Lone Star Left Endorses Kendall Scudder For Re-Election Of Texas Democratic Party Chair

A party came back from the dead. Let's not kill it again.

If you are running for SDEC and haven’t filled out the Lone Star Left endorsement form yet, you can find it here. I’ll be announcing those endorsements and other party positions in a few days. The next week or so, we’re going to talk a lot about the Texas Democratic Party, the platform, and the direction of the state. But today, I’m going to tell you why I think that Kendall Scudder should be re-elected as Chair of the Texas Democratic Party.

When Scudder and other candidates initially ran for office in March of 2025, I said I would endorse, but at the last minute, I decided not to.

I had a close friend who was running, and I could see from the outside looking in that Scudder had all of these relationships with SDEC members, which positioned him for the win. I didn’t want to step into it.

I’m always apprehensive in the political sphere when people automatically endorse their friends or get behind their friends because, “hey, we’re cool, so you should be in politics with me.” What if your friend had shitty politics? But as I got to know Scudder better over the last year, he’s alleviated many of my concerns.

When I started out, many years ago, I wanted to educate people about what was going on in Texas government. State politics became my passion. Knowing everything about it became my obsession. Well, it turns out that’s a lot of insider baseball. I never set out to become an insider baseball newsletter, but that’s what happened. The people who read Lone Star Left are generally highly politically engaged, work in the political or non-profit space, and are the 10% of the population that’s highly tuned in. As a political writer, there are pros and cons to being that type of outlet.

Regardless, before Scudder, under Hinojosa, I was rumored to be on the TDP “Blacklist” for openly criticizing the Party. Make no mistake about it, I will openly criticize the Party again if I think there’s something there to criticize. However, after Scudder was elected, he and I talked many times, and I believe he recognizes the role I play as a partisan political writer of Texas politics. Unlike Hinojosa, who never gave me the time of day, Scudder has been gracious with his time.

I now understand how he was able to build all those relationships with SDEC members because anyone who has met Scudder or listened to him speak knows he is passionate about turning Texas blue, progressive politics, and sticking it to Republicans in Texas. The more I have gotten to know Scudder over the last year, the more I have found that my politics and his are pretty deeply in sync.

But his politics, and how likable he is, aren’t actually the job.

Under the TDP Rules, the Chair’s responsibilities are spelled out.

Per Article VII of the TDP Rules, the State Chair is the principal and presiding officer of the SDEC, with the authority to deal with the affairs of the Party and to establish and appoint committees with the SDEC’s advice and consent. That’s the official language. In practice, it means the Chair runs the machine. Building out committees, presiding over a 60-plus-member executive committee that includes everyone from the Black Caucus to the Texas AFL-CIO, and making sure that the machine is actually pointed at winning elections instead of eating itself alive.

The Rules also lay out what every member of that body, including the Chair, is supposed to be doing. Actively promoting the platform and the ticket, helping recruit and train candidates, building county chair relationships, putting together Party messaging, and raising money. It’s the job description.

So when I say Scudder has built relationships with SDEC members, I’m describing the office’s actual function. A Chair who can get sixty-some-odd committee members, who represent everyone from the Hispanic Caucus to the Texas Young Democrats to the Texas Environmental Democrats, into the same room and pointed in the same direction is going to get the platform promoted, the candidates recruited, and the money raised. The relationships are the mechanism by which the job gets done.

So let’s talk about what he’s actually done with that office.

When Scudder took over, the Texas Democratic Party was broke. “Up to its eyeballs in debt” is the phrase he uses, and it’s not an exaggeration. The Party had been rendered irrelevant after the last election cycle. We moved backward in 234 counties. Ten blue counties flipped red. We didn’t even field candidates in 27 races. Only a third of the precinct chair seats in the entire state were filled. That’s not a party building power. That’s a party in hospice.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I reviewed the Party’s financials on the FEC, and since Scudder took over, the Party’s donations have grown each quarter.

One year later, the TDP is debt-free. It’s running a $30 million coordinated campaign. And for the first time since 1972, Texas Democrats recruited a candidate for every single state and federal office on the ballot. Since 1972. Before most of us were born, before three generations of Texas Democrats gave up on entire counties because nobody bothered to ask them to run.

That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because Scudder had spent the last year treating every corner of this state as worth fighting for, rather than writing off entire regions as lost causes. He calls it a 254 county strategy, and he means all 254 counties, not the dozen that show up on a consultant’s spreadsheet. Under his leadership, the TDP opened permanent offices in DFW, Austin, Houston, Amarillo, and Eagle Pass. Eagle Pass matters here specifically because South Texas is where the Party hemorrhaged the worst. Those ten counties that flipped red were down there, and instead of parachuting in consultants every two years and disappearing the day after the election.

He’s also rebuilding the actual machinery of organizing, the boring, unglamorous stuff that decides whether a county has a functioning Democratic Party. More than a thousand precinct chairs have been recruited and trained since he took office. That’s the grassroots infrastructure conversation in one number. You can’t decentralize power away from Austin insiders if there’s nobody on the ground to decentralize it to. Scudder’s been building that bench, county by county, precinct by precinct.

And the strategy behind the spending is just as important as the spending itself. For years, the TDP’s coordinated campaigns operated on a simple, lazy assumption. Anyone who scores above 70 on the Democratic support model is a lock, so don’t bother talking to them. Spend the money trying to flip Republicans instead. Scudder pointed out the obvious flaw in that model himself. The 1.1 million Texas Democrats who voted in 2020 and stayed home in 2024 scored between 70 and 90. They were exactly the people the Party decided weren’t worth the phone call. In response to that, the coordinated campaign is moving to a 100% universe commitment rather than writing off your own voters because they’re inconveniently reliable. That’s a structural fix to a structural failure.

He’s also been straight about where the Party still has work to do, which matters more than it sounds. Asked about AAPI voter outreach, he didn’t pretend the Party has it figured out. He admitted that the voter file itself is poor at identifying the language spoken at home, even for Spanish, the most widely spoken non-English language in the state, and that no state in the country has solved this well yet. Then he laid out what he’s actually doing about it. Investing in the data infrastructure to fix the underlying problem, and building out a bilingual communications department from scratch, because the Party didn’t have one when he walked in. He hired Juan Carlos Penzon, the former national news director for Univision, to run TDP communications.

None of this is a finished product. The Party still has to prove it can flip a US Senate seat in play, still has to prove the South Texas bleeding has actually stopped and not just slowed, still has to figure out where it stands on data centers and grid policy once delegates vote on a platform position instead of leaving it to one man’s opinion, which Scudder was careful to point out isn’t his call to make alone. But a year ago, the Texas Democratic Party was an organization people had written an obituary for. Today, it’s debt-free, fully staffed on the ballot for the first time in over fifty years, and building permanent infrastructure in places the Party abandoned a decade ago.

Nobody is perfect.

Scudder is a young chair, and I think there have been a few mistakes that have been rectified. I think we need to be honest about those. When Scudder was first elected, he promised to keep the TDP staff on board as they transitioned away from Hinojosa. I believe that was a mistake. In my opinion, he should have cleaned house immidiately after taking office. Maybe he was trying to do the right thing. Maybe he was trying to be fair.

It didn’t turn out well. When he decided to decentralize the Party, there was a lot of drama behind that. It’s not really worth the energy to revisit it. The Texas Democratic Party needs to win the state of Texas on behalf of 31.5 million people, so the millions of people without healthcare and the millions of children living in food insecurity have a chance at a better life.

Instead of working through it like adults, some of those folks centered themselves rather than on the 31.5 million Texans this Party exists to fight for. That’s how we ended up with a letter from a few dozen people a few months back calling for Scudder to resign, followed almost immediately by a letter from a thousand people asking him to stay. It’s also why two former staffers are now running against him for Chair. Make of that what you will. I have.

Here’s what I know. Scudder sees the vision for Texas. He’s tapped into the working class in a way the Party spent a decade forgetting how to be. He understands the grassroots because he’s spent his life in it. And he doesn’t need to be planted in the Austin bubble to do any of that, the way Hinojosa was for ten years, disconnected from the rest of this state while it slipped further away from us.

The Texas Democratic Party needs to win this state on behalf of 31.5 million people. So the millions without healthcare and the millions of kids living with food insecurity actually have a shot at something better. That’s the job. Scudder’s doing it. He should get four more years to finish it.

That’s why:

Lone Star Left is endorsing Kendall Sudder for Texas Democratic Party Chair.

Kendall Scudder took over a party that was broke, irrelevant, and missing from half the state, and in one year, he made it debt-free, fully staffed, and present in more counties than we’ve seen in decades. That’s leadership.

Re-elect Kendall Scudder as Chair of the Texas Democratic Party.

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

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

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

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