The Primary Season From Hell

Drama from the top of the ticket to the bottom of the ballot.

Forget about all that Talarico/Crockett drama, this primary season has been nothing but drama from the top of the ticket, all the way down. Was it over in March? Nope. Because there are runoffs, which are a continuation of the primaries.

By now, we’re all aware of the TX35 situation. I endorsed John Lira, but he didn’t make it to the runoff, and then everyone coalesced behind Maureen Galindo. However, since then, Galindo’s rhetoric has gone off the deep end, and I’ve withdrawn my endorsement. Nearly every Democrat in the state has spoken out against her, and the state party issued a statement about her. And we’re all coalescing behind Johnny Garcia now, even though he’s the corporate moderate. He can be replaced in two years. Fascism is the danger.

Yesterday, Hasan Piker did a segment on Maureen Galindo, calling her the “Marjorie Taylor Greene of the left.” It’s that bad.

Hays County runoff drama.

I was first alerted to this drama through Lone Star Pioneer’s “Democratic runoff turns bitter in Hays County as PAC tied to state representative targets county judge.”

Incumbent Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra is in a runoff against County Commissioner Michelle Cohen, and State Representative Erin Zwiener has put her thumb on the scale in a way that’s now very public.

Zwiener posted a lengthy endorsement of Cohen on Facebook, laying out a detailed case against Becerra. She also made the electoral argument.

But the bigger story is that Zwiener didn’t just post her opinions. Campaign finance filings revealed that 98% of the funding for a brand-new attack PAC called “Hays Progressives United” came directly from Zwiener’s campaign committee. The PAC’s entire purpose, based on its online activity, has been attacking Becerra. The Caldwell/Hays Examiner broke the financial disclosure story, and it spread fast.

The Becerra camp’s response has leaned heavily on one very salient fact. Becerra became the first Latino county judge in Hays County’s 170-year history when he was elected in 2018. He’s been endorsed by every Democratic organization in the county, the Texas Progressive Caucus, and has been tapped to chair this year’s Texas Democratic Convention in Corpus Christi. His supporters see Zwiener’s intervention as a white state legislator working to displace the county’s first Latino countywide elected official, and that framing has resonated.

There’s a wrinkle in that narrative, though. Cohen’s full name is Michelle Gutierrez Cohen. She founded Hays Latinos United, a grassroots organization that ran COVID testing and vaccination clinics on the east side of Kyle and Buda. These areas are predominantly Latino and low-income. She’s not exactly the face of the Anglo establishment, even if she’s being cast that way.

What you’re really watching is a proxy war between two different theories of Democratic politics in a rapidly growing purple county. Becerra is combative, populist, and a genuinely historic figure. Zwiener is methodical, policy-focused, and has receipts. Neither side is entirely wrong about the other. But with a Republican developer lobbyist waiting in November, Hays County Democrats don’t have a lot of margin for a scorched-earth primary, and right now, the earth is pretty scorched.

Harris County Judge race.

Now let’s head down to Houston, where the open seat for Harris County Judge has produced another race that should alarm anyone who cares about the direction of the Democratic Party in Texas’s largest county.

Incumbent Lina Hidalgo, who has held the seat since 2019, is not seeking reelection. That opened the door for two candidates, former Houston City Council member Letitia Plummer, whom I’ve endorsed, and former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who is (and I say this with clarity and not malice) essentially John Whitmire in a dress.

Parker spent over 20 years in Houston’s oil and gas industry before entering politics, and her record as mayor was defined by positioning herself as an effective manager, not a visionary, not a fighter, but a manager. As mayor, she cut millions in government spending and balanced the city budget without raising the tax rate, which sounds great until you realize that in a city with Houston’s inequality and infrastructure needs, “balanced the budget without raising taxes” is a choice, and it’s a choice that falls hardest on working people. She’s the kind of Democrat who gets praised in centrist circles for being “competent” and “pragmatic,” words that mean, in practice, that progressive priorities get deprioritized or shelved entirely.

Letitia Plummer, a practicing dentist and former city council member, describes herself as the progressive voice in this race, with priorities including equal pay, disaster recovery, and conditions at the Harris County Jail. She’s the kind of candidate who actually ran on the things Democrats in Harris County should be fighting for.

And yet. Parker currently leads Plummer by 18 points in the runoff polling, 54% to 36%. That gap is uncomfortable, but it’s not surprising. Parker has more name recognition, more money, and a decades-long political machine behind her. In the primary, she pulled 46.6% to Plummer’s 37.3%.

This is the Houston problem, and I’m sorry to say it plainly to my friends in the Houston Progressive Caucus, whom I deeply respect. Houston and Harris County keep electing centrist Democrats who manage the status quo rather than transform it. We watched it happen with John Whitmire. We’re watching it happen again. A deep blue city with enormous inequality, a housing crisis, climate vulnerability, and a jail situation that should embarrass everyone, and the frontrunner is the candidate whose calling card is fiscal management and institutional credibility.

Plummer can still win this. Runoffs are small electorate elections, and enthusiasm and organizing matter. If you’re in Harris County, please vote for Letitia Plummer on May 26th. And if you’re not already plugged in with the Houston Progressive Caucus, now is the time. They’re doing the work that shifts the long-term trajectory of Democratic politics in that county, and they need your energy and your membership.

Texas Majority PAC.

The concerns I have about the Texas Majority PAC (TMP) have been long brewing. I’ve even reached out to Wendy Davis to discuss the concerns, but she hasn’t responded. However, this came to light this week.

The Lt. Governor race aside, which I have stated I have no intentions of getting involved in, TMP has been funding/funded and showing favoritism in multiple primary races across the state. And considering their relationship with the Texas Democratic Party (TDP), I find that deeply alarming, since the TDP isn’t supposed to get involved in primary elections.

Now, by no means am I implicating the TDP in any wrongdoing. They may not even be aware of this type of shady activity by the TMP, but their closeness to this PAC while this PAC is doing ick is just ick.

There’s one particular race that pissed me off in March, where the TMP overthrew a solid progressive for a nice-seeming liberal. And I’m not going to get into the details of which race, because it’s in the past now, and we want the liberal to win come November, but I do have a lot of questions about their political instincts when it comes to Texas.

And from my understanding, it’s Wendy Davis who is setting the whole strategy at TMP, at least that’s what they paid her for.

We all love Wendy Davis. In decades past, she did a lot for our state and for our party. But she’s no Dolores Huerta.

The last time that Joe Jaworski ran for Attorney General, there was a runoff between him and Rochelle Garza. Garza won. This blindsided me. I think it blindsided a lot of us. Garza never held any rallies in North Texas. I think she only had her launch commercial and missed the only debate because she was pregnant. Ultimately, she was an invisible candidate who lost that campaign. There have long been rumors that Davis pushed Garza in Democratic circles around the state, telling people, “Only a Latina woman could beat Ken Paxton.”

I don’t know if those rumors were true, but during the primary, the TMP had allegedly shown more favoritism toward the Crockett campaign than toward the Talarico campaign. Then there is the Lt. Governor’s race. And the election I mentioned about the progressive vs. liberal, it was a white man vs. a woman.

Identity politics 101.

Texas is a majority-minority state. We should have diverse candidates up and down the ballot who reflect the electorate, absolutely. Texas also has some of the highest rates of poverty and food insecurity in America. We need to elect people who are dedicated to fixing that and making our state a better place.

But those two things are not in conflict, unless you make them so.

The problem with identity politics as a strategy rather than a value is that it can be used to launder centrist politics.

If your criteria for the better candidate is “more diverse” rather than “more committed to the people that diversity is supposed to represent,” you’ve turned representation into a costume. You’ve made it about optics, not outcomes.

And that’s the danger I see in what TMP appears to be doing. Texas’s working poor, who are disproportionately Latino, Black, and brown, don’t need a candidate who looks like them and then governs like a Chamber of Commerce moderate. They need candidates who will fight for housing, healthcare, wages, and schools. If TMP is using identity as a tiebreaker to sideline progressives in favor of more manageable liberals, they are not serving the communities they’re claiming to champion. They’re just replacing one set of insiders with a more photogenic one.

Wendy Davis stood at a podium for eleven hours to defend reproductive rights in Texas. That took real courage, and nothing I’m saying here erases that. But courage in 2013 doesn’t automatically translate into good political judgment in 2026. Strategy matters. Instincts matter. And if the strategy coming out of TMP consistently produces outcomes where progressives lose primaries and centrists win with PAC backing, that’s a pattern. And patterns deserve scrutiny, regardless of who’s behind them.

The Texas Democratic Party has a real problem if its closest outside allies are quietly picking winners in primaries while the party officially stays neutral. Even if TDP leadership is completely in the dark, and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, the perception alone is damaging. Voters who are already skeptical that the party establishment fights for them don’t need another reason to feel like the game is rigged before it starts.

We are trying to build a Texas Democratic Party that can actually win statewide. That means building trust with the working-class voters, Latino voters, young voters, and progressive activists who are the engine of any viable Democratic coalition in this state. You don’t build that trust by running identity politics as a shell game.

Wendy, if you’re reading this, my DMs are still open.

All of this drama, the infighting, the PACs, the proxy wars, the identity politics shell games, is happening in a cycle where Texas Democrats have more opportunity than we’ve had in a generation.

The national environment is strong. Republican overreach is real, and voters are feeling it. The structural barriers that have kept Texas red are not immovable, and 2026 is the year we find out how much progress we’ve actually made.

But opportunity doesn’t win elections. The organization wins elections. Unity wins elections. And every scorched-earth primary, every shady PAC, every establishment thumb on the scale makes the general election harder. We can survive all of this. Primaries are supposed to be messy, and we will come together on May 27th, but we need to be honest about the patterns we’re seeing because the same instincts that cost us in primaries will cost us in November if we don’t name them and fix them.

Texas is worth fighting for. Let’s fight smart.

• May 22, 2026: Last day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)

• May 26, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)

• May 26, 2026: Election day! (Democratic primary runoff elections)

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