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.

Lest we forget, the outgoing (yes, outgoing) Governor Greg Abbott promised a throng of supporters in Harris County last year that he would spend big to turn the region “dark red.” That didn’t happen, to say the least. But at Cactus Cove, the West Houston bar where Letitia Plummer, the Democratic candidate for Harris County Judge, hosted the party faithful, the mood early on was admittedly touch-and-go. Not necessarily because they doubted Plummer—who outraised her opponent, Republican Orlando Sanchez, by some $100,000 this fall—but because, for decades now, when GOP coffers opened, the streets ran red.

In all, Abbott reportedly burned through upwards of $25 million in Harris County, to say nothing of all the various super PACs in our midst. He recruited candidates to ensure fierce competition in each of Harris County’s 24 state House seats. He hired “team captains” to out-organize Democrats at the precinct level. On the eve of the election, he even visited Houston himself to get out the vote. And yet, by any reasonable metric, his investments failed. He failed.

At time of writing, Harris County Democrats have flipped at least a handful of Republican-held state House seats and swept up and down through county offices. Sanchez conceded at around 9:30 p.m., roughly 30 minutes before Abbott himself took to the stage to bid his own adieu. At the statewide level, soon-to-be-Senator James Talarico pulled in around 66 percent with Paxton a little over 30. Abbott, who hails from Harris, was routed by about 30 points against Austin state Representative Gina Hinojosa. In short, Harris formed the backbone of the Democratic tsunami that swept across Texas.

“Y’all, we did this,” Plummer began her victory speech. “Tonight, I choose to be an optimist.” And why shouldn’t she? While her primary opponent, Annise Parker, practically treated her own anointment to the judgeship as a given—the Houston Chronicle labeled Parker “uniquely qualified” despite (or rather because of) her evident disdain for grassroots politics—Plummer’s progressive bona fides (what the Chronicle backhandedly dubbed her “ambitious goals”) were enough for Harris County voters to place their trust in her. Plummer can’t claim to have incited this statewide tidal wave, of course, but the very parts of Plummer that pundits and technocrats deemed a liability were her planche de salut.

Sanchez, meanwhile, tried to frame himself as a sort of moderate Republican in the mold of ex-judge Ed Emmett (minus Sanchez’s support for Republican Texas Railroad Commission candidate and wannabe Rhodesian Bo French). It apparently wasn’t convincing—or enticing—to enough voters.

Rodney Ellis, currently the longest-serving Democrat on Harris County’s commissioners court, over which Plummer will preside, likened Tuesday’s results to the thrashing he experienced as a staffer during the Reagan Revolution. The 72-year-old only spent 20 minutes at Plummer’s watch party and left well before the race had been called. For the next hour, he was at the gym in his county office watching the results come in from an elliptical machine. “If this night is as good as it looks like it’s going to be, I want to make sure I’m around to watch us govern,” he told me.

So what might governing look like with a Democratic governor—the first in over 30 years? Harris County doubtless took the brunt of GOP lawfare, but, statewide, municipalities are facing fiscal crises with deep structural roots. While Harris County may boast a 4-1 Democratic supermajority on the commissioners court and a Democratic mayor, the region’s feudalistic funding regime portends steep deficits at both the city and county levels, with city and county officials often at odds. 

“I’d be very surprised if the county, for the general fund, does anything other than no new revenue in the next cycle, which means about a $250 million shortfall,” Ellis said. (Plummer, contra Ellis and the other Democratic commissioners, at least for now, opposed their recent property tax increase.) Meanwhile, Houston’s estimated $25 million budget gap has ballooned to $88 million (Whitmire said the Harris County Appraisal District “surprised” the city with its property value estimates). 

Harris County has proven this go-around that it is, to borrow from Ellis, “predictably blue.” The rest of the state, of course, isn’t. Incoming Governor Hinojosa likely won’t want bailouts to be what she’s remembered for. She’ll be under immense pressure from the right, no doubt through a poisonous barrage of conspiracy mongering, clip farming, and monitoring her every move—not unlike what happened to Lina Hidalgo, Plummer’s predecessor, who ultimately became her own worst enemy. 

Still, that Harris County Democrats successfully passed the baton from Hidalgo to Plummer shows that the ideas that animate them have staying power. But, as Ellis told me, “Be careful what you ask for; you may get it.”

The post Far From Abbott’s Promised ‘Dark Red,’ Harris County Drives Democrats to Victory Up and Down Ballot appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Last summer, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature gathered for an impromptu special legislative session to—on direct orders from President Donald Trump—redraw the state’s congressional maps to give Republicans an edge in five more seats in the U.S. House. These redraws were, by and large, centered on the principle that the historic vote shifts that Trump won in 2024 among heavily Hispanic South Texas were to be exploited—and recreated—in the 2026 midterms. This, the thinking went, would help insulate a GOP majority in the U.S. House and prevent Dems from taking back the chamber and holding Trump to account. 

It harkened back to the time that the Texas Legislature engaged in another mid-decaded congressional redistricting back in the early aughts, gutting Democratic seats across rural Texas, in order to manufacture a new majority in Congress. It worked then. 

But this latest mid-decade power grab was seen as a politically dicey maneuver at best. In hindsight, they were completely high on their own supply. 

Just over a year later, congressional Republicans failed to flip a single one of the South Texas seats that they redrew for their own purported benefit—in Laredo and its surroundings, embattled Democrat Henry Cuellar trounced Republican opportunist Tano Tijerina by some 30 points or more. Vicente Gonzalez won his Rio Grande Valley district, centered around Brownsville, by easy double digits. Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz was trounced by the Tejano star-turned Democratic phenom Bobby Pulido. In 2024, Trump carried that 15th District by 18 points. 

In the new 35th Congressional District, which  was moved out of Austin and into San Antonio and its exurban surroundings, Democrat Johnny Garcia won in a walk. Trump won it by about 10 in 2024. 

The 9th Congressional District, which was previously a historically Black seat held by Trump antagonist Al Green, was redrawn into a GOP-favored district centered in Harris County’s more conservative outer reaches. Leticia Guterriez, an utterly unheralded Democrat who only yesterday put out press releases to the media announcing her unexpected competitiveness, defeated Republican Alex Mealer (who narrowly lost a bid for Harris County judge in 2024) with… you guessed it, utter ease. 

Up in North Texas, the 32nd Congressional District, a suburban Dallas county seat that Dems flipped back in 2018, was remade into a red district that extended from Dallas into deep East Texas. Trump won it by 18 in 2024. As of nearly midnight, a Democrat by the name of Dan Barrios was in a tight race there with right-wing Republican Jace Yarbrough. 

All that, to put it mildly, wasn’t supposed to happen. 

There appear to be even more casualties, too, well beyond the confines of the dummymandered maps.

Brandon Herrera, the edgelord extremist gun-fluencer who ran to represent the people of Uvalde, and a sprawling mass of southwest Texas, trailed Katy Padilla Stout by eight points late Tuesday.

The blue tsunami threatened containment even beyond those handful of congressional seats.

As of this writing, Republicans Pete Sessions, Steve Toth, Lance Gooden, and Jake Ellzey were all hoping to eke out wins in districts that were never supposed to be competitive in the least.

As the last votes continue to be tabulated, we don’t know the full scale of this massive upheaval just yet. But one thing is clear: Texas Republicans’ political hubris and subservience to Trump will have contributed to their losing national control of Congress in disastrous fashion. 

That, again, wasn’t supposed to happen. 

The post Yep, Texas Got Dummymandered appeared first on The Texas Observer.

For months leading up to Tuesday night, polls and media coverage told of South Texas on its way to rebuke the GOP and the policies of President Donald Trump at the polls. But to what degree wasn’t understood until late into the evening, when it was clear that the region had corrected for its foray into the Republican party and then some.

All of the Rio Grande Valley’s four counties voted between roughly 60 and 70-plus percent for Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and Texas Governor candidate Gina Hinojosa, the latter of whom was raised in the Valley. The same margins more or less applied to the region’s Democrats in congressional and state races, margins too high for the GOP’s area candidates to recover from. 

Democratic U.S. House incumbent Vicente Gonzalez handily won against Eric Flores for Congressional District 34, after being targeted for pickup by the GOP. Congressman Henry Cuellar did the same against Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, in his Laredo-Rio Grande Valley district. Bobby Pulido, combining an undeniable name recognition and centrist-populist platform, won easily in the 15th, where Monica De La Cruz, a Republican, has held office for two terms. Overall, these results shattered a would-be Republican gerrymander from last year.

Up in San Antonio, former Bexar County sheriff Johnny Garcia prevailed for Congress against Carlos De La Cruz, who is Monica De La Cruz’s brother. Katy Padilla Stout, an attorney and former school teacher, beat YouTuber and Second Amendment sycophant Brandon Herrera in CD-23. 

It didn’t end in the congressional districts, either. San Benito state Representative Janie Lopez lost her HD-37 seat to Oziel Ochoa, flipping the district back to blue. In Corpus Christi, Denise Villalobos, the Republican incumbent state rep, lost too. Democrat Kristian Carranza has won against Republican Jorge Borrego in HD-118, a district encompassing the southeastern suburbs of San Antonio. Republican incumbent Marc Lahood, of HD-121, lost to Democratic challenger Zack Dunn. Down in McAllen, Julio Salinas, a progressive, Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat, won against MAGA Republican Gary Groves in HD-41. (Republican party-switcher Ryan Guillen, it seems, will hold onto his Starr County state House seat.)

Early voting turnout in the Rio Grande Valley’s counties was the first tell that a sweep was coming, even if the direction wasn’t exactly known then. Cameron and Hidalgo counties, where most people in the Valley live, turned out in early vote at levels similar to their early vote in the 2024 presidential cycle.

Trump wasn’t on the ballot this time, of course, but the Republican Party and its South Texas hopefuls have become synonymous with the president and his mass deportation campaign. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted this area specifically since Trump was elected a second time in January 2025, and it became, seconded only by cost of living, the most salient electoral issue of the region.

Since Trump’s inauguration, ICE has arrested over 50,000 people in the agency’s Harlingen and San Antonio sectors, called an “Area of Responsibility” (AOR) by the agency, according to arrest data acquired by the Data Deportation Project. Around 20,000 of those people were in ICE’s Harlingen AOR, which covers most of the Rio Grande Valley.

The people in South Texas have seen this as betrayal, whether by the GOP or by their neighbors who voted for them. This was an affront against the electorate that, for years, local, state, and national GOP factions have looked at as the greatest coalition to get—an untapped bastion of anti-establishment sentiment after years of disinvestment by the Democratic Party. That anger could fit somewhat inside of a playbook of the anti-government screeds from the Republican soapbox, and, briefly, it did work. Because the core of their messages over these last election cycles was simple: Democrats have abandoned you, but you now have a place to go. 

But for an electorate that votes based more on class and industry ties and, sometimes, solely for the personality–a legacy of the region’s boss rule politics and the strength of Blue Dog Democrat figures in the region–it is not so surprising to see what happened in South Texas on Tuesday night. Put another way, South Texans voted against policies that harmed them or their livelihoods, not necessarily for the Democratic Party, which campaigned on alleviating that pain. 

Years ago, local GOP boosters predicted a “red wave” would come to South Texas as disenchanted Democrats converted over. Between the 2022 and 2024 congressional and legislative races, this amounted to two U.S House seats–first Mayra Flores, who would have a nine-month stint in CD-34 after Filemon Vela left office before his term ended; then De La Cruz, who would win against Michelle Vallejo.

In 2024, the GOP’s messaging tamed in some areas and rose in intensity in others, trying to match or balance against the party’s supreme guiding force in Donald Trump. And it may have been that closeness to Trump that brought out people to vote Republican in 2022 and 2024.

But that’s over now, and the reverse has happened: The Democratic Party successfully capitalized on South Texas being disenchanted with the GOP, capturing their anger with ICE, rising costs of living, and, in the case of its support of Talarico and Hinojosa, data centers and public schools stripped of state funding. 

Long a stronghold for a certain kind of Democrat, deep South Texas in particular snapped back into the blue column, with a historic ferocity.

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