyone and their mother had “Legislative Priorities.” Not just the Legislators, but the orgs and the grassroots, and the “policy people.” So, last go around, I said, “Lone Star Left should have Legislative Priorities, too.”

And over the last year or so, we’ve discussed in detail a few of those and why:

• Universal Free School Meals

• Universal Childcare

• Mandating All Cities and Counties change their Election Dates to November

• Voting Reform: Repeal SB1, Expand Ballot Access, Automatic and Same-Day Voter Registration, Ban Gerrymandering, and Straight-Ticket Voting. Texas needs its own State’s Voting Rights Act.

• A Reparations Commission

• Legalize and Regulate Cannabis

This is a short list. Last week, I asked readers, “What did they want to see more of from Lone Star Left?” and the number two answer was, “Policy Discussions.” There are 169 days left until the 90th Legislative Session starts, and together we’ll discuss the whole priority list, piece by piece.

But here is the kicker.

We need to flip 14 House seats.

This year, 2026, we have more opportunity than we have had in many years. It looks really good for us. The caveat is that it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll flip the State Senate, Lt. Governor, or Governor’s seat. But flipping the House is the first step to taking Texas back.

Will we flip 14 seats?

I think so. But I’m an optimistic person, maybe too optimistic, because I’ve been wrong before. But this time, I’m not the only one betting on Texas.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is sinking $50 million into Texas, with its eyes on holding three seats and flipping 12. They’re also targeting Taylor Rehmet’s SD09.

Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), the granddaddy of Texas oligarch money, is worried about 15 seats.

Privately, through different consultants and data analysts, I’ve seen lists with up to 25 seats that could be vulnerable depending on how big the wave is and how much money candidates earn.

I’ve made a few of these lists myself. And every time I get an email, “But what about this candidate?” 🤷🏻‍♀️I base it on previous election data.

But another important metric is campaign finance. When Republicans flip House seats, they often do so with seven-figure election cycles. We shouldn’t expect to see that from any Democrats because they’re mostly not beholden to billionaire crooks, but if we’re 99 days out and a candidate has only raised like $300 (on either side of the aisle), that’s probably a good sign they aren’t going to win. Case in point:

What have the DCLL’s Golden 12 already pulled in?

This is based on the last finance report, which ended June 30. The next one ends September 24.

• HD34: Stephanie Guerrero Sáenz - $83,563.06

• HD37: Oziel “Ozzie” Ochoa JR - $55,814.08

• HD52: Chris Jimenez - $134,246.68

• HD61: Brittany Black - $34,965.59

• HD67: Jordan Wheatley - $41,494.79

• HD94: Katie O’Brien Duzan - $143,600.29

• HD108: Allison Mitchell - $170,208.19

• HD112: Zach Herbert - $230,915.27

• HD118: Kristian Carranza - $441,624.10

• HD121: Zack Dunn - $153,907.87

• HD133: Josh Wallenstein - $308,685.95

• HD138: Tyler Smith - $144,040

A few of these seem a little low for “golden” campaigns, but the ones that seem low all have a lot of cash on hand, either due to personal loans or low front-end spending.

What about TLR’s other three seats they were worried about, which weren’t on the golden list? (All of the above were on their list, plus these ⬇️.)

• HD20: Matthias J Early - $7,463.71

• HD55: Amelia Rabroker - $33,238.18

• HD65: Detrick Deburr - $7,077.00

A few other fundraisers, I noticed, may be pulling in higher than their weight:

• HD28: Sandy N Ibanez - $56,701.09

• HD31: Jennifer “JJ” Dominguez - $46,626.41

• HD56: Ashley Thornton - $60,326.08

• HD97: Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin - $42,161.77

• HD132: Sara McGee - $58,510.94

How much does the money part matter?

Not as much as you think, but also more than you’d like.

Taylor Rehmet won SD09 while getting outraised roughly 6.5 to 1 in the runoff cycle. He won because he had enough money, spent it on the right things, and then did the unglamorous work of actually talking to voters instead of just running ads at them. Democrats are not going to out-fundraise Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Tim Dunn, or Alex Fairly. We are never going to out-fundraise the network of whatever billionaire fascist decides this is the cycle he wants a Senate seat with his name on it.

But “you don’t need the most money” is not the same as “you don’t need money.” That’s a different sentence entirely. Sometimes they need cash.

Here’s what that cash actually buys:

Block-walking programs. Someone has to pay for the canvassing app, the printed walk lists, the gas money, and, for the campaigns that can afford it, actual paid canvassers.

Direct mail costs real money, and you’re not sending one piece. You’re sending several, timed to land right before early voting and right before Election Day.

Digital and text programs aren’t free either. Relational organizing tools, SMS platforms, targeted digital ads to reach the voters who don’t watch TV.

Staff. This is the one people forget. A field director. A comms person.

GOTV in the final two weeks, when turnout operations shift into a completely different gear, and the budget needs to be there to match it.

Now, the cost of a vote. This is the number campaigns actually live and die by. It’s raised dollars divided by the votes it actually takes to win. A candidate in a district that requires 40,000 votes to flip is playing an entirely different financial game than a candidate in a district that requires 15,000. Two campaigns can raise the same amount of money and be in wildly different positions, because one of them is trying to buy a much bigger electorate than the other.

This is why eyeballing a fundraising total doesn’t tell the whole story. $50,000 in a district you need 8,000 votes to flip is a very different story than $50,000 in a district you need 35,000 votes to flip.

Trump just set the entire oil industry on fire.

While I’m focused on elections, I know many of you have your eyes on global news, and all of us have our eyes on our pocketbooks. But Mango Mussolini wants to enrich his heirs and solidify his legacy before he burns in hell, which means escalation with Iran is almost inevitable. That also means food prices will continue to rise, and gas is likely to go back up.

Republicans are unlikely to fix anything in 99 days. In fact, they will probably make it worse.

And I’ve told you before, I can’t see the future. Although I do have a Magic8Ball, it’s not always reliable. Nobody can tell you exactly which seats flip if gas hits five dollars a gallon in October. But we do know that will be ugly for Republicans.

Affordability was already the number one issue in this cycle. Every point that inflation climbs between now and Election Day is a point in our favor, and if prices get worse than they already are, I would not be surprised to see us blow past the Golden 12 and into TLR’s list of fifteen, maybe deeper into that 25-seat list my consultant friends keep quietly passing around.

But a bad environment for Republicans just opens the door. Somebody still has to walk through it.

So how will we know which seats are actually in play, beyond the spreadsheets? Watch the same things I watch. Who’s raising money every single week? Who’s out block-walking on Saturday mornings when it’s already ninety-five degrees at 9 am? Who’s hosting fundraisers two and three times a week instead of coasting on a mailing list? Who’s got a phone bank running daily? That’s the tell. Money matters, but the candidates who win in tough districts are the ones treating every single day between now and November 3 like it’s the only one that counts.

99 days out, candidates should be busting their humps. If they’re not, that tells you everything you need to know about whether they’re serious about winning.

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Note: We only have 100 days left until the election, or 15 more weekends. From now until the election, I’ll be doing TWO Meet the Candidate episodes each weekend. A few days ago, I asked readers, “What did they want to see more of?” The number one answer was, “Democratic Candidate Spotlights.”

This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three 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 Steven Shook?

Steven Shook has spent his career keeping people alive. Since 2009, he’s worked in critical care, treating the sickest and most injured patients in the DFW metroplex. Fort Worth-born and raised, from a family of healthcare workers and small business owners (the kind of Texas biography Republicans like to cosplay), he earned degrees from Tarrant County College, Texas Tech University (summa cum laude), and UT Arlington.

He’s running for Congress in Texas’s 26th district, a seat currently held down by a dumpster fire. Shook is running on how he’s spent his whole adult life in rooms where bad policy shows up as a body on a gurney, and he’s tired of watching Congress write healthcare law like it’s an abstraction.

He calls it restoring the nation’s democracy to health. The resume behind the line is real, and in a district that’s been treated like a lost cause for a decade, real might be exactly what’s needed.

The district.

While the map above looks like this district is spread between three counties, it’s important to note that 74% of the district’s population lives in Denton County. Cooke and Wise Counties are pretty much red and rural. Denton is doing all the work for this district.

The district is 55.6% Anglo, 44.4% non-Anglo. Broken down: 20.3% Hispanic, 11.6% Black, and 10.2% Asian. Suburban Denton County cities like Flower Mound, Lewisville, and Carrollton have been diversifying for a decade while the district lines got redrawn to paper over it. Among the voting-age population, the Anglo share climbs to 58.9%, because that’s how Republicans do it. Older, whiter, more likely to already be registered.

Registration numbers tell the other half of the story. In 2024, this district had 572,023 registered voters and 388,007 of them turned out, a 67.8% turnout rate. In 2022, a midterm, turnout dropped to 52.6% of 521,227 registered voters. That’s a real midterm dropoff.

Cook Political Report has TX26 at R+11. But we’re not expecting a normal election year. Some analysts are predicting Democrats could overperform by double digits in November.

I’m not going to tell you CD26 is the marquee flip of 2026. But “not the marquee flip” and “not winnable” are different sentences, and Republicans redrew this seat because they know the difference too.

The gap between 2024’s 67.8% and 2022’s 52.6% is the whole ballgame. Democrats don’t need to invent new voters in CD26. They need the presidential-year Democrats who already live there to show up in a midterm-adjacent wave year the way they showed up in 2024. That’s an organizing issue, not a persuasion issue.

Steven Shook has to run like a Denton County candidate, not a generic Democrat. A healthcare worker with fifteen years in critical care and a Fort Worth biography is exactly the profile that plays in suburban swing turf, if the campaign runs on kitchen-table stuff, healthcare costs, property taxes, and grid reliability. Suburban Denton voters who might cross over would do so because their power bill doubled and their kid’s school district is fighting over vouchers.

The Asian and Hispanic growth in the district has to be organized. 10.2% Asian population in a suburban North Texas district is a coalition opportunity that doesn’t build itself.

A wave happens in a genuinely bad Republican midterm environment, combines with a Democratic base that turns out like it’s a presidential year instead of sitting home. If national conditions hold, TX26 is the domino that tells you the wave was real.

The incumbent.

Brandon Gill. First elected in 2024 after Michael Burgess, an insurrection supporter, retired after 22 years. Gill’s a Dartmouth guy turned investment banker turned right-wing media guy, and his father-in-law is Dinesh D’Souza, the guy who made “2000 Mules,” the documentary that told a bunch of gullible people the 2020 election was stolen using lies and conspiracy theories.

Gill is a literal walking Fox News fever dream. He introduced a bill to declare that anyone who enters the country without authorization, or is born here to a parent who did, is legally an “invader,” and to strip their kids of birthright citizenship. The bill amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to exclude the children of what it calls “invaders” from birthright citizenship.

He also introduced a 25-year moratorium on immigration from Somalia, and spent a January hearing accusing Tim Walz of enabling “widespread Somali fraud”. Then there’s the bill requiring naturalized citizens to prove English proficiency before they can become Americans.

He picked a public fight with Ilhan Omar, circulating a petition arguing the country would be better off if she were deported to Somalia. When Mehdi Hasan pushed back on him, Gill told him to “go back to the UK” and claimed Muslims are arriving “en masse” to “fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life,” later telling Newsmax that “Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States.” And when Minnesota Rep. Shri Thanedar called him out for referring to Indian Americans as “7-Eleven workers,” Gill’s response was to post a moody selfie captioned about how calling him racist “doesn’t work anymore.” Again, his wife is Indian American.

So, this is a guy who has spent his first eighteen months in office trying to redefine who gets to be American, and who counts as one, while targeting the people with the same status as his wife and in-laws.

In Steven Shook’s own words.

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

Q: Do you support a Green New Deal or similar large-scale federal climate action plan?

Yes. I support a large-scale federal climate action plan that rapidly expands clean energy, modernizes the electric grid, lowers energy costs, and creates good-paying union jobs. Texas should lead this transition, not be left behind. That means investing in wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage, transmission, and energy efficiency while ensuring that workers and communities dependent on traditional energy industries have a real place in the new economy. Climate action must be ambitious, practical, and centered on affordability, reliability, and economic opportunity.

Q: Do you support universal, publicly funded healthcare (i.e., Medicare for All or a similar single-payer system)?

Yes. I support universal, publicly funded healthcare that guarantees comprehensive coverage to every American, including hospital care, primary and specialty care, mental healthcare, and prescription drugs. As a critical care nurse practitioner, I have seen patients become sicker, disabled, or die because they could not afford treatment or medication. Healthcare should be based on medical need, not employment status, income, or an insurance company’s profit margin. I support a Medicare for All-style system that preserves patients’ freedom to choose their doctors while eliminating premiums, surprise bills, and excessive out-of-pocket costs.

Q: Would you support major tax reform, including raising taxes on billionaires and large corporations?

Yes. I support major tax reform that requires billionaires and large corporations to pay a fairer share. Working families should not carry a heavier burden while the wealthiest Americans use loopholes to avoid taxes and profitable corporations receive special treatment. I would support closing tax loopholes, strengthening enforcement against wealthy tax evasion, establishing a minimum tax on large corporate profits, and using the revenue to lower costs, protect Social Security and Medicare, and invest in healthcare, education, infrastructure, and good-paying jobs.

Q: Do you support ending U.S. military aid to countries with ongoing human rights abuses, including Israel and Egypt?

Absolutely yes. The United States should not provide military aid, weapons, or diplomatic cover to any government committing serious or ongoing human rights abuses, including Israel, Egypt, or any other ally. Our standards cannot change depending on which country is responsible.

Military assistance must be conditioned on compliance with U.S. and international law, protection of civilians, and meaningful accountability. When a government uses American weapons to enable collective punishment, unlawful killings, forced displacement, torture, or the denial of humanitarian aid, that assistance should be suspended. American tax dollars should never fund human rights abuses.

Q: Should the U.S. demilitarize the southern border and repeal harmful immigration policies?

Yes. I support demilitarizing the southern border and repealing policies that criminalize asylum seekers, separate families, deny due process, and place military forces in civilian communities. Border security should be handled by properly trained federal agencies, not the military, and enforcement must respect constitutional rights and human dignity.

We can secure the border without abandoning our values by investing in modern screening technology, adequately staffing ports of entry and immigration courts, protecting the right to seek asylum, and creating lawful pathways to citizenship. A humane, orderly immigration system will make our communities safer and our border more secure than mass detention, indiscriminate deportation, or military-style enforcement.

Bonus Question: Who are your political role models, living or dead?

My political role models include Barbara Jordan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Lewis, and Paul Wellstone. Barbara Jordan demonstrated that moral clarity, constitutional integrity, and a powerful voice could change both Texas and the nation. Roosevelt showed that government can act boldly when working people face an economic crisis. John Lewis embodied courage, dignity, and the principle that democracy requires persistent participation. Paul Wellstone proved that a progressive could stand unapologetically with workers, patients, and marginalized communities while remaining grounded and deeply connected to constituents.

I also admire the many nurses, teachers, union organizers, civil rights advocates, and local volunteers who may never hold national office but devote their lives to serving others. They remind me that public service is not about personal power, it is about using whatever power you have to improve people’s lives.

TX26 has to choose.

Your choice in TX26 is a guy who’s spent fifteen years keeping strangers alive on some of the worst nights of their lives, running on Medicare for All because he’s watched what happens when people can’t afford insulin. Or the other guy, a Dartmouth trust-fund racist who married into the “2000 Mules” family and has spent his first term in Congress trying to figure out new ways to strip citizenship from people who share his own in-law’s immigration status.

It’s close on math, because Texas Republicans drew the maps to protect fascism. R+11 sounds like a wall until you remember November may come the wave Texas Democrats have been praying on for years.

The other side of this one is Denton County’s presidential-year Democrats, the ones who showed up at 67.8% in 2024 and stayed home at 52.6% in 2022. Attendance problems get solved by somebody knocking on a door and asking a person to show up.

I’m not going to tell you Steven Shook is a lock. I’m not going to tell you a wave is guaranteed, either, no matter how many times a pundit types “double-digit overperformance” into a headline. What I will tell you is that Republicans don’t gerrymander seats they aren’t worried about.

If you live in TX26, or you know somebody who does, this is the year attendance matters more than persuasion. Show up. Bring your neighbor. Let Denton County finish the death sentence Texas Republicans have spent a decade trying to hang on our necks.

You can find out more about Steven Shook on his website, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

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Note: We only have 101 days left until the election, or 15 more weekends. From now until the election, I’ll be doing TWO Meet the Candidate episodes each weekend. A few days ago, I asked readers, “What did they want to see more of?” The number one answer was, “Democratic Candidate Spotlights.”

This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next three 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 Detrick Deburr?

He’s a software engineer, and he’s part of the last quarter century sitting in planning and zoning meetings. Planning and zoning is where decisions about how North Texas grows get made.

He’s also a father of three, grandfather of three, a member of Omega Psi Phi, and the kind of guy who writes books in his spare time. Two of them, actually. “Building Gamified Websites” in 2013, and back in 2001, “Deal Us In! How Black America Can Play and Win in the Digital Economy.”

His platform is public education funding, Medicaid expansion, and building out the social safety net. Nothing radical.

The district.

This is a Denton County seat. It’s 49.1% non-Anglo. Hispanic population’s pushing 20%, Asian population’s at nearly 16%, Black population’s at 12.5%.

It’s also rich, and it’s educated. Per capita income is $58,933 against a state average of $40,752. More than half the adult population, 53.4%, has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Statewide, that number’s 33.8%. Nearly a quarter of workers work from home.

And it’s growing fast. Total population went from 202,249 at the 2020 Census to an estimated 221,696 now. Nearly a third of the housing stock was built after 2010.

So, HD65 is the exact profile of suburb that flipped blue nationally starting in 2018 and never flipped back. Educated, diversifying, growing, allergic to chaos.

In 2024, DeBurr lost 60.3% to 39.7%. Yeah, this is his second time running. But we know that in the last election, 1.4 million Democrats stayed home, and it just sucked across the ticket.

At the top of the ticket in that same district that same year. Harris got 40.9%. Colin Allred got 43.1%. DeBurr ran behind both of them, by up to 3.4 points behind Allred specifically.

That’s a downballot drop-off problem, from name ID, from a lightly funded campaign, from voters who’ll punch Democrat for president or Senate and then just stop paying attention by the time they hit the state house row. Which means the ceiling in HD65 is already higher than DeBurr’s own 2024 number suggests. The district’s baseline Democratic lean. Closer to low-40s.

National conditions in 2026 point toward a Democratic advantage. Generic ballot polling has consistently shown Democrats ahead, with some surveys putting the margin as wide as double digits and others in the more modest mid-single digits, and Trump’s approval has been sitting in the high 30s to low 40s most of this year.

Caveat. Not everyone agrees this is a guaranteed wave. Some analysts point out the generic ballot advantage has been more stagnant month to month than the 2018 buildup was, and Republican-favorable redistricting has raised the floor on how many seats the GOP can lose even in a bad environment.

For HD65 specifically, the ingredients are there. A favorable national environment, a diversifying district, and an undersold 2024 baseline. What it needs now is a campaign that closes the gap between the top of the ticket and the state house line.

The incumbent.

Mitch Little is the guy who went viral for his interview on CNN when he was asked, “Why do this mid-district redistricting?” And he answered, “Because we can.”

Little was also one of Ken Paxton’s impeachment managers. He’s a lawyer, and a good one. An ethical one? That’s a whole other discussion.

Also, Steve Bannon campaigned for him.

In Detrick DeBurr’s own words.

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

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

I support raising the minimum wage to at least $15 per hour. However, $15 may not be enough for many Texas families. According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, each adult in a Texas family with two working adults and two children needs to earn about $24.45 per hour to pay for basic needs.

Living costs are different across Texas. Housing, food, childcare, and transportation often cost more in cities like Austin, Dallas, Houston, and Fort Worth than in rural towns. Because of this, one wage may not work for every community.

I propose the **Texas Local Living Wage Act**. This law would allow cities to set their own minimum wages based on local costs. Each city would study the cost of basic needs before setting its wage. The law would also change current Texas rules that limit the power of cities to set local minimum wages.

After setting its wage, each city would adjust it once a year based on the **Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W)**. This index measures how prices change over time.

The wage could increase by no more than 3% each year. It would never decrease, even if prices went down. If inflation rose above 3%, the extra amount could be added in a later year. This would help workers keep up with rising prices while protecting businesses from sudden cost increases.

Businesses with fewer than 50 workers could slowly raise their wages over six years. They would follow a clear schedule during that time. This would give small businesses more time to plan for higher labor costs.

This plan would give local communities more control over wages. It would also help workers pay for basic needs while giving businesses time to prepare.

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

I oppose using public money to pay for private education because it may weaken public schools over time. The Texas Constitution says the state must support a strong system of free public schools. Giving public money to private schools makes it harder for the state to meet this duty.

Texas public schools receive much of their funding based on student attendance. Voucher programs may encourage families to leave public schools. When students leave, public schools may lose money. However, many of their costs do not go away. Schools must still pay for teachers, buildings, buses, safety, and special programs.

Private schools do not always follow the same rules as public schools. They may choose which students to accept. They may not provide the same services for students with disabilities. They also may not have the same rules for sharing information about their money, policies, and results.

Vouchers may not give every family an equal choice. Some private schools charge more than the voucher pays. Families may also face transportation costs. In some areas, there may not be a private school nearby. Some schools may refuse to accept certain students. Wealthier families are often better able to handle these barriers.

Texas should show that vouchers help students without hurting public schools. The state should study who uses vouchers, which schools receive the money, how students perform, and how the program affects public schools. Until the state can prove that the program works fairly, new education money should go toward improving public schools that serve every child.

Q: Should higher education in Texas be free or debt-free at public institutions?

Texas should stop arguing and start fixing college costs.

Our state Constitution says Texas must support public education. People may disagree about whether that means free college by law. That debate can continue. But families need help now.

Today, a high school diploma is often not enough to get a good-paying job. Many jobs need more training after high school. That training can be a certificate, an apprenticeship, a two-year degree, or a four-year degree.

So Texas should make sure every student has a low-cost path to career training. A good first step is free community college for students who need help most. We should also support job training programs and apprenticeships that lead to real jobs.

Some people worry about cost. That is fair. But we can build a smart plan:

- Focus money on students with financial need
- Fund programs that lead to in-demand jobs
- Track results, like graduation and job placement
- Make schools show where money goes

This is not about giving everyone the same path. It is about giving everyone a fair chance.

Texas has always believed in public education. In today’s economy, that should include affordable training after high school. The big question is not _if_ we should do this. The big question is _how fast_ we can do it well.

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

All K–12 students should get free breakfast and lunch at school. Summer meals should also be offered in communities where many families have trouble buying enough food. This is important because kids learn better when they are not hungry.

Research shows that hunger can hurt focus, attendance, behavior, and grades. When students do not get enough to eat, it is harder for them to pay attention and do their best work. Free meals for all students help schools make sure every child is ready to learn each day.

Programs that only help some students can miss kids who still need support. Families may miss forms, move during the year, or earn just a little too much to qualify but still struggle. Universal meals also reduce embarrassment, because everyone eats the same way and no one is singled out.

A smart plan can pay for this by using federal meal money, state funding, and local support for kitchen staff and equipment. Schools may also save time and money by cutting paperwork and unpaid meal debt. Some people say free meals should only go to low-income students, but universal meals are simpler, fairer, and make sure no child is left hungry at school.

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, I support moving state funding away from fossil fuels and using it for community-owned solar, wind, and battery projects. Texas must get ready for its growing energy needs. Our current plans are not enough. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.

Public money should help the public. It should create local jobs, make the power grid stronger, lower energy bills, and support Texas communities. For many years, Texas has given support to large companies, especially oil and gas companies. It is time to rethink this plan and invest in the clean energy and battery storage we will need in the future.

Community-owned projects would make sure that local people share in the benefits. They would help Texas meet its energy needs while building a power system that is more reliable, affordable, and fair.

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

Being a Democrat today means standing up for working people. That means caring about things families deal with every day, like fair pay, affordable homes, health care, and stable jobs.

Democrats also care about people’s rights—like the right to vote, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and equal treatment for everyone. Democrats may not agree on every issue, but they agree that people should be free to live their lives, as long as they do not hurt others.

Being a Democrat means wanting a government that works well, is fair, and helps people. It means fighting corruption and trying to do the most good for the most people.

HD65 is waiting for a correction.

Whether Deburr gets the resources to close the gap between Allred’s number and his own is on the rest of us. With a favorable national environment, a candidate like Mitch Little, and a higher previous baseline at the top of the ticket, Deburr has an opportunity to flip this district.

Also worth noting, earlier this year, Deburr received the Texas Progressive Caucus’ endorsement.

If you’re in Denton County, or you know somebody who is, share this. That’s the whole ballgame in a district like this.

You can learn more about Detrick Deburr on his website, Facebook, and Instagram.

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• 101 days until the November election!

• Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:

• 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.

What do you want to see more of?

November 4, 1960, four days before the election that would decide the country. Lyndon B. Johnson’s motorcade rolled toward the Baker Hotel in downtown Dallas, and a Dallas police officer pulled the car over first, to warn him.

“There’s a little disturbance waiting for you at the hotel,” the officer said.

The disturbance was three hundred women in red, white, and blue. Junior League types, mostly. They’d spent the morning handing out Nixon-Lodge literature to the lunch crowd. By the time Johnson’s car turned onto the block, they were a mob, and they had placards, and the placards had been sitting in the Baker Hotel overnight, stored there by the local congressman who organized the whole thing.

His name was Bruce Alger. And Alger’s legacy outlasted him by fifty years.

Lady Bird Johnson stepped out of the car and a woman reached in and snatched the gloves off her hands and threw them in the gutter. The crowd cheered. Someone screamed “Judas.” Someone else screamed “traitor.” The signs said LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS and JUDAS JOHNSON: TURNCOAT TEXAN.

It took the Johnsons thirty minutes to cross a lobby.

By the time it was over, a Nixon supporter would say the whole stunt had set the Texas Republican Party back twenty years. Of course, in 1960, Bruce Alger was the ONLY Republican in the entire Texas congressional delegation. In fact, Texas was a Conservative Democratic state after the end of Reconstruction, and Alger became the first Republican sworn in after roughly 80 years of no Republicans in office.

But Bruce Alger’s stunt didn’t cost the Republican Party Texas. Bruce Alger built the Texas Republican Party, and everything that came after it. Alger was part of the blueprint.

In May, we discussed some of the early Republican extremism that ran through a Baptist pulpit two miles from that hotel.

This is a continuation of that story, of early Republican extremism in Texas, and the birth of modern day fascism in America.

The Baker Hotel was consistent with a man who spent ten years in Congress proving that the mob outside the hotel was his platform.

Start with the school lunch program. In 1958, Congress voted to subsidize meals for hungry schoolkids. Every member of the House supported it except one. Bruce Alger cast the lone vote against feeding children, on the grounds that it should be a local matter, not a federal one. He said it with a straight face, and he said it as if it made him a man of principle.

That “principle” ran through everything. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and against the 24th Amendment, the one that outlawed poll taxes. He didn’t sign the Southern Manifesto in 1956, so technically he can’t be filed next to Strom Thurmond on that one document. It didn’t matter. His votes did the same work, he just skipped the theater of putting his name on a joint statement with segregationist Democrats and let his record speak for itself.

After Kennedy was killed in his own city, while the country was still in mourning and Congress was debating the Civil Rights Act as a memorial to the president Dallas had just watched die, Alger wrote a column for the Congressional Record arguing the bill shouldn’t pass out of “emotional appeal,” and that civil rights had “mainly” been “an instrument” for politicians chasing Black votes. Three weeks after a sniper killed the president in HIS district, Bruce Alger’s public response to the moment was to complain that civil rights legislation was a scam.

He also introduced a bill to pull the United States out of the United Nations entirely, voted with his own party’s president, Eisenhower, only 9% of the time because even Eisenhower was too liberal for him, and missed votes at nearly three times the rate of his colleagues. The Washington press corps ranked him the second least effective member of the entire House. “My ignorance of politics,” he liked to say, “couldn’t be matched by anybody in politics.”

Alger sold contempt, contempt for government, for compromise, for the idea that a congressman’s job was to actually do something other than stand in front of a camera and refuse. Alger was everything the modern Republican congressman is, sixty-five years early.

Congressman Alger wasn’t a lone actor.

One congressman screaming into a microphone backed by a 12,000-member church, the state's most powerful newspaper, and one of the richest oilmen in America is a movement.

The Dallas Morning News was run by EM “Ted” Dealey, and under Dealey it became the most reliably paranoid daily paper in the country. He called the Supreme Court the “Judicial Kremlin.” He called Kennedy a crook, a Communist sympathizer, and “fifty times a fool,” in print, before Kennedy had done a single thing to Texas. Every morning, Dallas woke up and read that its own president was a child playing dress-up.

The Dallas Morning News still, to this day, leans right.

Two miles from the Baker Hotel, WA Criswell was running the same operation from the pulpit. In 1960, the same year Alger’s mob went after Lady Bird Johnson’s gloves, Criswell told his congregation that electing a Catholic president would mean the end of religious freedom in America. He later told reporters, that Catholics should never hold higher office. Historian Edward H. Miller said in the Washington Post: Alger “sought to amplify and capitalize on the pronouncements of those like Daley and Criswell.”

And bankrolling the whole ecosystem was HL Hunt, a First Baptist Dallas parishioner and Criswell’s personal friend, pouring oil money into the John Birch Society chapter that made Dallas the Birchers’ largest and best-funded outpost in the country. That chapter’s most famous recruit was retired Major General Edwin Walker, who’d been relieved of his NATO command for handing his troops Birch Society literature and came home to Dallas.

The same Dallas housewives who loved Alger loved Walker too. They made him a local celebrity. A local celebrity important enough that an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald decided, in March of 1963, that Walker deserved to die, and put a rifle round through his window. Walker survived.

When UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson came to Dallas to speak, he walked into an auditorium full of Walker’s people, who greeted him with Halloween noisemakers, Confederate flags, and a man screaming that Stevenson’s heart would “stop, stop, stop, and he will burn, burn, burn.” When Stevenson tried to leave, a woman hit him over the head with a picket sign.

Alger’s response to the fallout was to insist Dallas had nothing to apologize for, that the protesters had only proven the city was “proud, courageous, and truly the home of the brave.”

Twenty-nine days later, Kennedy was dead in the same city, shot from a building six blocks from where Stevenson had been assaulted, by a man who had already tried to kill Walker and had been marinating for years in the exact stew Alger, Criswell, Dealey, and Hunt had spent a decade building.

That’s the part Dallas never wanted to sit with. That an entire city had spent a decade building the pressure that made pulling it feel, to somebody, like patriotism.

The world decided Dallas killed Kennedy.

As a third generation Dallasite, this is something I’ve thought a lot about in terms of Dallas history. All of the older people in my family have their own Kennedy-related stories. A distant cousin of mine (now dead), has footage he took that day in the Sixth Floor Museum. One of my grandmothers used to work with Jack Ruby (she was a bar owner). I think that everyone who had family in Dallas at the time has some story.

But when Kennedy was killed, Dallas didn’t look in the mirror, and decide to become a better place politically, they kept on for more than a decade, embracing extremism. Nixon came calling, campaigning for Alger’s reelection and telling a rally of three thousand cheering Dallas Republicans he had “a hunch” they’d send their congressman back to Washington.

Alger himself finally lost in 1964, swept out in the same landslide that also took down Ed Foreman, the only other Republican in the entire Texas delegation. For a minute, it looked like the whole experiment had burned itself out along with the mink coats and the picket signs.

It hadn’t. It had just gone quiet, just for a little while.

Because the thing about Criswell’s pulpit, Dealey’s press, and Hunt’s money is that none of it needed Bruce Alger personally. Criswell kept building. By the early 1970s he had Nixon at the White House by his own invitation and a stated goal, in his own words, of winning America through the church. His hand-picked successors, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, took that goal national in 1979 when they engineered a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention itself.

And in 1980, twenty years after the Baker Hotel, the same city hosted the moment the whole strategy finally said the quiet part out loud. I’ve told you about it before. Paul Weyrich, standing in front of fifteen thousand preachers in Dallas, telling them flat out that he didn’t want everybody to vote, that his leverage “quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

And the men running Texas today are still working from them. The Washington Post put it in five names: “Alger’s progeny dominate the Texas GOP.” Louie Gohmert. Chip Roy. Dan Patrick. Ken Paxton. Same style. Same contempt for anyone who tells them to tone it down. Same conviction that the only real Texans are the ones who already agree with them.

Bruce Alger didn’t get a statue. He got an entire political party built in his image, running the state sixty years after Dallas voters finally threw him out of office.

If it can be built here, it can be broken here too. But first we have to admit it was built at all.

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Earlier this week, James Talarico held several town halls in the Black community. Before his town hall in Houston, he was the surprise guest speaker at Letitia Plummer’s event, where he endorsed her and vowed to support her. One of the things that Talarico has promised is $25 million in Black voter outreach across the state.

What I would like to see is a good chunk of that invested in joint organizing with Letitia Plummer to turn out the vote in Harris County. Nearly 25% of Texas’ Black population lives in Harris County. If the Talarico campaign invests heavily in turning out the vote there, that will be beneficial not only for him, but also for Letitia Plummer. And we really want Letitia Plummer to win Harris County.

We really need Harris County to hit 2018 levels, with a turnout of between 750,000 and 850,000 Democratic votes. This is the biggest Democratic county in the state, and if they can hit those numbers, we can hand Talarico and Plummer a win, but we also have four Texas House seats (HD127, HD132, HD133, and HD138) and one Congressional seat (TX09) that may be flipped.

Yeah, Harris County is a big deal, but it isn’t the only puzzle piece for November.

The Hispanic vote’s wide swing left.

In March, something happened along the Rio Grande. Democratic primary turnout in Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, and Willacy counties more than doubled from 2024. The share of registered Democrats who actually bothered to vote beat 2018. It beat 2020. It beat every comparable midterm we’ve got on the books.

Hidalgo County: 61,480 Democratic primary voters, a 114% increase over the last comparable cycle. Cameron County: Democratic early voting more than doubled, 22,317 ballots versus 8,561 Republican. Starr and Hidalgo posted the two biggest turnout jumps of any counties in the entire state, 67% and 51%, relative to their 2020-2022-2024 average. A full third of Latino early voters hadn’t shown up for a primary in years. They showed up this time.

Talarico’s been building relationships in the Valley since December, when he and Tejano star Bobby Pulido held a joint rally in Weslaco and cross-endorsed each other. That was already his second Valley trip since launching his Senate bid. In February, Talarico, Pulido, and Gina Hinojosa packed the ACE Center in Edinburg, Pulido’s hometown, and Pulido told the crowd, “If we’re going to win, we have to talk to people that voted Republican. They’re not our enemies.” This month, Talarico ran a 750-mile “Frontera Tour” from El Paso to the Valley, stopping in Laredo for a tariffs conference, a town hall, and a school supply drive.

Paxton, for what it’s worth, rallied in McAllen that same week. Only about 100 people showed up.

A UnidosUS poll has Texas Hispanic voters backing Democrats 54 to 28 if the election were held today. National polling from Axios has Latino voters favoring the generic Democratic House candidate 54 to 27, with immigration enforcement now their second biggest issue, right behind the economy. And here’s my favorite number in this whole section, the DCCC’s own internal memo, the one analyzing why Republicans redrew five congressional seats around a Latino rightward swing that was supposedly permanent, now calls that entire mid-decade gerrymander “a misguided and failed effort.”

A dummymander, just like I’ve been saying all along.

I predict Bobby Pulido will flip this district (TX15). Republicans also think they’re going to pick up TX34 (Vicente Gonzalez) and TX35 (Johnny Garcia), but I’m also predicting Democrats hold on to those districts as well. My mode of prediction is my Magic8ball, obviously, since I can’t see the future.

The Republicans drew the maps really stupidly.

We talked about this a lot last year, and I’m glad we’re finally getting closer to the chickens coming home to roost. Because what they did with their racist gerrymandering was try to eliminate Black political power in favor of more Hispanic districts that swung for Trump in 2024. But instead of basing it on census numbers, they based it on Trump’s election data. 😂 And now that the Hispanic vote is swinging back left, they’ll have wound up shooting themselves in the foot.

Republicans got exactly the map they wanted. Every seat they carved out, every line they drew based on Trump’s 2024 Hispanic numbers, and it’s still not going to save them. You can gerrymander a district. You cannot gerrymander a voter’s mind two years later when ICE shows up in their cousin’s neighborhood.

Now let’s talk about what it actually takes to flip anything.

Texas House: Democrats need 76 of 150 seats for a majority. That’s 14 seats Democrats need to net.

Which brings me to the DLCC, who showed up to the party for the first time in years with $50 million and a target list of 12 Texas House seats. I appreciate the enthusiasm. I really do. But their own math, by their own list, only gets Republicans down to a 76-74 margin. That’s not a majority. That’s a nicer minority. And three of the seats on that list are on defense, not offense.

So if the national money is only bringing a 12-seat plan to a 14-seat fight, guess who has to make up the other two. Us. The county parties. The precinct chairs. The people actually knocking doors instead of running spreadsheets in DC.

State Senate is not happening this cycle. Democrats need 16 of 31 seats for control, and we are nowhere close. What we’ve got is a chance to chip away, SD2 chief among them, the seat running through Dallas, Rockwall, and Kaufman.

Congress is the one where the gerrymander cuts both ways. Texas has 38 seats. Republicans currently hold 25 of them, and the whole point of the 2025 mid-decade redraw was to hand them 30. Five more seats, a cushion for the US House majority. However, don’t expect to see that happen this year.

Abbott vs. Hinojosa.

This race matters more than the US Senate race (in my opinion), but it’s going to be a much harder climb. The polling is a mess, and I mean that as a compliment to Hinojosa. NYT/Siena had Abbott up 51 to 44 on June 30th. Three weeks earlier, UT’s Texas Politics Project had it 47 to 40. The RealClearPolitics average sits at Abbott plus 6.8, 49 to 42.

Meanwhile, a Texas Public Opinion Research poll back in April had it 48 to 43. Hinojosa’s own campaign put out an internal in February claiming a 3-point race. Take it with the grain of salt it deserves.

But here’s the number that actually made me sit up. In March, Public Policy Polling found Abbott and Hinojosa tied 48-48 in TX23. Trump carried that district by 15 points in 2024. Fifteen. If a Republican governor is drawing dead even in a seat Trump won by double digits less than two years ago, that’s floor-cracking.

Now the part that should worry you if you’re the type who worries. Abbott is currently sitting at $71 million as of this month. Hinojosa raised about $8.5 million so far.

The question is whether it’s finally enough to break a streak that has survived Beto, survived Wendy Davis, survived every Democrat who’s ever told you this was the year. I’m not going to promise you it’s different this time. I’m going to show you the numbers and let you decide for yourself.

Here’s the number.

In 2024, Republicans turned out 6,393,597 votes in Texas. Their best ever. In 2020, Democrats turned out 5,259,126. Their best ever too. Those are presidential-year numbers, and 2026 isn’t a presidential year, so neither one is the target. But they tell you the ceiling on each side, and that matters.

Midterms are a different animal. Turnout drops for everybody. In 2018, the best midterm Democrats have ever had in this state, Beto pulled 4,045,632 votes and still lost by 215,000. In 2022, a rougher cycle, Beto got 3,546,615 running for governor and lost by nearly 900,000. That’s the real range we’re working with. Not presidential turnout. Midterm turnout.

So here’s the math. Texas has 18.6 million registered voters right now, up from 15.8 million in 2018. That’s 18% growth in the voter rolls in eight years. If Democrats simply matched their 2018 turnout rate, the same level of participation, on today’s bigger voter file, that alone gets you to roughly 4.7 million votes.

And here’s why that number might actually be enough this year, in a way it wasn’t in 2018. Paxton is polling under 50% against his own party’s preferred candidate for the Senate seat. Abbott’s margin has been shrinking in poll after poll. The primary turnout we’ve already seen, record-breaking across the state, doubled in the Rio Grande Valley, up 88% in Bexar County early voting, tells you Republican enthusiasm isn’t showing up the way it did in 2024. If the GOP comes in anywhere near their 2018 or 2022 floor, somewhere around 4.3 to 4.6 million, then 4.7 million doesn’t just close the gap. It wins the race outright.

That’s the number Talarico and Hinojosa need statewide. 4.7 million. I might even say 5 million to be safe.

Now watch how fast the math gets local. Harris County alone, at 2018 levels, delivers 750,000 to 850,000 of those votes. That’s somewhere between 16 and 18 percent of the entire statewide win number sitting in one county. Add Dallas, which delivered 511,027 votes for Harris in 2024 and represents about 10% of all Texas Democrats. Add Tarrant, which is 7.96% of the statewide Democratic base and just proved in a special election that it can outperform its own recent history by 50 points in the right precincts. Add Bexar, which just posted 88% higher primary turnout than the last midterm. You start stacking up the four biggest counties in this state, and you are most of the way to 4.7 million before you’ve even gotten to the Valley, before you’ve counted a single vote out of Travis, before Black voter outreach money has even fully hit the ground in East Texas.

This is arithmetic. The counties know their number. Now they just have to hit it.

That’s the whole ballgame.

A number that’s smaller than what Republicans already proved they can turn out in a good year, and smaller than what Democrats proved they could turn out in 2020. We’re not asking Texas to do something it’s never done.

Harris County gets you 750,000 to 850,000 of it, and that number gets a lot easier to hit if Talarico’s $25 million in Black voter outreach actually lands where it needs to land, which is arm in arm with Letitia Plummer. Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar stack another enormous chunk on top of that before you’ve left the four biggest counties in Texas. And then there’s the part of this map Republicans handed us themselves. The Rio Grande Valley has done a complete 180. Hidalgo up 114%. Cameron more than doubling Republican turnout. Starr and Hidalgo posting the two biggest jumps in the entire state.

Republicans spent 2025 racially gerrymandering a map off Trump’s 2024 numbers, like a guy betting his whole paycheck on a horse because it won last Tuesday. The dummymander is going to hand Bobby Pulido a congressional seat in a district Republicans built specifically to prevent that from happening, among other seats, including TX35, TX34, and TX09 (maybe).

Abbott still has more money than some small countries. No Democrat has won a governor’s race in this state since Ann Richards, and that streak doesn’t care how good our polling looks in July. The DLCC’s own list only gets us to 76-74 in the House, not a majority, which means the last two seats are on us. Precincts across Harris, Dallas, and Tarrant are still sitting empty, waiting for someone whose actual job it is to knock on the next door over. Talarico still has real work to do with Black voters after the primary.

But here’s what I know for certain. The people writing Texas off as a lost cause haven’t done the math. I just did it for you. Every county has its number.

Texas doesn’t flip because of a poll. It flips because neighbors talk to neighbors until the people writing the laws finally look like the people living under them.

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This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next four 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 Diana Luna?

Diana Luna is Abilene-born and raised. When she and her family finally had enough saved to buy a house, she picked one inside AISD boundaries on purpose. She’s a product of these public schools, and she wanted her kids to be too.

She’s spent almost twenty years working in nonprofits, running programs, supervising them, auditing them, a lot of it funded by the same government dollars Austin loves to threaten and claw back. She’s seen up close what bad policy does to people. She’s been organizing locally for years, Liberal Moms of Abilene, the Taylor County Democratic Party, wherever there was work to do.

The district.

Okay, HD71 is basically just Abilene, and then a bunch of ranch lands around it. This is an older district. Almost 16% of the people here are over the age of 65, higher than the state’s average. This means there are a lot of people who have spent their lives paying into Social Security and are watching Austin figure out how to make that money stretch less every year. Over 30% of households here draw Social Security income, also well above the state average.

It’s whiter than the state, 61% Anglo compared to 39% statewide, but the Hispanic population is real and growing, a quarter of the district. Almost 38% of the voting-age population is non-Anglo.

Money is tight here. Per capita income is $7,000 lower than the state average. Nearly 15% of the district lives in poverty. Bachelor’s degree attainment sits at 25.8%, well under the state’s 33.8%. This is a working district. Retail trade, healthcare, education, and social assistance are the biggest employers, accounting for almost 28% of the workforce. Government jobs employ 16.3% of the district, above the state average, which tells you something about how many people here depend on the check Austin decides whether or not to send.

Now we have to be straight about the numbers. In 2024, Trump took HD71 with 77.1% of the vote. Harris got 21.9%. Cruz beat Allred 74.2% to 23.6%. And in the actual State House race, the one that matters most for this conversation, Republican Stan Lambert won 81% to 19% against the Democrat, who pulled just 13,678 votes district-wide.

Turnout was 62.4% in a presidential year.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you HD71 flips this cycle, because it won’t, and if I told you otherwise I’d be lying.

This is roughly a R+55 district on presidential numbers. A wave election in Texas this year might move margins five, eight, maybe ten points in the best Democratic environments we’ve seen this century. That is not a bridge from 19% to 50%. We usually don’t flip a district by 30 points in one cycle, wave or no wave, and anybody who tells a first-time candidate otherwise is setting her up to get her heart broken in November.

Here’s what a serious HD71 campaign actually does this cycle. Registering the roughly 40% of eligible non-Anglo voters who may not currently be on the rolls, because SSVR in this district is under 16% of registered voters against a Hispanic population share of 25%. That gap is the campaign. That gap is bigger than any single election.

It means running up the number from 13,678. Diana Luna doesn’t need to beat Republicans this year. She needs to double or triple the Democratic vote total from the last cycle, prove there’s a bench of volunteers and donors and infrastructure in Abilene that didn’t exist before, and make the next Democrat who runs here start from a real number.

It means talking directly to the 30% of households living on Social Security about what happens when Republicans in Austin keep starving public services those households rely on.

And it means being honest with the base you’re building that this might be a multi-cycle project.

The Republican.

Stan Lambert, the incumbent, is retiring. The Republican who has been nominated to run in his place is Jay Hardaway. And, woooo, he is really out there.

Hardaway is Jodey Arrington’s previous district director, and he’s an ultra-religious, fundamentalist nutjob. He wants to prioritize, in the Legislature, shoving his religion down our throats and forcing women to have lots of babies.

In Diana Luna’s own words.

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

Q: Should higher education in Texas be free or debt-free at public institutions?

Yes, in my lifetime, higher education has gone up in cost almost 30%, while it hasn’t gotten better, and more graduates are leaving school underemployed or unemployed, if they can afford to graduate at all.

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

Yes, I was a free lunch kid, and I know firsthand what going to school hungry feels like.

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

Yes, no billion-dollar industry should require the taxpayer to bail them out.

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?

I fully support moving non-violent crime to mental health, job readiness, and youth programs. In many cases, it’s the state and community that have failed people. I believe there is a solution where the thousands of staff that currently work with these inmates don’t lose their jobs but can be retrained and skilled.

Q: Should local police be barred from enforcing federal immigration law?

Yes. I have worked in refugee resettlement, and one of the most eye-opening parts of that job was how little law enforcement knew about immigration and enforcement.

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

I am out in my community. There’s an old saying that goes, “Why do you rob a bank? Because that’s where the money is.” So how do you engage people? You go where the people are and engage with them.

So that’s Diana Luna.

A free lunch kid who grew up to audit the programs that used to feed kids like her. A nonprofit lifer who knows exactly what happens when Austin decides a line item isn’t worth funding anymore. A woman who said no to running for office more than once before she finally said yes.

And on the other side, Jay Hardaway. A former congressional staffer turned fundamentalist true believer, running to make sure the state has more say over women’s bodies and less say over what oil and gas companies dump in the water.

Elections are about who shows up, who gets registered, who decides their vote actually means something for the first time. Every vote Luna pulls above 13,678 is a brick in a wall somebody else gets to build on. Every door she knocks on is a household that now knows a Democrat cared enough to show up in a district the party wrote off years ago.

Diana Luna isn’t asking Abilene for a miracle. She’s asking for a real number, and the dignity of being taken seriously in a district nobody bothers to visit.

That’s worth paying attention to, wave or no wave.

You can find out more about Diana Luna on her website, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

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Several people in Williamson County have received the notice above, with a few reporting on Facebook that they have never been arrested or convicted of a crime. It would seem that enough of these notifications have gone out that the Williamson County Elections Department has posted this to their social media:

Unsurprisingly, the comment section underneath this post has blown up, prompting the Williamson County Elections Department to change its settings regarding who can comment. It has also led the League of Women Voters of Williamson County to put out a statement (we’ll get to that in a moment).

In the comments, the WilCo ED cited this memo and told people they “were just following state law.”

Advisory 2024-18 is a memo the Secretary of State’s Elections Division sent to county registrars in June 2024, over the signature of Director of Elections Christina Worrell Adkins, reminding them that the National Voter Registration Act, which imposes a 90-day quiet period before federal elections, during which counties can’t run mass eligibility purges, except for a few carve-outs.

That 90-day period starts on August 5, exactly three weeks after the WilCo ED notified the public that it was conducting “list maintenance.”

Also, this memo was written for a moratorium calendar that doesn’t apply to July 2026. The advisory tells you WilCo is allowed to do this. It does not tell you why they’re doing it now, at this volume, off a matching system not precise enough to keep from mailing felony accusations to people who’ve never been arrested.

Who is running Williamson County Elections?

The person signing off on this whole operation is Bridgette Escobedo, WilCo’s Elections Administrator. The Williamson County Elections Commission hired her.

But here’s the thing about the “nonpartisan election administrator,” under Texas law, the Elections Commission that hires her is chaired by the county judge, and includes the county clerk, the tax assessor-collector, and the chairs of both political parties that cleared 5% of the vote in the last governor’s race. Both parties get a seat at that table. Only one has the majority and the gavel.

The county clerk is a Republican (per WilCo GOP). The tax assessor-collector is a Republican (per WilCo GOP). However, he is being replaced next week. This is an appointed position by the majority Republican Commissioners’ Court.

And Williamson County’s county judge situation right now is its own small chaos story. Bill Gravell, Republican, has held the seat since 2019, won re-election in 2022, and in March 2025 resigned mid-term to work for the Trump administration as the Small Business Administration’s Region 6 advocate. The Commissioners Court, itself Republican-controlled, replaced him in a split 3-1 vote with Steven Snell, the former Liberty Hill ISD superintendent, who has exactly zero electoral mandate from Williamson County voters and will serve as an appointee until he either runs or gets replaced in November.

So, the WilCo Elections Commission (R), which appointed the Elections Administrator is mailing perhaps tens of thousands of Williamson County residents letters threatening their voter registration over a data-matching process even they can’t clearly explain, and they answer to a county judge who’s never faced Williamson County voters for this specific term, appointed by a commissioners court that is entirely Republican, in a county whose top elected leadership just vacated its most powerful seat to go work for Donald Trump.

The actual law behind this was passed last legislative session.

Senate Bill 510, authored by Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-SD07). It builds on a 2021 law, SB 1113, which allows the Secretary of State to withhold state election funding from a county registrar who drags their feet in canceling a voter’s registration after a notice of examination is sent. SB 510 widened that. Now the SOS can pull funding from a county if the registrar is slow in approving, changing, or scheduling hearings, in making challenge determinations, or in delivering a notice in the first place. Not just cancellations. Anything.

Williamson County has a financial incentive to move fast on this. A budget one. Sit on your list-maintenance dashboard too long, and the state starts holding back your Chapter 19 funds.

However, this is the first county we’ve heard of using this law to the extent that it’s prompted statements from both the local Elections Department and the League of Women Voters.

Is it possible, that WilCo is taking this law to the extreme? Or that other counties have remained quiet on it? Or that mainstream media has chosen to ignore (again)?

Bettencourt has made a career out of this particular flavor of “election integrity.” He ran Harris County’s tax office, moved to the Senate, and has spent the better part of a decade building the legal architecture for county-level oversight and enforcement, most recently going after Harris County again this spring over voter address issues under a law he also wrote.

A two-year-old advisory memo states that WilCo can run these matches at any time. A one-year-old funding law says WilCo better run them fast or lose money. And nothing on the books says WilCo has to run them accurately, or explain the matching process.

Of course, it’s more Republican voter suppression working as intended.

What to do if you get one of these.

If you receive a Notice of Examination in your mailbox, you have 30 days from the date the notice was mailed to respond, or your registration will be canceled automatically.

First, call your county elections department directly and verify the notice is real. Scams piggyback on exactly this kind of confusion, and county offices can confirm whether they actually sent it and walk you through what documentation they need. In Williamson County, that’s 512-943-1630. (In another county, you have to look it up.)

Second, if you believe the notice was sent to you in error, and if you’ve never had a felony conviction, this is squarely an error. Respond in writing before the deadline with whatever proof applies to your situation, and keep a copy of everything you send. Certified mail if you can swing it. Don’t take “I dropped it off” on faith with a government office that’s currently mailing felony accusations to people with clean records.

Third, if you think this happened to you in error, or if something about how or why you got flagged smells off, call the non-partisan Election Protection Hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683, or 888-VE-Y-VOTA en español). The Texas Civil Rights Project staffs them, along with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and they exist specifically to address wrongful purges, intimidation, and barriers to registration. They can also help you figure out whether this is a pattern worth escalating, rather than just a one-off clerical mistake.

You can also file a formal complaint directly with the Secretary of State’s Elections Division. They have a complaint form on their website, and yes, the irony of filing a complaint about a process that cited the SOS’s own guidance memo is not lost on me. File it anyway. That’s how these things end up getting audited.

Do not assume this will sort itself out. Do not assume the county will catch its own mistake. The burden, as written, is on you to prove you’re not a felon, not on Williamson County to prove that you are.

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Note: Sometimes spelling errors happen. 🤦🏻‍♀️

According to the Quorum Report, this week, new acting Comptroller Don Huffines has ousted a 40-year senior employee and will further judge staff on whether they’re sufficiently Christian.

The only problem is that Don Huffines can’t judge the Comptroller’s office staff on their Christianity. Because:

1. That’s still against federal law. (Unless the GOP is pushing for a case they can angle up to the Supreme Court.)

2. According to Huffines’ own bible, it says, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Which means, basically, saying you’re a good Christian doesn’t make you one. It’s more important what you do.

In February, records surfaced showing Huffines’ family had secretly bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico back in 2023. Through a shell LLC formed a month before the purchase, on land whose ownership only came out because somebody renamed a road and fought a property tax bill.

Why is Huffines buying real estate through a shell LLC if he’s got nothing to hide?

A few days before that story broke, Turning Point Action endorsed Huffines for Comptroller. TPUSA has long been known for its overt white supremacy. It’s worth also noting that Huffines’ son, Russell, works in coordination roles in the Trump White House’s Office of Cabinet Affairs. The same office would be helping prep Attorney General Pam Bondi for the House hearings where she’s been stonewalling questions about the Epstein files.

Here’s the one I can’t get past. Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch was infrastructure. A place built to move powerful men in and out quietly, with an airstrip and a hangar and a phone book full of the kind of names that don’t answer subpoenas.

Why would a wealthy Texas businessman with his own deep political connections want to own that? Why buy it secretly? Why fight to keep the sale quiet instead of announcing it, the way developers usually announce everything?

I don’t know the answer. I’m just asking the question Huffines hasn’t yet answered.

But, to be clear, buying a secret pedophile ranch wasn’t the first un-Christian thing Huffines has ever done.

Back in 2022, when Huffines ran against Abbott for governor, he had a field staffer named Jake Lloyd Colglazier. On his own YouTube channel, Colglazier said he wanted America to keep a white “supermajority” and “homogeneity.” He said the actual words. He also ran a chatroom where members called for “death to all minorities.” He said he “spit on George Floyd.” He mocked an Asian woman with a line so ugly about her getting beaten by her husband that I won’t even paraphrase it.

Huffines knew all of this. Reporters asked him directly if he’d fire the guy. He wouldn’t. His statement, “My campaign will not participate in cancel culture.”

Huffines knew his staffer was a white supremacist and chose to keep him employed anyway. He was asked, point-blank, multiple times, whether he condemned white nationalism. He never did it. Not once.

To this day, Don Huffines has still not condemned white nationalism.

Then there’s the ad campaign. Huffines ran on “invasion” rhetoric, the border as an invading horde, the same word choice used by the shooter who walked into an El Paso Walmart in 2019 and murdered 23 people, because he said Texas was being invaded. The Texas Democratic Party called it out directly.

This was racist. Not “racially charged.” Not “controversial.” Racist. Period. A white supremacist was kept on staff, on purpose. Rhetoric lifted straight from a mass shooter’s justification for killing Texans, run in paid media, on purpose.

Don Huffines is a so-called Christian who can’t condemn white nationalism, wants to grade his own staff’s faith, and is about to control the checkbook for a state where 62% of the population is non-white.

Huffines is like most Republicans whose political careers began in the Texas Legislature.

Don Huffines and his brothers were born into privilege and wealth. His grandfather, JL Huffines, started Huffines Motor Company, a car dealership, in Denton, Texas, in 1924, decades before Huffines was even born. That wealth was handed down. Then, in the early 1990s, he built a second fortune buying up distressed land after the S&L crash, at the exact moment regular Texans were losing homes and savings in that same collapse. Then he went to Austin and voted like a man who’s never once had to worry about a paycheck, a union card, or a landlord.

Look at the record. In 2015, he backed a bill prohibiting local regulations that prevent landlords from refusing to rent to tenants based on the source of their income. A multimillionaire real estate developer voted to protect landlords’ right to turn away the poor. Shocking, I know.

That same session, he backed provisions amending payroll deductions and prohibiting wage deductions for state employee union dues, as well as a 2017 bill requiring parental consent for minors to join a labor union. Huffines wanted to make it harder for a 16-year-old working a summer job, even to sign a union card without parents’ permission. This is a man who has never needed a union a day in his life, deciding other people’s kids don’t get to have one either.

He voted to prohibit health plan coverage for abortion twice and to increase premiums for anyone whose insurance dared cover one anyway. He voted no on reforms to the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, the insurer of last resort for hurricane-prone coastal communities, in 2015. Of course, he’s fine with fewer coverage options for regular families. His family owns a 7,600-acre ranch in New Mexico.

Grew up comfortable, got richer off a financial crash that ruined other Texans, and spent his time in the Senate making sure the rules stayed tilted his way. He arrived in Austin to make sure working Texans kept losing.

The Comptroller’s office is the one job in Texas government that touches everything.

It certifies the budget. It manages the state’s investments. It runs the audit function that’s supposed to catch exactly the kind of self-dealing and conflicts of interest we’re talking about here. It oversees unclaimed property. It decides, in no small part, who gets paid and who doesn’t. That’s the office Don Huffines now runs, at least until the election.

Huffines is a man who wants to grade state employees on their Christianity while failing his own bible’s test. A man whose family secretly bought the operational headquarters of the most notorious child sex trafficking case in modern American history, through a shell company. A man who kept a white supremacist on payroll and still, to this day, cannot bring himself to say the words “white nationalism is wrong.” A man whose entire political career has been built on votes that protect landlords, punish union organizing among teenagers, and strip insurance coverage from the people who need it most, financed by a fortune built on other Texans’ financial ruin.

And now we’re supposed to hand that man the keys to the state treasury and trust he’ll run it with integrity, transparency, and the interests of ordinary Texans in mind? Sure.

Texans need a comptroller who can add and also has integrity. Don Huffines is missing at least one of those.

In November, make sure you vote for Sarah Eckhardt for Texas Comptroller.

Texas has had enough of wealthy, old Republicans screwing everything up.

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According to Urban Dictionary, a Pod Person is a “person pretending to be something they aren’t, or an impostor.” And watching Governor Greg Abbott’s behavior lately, I am almost certain the real Abbott has been abducted and replaced with a Pod Person. I have proof.

Exhibit A: Abbott calls for Texas Rangers to investigate Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s murder by ICE.

Don’t get me wrong, this is what we want. If you’ve seen the videos from the Houston incident, you know that an independent investigation is warranted. And I thought that with enough pressure and media attention, we could get the Houston PD to investigate. But Abbott calling in the Rangers?

We’d all be silly-nillies if we forgot that only a few years ago, Greg Abbott instructed border patrol to push children into the Rio Grande and to deny migrants at the border any water.

Then, we can’t forget that Abbott intentionally installed drowning devices along the Rio Grande, intentionally to drown migrants, which did lead to several deaths.

In fact, Abbott was caught on the Dana Loesch Show musing over murdering migrants at the border, stating the “only reason they weren’t shooting them was because of the Biden Administration.”

At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Greg Abbott rolled around on stage in a stadium full of J6ers, religious fundamentalists, and Nazis. He promised to be harder on immigrants under the Trump administration than ever before. The crowd held up signs that said “Mass Deportation.”

Let’s be clear about what “mass deportation” actually means, because I say this as a historian. Mass deportation isn’t a policy proposal.

The Armenian Genocide started with deportation marches into the Syrian desert. The Holocaust started with deportations to ghettos, then to camps, each stage sold to the public as “removal” and “resettlement.” The Trail of Tears, which plenty of historians now correctly call what it was, started as a removal policy, too.

This is a pattern, every single time, and it was the pattern in 2024 when a stadium full of MAGA delegates held up “Mass Deportation” signs like they were rooting for the home team.

So here’s your timeline. Push kids into the river. Deny water in 100-degree heat. String up drowning devices with nets underneath so nobody can swim free. Go on a radio show and complain that the only thing stopping Border Patrol from shooting migrants was Joe Biden. Stand on a stage while a stadium screams for mass deportation and promise them you’ll deliver. And now, in the summer of 2026, that same man wants us to believe he’s troubled enough by a migrant’s death to call in the Texas Rangers.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Abbott has spent years telling us exactly who he is, and asking us to forget it, when it’s politically convenient. The real Greg Abbott wanted these people dead. Whoever showed up at that podium wanting a Rangers investigation is wearing Greg Abbott’s skin.

Exhibit B: Abbott is trying to ban all the data centers he invited to Texas.

Governor Abbott has spent the last decade recruiting the tech industry to Texas. As recently as November 2025, Abbott sat next to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to personally announce Google’s $40 billion investment in three new Texas data center campuses, calling it “a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state” and Texas “the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”

The data center tax abatements are projected to cost the state $3.2 billion in lost revenue over the next two years. Gina Hinojosa is already using this against him directly, “Data centers are moving to Texas because Greg Abbott helped create the most generous tax dollar giveaway to data centers in the country so that Texans would foot the bill... Abbott has zero credibility here. No one believes that the arsonist is going to put out the fire.”

But, all of a sudden, a new Greg Abbott showed up. (A Pod Person Greg Abbott.)

In June, Greg Abbott sent a letter to state regulators demanding oversight. He wanted data centers to pay for their own power, reuse their own water, and stop passing their costs onto Texas families. By the end of the month, he was standing in Bullard calling for an outright ban on AI data centers in rural neighborhoods, framing it as a fight for “East Texas values.”

He wants to eliminate the very tax break he signed into law. He wants developers “responsible for funding their own projects here in Texas,” as if he didn’t spend a decade making sure they never had to.

I don’t buy this Abbott either.

You don’t get to torch a match, watch the fire spread for ten years, and then show up at the scene demanding to know who started it. Abbott built this. He signed the tax break. He recruited the companies. He stood next to Sundar Pichai and called it “the epicenter of AI development” seven months before he called it a threat to East Texas values.

What changed is that nearly two-thirds of rural Texans started telling pollsters they hate what he built.

Then, this week, two weeks after promising a ban, he personally announced a $919 million AI infrastructure deal in McKinney backed by a state grant.

Pick a lane, Governor. Pod People can’t hold two positions in the same body. They can’t both be real. One of them is wearing the other one’s skin, and I don’t think it’s hard to guess which one’s actually running the state.

Exhibit C: Abbott is ready to adapt to the consequences of climate change.

Greg Abbott just proposed a $400 million fund to fortify roofs against “extreme weather events... becoming more frequent and severe,” his own campaign’s words, not mine, because home insurance premiums are up 80% since 2020. He’s finally acknowledging that the weather is getting worse.

In 2017, after the devistating impact of Hurricane Harvey, Abbott refused to say climate change was a factor when asked directly, during a press conference where he was literally signing a disaster declaration.

When DHS Secretary Mayorkas linked climate change to the border migration crisis, Greg Abbott said, “Climate change? Mayorkas is pathetic.”

When the UN Secretary-General urged Texas to reduce its reliance on oil and gas, Greg Abbott told him to “pound sand” and then completely skipped COP26.

After the 2021 winter storm killed hundreds of Texans, Abbott went on Sean Hannity. He blamed wind turbines, saying, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” even though the Green New Deal was never implemented in Texas. The real problem was the unwinterized fossil-fuel infrastructure.

As Governor, Abbott has signed executive orders to bolster the oil and gas industry. He has repeatedly fought the EPA over Permian Basin regulation, declaring that “the State of Texas will do whatever it takes to protect its production” of oil.

Now, the Pod Person Greg Abbott wants to protect Texas roofs from extreme weather (caused by climate change).

Is Abbott sneaking out the back door of his own denial because the roof, quite literally, is caving in on an election year?

The real Greg Abbott has spent his whole career telling Texans the weather isn’t political. The Pod Person is pushing a $400 million grant that says otherwise.

I rest my case.

There are only two logical explanations for this.

One. Aliens really did abduct Greg Abbott sometime this spring and replace him with a Pod Person.

Two. Greg Abbott’s internal polling is so catastrophically, historically bad that his campaign has decided the only path to a fourth term is to spend the summer performing the opposite of everything he’s built his entire career on.

You don’t reverse course on immigration, tech policy, and climate denial in the same six-week stretch because you had a change of heart. You do it because someone showed you a spreadsheet that scared the hell out of you.

Abbott is panicking, in real time, in public, and hoping Texans don’t notice.

We noticed.

Gina Hinojosa isn’t waiting for Abbott to finish his costume change. While Abbott spends his summer trying on new faces, Hinojosa’s been saying the same thing since day one. That Texans deserve a governor who isn’t allergic to their own record. That affordability isn’t a talking point you discover in an election year, it’s a promise you make and keep. If you’re tired of guessing which Greg Abbott will show up at the podium, there’s a candidate on the ballot who doesn’t need a body double.

The pod people can keep swapping costumes. Texas needs a different governor.

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Reefer madness has once again swept through the prudes and the religious nuts in the Texas Senate, courtesy of the alcohol lobby. Last week, the Senate held an interim hearing on the “dangers of THC,” in preparation to ban it statewide in 2027. I watched the hearing a few days late, but I’m catching up, so let’s talk about it.

I’m going to include a few videos, the first one showing how much of a non-issue this is in a state of 32 million people, including 7.5 million children.

Don’t worry, I did the math for you.

In the last five years:

• THC exposure accounted for 0.033% of all calls to Poison Control.

• 0.002% of all EMS responses statewide.

• 0.032% of all hospitalizations.

According to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, there have been 19 THC-related deaths in the last five years, which is astounding, since no THC deaths have ever been previously recorded in human history. More than likely, they’re attributing the overdose of another drug with THC in the system, or a fatal car accident, as THC-related, and not some teenager smoking themselves to death (because that’s impossible).

Interestingly, this is what the Texas Senate is focusing on when:

• We have 963–1,162 drunk driving deaths per year in Texas.

• 10,647 per year in Texas attributable to excessive alcohol use (liver disease, alcohol poisoning, chronic disease).

• Cigarette smoking alone kills 28,000 people each year in Texas.

• Heart disease is the #1 killer of adult Texans.

• Gun violence is the leading cause of death for Texas youths.

It’s almost like the Republicans in the Texas Senate are completely ignoring the real issues while making up imaginary issues to appease the lobbyists and religious fundamentalists.

Plus emotional manipulation.

This is a frequent tactic used by Republicans in the Legislature. They fly in some poor mother to tell her sob story about how THC ruined her teenager’s life.

They flew in Ted Cruz’s dad when they wanted to ban communism in Texas schools. They flew in some poor sap from New York when they wanted to ban gender affirming care. It’s just what they do.

In my 40-something years of life, I never even heard of “canabis psychosis” until a few years ago, from Republicans who wanted to ban it. I had to Google if it was a real thing. It is. And it’s actually very serious, and I in no way want to downplay the teenagers impacted by it.

The Republicans’ own invited witnesses, Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, testified that THC can increase the risk of psychosis in people who are already predisposed to it. That is a very different claim than THC causing psychosis in an otherwise healthy person, and Harris said so directly, in the same hearing, to the same committee.

So yes, cannabis psychosis is real. It’s also a risk-factor problem. Committee members spent hours treating a predisposition risk like a population-wide time bomb, to justify banning a product for 32 million people to protect a much smaller, already-vulnerable group. There are better, more targeted ways to do that than prohibition.

The mom:

Aubree Adams testified for 12 minutes, and by the end, there wasn’t a dry eye in that committee room. However, her family’s nightmare is not evidence that THC is a “weapon of mass destruction” for 32 million Texans. It’s evidence that a small population, people already vulnerable to psychosis, are at real and serious risk from heavy THC use. That’s it. And Republicans in the Senate are conflating the issues.

Adams closed her testimony with “THC has the highest transition rate to schizophrenia among all drugs, including meth.” I went and checked. She’s right. A meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin found cannabis-induced psychosis converts to schizophrenia at about 34%, higher than amphetamines at 22%, and way higher than alcohol at 9%.

But read it carefully. That 34% is the transition rate among people who already had a psychotic episode triggered by cannabis. It is not the rate at which THC causes psychosis in a random Texan smoking a blunt on his couch. It’s the rate at which an already rare, already severe reaction worsens. Adams’s own testimony is a case study in exactly the population Katharine Neill Harris was talking about. People with an underlying vulnerability, whose lives get set on fire by a drug that, for the other 99% of users, does approximately nothing.

Adams also cited a Wall Street Journal piece about her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, “The Rise and Fall of the Napa Valley of Cannabis,” as proof that legalization brought homelessness, organized crime, and violence. It’s a story about an oversaturated legal market, stacked state, county, and city taxes, and a legal industry that collapsed under its own weight while the black market undercut it on price. It’s a business story. It is not a public health study, and it does not say what she told the committee.

I don’t doubt Aubree Adams believes every word she told that committee. But the Texas Senate isn’t supposed to write statewide drug policy off ONE family’s worst years, especially when the state’s own health department handed them the actual numbers, and those numbers show exactly how rare her family’s experience is.

Lois Kolkhorst has reefer madness.

The same Lois Kolkhorst who has spent years gutting maternal health care access in this state, and Texas now has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country to show for it. Keep that in mind while she lectures you about protecting Texans from a plant.

Kolkhorst pulls up a Wall Street Journal chart on drug-induced psychosis transition rates and reads off that cannabis ranks number one. Then she says, and I’m not paraphrasing, “It’s like 50%. I mean, it’s like off the charts.”

It’s not 50%. The actual peer-reviewed number, from a meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin, is 34%. Kolkhorst rounded up by 16 points, because she’s a liar.

Then she asks the doctors, “Is cannabis the driving force behind schizophrenia and bipolar disorders?” And here’s the sleight of hand. She took a number about a small, already-vulnerable group and used it to answer a question about 32 million Texans.

To his credit, Dr. Lucia actually gave a real answer. He said broad, casual availability might be “unmasking or causing” mental illness in kids, one where the vulnerability was already there, and cannabis exposed it.

I’ll give her one thing, because I’m not interested in being the mirror image of what I’m criticizing. The potency argument is real. Average THC content in seized cannabis went from 4% in 1995 to 15% in 2021. Allen PD’s own testing found products running 7% to 78% THC, with some smoke shops selling 99% THCA concentrate. Texas hemp law caps THC at 0.3%. Nobody’s following that law, and that’s an actual regulatory failure worth fixing.

It’s just not the same thing as “cannabis is driving a statewide epidemic of schizophrenia,” and Kolkhorst spent the hearing treating both claims like they carry equal weight.

Charles Perry has reefer madness.

Keep in mind, this is the same Charles Perry who thinks children in public schools are using kitty litter. He said he plans to file another THC ban bill for 2027, regardless of what this hearing turns up.

Perry compares the current hemp market to K2, the synthetic cannabinoid that actually did kill people and got banned outright in the 2010s. “This is the modern-day K2,” he says. It isn’t. K2 was random synthetic chemicals sprayed on plant material, chemically unrelated to THC, built specifically to dodge drug tests, with a toxicity profile closer to poison than pot. Comparing legal hemp-derived THC to K2 is like comparing beer to antifreeze because they’re both liquids you can drink.

But the real tell comes near the end. Perry notes that EMS calls for THC went down while poison control calls went up, and DSHS’s own presenter told him the data suggests people are just handling more of it at home instead of calling an ambulance. Then Perry says the quiet part out loud, “I knew that was going to be the narrative that comes out, and it’ll still be the narrative, because truth doesn’t matter.”

A sitting state senator, chairing testimony from his own state health department, telling the room that the truth doesn’t matter because he already knows what he’s going to say regardless. That’s the whole hearing in one sentence.

Perry declares the entire industry a lie, compares it to a poison that killed people, and announces he’s filing the ban bill before the hearing is complete.

I’ve known hundreds of stoners in my life.

Maybe thousands. Whole holidays’ worth of family and friends who’ve been high since Nixon was president. I’ve watched people go through entire decades of daily use, the way other people drink coffee. Willie Nelson is eligible for Medicare twice over and still touring. Snoop Dogg built an entire media empire on being publicly high since the Clinton administration. And in my 40-something years, “cannabis psychosis” wasn’t a phrase I’d ever heard until Republicans needed a new reason to ban a plant.

That doesn’t mean it’s fake. It’s real, and for the people it hits, it’s devastating, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise just to win an argument. Despite that, there’s a real, serious case for legalizing weed statewide and regulating the hell out of it.

• Cap the potency.

• Test the products.

• Keep it away from kids, the same way we’re supposed to keep alcohol and cigarettes away from kids.

That’s a policy conversation worth having, and Texas hasn’t had it, because having it would require admitting the current unregulated hemp market is the actual problem, not THC itself.

What Texas is doing instead is banning the plant while cigarettes kill 28,000 Texans a year, alcohol kills tens of thousands more, heart disease is the state’s number one cause of death, and nobody in that committee room said a word about any of it. They ignored an actual, ongoing, thousands-of-bodies-a-year body count, because tobacco and alcohol have lobbyists, and weed, for now, mostly doesn’t.

They pick the fight they can win instead of the one that’s actually killing people, and it’s about as Republican as it gets.

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This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next four 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 Angie Carraway?

Angie Carraway was born in Dallas County but grew up in a military family and moved around a lot. Texas eventually pulled her back home.

Before she was a teacher, she was a hospitality worker. In 1996, she married Robert Carraway, and they built a life together in Collin County. She became the first person in her family to earn a college degree from the University of North Texas, and then she became a teacher.

For fourteen years now, she’s taught middle school social studies and history in Lovejoy and Princeton ISDs. She’s seen our state government failures in education up close.

Carraway is running because she’s watched the cost of everything go up while the people making decisions in Austin seem increasingly uninterested in the people actually living with the consequences. She’s sat with parents worried about how they’re going to make rent. She’s watched kids in her classrooms carry stress that has everything to do with what’s happening at home.

The district.

Collin County, and it’s not the Collin County of ten years ago. It’s young, it’s diverse, and it’s rich by Texas standards. Anglo residents make up 50.8% of the population, non-Anglo 49.2%, split between Hispanic (18%), Asian (14.7%), and Black (14.6%) residents. Nearly half of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher (47% versus 33.8% statewide). Per capita income is $49,186, compared with a state average of $40,752. Poverty sits at 6%, less than half the state rate.

This is white-collar suburbia. Almost a quarter of workers (24.7%) work from home, nearly double the state rate. The average home value is $490,474. Nearly 80% of housing is owner-occupied.

Trump carried HD89 by 17 points, 56.8% to 39.6%. Ted Cruz did worse, beating Colin Allred by 10.7 points, 54.1% to 43.4%. I don’t know if I would call that the baseline partisan lean, considering how low the Democratic turnout was in 2024.

Incumbent Republican Noble beat Democrat Evans 60.6% to 39.4%. That’s worse than Trump’s margin. That race didn’t have a lot of money, plus for whatever reason, Republicans still like Candy Noble enough.

I won’t sugarcoat this. HD89 is not a swing seat on paper. It’s a seat that requires closing a 21-point gap, not a 3 or 5-point gap. That’s a real climb, not a rounding error.

It’s name recognition. It’s a serious wave year. It’s a County Party that is drilling into voters to vote all the way down the ballot. A campaign that can replicate Allred’s performance with these voters, without Allred’s statewide infrastructure, closes most of that distance on its own.

The math from there is that this is a district full of exactly the kind of college-educated, high-income, work-from-home professional class that has been drifting away from the GOP nationally since 2016, if Democrats give them a candidate worth crossing over for. It’s also nearly half non-Anglo, with real Hispanic and Asian populations that Republicans currently bank without serious contest.

The incumbent.

Candy Noble (R) helped pass the school voucher bill. She has spent nearly every year in the Legislature playing culture-war games.

Here is Candy Noble defending incest:

She’s also the author of the Ten Commandments bill.

Here is a FANTASTIC clip from 2023, when Noble and James Talarico went toe-to-toe the first time she pushed the bill. (He mopped the floor with her.)

She’s also endorsed by the Texas State Rifle Association with an “A” rating from the NRA, and endorsed by Texas Right to Life, Texas Alliance for Life, and Texans for Life. So, guns are unrestricted, and abortion is banned. Standard-issue Texas GOP, force ’em to be born, then shoot ’em when they’re here.

That’s all there is to say about her.

In Angie Carraway’s own words.

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

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

Look, trickle-down economics is a farce. We have the 8th largest economy in the world. Enough is enough. If businesses want to come here, they need to pay their fair share of taxes, period. The working-class citizens in Texas don’t get a break, so why should large billionaire corporations?

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

With EVERY fiber of my being, I oppose the privatization of public education. Parents have ALWAYS had a choice on where to send their kids to school. There are robust charter and private school options in Texas. The 5.6 million public school children deserve a fair chance at education. The state should NOT be pushing its voucher scam on children in Texas that can deny children based on ANY reason!

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

YES! It is a proven fact based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that a child’s basic needs MUST be met before learning occurs. So let’s feed the children!

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

Capitalism should never compromise basic environmental principles. There should never be a question of profits over principles. We only get one Earth, let’s not deplete its resources before they can be renewed.

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

I definitely think there needs to be limits on what can be raised to limit the amount of corruption. It does cost money to have voter contact, no doubt. But the embarrassingly amount of money in my opponent’s bank account makes me question what her motives are in governance.

Bonus Question: Who are your political role models, living or dead?

There is not one person I can limit myself to when it comes to political role models. I adore anyone who. Relieves in fighting for the principles of honesty and integrity. Someone who stands up for the marginalized communities and ensures that every hard working American gets a chance of the American Dream!

HD89 is not an easy pickup, nobody’s pretending otherwise.

But look at what’s actually sitting in this district. A professional class that keeps drifting away from a party that’s decided the Ten Commandments belong on a whiteboard and incest deserves a defense. A non-Anglo population that’s pushing half the electorate, and nobody’s bothered to organize seriously. A Democratic candidate who spent fourteen years in the classroom, while Candy Noble answers to the most extreme.

Angie Carraway isn’t running because the math is easy. She’s running because somebody has to make Candy Noble defend this record to the people actually living under it.

Collin County isn’t the county it was ten years ago. At some point, its representation should catch up.

You can learn more about Angie Carraway on her website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky.

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The map above, which shows the South/Southeast corner of Bexar County, includes House District 118. This district has been a thorn in my side, in every Democrat in Bexar County’s side, for going on five years now. Mostly because this district is flippable, but we’ve had a lot of bad luck. However, between the Hispanic swing back left, the (fingers crossed) wave we could have in November, HD118 is a blue target, one that has been added to the DLCC list. So, can it flip this year?

A brief history.

This was Leo Pacheco’s (D) seat for many years. During the 2021 session, he was doing a lot of things that were pissing off the Bexar County Democrats, eventually leading to the County Party censuring him for his vote on an open carry bill.

Pacheco resigned later that year, leaving the door open for a special election. Since then, Pacheco has joined the dark side and become a Republican.

At the time, HD118 was a +14 (D) district. But do you know what else was happening at the end of 2021? Gerrymandering.

There was a special election in September 2021, with five people. And it went to a runoff between John Lujan (R) and Frank Ramirez (D).

That November 2021 runoff, Democrats were so confident they had that election in the bag. Only 5,600 Democrats showed up. The Republican won by 300 votes.

That’s how John Lujan got into office. Then the Republicans redrew that district from a +14 (D) to a +3 (D). This made the next few elections challenging for a few reasons.

One. Democrats in Texas were demoralized in 2022 and 2024. They didn’t vote. We can talk about all the nuances of why, but that’s for another day.

Two. This district is 62.4% Hispanic, and the Trump approval rate has swung widely from up to down since 2022.

In 2022, after the redistricting, Republicans poured $1.5 million into that race to hold on to it. It worked.

In 2024, Kristin Carranza ran for HD118 for the first time. (Here’s my 2024 Meet the Candidate article. I could have sworn we did one in 2026, but it’s all running together.)

Considering that 1.4 million Democrats stayed home in Texas in 2024, Carranza still did really well (considering). She lost 51.8-48.2%, a 4,622-vote margin out of roughly 80,700 votes cast.

She raised more money than any first-time Texas House candidate in history, got $1.2 million from David Hogg’s PAC, and knocked 100,000 doors. Trump carried the district by about 5 points.

HD118 no longer has the incumbent advantage.

John Lujan (R) ran for Congress and lost.

The Republican running is Jorge Borrego. He has a mustache, and he used to work for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is the Texas version of the Heritage Foundation, which is fascist-adjacent.

Regardless, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has had Republicans in the Texas Legislature by the short and curlies for many years. Every policy on Borrego’s website aligns with every policy that has broken this state for the people who live here. More of the same, that’s all that he’s offering.

Trump and Abbott being underwater matter here.

Trump’s approval rating in Texas is 43-51, according to the June UT/Texas Politics Project poll. Net negative eight. Among true independents, that number is a bloodbath. 12% approve, 71% disapprove. Only 38% of Texans think the man “cares about people like you,” down from 46% the week before he won the state by 14 points. His economic numbers are worse than his overall numbers. Inflation and prices, the thing every single person in HD118 actually feels, sit at 28% approve, 58% disapprove.

Abbott’s a little better off. He’s sitting at 44-44 statewide, down from 46-43 in April. That’s a fourth-term incumbent with the built-in advantages of incumbency treading water in his own state.

Where the environment actually helps Carranza is the cost of living. HD118 has a per capita income of $32,194, compared with a state average of $40,752, and nearly 13% of the district’s residents live in poverty. Abbott’s approval on “inflation and prices” statewide is 30-45. On housing, 28-40. Those are exactly the issues this district feels hardest.

The environment is worse for Republicans than it was in 2022, when they needed every advantage they had, including Lujan himself, to hold this seat. This year, they don’t have Lujan. They have a 30-year-old TPPF voucher lobbyist nobody’s heard of, running in a worse national environment, against a Democrat who already came within 4,622 votes without any of these tailwinds.

HD118 flipped Republican in 2021 because of a low-turnout special election Democrats got caught sleeping on.

It stayed Republican in 2022 because of a mid-decade gerrymander and $1.5 million spent to save one specific guy. It almost flipped back in 2024, despite a bad year for Democrats elsewhere in this state.

None of those conditions exists anymore. The gerrymander’s still there, but the guy it was built to protect isn’t on the ballot. Trump and Abbott are both wading through the same water that’s drowning Republicans everywhere else this cycle. The national money that used to show up for Lujan alone is now showing up for Carranza, too.

Borrego’s not John Lujan.

HD118 doesn’t need a miracle this year. It needs Democrats to show up and vote like they already know how this story ends.

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I didn’t become a political writer the easy way. I was a teenage mom, then a single mom in my twenties, and years of corporate work that paid well and cost me my sanity. Sandy Hook broke something open in me in 2012. I ended up in Moms Demand Action during the Open Carry Tarrant County years, and got pulled into running Living Blue in Texas. Thirteen years later, it’s still just me and Dr. Jo from the original crew. In 2020, I cashed out my 401(k) and went back to school, and became the writer I’ve always wanted to be. My one rule I won’t break is no paywalls. I remember being the broke 25-year-old who couldn’t afford information to know what her own government was doing to her. Nobody reading this has to be that person. No PAC money. No dark money. No corporate sponsors. Just readers.

Which is why I need to say this. A man got mad at me for refusing to turn this platform into a weapon against their local Democrats, with whom they personally have a grudge. I don’t take marching orders from anybody, and I especially don’t take them from a man who thinks a woman with an audience owes him her voice. This is the entire point of not taking PAC money or dark money.

If you want independent Texas political writing (on the left) to keep existing, become a paid subscriber. It’s the only thing keeping this free for the people who can’t pay.

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And because nobody tells me what to write, today we’re going to talk about a murder mystery that’s been weighing heavily on my mind. It happened 153 years ago, on the steps of the Texas Capitol, during a legislative session, to a current sitting legislator.

The world is on fire right now, and we’re living through it, so it feels new and scary. But there’s always been a fire in Texas.

February 19, 1873, 7:30 pm.

It was payday, back before debit cards and direct deposits. The members of the 13th Legislature spent the afternoon cashing their per diem at the Treasury, and Louis Franke was among them.

Franke had $260 in his pocket. He left the House chamber and started down the front steps of the old Capitol, headed for the Land Office, where the Immigration Committee, of which he was the Chair, was waiting for him.

Two men were sitting in the shadow of the east portico column. A House clerk walking up the same steps a few minutes earlier had noticed them, close together, talking low. He couldn’t make out their faces.

A few minutes later, a clerk from the Department of Education came running into the Hall asking if anyone knew a Mr. Franke, because he was in bad shape down by the steps. Somebody went out and found him. Franke was still sitting up. He said he’d been knocked down and robbed.

He didn’t live to see morning.

Louis Franke, born Ludwig Carl Ferdinand Francke in 1818 in what’s now Germany, got involved in opposition politics in 1840s Europe, and decided the smart move was to leave before the authorities decided it for him.

In 1872, at the tail end of Reconstruction, Fayette and Bastrop counties sent him to the Texas House. He chaired the Immigration Committee. He sat on Agriculture and Stock Raising, Redistricting, and Public Lands and Land Office.

He served for a little over a month.

Witness accounts.

He was carried into the room of Gustave Hoffman, a fellow member of the House, around eight o’clock that night. Two men, S. Robb and Col. Nelson, brought him. Senator Flanagan had been the first to find him. Hoffman testified under oath at the inquest the next day. Franke arrived badly bruised, bleeding heavily, and still able to talk. He told Hoffman two men had knocked him down and robbed him. He said he didn’t know their names.

Dr. B.E. Hadra examined him that night. His testimony was also under oath. A broken leg. Two wounds to the head, one made by something dull, one by something sharp enough to interrupt the skin between them. A depression of the skull above the right temple. Hadra’s stated opinion was that these wounds killed him.

They did, at 4:30 the next morning.

His watch was still on him. Untouched. So was seven dollars in coins. The only thing missing was the $260 in paper currency he’d drawn that afternoon, folded up and ready to carry home.

The morning after, police found a painter with red on his shirt and deemed it probable cause. Arrested him on the spot. Turned out to be paint, not blood, and they let him go. Two soldiers were next publicly accused by rumor and had to go to the newspaper office themselves to clear their names in print.

Then came Williams and Spaulding. Two men, arrested on suspicion, held under guard, were named in the paper. Then, nothing. They stop existing in the story, which tells you everything about how seriously anyone was tracking this once the initial panic died down.

Meanwhile, there was an actual trail. Blood and footprints led from the Capitol steps around the Executive office to a wood pile, then over a fence toward Sussman’s grocery, where two men matching witness descriptions had bought beer that same night with a fat roll of cash.

Four days later, a Dallas Herald correspondent covering the story from Austin said that the men actually being arrested had neither the motive nor the nerve for a crime like this, while whoever really did it was, in his words, coolly looking on and enjoying the farce. He predicted, correctly, that nobody would ever be caught and blamed the bungling of the people in charge of finding them.

The Texas Legislature moved fast.

Three days after Franke died, Senator Joseph Sayers introduced a joint resolution authorizing the governor to offer a $5,000 reward for the capture and conviction of the killers. It passed the Senate 20 to nothing. It passed the House 69 to nothing.

The reward was passed unanimously. The men who killed Louis Franke were never identified.

It’s a pattern you’ll recognize if you’ve been paying attention to Texas government for longer than five minutes. Grand gestures are cheap. Actual accountability is the expensive part, and it’s the part they always seem to run out of budget for.

A sitting member of the Texas House of Representatives was beaten to death within sight of the Capitol steps, and the state’s own investigators never found the murderer.

But then, there are the parts that become fact and the parts that become legend.

I came across this story because I was interested in the 13th Legislature from a historical perspective. The 13th Legislature was the first legislative session after the Amnesty Act of 1872, which restored political rights to over 150,000 former secessionists. The ex-Confederates did many bad things in Texas after that, especially the racist Alexander W. Terrell (and the TSHA has whitewashed him).

The Texas House of Representatives put out their set of facts, and eventually, the newspapers got bored, and the ex-Confederates in our government stopped chasing Louise Franke’s killer.

However, decades after Louis Franke died, his widow, Bernhardine, told a different version of that night to a relative, who wrote it down years later as family history. In her telling, there was no fight on the steps at all. A stranger asked Louis to step out onto a balcony on the north side of the Capitol to discuss something private. Louis followed him. The man attacked him and threw him over the railing. That’s the story Bernhardine carried for the rest of her life. That’s not the story the inquest testimony tells. I’m giving you both because a widow’s memory of the worst night of her life and a coroner’s sworn record don’t have to agree to both be true to somebody.

Then there’s another rumor. Decades later, a man on his deathbed confessed to being one of the two killers, and said the whole thing had been arranged by someone with enough standing in this state that naming him would have been a scandal nobody wanted. He supposedly took that name to his grave rather than let it out. This story surfaced independently more than once, including on an Austin television program in 1969, ninety-six years after the murder.

Nobody, including the family who kept passing this story down, ever claimed they could prove it. I can’t prove it either. But I’ll tell you that a rumor that a powerful man bought his way out of a murder charge doesn’t survive for a century in Texas because people have nothing better to do. Deep down, folks believed it was exactly the kind of thing this state would let happen.

In almost any town in Texas, you hear rumors about wealthy families, and the things they do, and the things they get away with because of the power they buy. Maybe there’s always been those stories, and maybe there’s always been some truth to them. Or maybe Louis Franke just ran into two drunks, who happened to know when the legislators got paid.

The woman left holding it all together.

Franke’s widow, Bernhardine Franke, was not yet forty when her husband was killed, and he left her with eight children. Eight. The youngest was only three months old. And when friends tried to arrange a government pension for her, she said no. Maybe out of pride. She wound up running a farm and raising all of her children herself.

With her sons working alongside her as they got old enough, she grew a successful farm to pass down to her children.

Nobody offered Bernhardine Franke a unanimous vote or a joint resolution. She just got up every morning and did the work for the rest of her life.

If there’s a version of Texas resilience worth admiring, it’s not the legislature passing a reward it never had to pay out. It’s a widow with eight kids and no help from anybody, proving she could do it all on her own.

It’s easy to look at Texas today and think we’ve hit a new low.

None of that is new. Texas has been Texas since the Capitol was doing business by candlelight. A man was beaten to death two hundred feet from where lawmakers still walk into work, and the state passed a reward, patted itself on the back, and let the whole thing go cold. That’s typical Texas government.

I’m not telling you this story to make you sad. I’m telling you because it’s true, and true is reason enough. I don’t need anybody’s permission slip for that. Louis Franke’s killers walked free. Bernhardine wrote her own story.

But somebody, eventually, has to keep telling the truth about how this state actually works, even when it’s inconvenient, even when it makes people mad or sad, even when it’s about something that happened before any of us were born. Because there are some things that happened before many of us were born, like the Voting Rights Act, that still impact today.

Texas is always counting on somebody not to tell the story. I’m going to keep telling it, anyway.

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Have you seen the Pro-Publica/Texas Tribune bombshell today? Paxton’s own office told Texans, “It is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.” But according to the Biblical divorce, between Angela and Ken Paxton, he moved out of their humble abode, and then voted from that home SIX times after that.

In 2020, Paxton spent more than 22,000 staff-hours on voter fraud cases but resolved only 16, all of which were due to false addresses, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. He helped Donald Trump try to steal the 2020 election. He was impeached by his own party.

Now, all the headlines from mainstream media say, “Paxton MAY have committed voter fraud.”

The court of public opinion.

If you missed it, a few months ago, I wrote, “Ken Paxton Will Go Down As The Most Corrupt Attorney General In Texas’ History.” I thought we covered everything. There’s more, actually; there’s a part two coming soon. But here’s the thing, I spent most of the day on Google and in the back corners of Democratic Underground, and there was still so much more.

The voters on our side, in the court of public opinion, have made up their minds about Ken Paxton. We’ve all had a front row seat for more than a decade to the naked corruption perpetrated by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

And even if there is an investigation. Even WHEN Paxton loses, and Talarico wins, if an investigation proves Paxton committed voter fraud. I would almost put money on Paxton fleeing the state, but the Republican base will still support him and make it about some conspiracy.

Texas Republicans do corrupt shit. They always have. Ken Paxton. Greg Abbott. Dan Patrick. All of them.

Like only last October, Abbott was named in a pay-to-play scheme. And now he’s calling to end data centers in rural Texas, four months before the election, after he welcomed all these mega-corporations here.

What we are looking at in Texas, between the open corruption, the data centers, the games of “throw-the-ball-and-hide-my-hand” that Republicans play, is decades of deliberate deregulation. This is what years of donor-first governance look like, sky-high electric bills, healthcare deserts, hungry children, fights over water, and our leaders aren’t even in the country.

Did you see that Ken Paxton hates America so much that he went to England for our 250th birthday?

The irony. 250 years after the land-owning, slave-holding, white racists kicked the British’s ass so they could steal more Indigenous land, our AG, who is running to be part of our highly propagandized, debatable, still white supremacist federal government, spent that birthday in London drinking tea and crumpets with his girlfriend.

So much for the ultra-patriot right.

For as long as Texas has known Ken Paxton, he has shown us that he has no moral floor or ethical framework to guide him. Not even the law has stopped Ken Paxton from doing whatever he wants in the moment.

And if Ken Paxton wants to drink tea at noon with his little pinky up and his girlfriend by his side at America’s once oppressor’s doorstep on July 4th, he will. And if he wanted to vote from wherever the heck he was living, he could do whatever he wanted. He’s the top cop after all.

When Tim Dunn paid off Dan Patrick (allegedly) for Paxton’s acquittal, did anyone think he would walk the tight-rope after that?

What actually keeps me up at night.

It really isn’t Paxton, or Abbott, or Patrick. It’s the base. The people who know all the same information you and I do, yet come away with conspiracies or a warped sense of reality.

Last year, sometime, I fell down a TikTok rabbit hole. The “leaving MAGA” side of TikTok, where former true believers document the process of unlearning everything they were raised on. I just listened (yes, I was being nosey).

And the thing that came up over and over was empathy. Person after person described that nobody ever taught them how to feel it. Not in their Conservative households or their Evangelical churches. They were deconstructing. It was fascinating to watch. But also an alarming realization that there are millions of people walking around out there who were never taught empathy. And they vote.

I’ve read a thousand op-eds trying to explain the Southern white working-class Republican. Class resentment, media capture, racial backlash, take your pick. But none of them ever fully explained the thing I kept running into, the man in the work boots defending a billionaire’s tax break. “Ain’t no poor man ever gave me a job.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence my entire life in this state, as if it were real wisdom.

I think this is an empathy gap. And if you were never taught to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, you were also never taught to imagine yourself in the shoes of the guy paying $600 million to write a business court into law so his lawsuits get decided by his own hand-picked judges.

You just see a rich man, and rich men get to win. That’s the whole worldview. That’s not a defense, to be clear. Grown adults are responsible for the votes they cast and the men they keep sending back to Austin. But it is, I think, the actual mechanism. Paxton and Abbott don’t survive scandal after scandal because Texans are gullible. They survive because a whole sect of the population in Texas was raised in a world without empathy, so corruption looks like winning, because rich men win.

Neither Paxton nor Abbott has ever faced accountability.

Texas is tilting away from Republicans. The truth is, it’s been tilting away from them for a long time, but we’ve been a non-voting state for so long that it hasn’t caught up to them yet. It’s about to catch up to them.

I know, I know. “Michelle, you say that every election.”

One of these days, I’ll be right. One of these days, enough Texans will get tired of watching the corruption, the lies, the tax dollars funneled to the wealthy, while the least among us suffer. One of these days, the aging Republican base will age itself out.

In 2026, we have a shot. Republicans have gerrymandered nearly everything on the map based on low voter turnout, and they spend at least one Sunday a year in church praying that the low voter turnout holds. But if Democrats showed up. If typical non-voters, young voters, working-class voters, and Hispanic voters showed up, we can flip this state. We can take the US Senate seat, the Governor’s seat, several Congressional seats, and we can flip the Texas House. It really just takes turnout.

Texas didn’t get this broken by accident, and it isn’t going to get fixed by accident either. It’s going to get fixed by showing up, by knocking doors, by turning “I don’t do politics” into “I did, actually, and here’s my sticker.” Paxton can drink his tea. Abbott can hold his press conferences. We’ve got an election to win.

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• 120 days until the November election!

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

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