“Chuck Schumer fought tooth and nail against half of these f---ing people… He does not understand the urgency of the moment and what the future demands.” A quote from Jon Stewart in an image I saw on Bluesky yesterday.
US Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and the establishment didn’t formally endorse newly elected progressive Senators Abdul El-Sayed or Peggy Flanagan. Nor did he support Angie Nixon in Florida, who only lost by two points.
Our country was taken over by fascists, and now Democrats have the opportunity to fix the things that they broke. The moment is urgent.
By “these people,” he meant the insurgent Democrats who ran against establishment priorities. He meant progressives.
This last week, America didn’t just elect a Democratic mandate. They elected a progressive mandate. According to Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, the caucus will have 105 members going into the 120th Congressional Session. He says that progressives will be the “delivery caucus,” and moderates only won on a progressive populist message.
Texas is no exception. While both Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico ran as populists, both have roots in progressive populism. The Texas Democratic Party 2026 platform is a progressive populist’s dream. And progressive populism has always had its roots in Texas.
Check out this January 2025 article from our new Agriculture Commissioner-elect Clayton Tuckerabout how progressive populism was born in Texas, from the Farmers’ Alliance in Lampasas through the New Deal.
Texas Progressives worry about our new officials pandering to the right.
It’s a legitimate fear, knowing how often Democrats in DC have failed to meet the moment. And a few days ago, Gina Hinojosa appointed Republican former House Representative Ernest Bailes.
She had a very good reason. In the 88th Texas Legislature, Ernest Bailes was one of 21 Republicans who defied Abbott and joined Democrats to strip vouchers out of the education bill.
Bailes went against Abbott and the majority of the Republican body to kill that bill in 2023. And because of that, in the next Republican primary, Greg Abbott gave his primary opponent over $700K to get Bailes out.
Bailes is staunchly pro-public education, even when he had to stand against his party. Since a huge part of Hinojosa’s agenda is to fix public education, it makes sense to have a pro-public-education Republican she can trust on the transition team.
Fixing public education isn’t a Democratic project, and Hinojosa shouldn’t treat it like one. It’s a priority for all Texans. For many sessions, rural Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats against vouchers. It wasn’t until Greg Abbott took $13 million from Jeff Yass to target those Republicans and replace them with voucher yes-men that vouchers finally passed.
Hinojosa needs to rebuild a coalition of pro-education Republicans willing to work with her statewide. Bailes knows who is in this coalition and she trusts him.
At no point did Hinojosa say Bailes was going to be in charge of LGBTQ+ rights or women’s bodily autonomy. Adding a pro-education Republican who stood up against his own party isn’t pandering to the right. It’s what progressive populism looks like in practice. You know, find the people who have been screwed by the billionaire-funded machine and put them to work against the billionaire-funded machine, regardless of the letter next to their name.
And who else did Gina Hinojosa appoint to her transition team?
Ryan Pollock, a sixth-generation Texan and IBEW Local 520 journeyman electrician who now runs the Texas Building Trades Council. He pushed the AFL-CIO to back a Green New Deal and appeared in DSA recruitment material.
For years, Gina Hinojosa was ranked the most liberal in the House. And she embraced that label.
In recent interviews, when confronted about being a progressive, Hinojosa pushed back and said she thinks of herself as a populist. It wasn’t until I saw this clip of Hasan Piker’s uncle about her populist label that I realized the distinction.
Cenk Uygur heard “populism” and declared victory over progressives. But Gina Hinojosa hasn’t abandoned progressive values. She’s just reframing them.
And we know this because her priorities so far have matched the Texas Democratic Party platform, which prioritizes progressive populism, AKA economic populism.
What is “populism” anyway?
When people hear “populism,” they think of Trump, anger, and othering people. But populism is just politics that champions (or claims to champion) the common people.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing forms. Left-wing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Right-wing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or the LGBTQ+ community.
When you look at policies like housing, right-wing populism might say costs are driven by immigration, or they might frame zoning reforms as an elite plot against suburbs. Like in 2020, when Trump said, “Democrats would abolish the suburbs,” and repealed the fair housing rule.
On the other hand, left-wing populism might say costs are driven by exclusionary zoning, Wall Street buying up houses, and rent algorithms. Their fix would be to tear down segregation-era land rules and build more.
I could probably give you 100 examples like that. Progressive populism treats corporate power as the problem. Right-wing populism mostly treats corporate political views as the problem, and redirects economic anger toward a group below.
Gina Hinojosa’s record in the Texas House is enough to know what kind of populism she plans to fight for.
The Texas Democratic Party platform is progressive populism, not either/or. And as TDP Chair Kendall Scudder put it last year, “I stand really firm in the party staking its claim on the left, staking its claim on economic populism.”
In Washington, DC, Democrats are gearing up for an internal battle between progressives and the centrist establishment. Right now, that battle hasn’t trickled into Texas Democratic ranks, but don’t be surprised if we see some of it from certain legislators next year.
What the future demands.
I spent several hours yesterday going through all the Texas House Democrats’ and newly elected members’ websites, trying to get a list of everyone’s priorities going into the 90th Legislative session.
59 of the 82 of them have “fully fund public schools” on their websites. I made a list of everyone’s priorities, and there are more than 60. Here are the top ten:
Schools, taxes, healthcare, and safety. That’s what Democrats ran on.
Hasan Piker’s uncle’s idea that progressives got “hijacked” by the culture wars doesn’t hold up. “Culture wars” has always been the Republicans’ thing.
In the 90th Legislative Session, you should expect to see:
Vouchers/ESAs: defund or repeal the 2025 program
Data center regulation and water rights
Repealing the Death Star law (local control)
Ethics and campaign finance reform
Medicaid expansion
If they can push all of those things past the Senate Republicans. Some will cave.
Chuck Schumer may not understand the urgency, but until they prove otherwise, we have to believe the new slate who were elected do. It’s why we elected them.
Pre-filing begins tomorrow.
Pre-filing is when Legislatures start filing bills they plan to push in the coming session. With 29 freshman Democrats coming in, we’ll see who meant what they said on the campaign trail.
Starting tomorrow, every Democrat who promised to fully fund schools, rein in data centers, or take on the billionaires gets to put it in writing.
Texas didn’t elect a slate of progressive populists to play nice with the people who broke everything. We elected them, in record numbers, because we understand the urgency of the moment.
Now it’s up to them to show us that they understand what the future demands.
January 12, 2027: The 90th Legislative Session begins.
Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.
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Umm where is expanding voting rights on this? We will never win again unless we fix this. We need to do this on statewide, to ensure that SCOTUS doesn’t take them away.
Schumer is an old school, inside baseball institutionalist who plays within the moderate establishment Democratic guidelines. He's trapped in an old paradigm of working with old-school moderate GOPers who simply don't exist anymore in the Senate. I very seriously doubt he has the vision and fire breathing guts to push a real left-wing populist agenda if he were elected Senate majority leader.