At long last, Texas Democrats have their statewide slate.
On Tuesday, the easy victories of Austin state Representative Vikki Goodwin for the lieutenant governor nomination and Dallas state Senator Nathan Johnson for attorney general completed the team that will attempt to take advantage in November of what seems to be the most promising year for Lone Star liberals in at least four cycles.
So, here are some reasons that might be a bad thing.
First, this is a very white slate. Goodwin and Johnson join Austin state Representative Gina Hinojosa for governor and Austin state Representative James Talarico for senator in November’s top four ballot slots.
That means three of the highest-profile quartet are Anglo. And, for the four remaining statewide executive-branch positions up for election—comptroller, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner, and railroad commissioner—all are Anglo save for Benjamin Flores, the land commish hopeful who adds a second Hispanic surname to the octet. Texas, by way of reminder, is a plurality-Latino state that also has the largest total Black population of any state (and which just saw a bruising March Senate primary that fractured along racial lines).
This is also—maybe you already noticed the trend in the honorifics—a very Austin-centric lineup.
Three of the top four slots are held by state reps from the capital city—the bluest of Texas’ blue cities. The would-be comptroller, furthermore, is Austin state Senator Sarah Eckhardt. Texas, by way of reminder, is home to two mega-populous metros—and they are Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. (There’s also a booming metro to the south, by the name of San Antonio.)
On the other hand, here are some counterpoints.
By the standards of Texas Democrats, this is a highly qualified electoral offering. All four of the top candidates are currently sitting state legislators. And seven of the eight statewide executive aspirants hold state- or city-level elected office. In terms of experience—and willingness to risk something to run—this is a massive upgrade over any other recent election.
It’s also possible that none of the above quibbling matters a whit. Because perhaps the best news for the Texas Democratic Party was delivered Tuesday courtesy of Republican voters.
In a nearly 30-point rout, Attorney General Ken Paxton, propelled by a late Trump nod, vanquished incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn to seize the Texas GOP’s top ballot position come November. While early polling didn’t always show a wide electability gap between the two Republican men, there are times when one must trust one’s lyin’ eyes.
This is about more than Paxton’s sordid string of past scandals as compared to Cornyn’s relatively clean past. This is about a fairly straightforward question: If the (narrow) path to victory for Talarico depends on ticket-splitting between him and Governor Greg Abbott—which the conventional analysis says it does—then who was the GOP candidate more likely to repel an Abbott voter?
An Abbott-Talarico-sized door needed to open, and it’s simply much easier to imagine voters stepping through it when they’re presented with the walking ethical nightmare and 110-percent pot-committed Trump minion that is the state’s sitting attorney general. (Now, if Abbott himself enters the danger zone this year, we’re talking about another, more historic scenario with much greater implications for the actual lives of Texans, but for now I’m going to leave such speculation stranded between these parentheses.) It’s worth noting, as well, that the last time Texas saw a somewhat competitive midterm—in 2018—Paxton notably underperformed the other statewide Republicans outside of Ted Cruz.
Talarico could be strong enough, and Paxton should be weak enough, that another five months of terrible news for Trump and Republican rule just might bring the senatorial finish line beneath a blue wave’s high-water mark.
That’s a lot of conditional clauses amounting to this: It is now plausible that hope is not delusional. (For any non-Texan readers out there, this is actually a very bold claim I’m making here.)
Meanwhile, a few rungs down, GOP voters also nominated Bo French over incumbent Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright. French is what you might delicately call a promoter of fascist beliefs. Or, rather, the man is a fascist. But even the staunch opposition of Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick couldn’t stop the Paxton ally from seizing the nod, creating another possible soft spot.
Facing a difficult midterm year, Texas’ hardcore Republican electorate voted its highly questionable conscience rather than playing the electability-seeking pundit. If this tiny and zealous assemblage doesn’t pay the price for this decision in November, then we all will.
In assorted downballot Democratic news, the rising Houston star Christian Menefee easily prevailed in his congressman-versus-congressman showdown with the 78-year-old Al Green. And in two other congressional matchups also created by the GOP’s mid-decade scrambling of the electoral map, Colin Allred regained a position in the U.S. House at the expense of Congresswoman Julie Johnson, and a candidate widely condemned as antisemitic was defeated by a Blue Dog Democrat for the redrawn 35th Congressional District—a San Antonio-area seat that the GOP plans to flip but that could be in play in a blue-wave scenario.
In the Rio Grande Valley, the Bernie Sanders-backed Julio Salinas prevailed in a McAllen-area state House runoff for the seat previously held by the conservative Dem Bobby Guerra, and Ozzie Ochoa earned the nod for the Cameron County-based state House District 37—which Dems fumbled away back in 2022. Both of these South Texas districts went for Trump in 2024, so their fate this year will be part of a broader story of whether this region swings back toward the Democrats. Also hanging in the balance of regional Latino opinion are the 35th, mentioned above, and the U.S. House seats represented by Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez—all of which were around plus-10 for Trump in ’24. And, as a reach, there is the 23rd Congressional District, a plus-15 Trump seat for which the GOP has nominated an extremist Youtuber (for completeness’ sake, Bobby Pulido is also challenging Monica De La Cruz for the plus-18 Trump 15th).
In Austin, progressive labor candidate Montserrat Garibay prevailed over a former city council member in the race to replace Gina Hinojosa in the state House. Up in Dallas, incumbent state Representative Venton Jones easily prevailed against a runoff challenger, but over in Houston, longtime state House member Hubert Vo joined Tarrant County-based representative and colleague Chris Turner—who was ousted in the March primary—in falling prey to both a strong intraparty opponent and the vicissitudes of a changing district.
The post They’re Mostly Anglo. They’re Largely from Austin. And They Just Might Have a Shot. appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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