By the beginning of the 2024 electoral cycle, I’d spent enough time as a progressive-leaning observer of Texas politics to have developed a certain telltale armor. No one was going to convince me that Colin Allred was about to succeed where Beto O’Rourke had failed, or that Texas was prepared to reject Trump. And, while it didn’t help a living soul get healthcare or a decent public education, that protection served me well in the bloodletting to come.
Yet today, dear reader, I must admit I feel cracks in the armor widening.
There are objective reasons for this. Polling from April to July showed James Talarico and Ken Paxton in essentially a dead heat for U.S. Senate (O’Rourke was polling down 7 points at the same time in his comparable bid). Talarico is out-fundraising Paxton three to one, while Trump is now even less popular than he was eight years ago. More Democrats than Republicans voted in the March primaries, and in Tarrant County a special election saw a state Senate seat swing 31 points toward the Dems.
But belief is about more than falsifiable proof. There is an alchemy to it. My own internal journey may matter little, but on a mass scale the slow accretion of conviction matters greatly, and here the media plays a role.
Which brings me to a body of work that I seem to see transforming in lockstep with my own shifting perspective—a body of work that is, well, a blog.
I remember “LivingBlueTX,” starting somewhere back in the COVID haze, as a fairly popular Twitter account (today co-opted by a right-wing troll) promoting and engaging in Texas Democratic politics. It was a spin-off of a well-followed Facebook page for suffering Lone Star liberals begun back in the tea party era.
The account was run by Michelle Davis, who, as she explained in a recent podcast, was an Arlington-based corporate digital marketer and admin of the Facebook page in 2020 when she cashed out her retirement savings to strike out as an independent blogger and poster under the LivingBlue brand.
Two years later, she renamed her project “Lone Star Left” and transitioned to Substack, the newsletter platform home to much of today’s independent media, where she publishes at a near-daily clip under the slogan “Because facts have a left-wing bias.” The project would fit comfortably in the blog era of the earlier 21st century—she’s more writer than influencer. But she does have a sizable TikTok following, and she embraces the weird amalgamation that is Substack today by mixing in both live video and podcasts, getting significant guests including state House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu, state Senator Roland Gutierrez, and a crush of Dem candidates during primary season.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Davis’ audience has grown from around 4,000 subscribers to around 11,000 (which places her, on Substack, below former ag commish Jim Hightower but above that “Texas Paul” guy who does the selfie videos with the coffee mug).
Beto O’Rourke in November 2018 (Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman via AP)
Until recently, I followed her output inattentively, but last summer a particular political intervention caught my eye.
At the time, Texas Dems seemed in the throes of a quintessential “disarray.” Erstwhile torchbearers O’Rourke and Allred were meeting with would-be successors Joaquin Castro and Talarico to supposedly coordinate a statewide slate for 2026—except they couldn’t agree on anything, a fact that soon got out to the press. Eventually, two of them jumped in the same race, and the other two did nothing.
To me, the whole thing was typical. They’re Texas Democrats; they’re going to lose, and they’re going to do it without much style or strategy. In other breaking news, Texas summers are hot.
But Davis took a tack that struck me as bizarre. First, she did a rally write-up in which she lavishly praised (minus Allred) the whole indecisive pack of men as leaders of an insurgent, progressive-populist, anti-D.C. political party on the verge of being unleashed—an assessment that bore little resemblance to any Texas Democratic Party I knew of. Then she published a letter cosigned by party activists calling on the men to sort themselves out in a specific way. They didn’t listen, but, in what I now know is her usual fashion, Davis kept on undeterred.
Going back to 2022, the Lone Star Left blog is defined by a deranged optimism. For a concrete example: Just six months after the ’22 midterms—which, at best, were a non-disaster for Democrats—Davis predicted that Dems could flip 17 state House seats in 2024. (The GOP actually added two seats.)
From the beginning, Davis, who also self-describes as a millennial mom, mixed such electoral punditry with coverage of the minutiae of the state party organization itself. She was a strident critic of former longtime party chair Gilberto Hinojosa. She explained the work of precinct chairs and called on her readers to fill the party’s numerous vacancies. She championed the Progressive Caucus within the party, and she treated the writing of the official 2024 state party platform as a marquee event.
“The platform that the Party passed was the most Progressive Platform in history,” she wrote in June 2024, noting that Texas Democrats were the first in the country to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Cynics like me felt that, unlike in blue states, pro-Palestine leftists had succeeded here largely because of the low stakes of what this particular party says it believes. But Davis, a self-identified progressive, treats the platform as a barometer of what both the base and the mass of nonvoting Texans want, and she judges Democratic politicians by their divergence from it. (A bit more like what you see on the GOP activist side.)
Lone Star Left also issues endorsements in the manner that Republicans believe Philadelphians vote: early and often. And her track record is, to put it charitably, mixed. She has a soft spot for a type of lefty candidate who comes in roughly fifth in a five-way primary. And time has proved unkind to some of her broader predictions as well, including from August 2024: “Lina Hidalgo is a rising star within the Democratic Party,” and, “In my mind, Jasmine Crockett has already won her 2026 bid against John Cornyn.”
As November 2024 approached—like a movie serial killer behind a protagonist who just won’t stop chatting on the phone—Davis kept caution firmly in the wind. “Election Eve prediction from Lone Star Left: Colin Allred will win,” she wrote.
We all recall how those elections went instead, but I suspect few of us can claim quite the bounce-back of Lone Star Left. Within hours, Davis advised: “In the shadow of defeat, we can find our strength.” Two days later, she assessed that Dems, including Allred, had veered too far right and abandoned the base, which in turn had abandoned them.
As the forces of centrism geared up nationwide to push the opposite narrative, she barreled ahead, cranking back to life her highly specific prediction machine, forecasting that Dems could flip up to 30 state House seats this November and that they would nab multiple statewide offices.
All that probably sounds like a willful refusal to let facts intrude on a chosen narrative, and it probably is. And yet, the winds of reality seem to be shifting her way.
Gina Hinojosa on July 18 in Lubbock (AP Photo/Justin Rex)
Take the latest Texas Democratic Party convention as evidence. For months, a minor brouhaha had been simmering after the recently appointed chair, a self-styled populist and progressive named Kendall Scudder, moved the party headquarters to his hometown of Dallas. Some party staffers were upset by the move, and this bubbled over into a couple of Dems-in-disarray-style articles in the Texas Tribune. Davis threw down, in blog form, for Scudder—saying her fellow North Texan had made the right move in pivoting the party away from Austin and was pursuing the right strategy of filling empty precinct chair positions and fielding a candidate in every legislative district (which the party achieved). Of the malcontents, she said, Scudder “should have cleaned house immediately after taking office.”
When the party convention arrived this June—which Davis covered in more minute detail than anyone else—the conflict came to a head in a race for chair that Scudder won with an overwhelming 75 percent of the vote. At the same time, Bernie Sanders-affiliated candidates are winning primaries around the country, and party mandarins are wringing their hands about rising socialism as Republicans increasingly resign themselves to a wretched midterm. It’s a state of affairs that Davis anticipated much more so than, to name one observer, me.
In my binge-read of Lone Star Left, one post jumped out as unlike the rest. “Lying in a hospital bed with nothing but fluorescent lights and a blood pressure cuff for company will make a person think,” Davis wrote last June, describing a very recent “health hiccup” she was recovering from. “I realized this was the first time in years I’d gone four whole days without sending a newsletter. … I started thinking about why I do this in the first place.”
She reported how readers write to her saying that, because of her work, they became precinct chairs, hosted a forum, or became voter registrars. And that’s her reason. “We’re Texans,” she added in a concluding call to arms. “We don’t wait for miracles. We make them.”
Well, dammit, maybe so. Just because you haven’t seen a thing doesn’t mean it’s not unfolding before your eyes.
The post The Year for Magical Thinking appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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