The 2026 TDP Resolutions Headed To The Convention Floor

And a warning to watch for roaming gangs of centrists.

Jun 25, 2026

Three permanent committees met leading up to the Texas Democratic Party (TDP) 2026 Convention, and will meet at the Convention. From my perspective, it’s been a little frustrating getting my hands on information from these “public” committee hearings because they’ve run concurrently on Zoom, and the ones I attended are the same ones the committees uploaded to YouTube.

During the last Convention cycle (2024), both the Platform and Resolution Committee hearings were uploaded to YouTube. Of course, I asked friends I knew in Committees about it, but they didn’t establish guidelines before the committee hearings, and it was up to each committee, and we don’t know if they even recorded the meetings.

No link to the platform changes has been provided to delegates yet, either.

So, we don’t know yet the FULL platform changes going into the Convention. We’ll find out soon enough, though. The countdown is on:

Progress Texas read the Platform’s preamble on their show yesterday. I love these guys, but I really wanted the meat and potatoes.

Someone emailed me to say that several of the platform resolutions I introduced have passed the committee and will reach the Convention floor. I’ll have an update on which ones they are specifically before delegates vote on the platform. 😉

Resolutions, Rules, and Platform. Here’s what they do.

Think of the platform as the party’s standing position paper, organized by policy area, that lays out where Texas Democrats stand on healthcare, education, immigration, labor, you name it. It’s revised at every Convention, but it’s built to last between conventions, not to chase the news cycle. If you want to know what Democrats believe about Medicare for All as a general matter, you check the platform.

Resolutions, by contrast, are one-offs, a specific ask, often tied to a specific bill, official, or news event. So when a resolution comes in that’s just a restatement of something the platform already covers.

The Rules Committee governs how the party functions procedurally, bylaws, how conventions are run, how committees are structured, and how votes get counted. It’s the least glamorous of the three and also the one nobody wants to find out they need until something breaks.

A resolution is a specific, often time-bound statement of position, “the TDP supports an arms embargo on Israel,” “the TDP opposes Speaker Dustin Burrows,” “the TDP calls for a $17 minimum wage.” These are written by individual delegates and voted on at county and Senate district conventions throughout the year. By the time they reach the state permanent committee, there are routinely 500-plus of them.

The committee’s charge is narrow but mandatory. Any resolution that passed at conventions covering 10 or more congressional districts has to be taken up, full stop. Everything below that threshold can still be considered, but it takes a two-thirds vote of the committee present even to bring it up. The math behind hitting “10” gets surprisingly gnarly fast. A single Harris County convention vote counts as 9 CDs automatically because Harris straddles 9 districts, while a resolution passed independently in 9 different counties needs a 10th somewhere to clear the bar without a supermajority vote.

This is also where the genuinely hard editorial and parliamentary fights live. This cycle’s marquee fight was over a slate of nearly twenty resolutions dealing with Israel and Gaza, arms embargoes, genocide designations, AIPAC accusations, which is now drawing outside press coverage and, per Houston Public Media’s reporting, real internal tension about whether the party should be wading into foreign policy at the level of individual delegate resolutions versus letting Platform handle it as a broader, more carefully negotiated plank.

Resolutions that don’t get addressed by the permanent committee at Convention aren’t dead. They roll over to the State Democratic Executive Committee’s resolutions subcommittee, which has the next two years to keep working on them before the next convention cycle.

The 2026 TDP Resolutions headed to the Convention floor.

All delegates will be voting up or down on these.

Ending complicity in genocide
Arms embargo on military aid and weapons transfers to Israel
Recognition of a Palestinian state
Statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico

The only one of these resolutions ⬆️ that I think should be expanded on is the Statehood one. Puerto Rico Statehood is a complicated topic. The people of Puerto Rico should be allowed to vote on whether to become a state or remain a Territory. They last held a referendum on it in 2020. It was a low-turnout election, with only 53% voting on Statehood. This many years later, they should vote again. But America should stop beating around the bush and give them what they want, whatever it may be.

Amend the Texas election code to allow limited use of preferential/rank-choice voting.
Election day voter registration (”same-day registration”)
Universal access to countywide voting (decoupling joint primary requirements)
Rank-choice voting

Three states have already passed rank-choice voting. But on the flip side, a bunch of red states have banned rank-choice voting mostly because Republicans are stupid. Last Legislative cycle, Republicans introduced a bill to ban rank-choice voting in Texas, too. However, it didn’t pass.

Women’s right to choose / abortion rights
Death penalty abolition
Transgender rights and protections
Raising the federal minimum wage to a living wage of at least $17/hour

We should raise the federal minimum wage; we should raise the state minimum wage, too. I know, technically, if the federal gets raised, the state gets raised, but what if the federal doesn’t get raised and we do happen to flip Texas blue?

Abolishing ICE
Pathway to citizenship
ICE accountability (separate from abolition resolutions)
Condemning Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows
Gun violence prevention/gun safety (combined, amended with “leading killer of children” language, gun show loophole, mental health checks)
Regulation of petrochemical facilities / environmental justice for Gulf Coast communities

Honestly, that last resolution was needed two decades ago, and the Gulf may be beyond repair by now. But we have to try.

Legalization of cannabis
Public school funding, opposing vouchers/property tax mechanisms/state takeovers
People’s primary policy / banning billionaire influence in primaries
Social Security expansion
DEI / anti-discrimination resolution (amended to include anti-racial, ethnic, gender, religious, cultural, homophobic, transphobic language)
Heat safety protections for outdoor workers

That’s the bulk of it. There are a few I skipped over because of the conversations I couldn’t keep up with, and several items were explicitly deferred.

Be on the lookout for my next explainer, on either Rules or Platform, once I can actually get my hands on the language.

Now, a confession. Going into these committee hearings, I was genuinely worried about which direction this party is headed. Are we continuing our leftward trajectory, the one that’s actually been winning us elections and energizing volunteers, or is the meandering middle finally going to muster the spine to fight back and drag us into some focus-grouped, nobody’s-mad-but-nobody’s-excited version of the Democratic Party? I’d heard rumors of rabid centrists lurking in these committees, waiting for their moment.

But looking at what actually made it out of the Resolutions Committee, and knowing that several of my own platform resolutions cleared as well, I’m cautiously optimistic we dodged the worst of it this year.

That said, don’t get comfortable. The Convention floor is a different animal than a committee Zoom call, and the centrists travel in packs. You can usually spot them before they even open their mouths, but if you need an ID guide, listen for the verbiage. If someone tells you they “understand both perspectives” on a resolution about kids getting shot, or asks the room to “soften the language” on ICE disappearing people into unmarked vans, or pleads with everyone not to “alienate” anyone, congratulations, you’ve spotted one. Tag, release, and vote them down.

And remember Corpus Christi is short on water, so hydrate with Gatorade.