The TDP Platform Got A Rewrite. Here Are A Few Things They Changed.
Spoiler: it's a lot more populist than 2024.
The new platform (which hasn’t been voted on yet) has been published on the Convention website. There are a LOT of changes compared to the 2024 platform. It may take us all week to go through all of this, and that’s fine, one bite at a time. The Convention will vote on the platform tomorrow, and some of it can change from the floor.
Here is the full livestream from today (but I clipped some of the best speakers below):
The biggest change to the platform is “Affordability” as the lead section. This is a huge tonal shift toward populism. The platform now opens with grocery prices, junk fees, housing costs, surveillance pricing, and corporate price-gouging as the first substantive section after the preamble, ahead of jobs.
Under the Affordability section, it includes these subsections:
Increasing Grocery Affordability
Increasing Housing Affordability
Lower Taxes
Lower Utility Bills
Increasing the Affordability of Transportation
Increasing Fiscal Responsibility
Public Employees & Pensions
The Republican Party of Texas still doesn’t have its 2026 platform uploaded to its website yet, but I’m pretty sure their only thing regarding lowering costs for everyday people is to “abolish property taxes,” which is impossible, without giving us a 25% sales tax.
Some new and interesting things.
A new plank has been added to ban surveillance pricing, which is actually really great. I recently had lunch with my new State Representative-elect, Junior Ezeonu (D-101), who told me that this was one of his priorities.
Surveillance pricing is when companies use data they’ve collected about you to set a personalized price rather than a single fixed price everyone pays.
The old model was that a gallon of milk cost $3.99. Everyone who walks into the store pays $3.99. The surveillance pricing model is when an algorithm decides what you are specifically likely to pay and determines who you are, with small cameras installed in digital price tags. So, the person next to you pays $3.99, and you pay $4.99, because the algorithm decides you’re worth more money.
They’ve also given “Rural Texas” an entire section. Under that, the subsections include:
Restoring and Replacing Our Aging Rural Infrastructure
Moratoriums on Data Centers
Ensuring Rural Students Equal Access to a Quality Education
Accessible and Affordable Healthcare for Rural Texans
Comparable Quality High-Speed Internet and Cell Phone Service
Empowering Local Governments and Maintaining Local Control
Texas Democrats support aggressively combating the New World Screwworm
It’s important to point out the subsection on “Moratoriums on Data Centers,” which calls for moratoriums not only on new data centers but also on crypto mining. And it includes disclosure and local-control provisions.
We’re now calling for a stock trading ban for SCOTUS, the executive branch, and Congress. And it can’t come soon enough. This is one of Talarico’s pledges, along with many of the Congressional delegates and candidates. It’ll take the political courage of the majority. But it is absolutely STEP ONE in fixing our broken political system.
Judicial term limits. This will be one of the topics we’ll have to dive deeper into later next week, because while it sounds great, I happen to know that over the last 100 years, many groups on both sides of the aisle have pushed for judicial term limits for SCOTUS. The platform calls for term limits for all federal judges, not just SCOTUS. And also talks about staggering SCOTUS appointments, guaranteeing no more than two per presidential term, and detailed “Shadow Docket” reform language requiring written opinions and supermajority for emergency stays.
We all can agree that SCOTUS needs a political overhaul, and maybe the 120th Congress will have the political courage to make it happen.
There’s now a plank for adding a mechanism to recall state and county officials. Right now, Texas voters have zero ability to do this above the city level. No recall for the Governor, no recall for legislators, no recall for statewide judges, nothing. You can be stuck with somebody for the full term, no matter how badly they screw up, short of impeachment, which the Lege controls and which they use roughly as often as Ken Paxton tells the truth under oath. It’s a long-needed tool for the people in Texas.
AI policy has also been massively expanded on the platform. In contrast to the Republicans, who have a death wish and want to remove all AI regulations, the TDP platform includes bias audits, deepfake/likeness protections, criminalization of CSAM specific to AI generation, age verification for AI tools, workplace surveillance bans, and disclosure requirements for AI vs. human interaction.
We’re calling for the Railroad Commission to be renamed. Because too many people still don’t know that’s the body that regulates oil and gas.
The platform is also calling for a reparatory justice commission for Black Texans. I strongly support this. This will have to be one of the other planks that we deep-dive into in the next few weeks to understand why all Texans should support reparatory justice for more than 140 years of human and civil rights injustices in the Lone Star state, and how it still impacts millions of Texans today.
It calls for the explicit end of Operation Lone Star. Audit? Fucking end it. No reason our taxpayer dollars should be going to that.
AIPAC is also named explicitly. The 2024 platform discussed “foreign-interest PACs” generally. However, the 2026 platform names AIPAC directly in the campaign finance reform section. That’s a notable hardening. It also adds explicit language calling for an end to “transfer and sales of offensive armaments to the State of Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces.”
Tomorrow’s the big one.
The Convention votes on all of it, the platform, the resolutions, the rules, and the state officer elections, Chair, Vice Chairs, the whole slate. Anything in this platform can still get amended or stripped on the floor, so don’t treat a single word of what I wrote above as final until the gavel says it is. TDP’s YouTube goes live at 10 am if you want to watch it happen in real time instead of waiting for me to tell you about it after the fact.
We’ve barely scratched the surface here. Healthcare, education, immigration, the rest of Equality & Social Justice, all of it is still sitting there waiting for the deep-dive. One bite at a time. See you tomorrow.
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Thank you so much for the You Tube videos of the speeches our Party Candidates made at the Convention! I was even impressed with Johnson’s speech! He had never wowed me before. He is definitely better than Mayes Middleton. 😅