Tejano star Bobby Pulido crushed the incumbent Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz by 24 points last night in a fierce blue backlash against gerrymandering, immigration crackdowns, and the high cost of living in South Texas’ Congressional District 15.

With 30 years of touring and two Latin Grammys under his belt, Pulido was a formidable opponent for the lesser-known congresswoman from the start. His nostalgic 1990s hits became the soundtrack to a moderate, good-vibes campaign pushing back against the extremism of President Donald Trump, who previously won the predominantly Hispanic district by a stunning 18 points in 2024. The red ripple and gerrymandered maps that ushered in De La Cruz as the first Republican to represent the 15th district proved to be a short-lived and failed experiment, one of countless casualties in last night’s blue tsunami.

The congresswoman’s last-ditch efforts to distance herself from the immigration raids that have disrupted life across South Texas proved futile as Pulido’s star status propelled him higher and higher in the polls. He performed at countless quinceañeras, the Texas Democratic Party convention, and at rallies alongside Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico. On October 17, the 53-year-old musician gave his final performance, La Ultima Desvelada, at a sold-out arena in Edinburg.

But now that the music’s over, constituents will see what kind of congressman Pulido will be. Asked about how he connects with voters on important issues, Pulido told the Texas Observer in a July interview, “Issues are more important to journalists than they are to people. I think the people don’t look at it as ‘How do you stand on this issue?’ It’s ‘Can I trust that you care about me?’” He’s spent more time performing “Desvelado” for local audiences and taking pictures with fans than diving into his vaguely populist, centrist platform.

“For over 30 years, you played my music at your weddings, your quinceañeras, and your carne asadas, and the past year you welcomed me into those same celebrations on the campaign trail,” Pulido said in a statement to the Texas Tribune. “Tonight, you trusted me with something even bigger than a song. You trusted me with your future, and I will work hard everyday to honor it.” 

The beloved figure will be joining the ranks of a not-so-beloved coalition that helped fund his campaign: the Blue Dog Democrats. The conservative Democratic group established in the 1990s is notorious for siding with Republicans in Congress on critical issues like abortion, gun control, and border security. Their numbers have been dwindling over the past decade, but Pulido’s victory alongside that of Johnny Garcia in Texas Congressional District 35, fortifies the group’s hold on South Texas—alongside Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez in Brownsville, who both also handily fended off the GOP’s attempts to take them out last night. 

The Tejano singer has said he maintains his support for the Second Amendment, capitalism, and a militarized border, although he believes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations have wrongly targeted innocent people and disrupted life in the community. Immigration raids and for-profit detention centers became a flashpoint in the race.

Even De La Cruz ran advertisements boasting of her efforts to free people from federal immigrant detention. Yet in the final months of her campaign, she appeared at Trump rallies and at his fruitless Republican Midterm National Convention in Dallas. There was seemingly nothing to hold back the wave of retribution that wiped her out of office. She accepted defeat last night in a statement calling her two terms in Congress “the greatest honor of my life.”

With a whole new slate of Democratic leadership set to govern Texas and take up the majority in Congress, there are huge promises to be upheld and battles to undertake. J.C. Frias, a popular progressive influencer from the Rio Grande Valley, took to social media to share his excitement and concerns following last night’s astonishing victory. “We are all celebrating as we should, but I just wanna say we want justice. We want accountability,” Frias said. “I’m talking about our neighbors being beaten, handcuffed, dragged, threatened with firearms pointed to their face.” Frias demanded public trials and investigations of ICE.

Pulido, with all his bells and whistles, may instead represent a return to the status quo in South Texas. He told the Observer he believes in common-sense border enforcement and that ICE needs to rebuild trust and accountability—but asked what legal measures should be taken to hold them accountable, he merely responded: “Elect Democrats.”

At an election night party in his hometown of Edinburg, Pulido talked about the value of hard work and dedicated his victory speech to improving life for the working people of South Texas. “We’re rich in family, faith, culture, and determination. What we’re missing are opportunities,” Pulido said. “I want our children to grow up in South Texas, to find good jobs, buy homes, and raise families here. I want the next generation to have opportunities our parents and grandparents could only dream of.”

The post Bobby Pulido, the New Scion of South Texas Democrats  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

I’m not one to typically employ the writerly first person, but after last night please allow me the indulgence. Eight years ago, having moved to Texas to cover the 2018 midterms for the Texas Observer, I traveled across the state tracking what would be a blue wave of historic proportions. On Election Night, I watched from the minor league baseball stadium in El Paso as an upstart Democrat named Beto O’Rourke came within a hair’s breadth of winning a statewide seat in Texas for the first time in a generation. 

On those coattails, fueled by mass resistance to Donald Trump’s first presidency, Democrats flipped a dozen state House seats and a couple state Senate seats, and made inroads all across the Texas suburbs. It felt like the long-lost Democratic cause in Texas was on the precipice. 

Instead, that Sisyphean rock kept falling back to solid red ground. In 2020, Democrats’ sky-high hopes fell flat hard. In 2022, no dice. In 2024, a major regression. The one-party-ruled red empire of Texas appeared as unbreakable as ever.

Then, in this year of 2026, with the seeming snap of a finger, it all vanished. 

Ken Paxton—that ethically and morally impaired man who finally proved that he is not, in fact, made of Kevlar—lost by a dozen points to a Democrat named James Talarico. And it didn’t stop there. Relatively early in the night, Governor Greg Abbott—running for an unprecedented fourth term at the helm of the State of Texas—conceded to Gina Hinojosa as his powerful fiefdom crumbled to dust. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, also seeking a fourth term, fell too. So did every single Republican running for statewide office. Attorney General? Gone. Railroad commissioner? Bye Bo French. Texas Comptroller? Toast. Texas Agriculture Commissioner? Adios. Texas Land Commissioner, gone. Texas Supreme Court? Now a narrow 5-4 GOP majority. 

Control of the Texas House, which Republicans have held for over 20 years now? Democrats are now on the verge of running the show in the lower chamber come January—with certain members already filing their speakership papers last night. And if not for some sound gerrymandering of the hard-right Texas Senate, Democrats would be about to enjoy a trifecta of power. The congressional gerrymandering of 2025, meanwhile, done in an attempt to deliver Donald Trump five more red seats in Texas, fell apart as Democrats ran the table in South Texas and beyond. 

The full scope of Democrats’ utter rout of Texas is still being tabulated, but it was a bloodbath in every sense. To say it feels surreal—unreal—is an understatement. What was one day earlier the most powerful, entrenched Republican state government in the nation is now packing its bags, destined for the exits in two months. Looking back to 2018, a cycle that perhaps presaged 2026, it all looks rather quaint. 

So, what the hell happened? How did this decadent red empire of Texas so thoroughly disintegrate in the course of one cycle? How are we actually looking at not just one or two statewide flips for Democrats, which alone would’ve been a gargantuan victory, but a Blue Texas? How did a true political revolution upend the Lone Star State in one fell swoop?

I was not at all expecting the outcome we saw on election night–I don’t think anyone really was. 

But many things do come to mind. One cannot help but look back at the past several years, at how Republicans in charge doubled town on a politics of delivering pain and retribution to their perceived enemies, of electoral and legislative hubris (some of it earned), of casual corruption, of extraneous extremism, of an increasing indifference to those not in the GOP club. Culture wars about gender, book banning, and so on.  Ramming through a private school voucher program to please out-of-state activists. An ongoing refusal to invest in the public education system and a willingness to let a broken property tax system fester cycle after cycle, promising always that the next election would be the one to deliver relief.

Or maybe it was mostly the $4+-per-gallon gas prices and a president who ran against forever wars going to war—not yet forever in duration but possibly on its way—while engaging in the most brazen sort of self-dealing and personal enrichment and launching an indiscriminate domestic police campaign against hard-working immigrants. Maybe it was one of the most anti-incumbent election waves in American history. And maybe it was everything. 

To be a bit indelicate, whatever happened, it happened very fucking loudly here in Texas. And it happened all at once. 

For Republicans here, there will be plenty of time for sorting the blame and meting out the recriminations. Trump has already begun to blame everyone but himself. And there is time, though not as much, for sorting out just exactly what the Democrats who now find themselves on the verge of running Texas will do. 

But on the former count, soon-to-be-former Texas Comptroller and right-wing hardliner Don Huffines—who primaried Greg Abbott in 2022, a bid that helped usher in a rightward lurch in state government—got a head start last night. 

“I blame it on our leadership; I just do,” Huffines said in a speech at his campaign event last night, citing the top leaders seeking fourth terms in office. “I blame this on Greg Abbott, I blame it on Dan Patrick. … I hope they’re happy. Because now we’re all going to suffer. … People are tired of the Republicans being in office.” He went on to lament how Abbott and Patrick’s promises to reduce property taxes this cycle only served to remind voters that they haven’t gone down in a dozen years. 

Ending his somber/angry rant, Huffines said there’s a “lotta great patriots” who still care about what happens in Texas. “What are we gonna do? Who are we gonna call?” Huffines said, seemingly to himself, cueing up his anger. 

“There’s no one left.”

The post And Poof. There Goes Red Texas. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To paraphrase a fake quote from Vladimir Lenin—who, had he been a statewide Democratic candidate here last night, would have won by at least five points—there are decades when nothing happens, and there are nights when the Republican men who’ve held this state in their collective deathgrip for the past 12 years are thrown like Whataburger wrappers onto the electoral ash heap of Texas history. 

There are a few ways to summarize Tuesday’s results. For example, as in the headline above: “Holy shit.” Or: “This is impossible.” Or: “I think I’m accidentally on some kind of drug you typically have to forage deep into a remote jungle to find.”

Or, somewhat more precisely, Texas Democrats last night did the following: Flipped every statewide race from U.S. senator down to railroad commissioner and even including the four state Supreme Court seats that were up (of nine total). Facing a Trump-ordered 2025 U.S. House gerrymander meant to flip 5 seats to the Republicans, Democrats instead flipped one net seat for themselves, driven by an overwhelmingly strong performance in South Texas, where the GOP had overindexed on Trump’s fleeting 2024 strength. Dems needed 14 seats to flip the state House, a generally unfathomable number as of 6:59 p.m yesterday; as of Wednesday morning, they’d clearly flipped the chamber, with the only question being the size of their incoming majority. With Texas’ help, Dems nationwide flipped the U.S. House and Senate by wide margins too.

At the very top of the ballot, Austin state Representative James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton by something like 12 points, while the statewide Dems below—most notably state Representative Gina Hinojosa squaring off with Governor Greg Abbott—prevailed in the range of 5 to 7 points.

That, to be clear, is not what the polling showed—with Talarico and Hinojosa overperforming their poll averages by roughly 10. And that’s not what any pundits, save perhaps one I can think of, predicted. That is a fever dream made flesh.

We are, after all, only two years removed from a historically dispiriting election for Texas Democrats. In 2024, Dems here lost ground everywhere—from the biggest cities to the swingiest suburbs to, most acutely, heavily Hispanic South Texas—as voters including the youngest cohort spurned Kamala Harris and, to a slightly lesser extent, Senate hopeful Colin Allred. 

This year, to give a sense, the most populous county in the Rio Grande Valley in deep South Texas—Hidalgo County—swung toward the Dems by about 49 points, comparing Trump’s ’24 margin to Talarico now. Talarico performed some 30 points better there than the top-ballot Dem in 2022 as well. 

Turnout numbers aren’t final, but we’re headed for a number around 10 million—a certain record-breaker for a midterm, though not too different from 2018 as a percent of voters registered. New York Times estimates suggest Hispanic Texans shifting 40-plus points toward Dems compared to 2024 and voters ages 18-29, in the realm of 50 points.

The hardest thing, then, is not understanding whether Republicans took a shellacking this year for the ages; it’s understanding what this all means come January. 

Will Texas Education Agency head Mike Morath be fired? Yes, that’s safe to say. Will that stop the school district takeovers that have roiled the state? One can hope. Will the Lege actually turn around the ship of privatization and equitably fund our public schools? Harder to say.

Will any pushes to further entrench police cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or punish abortion-seekers be dead on arrival? Seem like safe bets. Will Texas stop putting band-aids on a broken government revenue system and just pass a damn progressive income tax? Well, no, but maybe one day! Anyone who tells you they know what’s possible now is lying.

Today is Wednesday, November 4, 2026, and our state officially faces the unthinkable: Democrats who govern.

The post Holy Shit, Texas Democrats Are Gonna Govern appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Cumbia thumped through the dark, and drinks flowed as the crowd grew in the pavilion of the Long Center. The dazzling Austin skyline stood at their backs, but all eyes turned in the opposite direction to the massive projector screen. MS NOW was displaying the election results as votes came in from around the nation.

Screams erupted into the night when Texas popped onto the screen; with only about 35 percent of the votes in, Democratic candidate James Talarico was leading the race for U.S. Senate by almost 20 points.

People hugged, laughed, held back tears, and clustered closer to the screen in nervous anticipation. It was still too early to be believed, and it’s been nearly 40 years since Texas sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. Several of the polls leading up to Election Day put Talarico leading Attorney General Ken Paxton by a small, skeptical margin—nothing like the blowout we were watching unfold. As of early Wednesday morning, Talarico led Paxton by 10 points. 

(Eden Shamy)

Sylvia and Guy Marroquin, a couple in their 60s from Austin, felt excited and optimistic. “People are really tired of the last 10 years. We’re exhausted, and we are ready to have a return to stability, normalcy, kindness, and that we can trust the people who are representing us,” Sylvia said, sporting a burgundy Talarico cap and matching shirt.

Over the next hour, hundreds more people packed into the pavilion and on the lawn. Local Chicana trio The Tiarras ripped electric guitar solos and sang songs of unity on the stage outside. The drink line stretched longer, and attendees savored food from iconic Austin spots KG BBQ and Amy’s Ice Cream. Vendors sold art, t-shirts, and caps along the semi-circle rim of the crowd.

A group of young friends, self-described Talafreakos from Houston, said the watch party was nerve-wracking but thrilling. “I’m super energized! I wasn’t gonna miss this. I’m taking every opportunity I can to show up for us, for all of Texas,” said Eddie Sanchez, wearing a square pin depicting Talarico and Gina Hinojosa as back-to-back partners in crime.

Talarico’s rout of Paxton was just the tip of a statewide blowout in which every statewide Democratic candidate, including gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, won—a historic upset in every sense. As statewide and federal wins for Democrats all around the country were announced on screen, the crowd roared to life. A small army of broadcast news reporters clustered near the front of the crowd to capture the shock and awe emanating from all around, as energetic accordion music coursed through the air.

(Eden Shamy)

President of the Texas Young Democrats Joella Methola stood near the bright screen, which continued to reaffirm the blue wave many in the audience felt they could only ever dream about. Methola said she wasn’t so surprised. She believes voters are angry with the Republican Party, and she credits the work of Democratic organizers who connected with overlooked communities and ran candidates in every state and federal race. “This is due to the work of young organizers on the ground,” Methola said. “Republicans were trying to suppress the vote. They redraw the lines. They close polling locations. And this is what happens when you anger people. They turn out and they vote!”

Even as some news outlets began to call the race for Talarico, the crowd stood in wait for the broadcast outside the Long Center to declare victory. Reality still hadn’t settled in, and people felt like their eyes were deceiving them. 

Just past 10 p.m., Talarico and Hinojosa’s faces flashed across the screen in succession as the projected winners. The crowd exploded and chanted their names. A woman in a blue jumpsuit dropped to her knees and wept. People everywhere clutched their loved ones close. They mounted the tabletops and thrust Talarico signs into the night sky.

“It’s over! It’s over!” exclaimed Mervin Jordan, a man from Houston. “Trump is probably smashing everything up in the Oval Office right now!”(Sure enough, the president was railing against Governor Abbott and other failed candidates on Truth Social.) 

As the initial uproar eventually died down, attendees filed inside the main auditorium. A hundred people packed the risers behind the podium waving Texas flags and “Love Thy Neighbor” signs. The upper balconies broke into chants of “Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can’t Lose!” Democratic state Representative John Bucy, who hails from Williamson County, spoke before one of Talarico’s former students finally introduced the U.S. senator-elect.

(Eden Shamy)

“We just took back Texas,” Talarico said, hardly visible through a flurry of frantically waving flags and enveloped by applause. The whole crowd was on its feet. “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas. We just showed that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love.”

The preacher touched on all the key elements of his insurgent campaign in his victory address. He called out America’s broken political and economic system, including the AI slop advertisements and the hundreds of millions of dollars Elon Musk dumped into the race. He called for universal healthcare, to invest in teachers and students, and to end the forever wars driving up costs. And throughout, he delivered a sermon about the power of love over hatred and corruption that had become the cornerstone of his campaign.

“They played dirty because they were desperate, but we never lost hope,” Talarico said. “And against big money and long odds, we took our power back.”

Attendees finally dispersed around midnight, many spilling over onto the streets of downtown Austin, and to the Texas Capitol, still flashing their Talarico signs. Passing cars blared their horns in celebration of the stunning blue wave that eradicated nearly every single Republican statewide official. “We won,” everyone kept repeating to each other. “We actually won.”

The post ‘We Just Took Back Texas’: Watching the Blue Tsunami from Talarico’s Victory Party appeared first on The Texas Observer.