At this year’s Texas Democratic Party convention, sounds of the Corpus Christi coastline lulled Lone Star liberals into the recurring dream of a blue wave crashing over the state. After 30 years of Republican rule, Democrats once again insisted that 2026 would be their best shot at flipping Texas in decades. Emboldened by a viral U.S. Senate candidate in James Talarico and the toxic failures of President Donald Trump, the conditions almost mirror 2018 when the last blue wave turned the tides of several down-ballot races but, at the top, ultimately turned out to be little more than a message written in the sand. 

Over the course of the three-day convention, a long line of speakers attacked Republicans on the high price of groceries and healthcare as well as the shuttering of public schools across the state. In the drought-stricken city of oil refineries and the original Whataburger, the most prominent climate issues mentioned weren’t tied to fossil fuels and the oil and gas industry but water-wasting data centers and cattle-killing screwworms. They adopted a new party platform focused on populist policies protecting workers’ rights, expanding public transportation, and making healthcare more affordable.

On the surface, the Democrats asserted themselves as a unified party of the working class against the all-powerful billionaires. The party boasted of advances in GOP strongholds that include a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, new chapters of the Young Democrats in West Texas, and putting forth Democratic “Challengers” for every legislative and congressional race in the state. Yet tension stirred within the ranks of delegates and party officials. The lack of diversity at the top of the ticket, clashes over Israel, and debates over progressivism versus moderation represent a battle for the future of the party that was thinly veiled by constant calls to unity.

The population of Texas is over 30 million people, of which about 40 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black—yet this year’s slate of Democrats for statewide office is made up mostly of white candidates from Central Texas. Three politically experienced women—including state Representative Gina Hinojosa for governor, state Representative Vikki Goodwin for lieutenant governor, and state Senator Sarah Eckhardt for comptroller, all from Austin—are helping lead the ticket, but the ballot is noticeably lacking in racial diversity that has left some Black voters, politicians, and activists who form the base of the Texas Democratic Party feeling disenfranchised.

The Democratic primary battle for the Senate nomination between Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and Austin state Representative James Talarico unleashed controversy over the topic of “electability” in a state dominated by the politics of whiteness, Christianity, and masculinity. Talarico’s victory in March didn’t fully quell the debate as he tries to shore up the vast majority of Black voters cast their ballots for Crockett in the primary, particularly in Dallas, Houston, and East Texas.

“I saw how excited my students were for Jasmine Crockett,” said Laura Longoria, a delegate and high school teacher in East Texas. “I’m worried we’re going to lose some of that excitement.” Since then, Talarico has attempted to forge a stronger connection with Black Texans by speaking at Black churches and universities. He also announced a policy plan to combat maternal mortality, which disproportionately affects Black women.

(Photo by Eden Shamy)

Talarico invited Crockett to be a keynote speaker at the convention, an offer she reportedly denied. As she told the Dallas Morning News: “I had a missed call that I’ve not returned, nor have I listened to the message from Talarico.” She added that the invitation seemed like an afterthought, but “I can’t say for sure because I haven’t listened to it.” Some perceived the comments as deliberately undermining Talarico, although Crockett endorsed him immediately after losing the primary. Her office told KVUE that Crockett was simply busy doing her job in Congress, and attending the convention would not be feasible. 

On the second day of the convention, Talarico spoke before Texas Democrats’ Black Caucus, where he was well received. “The Democratic Party has a troubling history of taking Black voters for granted,” he said. “And I am committing to you to not make those mistakes.”

Talarico and candidates Vikki Goodwin, Nathan Johnson, and Sarah Eckhardt also stumped before the Tejano and Hispanic caucuses. They vowed to end cooperation with ICE and shut down inhumane migrant detention centers. Vice Chair for Finance Kolby Duhon emphatically stated that “Black women are the backbone of this party,” to roaring applause during the general session, which featured a more diverse array of candidates running up and down the ballot.

Speaker after speaker took the stage at the Hilliard Center to address the “rice and beans issues,” as Senator Chuy Hinojosa put it. The Texas Democrats’ adoption of a more populist platform—one that emphasizes a commitment to kitchen table economic issues targeting the working class—was fortified by special guest Dolores Huerta, the Chicana civil rights leader, Tennessee state Representative Justin J. Pearson, and keynote speaker Senator Bernie Sanders.

“Today we must refound this nation once again against a tyrannical government,” said Pearson, who’s been on the forefront of the battle against racially gerrymandered maps in Tennessee. “If the Republican Party is going to be the party licking the boot of the billionaires who are taking our land, polluting our water, and taking our jobs, then let us be the party of the working class.” Dolores Huerta’s surprise appearance moved the entire arena to their feet in chants of “Sí se puede.” Yet in the on-stage interview, little was actually said about the state of labor organizing in Texas. 

Pearson and Huerta were immediately followed up by the keynote speaker U.S. Senator Cory Booker, a mainstream Dem from New Jersey. Last year, the senator’s record-breaking filibuster speech against Republican spending cuts surged his popularity among rank-and-file liberals. But for progressives, Booker remains an unpopular figure due to his past support for Israel and education reform like school choice. While Booker preached for 25 minutes about living up to Democratic values, three young women stood up from the front of the crowd in protest. “Why should Texans listen to you when you’ve accepted almost a million dollars from AIPAC?” they shouted. “We deserve better than sell-out Democrats like you!”

Many in the surrounding crowd sought to quell the dissent, yelling at them to be quiet and leave. Police were called in and escorted the protestors out of the arena.

The three protesters are members of the Austin chapter of Sunrise Movement, a youth-led group for climate justice and anti-fascism. Rosario Lopez-Cadenas, a 26-year-old progressive who participated in the protest, said she attended the convention to better understand the Democrat’s vision of the future. “I really got a sense that a lot of them were campaigning on being anti-Trump but not much else,” said Cadenas. “Working-class people don’t want to be complicit in genocide, and it makes Cory Booker kind of untrustworthy.” 

(Photo by Eden Shamy)

This year’s convention was dotted by keffiyehs and other nods of solidarity with Palestine. In the exhibit hall, attendees gathered around the “Falasteen Street Museum,” a collection of posters that detail the history of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. The mobile exhibit has been a recurring educational feature of pro-Palestine gatherings around Austin.

The two leading non-Texan speakers—Booker and Sanders—have found themselves in frequent opposition over the years, particularly on lowering prescription drug prices and cutting off aid to Israel. After greenlighting arms sales to Israel for two years while it’s committed what a United Nations commission has found to be a genocide in Gaza, Booker finally supported Sanders’ bill this April to block military aid to the apartheid state—not necessarily because of Palestine but because of his opposition to “Trump’s war” in Iran.

When Sanders took the stage the following Saturday night to close out the convention, he received a standing ovation for promising to end aid to Israel. In his typical always-on-message fashion, the 84-year-old Vermont democratic socialist’s speech detailed all the ways in which billionaires have corrupted American democracy through their super PACs and ownership of the media. “The American people do not want establishment status quo policies,” Sanders said. “This country is facing major crises, and they want bold proposals.”

(Photo by Eden Shamy)

Days before the convention, Sanders (and an acolyte in Mayor Zohran Mamdani) helped fuel recent victories for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the New York primaries. But Texas is no New York. Top-of-the-slate candidates such as Talarico and Hinojosa have focused their broadly popular messages on pocketbook populist issues and taking on political corruption, and have made explicit appeals to moderates and disillusioned Republicans.

On Friday night, Hinojosa harnessed broad discontent into a sharp criticism of Governor Greg Abbott and the political establishment. “There is a name for what you have been paying. It is the Greg Abbott Corruption Tax,” she said. “You pay it when your electricity bill arrives, when your local school closes, when your grocery bills go up. You pay it when you can’t get the care you already paid for and need to survive—all while Greg Abbott and his donors get richer.”

To close the night, Talarico gave a speech that went right after his opponent. “This isn’t a partisan thing. Republicans know just as well as Democrats that there’s no place for guys like Ken Paxton in Texas,” said Talarico. “That’s why these two parties that don’t seem to agree on anything these days came together to impeach the most corrupt politician in America.”

Still, rising socialist factions within the Democratic Party have spurred fear in the more moderate wing, and some have even formed their own group to swear their allegiance to capitalism. Congressman Vicente Gonzalez Jr. and congressional candidate Bobby Pulido—both running highly contested races in South Texas—were among the first of 13 Democrats to sign the “Promise to America.” Both of them are conservative Blue Dog Democrats that believe it will take moderation to win over traditional voters in South Texas.

Congressional candidate and Tejano performer Bobby Pulido performs at the Texas Democratic convention in Corpus Christi. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

“We are capitalist, not socialist,” and “We are mainstream, not extreme,” are among the core tenants of the Promise to America. Despite these undercurrents of ideological conflict, Democrats stayed focused on a message of unity and getting out the vote to flip Texas this November. People danced and cheered for Pulido during his opening night performance, and they applauded both Booker and Sanders alike. In the end, the party voted overwhelmingly to “Keep Kendall” Scudder as party chair in an election that featured two other challengers.

“We are one party with one purpose,” said Scudder in his fiery closing remarks. “When we leave Corpus Christi today, we leave with a unified message and a shared promise to the people of Texas: Texans don’t need more political theater, they need leaders.”

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Texas Observer reader,

The following are my remarks, in part, from our May 6 MOLLYs fundraiser gala:

Last year, some of you may remember, we published a very viral story in which we identified an ICE prosecutor in Dallas as the operator of an extremely, extremely racist X account. 

In terms of impact, everything seemed to be going well. Congress members demanded answers, and the prosecutor was quickly yanked off the job. But the months dragged on, and we just could not get ICE to confirm whether the guy was being terminated. 

Well, less than two weeks into the new year, it wasn’t ICE but a source at the courthouse who tipped off our special investigative correspondent, Steven Monacelli, that the prosecutor was coming back to work. Steven managed to be there to document the man’s return; Congressman Marc Veasey made a last-ditch effort in the U.S. House to reduce the prosecutor’s salary to $1, but it failed. And that was that. 

Maybe you find that shocking, and maybe not. I’ll admit that it shocked me a bit. It showed me the full depth of this administration’s commitment to white supremacy. Not even a bit player—who’d been tweeting while in court, mind you—could be sacrificed to save some face.

It could be enough to discourage some, but it wasn’t—and won’t be—enough to discourage us at the Texas Observer. 

July/August 2026 cover (Illustration by Clay Rodery)

We kept going. The very same week we reported the prosecutor news, the same correspondent did another story for us identifying four North Texas businesses as having ties to the neo-nazi group Patriot Front, and Francesca D’Annunzio exposed state police’s use of a shadowy cell phone-tracking software. 

Soon, Michelle Pitcher revealed an overdose crisis within Texas state jails and began work on a narrative podcast, a totally new undertaking for the Observer. Justin Miller exposed the cost to the taxpayer of our attorney general’s extensive campaigning and networking around the state and abroad. Lise Olsen dug up a botched murder investigation down in the Rio Grande Valley. Gaige Davila broke the news of an essential immigration court interpreter being targeted and arrested by ICE at a South Texas airport. 

And Josephine Lee proved that concrete, tangible impact is still achieved through investigative reporting—as her work cost Houston’s state-imposed superintendent a six-figure, most likely illegal moonlighting contract. 

You see, in Texas, it’s all too easy to get discouraged if you don’t properly calibrate. If you count on electoral victory every two-year cycle, or on accountability for elected officials each time their malfeasance is exposed, well, that’s simply not the rhythm of our struggle here. 

We take our wins where we get them, we are not discouraged, and we keep going.

Solidarity,

Note: To be the first to get all the stories in our bimonthly issues, become a Texas Observer member here.

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Around 4 a.m. on May 15, in the 1-year-old South Texas town of Starbase, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old man from nearby Donna, rode a scissor lift around 50 feet up toward the ceiling of the “Starfactory,” where Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes parts for its Starship rockets. Bautista and other workers with Delta Fabrication and Machine Inc., a contractor out of Daingerfield, needed to replace metal beams supporting the structure of the factory with new ones.

Bautista strapped himself to a white beam that weighed nearly 8,000 pounds and was about 5 stories off the ground. The beam, Bautista’s supervisor would later tell Cameron County sheriff’s officers, had “not been adjusted correctly.” The supervisor, named as Brent Lee Harvey in the sheriff’s office case report, said that he had contacted a foreman, Omar Alvarado, and instructed his team to “properly adjust and secure the beam to the structure.”

According to the report, Bautista was attaching himself to another beam when the one he was already secured to started falling. Alvarado told a sheriff’s investigator that he was on the phone when the beam fell and took Bautista with it. Alvarado further told the investigator that Bautista may have thought the beam was secure because it had anchor bolts already installed on it. Bautista would hit the beam on the way down before falling to the concrete factory floor. 

Harvey said, per the report, that “he did not know why Jose Luis would have attached himself to the improperly secured beam.” Harvey also said that the bolts on the beam were temporary.

Within minutes of Bautista falling, a man described with the acronym “EHS”—likely an environmental health and safety specialist—started doing CPR, and security guards arrived to help load Bautista into one of Starbase’s ambulances, the report states. Doctors would pronounce him dead at a Brownsville hospital the same day. Three days later, after an autopsy, Cameron County would declare his cause of death “multiple blunt force trauma due to a fall.” 

The Cameron County Sheriff’s Office declared Bautista’s death an accident. Initial news reports said Bautista had fallen only 8 feet—rather than the much greater height described in the later sheriff’s office report—based on what hospital staff had told Cameron County Justice of the Peace Mary Sorola. Sorola did not respond to the Observer’s requests for more information about those conversations.

Starbase in 2021 (Ivan Armando Flores/Texas Observer)

It’s unclear whether SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was at Starbase—a name now used both for the newfound company town and the company’s production and launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach—on the day Bautista died. His private jet’s flight log shows his plane flying from Los Angeles to Brownsville on May 21, six days after the incident, and returning to California on May 22, the same day as the last Starship launch. The Starship exploded on May 22, prompting another mishap investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Musk hasn’t publicly commented on Bautista’s death. Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Treviño told the Observer in an email that the law enforcement agency gave all the evidence it collected to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

“OSHA is looking at specific violations of standards, so this could be violation of various fall protection standards, or mechanical equipment standards, mechanical lift standards,” Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA during the Obama administration, told the Observer. “OSHA’s probably going to be looking into other things, like training and some structural issues on how the beam was attached.” 

Bautista’s death is the first worker fatality at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, but there have been numerous injuries there in the last few years. Just among its own employees—not including those working for contractors on-site—SpaceX saw 427 injuries and 9 respiratory illnesses between January 6, 2022, and June 10, 2025, according to documents SpaceX filed with OSHA and acquired by the Observer through a records request. These injuries included concussions, second-degree burns, partial finger amputations, hernias, dislocations, crushed hands, and broken ribs, legs, and ankles. 

OSHA did not release more recent records documenting injuries because they are part of ongoing investigations into incidents at the Starbase facility, one of which is Bautista’s death. 

Another ongoing investigation stems from a crane tipping over at SpaceX’s Massey testing site, which is a little more than five miles west of the factory and the launch pad. Workers were removing debris from a Starship exploding at the test site last year. As the crane fell, its operator jumped out of the cab and onto the ground, according to OSHA records, breaking his pelvis and wrist and receiving a minor head injury. OSHA cited SpaceX eight times for the incident, including a violation for a worker operating a separate crane with an expired license and another for the tipped-over crane not having been inspected in the last year. SpaceX is contesting all of the citations. 

An Observer analysis of injuries at SpaceX’s Starbase in 2025, using OSHA’s publicly available injury data, shows that the company had an injury rate that’s more than five times the national average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing facilities in the United States. The company’s facility in Hawthorne, California, which has more than twice the employees of Starbase, has less than half the injury rate of the South Texas site. OSHA confirmed these calculations as accurate when asked by the Observer.  

Some employees who suffered such injuries have filed lawsuits against SpaceX in Cameron County courts, many of which are still pending and have yet to see trial. This includes a former worker who had his leg crushed from being run over by a boom lift, another who got head injuries from a falling ladder, and another who fell into an improperly lit open pit. 

One open lawsuit, from San Benito resident Doroteo Perez, describes an incident that is similar to the circumstances of Bautista’s fall. Perez, who was an employee for a contractor working at Starbase in 2024, alleges that SpaceX personnel told him a piece of machinery he was dismantling was “structurally sound” before he began to dismantle it. “As soon as the Plaintiff began cutting, the structural piece collapsed upon Plaintiff’s person,” the lawsuit states. Perez’s attorney, Richard Zayas, did not respond to requests for comment about the case.

In the sheriff’s office case report from May, both Bautista’s foreman and superintendent point to Bautista being responsible for his own safety. Barab said it’s common for employers to shift blame for an incident to an employee, but that it usually doesn’t work as a defense.

“The employer has to prove that the employee was well trained, well supervised, well equipped, and violated the employer’s safety rules anyway,” Barab said. “Generally the employer also has to prove that employees who committed similar offenses have been disciplined in the past as well.”

According to the report, Bautista had only previously been warned to properly adjust his safety glasses, with Harvey and Alvarado both saying that Bautista didn’t have prior safety violations. 

“As management, you’re responsible to make sure that your crew and the people that are about to be on this task are fully aware of what’s going on,” a former foreman who worked on similar jobs at Starbase last year—and who requested anonymity out of fear of job-related consequences because they still work in the same industry—told the Observer. “In a situation like that, they should have been right there.”

The same ex-foreman noted that OSHA would likely be investigating whether there was a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) for the work Bautista was doing. Treviño, the Cameron County sheriff, when asked whether his investigators looked at a JSA, told the Observer: “not to my knowledge.” 

The City of Starbase and SpaceX did not respond to questions about Bautista’s death from the Observer. Neither did Delta Fabrication and Machine, Inc. 

Elon Musk, beside the right-wing president of Argentina in February 2025, wears a MAGA hat and wields a chainsaw, symbolizing his short-lived but destructive tenure leading DOGE. (Shutterstock)

In 2024, SpaceX was named one of the nonprofit National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s “Dirty Dozen,” after reporting from Reuters showed the Starbase site had hundreds of injuries, many of them not reported to OSHA.

“SpaceX is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world. It has access to extraordinary resources, cutting-edge technology, and some of the most advanced engineers on the planet,” Jessica E. Martinez, the executive director of the nonprofit, told the Observer in a statement. “There is simply no excuse for workers being exposed to preventable hazards. Whether someone is a direct employee or a contract worker, their life should never be treated as expendable.”

OSHA is expected to take up to six months to conclude its investigation into Bautista’s death.  The agency rejected a records request for documents because its investigation is ongoing.

Meanwhile, less than a month after Bautista’s death, SpaceX went public, raising $75 billion in its record-breaking initial offering. The company’s stock valuation briefly made Musk the first trillionaire in world history.

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