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.

It’s only fitting that the last campaign video Congressman Al Green posted to Facebook—far and away the most-used social media platform among senior citizens—featured “Let’s Stay Together,” the greatest hit by the other Al Green, the last of the great soul singers, about a smooth talker imploring his lover to stay by his side, “whether times are good or bad.” 

But not even 1970s sensuality was enough to keep about 69 percent of voters in Texas’ newly drawn 18th Congressional District from choosing 38-year-old Christian Menefee, Green’s junior by some 40 years. 

Perhaps the times are just that bad, or perhaps it was simply time. Would the world really be that much better off if Green left office two years from now, at 80? First Sheila Jackson Lee, then Sylvester Turner—the 18th Congressional District had evidently seen enough of Houston’s towering Black icons, pugnacious as ever but well past their primes, securing the office only to succumb to the end that we all must face. It must feel heartless: Green gave decades of his life to the cause, and this is what he gets, a wallop on his way out the door? 

As for Menefee, others will try to claim his victory as their own. Custom dictated that he thank “the people of this district” for voting, but the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was quick to congratulate him on defeating “one of the most outspoken anti-Israel voices in Congress.” (AIPAC didn’t even back Menefee in the race, but it was eager to punish Green, a reliable ceasefire vote.) Meanwhile, David Hogg, the self-exiled vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, was quick to plug his Leaders We Deserve PAC for helping “elect & re-elect” this “next-generation leader.” And if money talks, the more than $5 million Menefee received from crypto-aligned super PACs is probably giving him an earful, too. 

In mid-January, Menefee completed a Stand With Crypto questionnaire and received an “A” (for “Very Pro Crypto”) from the advocacy group, putting him in league with Texas Blue Dogs like Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Green, for his part, has an “F.” Reporters, local and national, liked to say there was little daylight between Menefee and Green, and Menefee certainly downplayed this grade disparity to make that seem true. When The New York Times asked Menefee about it, he all but played dumb, as if surprised by all the hubbub, and referred to himself as a “local yokel.” Crypto lobby? You mean the stuff that hurts Superman?

Menefee’s response was frightfully similar to that of Jasmine Crockett, who has also been needled by questions about crypto funding. In 2022, having received $2 million from crypto super PACS, she told journalist Patrick Svitek that the groups simply gravitated toward her due to the “strength of my candidacy” and that, while she knew little about crypto, she was “committed to researching all these things.” Later, quite uncharacteristically, she joined Republicans on a vote to help Trump deliver one of his campaign promises: To make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” For what it’s worth, Crockett received a “C” (for “Neutral”) from Stand With Crypto, but when crypto-affiliated PACs cut their ads for Menefee, they specifically featured her endorsement. 

Texas’ mid-decade redistricting had pitted a veteran of the Congressional Black Caucus (Green) against one of its newest members (Menefee), endorsed by one of its most popular (Crockett). The whole affair foreshadows fights to come across the South, as Republicans—armed with the recent Supreme Court decision torching the Voting Rights Act—gerrymander Black districts like Green’s out of existence. As many as one-third of CBC members are under threat, kicking off a panicked set of planning sessions within the CBC to discuss what fighting back might look like. As of mid-May, that plan is reportedly “still coming together,” but so far it looks a lot like what the plan always is: turning out Black voters come November. 

It’s an expensive job. Not for nothing, Menefee has shown he can raise money. So has Crockett. She’s on her way out of Congress, but that hasn’t stopped her from stumping for Menefee and fellow CBC member Wesley Bell in Missouri, who relied on AIPAC and crypto cash to boot progressive Squadmember Cori Bush out of office in 2024. (Their rematch is set for early August.) This isn’t to say Menefee is in lockstep with Crockett’s national tour. Despite its reputation as the “conscience of Congress,” the CBC tends to turn a blind eye to how its members fundraise anyway. But the game is bigger than him now. Much has been said about “experience” this cycle—who has it, what it’s worth—but Menefee will have to learn quickly who his friends are, and who their enemies are, because those are his enemies now, too. 

When Al Green refers to himself (quite frequently) as “unbought and unbossed,” he’s alluding to the words of Shirley Chisholm, a founding CBC member and the first Black woman to run for president. “It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices,” she once wrote. “It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their prestige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang onto those jobs?” 

She died in 2005, the same year Green entered Congress. How long ago that seems.

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And so Colin Allred’s three-year journey through the wilderness of ambition ends more or less where it began.

Three years ago, the NFL player-turned-civil rights attorney left behind a deep-blue U.S. House seat composed largely of Dallas County residents. On Tuesday night, he effectively won a deep-blue U.S. House district composed entirely of Dallas County residents. In ordinal terms, he budged an integer: from the 32nd to the 33rd. 

In between, he established himself as a politically mercurial, occasionally perplexing figure in Texas Democratic politics—the final avatar of statewide liberal hopes in those murky middle ages between Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 near-win and this year’s (projected) blue wave of possibility. 

His 2024 campaign for U.S. Senate is generally discussed as a cautionary tale, his overreliance on TV ads and weak reach among even the Dem base treated as missteps to be avoided this time around. This is what today’s Democratic Senate hopeful, James Talarico, referred to earlier this year as “mediocre” (more on that in a moment). 

One could see this narrative as unfair; after all, Allred did run 5 points ahead of Kamala Harris by margin of defeat. But, when your opponent is Ted Cruz, you’ll simply always be held to a higher standard, and a 9-point loss just can’t be spun into a moral victory. That, and, well, the vibes were what they were.

In his fruitless bid, the flat-affected Allred dutifully moved to the right where the consultant class had deemed it necessary. He came out against trans youth participation in athletics, in a confusing and bloodless way; he voted for a mendacious GOP resolution against “open borders” and even praised the announcement of new border wall under President Joe Biden—somehing the president himself had described as an unfortunate legal inevitability. Six years prior, when first campaigning for the House, Allred had called the border wall “racist” and said his generation would “tear it down.” 

It all amounted to little at the polls, even after he raked in a record-breaking fundraising haul. The following year, when he announced he was trying again for the Senate, the reception was sufficiently lukewarm that Talarico, an unseasoned state House representative from Austin, was undeterred from jumping in—as was Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who stepped over Allred and into the race herself on the last possible day, a move that caused Allred to begrudgingly lower his sights and aim to recover a spot in the House.

He took with him the money from his Senate bid, which helped give him a significant cash advantage over Congresswoman Julie Johnson—who had succeeded Allred in his old district before last year’s Trump-mandated gerrymandering yanked the seat from under her. Johnson was less than pleased with Allred’s last-minute entry, and she tried to paint him as a parachute candidate, but she was defeated by about 10 points in the runoff nomination contest Tuesday. The general election will be a formality.

The stakes and meaning of the Allred-Johnson runoff were exquisitely murky. “This is not a classic progressive versus moderate war the way that it used to be in the Democratic Party, but there are definitely shades of a more centrist coalition-focused Democrat like Allred, who is challenging a more progressive activist-oriented Johnson,” an oft-cited political science professor told an Observer reporter last month. 

Indeed, these “shades” bordered on invisible. If Johnson was the progressive—and she did rightfully hit Allred for his reactionary posturing on immigration—she was a progressive amply supported by AIPAC who’d trade shares in Palantir. And if Allred was the moderate, he was a moderate who now said things like: “ICE has to go. I think we should get rid of ICE, abolish ICE, whatever you want to call it”—while being backed by the Texas AFL-CIO and by Crockett, who in her own convoluted primary, which ended cleanly in March, found herself painted as the progressive.

Somewhere back in the haze of all this, after Allred switched seats but before Talarico won his Senate nomination, Allred also engaged in perhaps the most interesting and pointless of his political interventions over the past three years. Clearly aggrieved at the party’s passing him over, he latched in early February onto comments made by an influencer, who had relayed that Talarico had privately called Allred a “mediocre Black man” (to which Talarico has responded that he simply referred to Allred’s campaign as mediocre.) 

In a straight-to-camera broadside, Allred told Talarico, referencing the latter’s frequent deployment of liberal Christianity: “You are not saving religion for the Democratic Party or the left. We already have Senator Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock for that. We don’t need you.”

He endorsed Crockett, called Talarico a “hater,” and advised: “Don’t come for me unless I send for you.”

Recall: This was a candidate who seemed to be studiously unstimulating, to the dismay of many Democrats, throughout the 2024 cycle. It was an (admittedly entertaining) outburst almost impossible to fit with what came before, and it amounted to little—as Talarico prevailed a month later. Allred has since, though without much enthusiasm, said that he will back the Democrat for Senate after all.

So it is that the pursuit of power can make any of us seem a bit silly, and yet victory releases us from the past. Now is not the time for relitigation; it is the time for shielding one’s eyes from the blazing dumpster fire that is the Republican side of these runoffs, and for acknowledging a man who left his haters, whoever they may be, behind. 

You can’t go home again, but Colin Allred came close Tuesday night.

The post The Eternal Recurrence of Colin Allred appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The Democratic establishment successfully thwarted Maureen Galindo and her increasingly unhinged and conspiratorial tirades against American Zionists—which were roundly denounced as antisemitic—in the runoff for the newly redrawn 35th Congressional District in South Texas. Johnny Garcia, an official with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, easily beat Galindo by around 20 points Tuesday night. 

Galindo, a sex therapist, tenant organizer, and first-time candidate, had come in first in the March primary. 

Garcia’s decisive win comes after the Texas Democratic Party and national Democratic leaders roundly denounced Galindo for her antisemitism. On social media, Galindo said that she would “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers.” She added that it would become a “castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Last week, Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder and the 35th District’s four county party chairs issued a joint statement that said: “Antisemitism and hateful rhetoric have no place in the Democratic Party or in our communities. Maureen Galindo’s comments do not reflect our values as Democrats or as Texans.”

Prior to the increased attention and controversy over Galindo’s comments, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the national party’s congressional campaign arm, known as the DCCC—was already taking a safe bet on Garcia’s “old-school” Democrat values. On May 4, the DCCC added Garcia to their “Red to Blue” program, opening him up to a network of funding and party resources. 

The district—which is under its current boundaries represented by progressive Austin Congressman Greg Casar—is one of five Texas Republicans recently gerrymandered into likely Republican seats. Under its new boundaries—which now include part of San Antonio and Bexar County, extending into a handful of deep-red rural counties in South Texas—Trump would’ve taken the district by 10 points in 2024.

Galindo’s campaign, in which she branded herself as an unabashed progressive, also raised suspicion as a Republican-connected PAC poured over $900,000 into promoting her. GOP operatives said they believed her untamed radicalism and antisemitic comments would ensure them victory in the general election.

Instead, the battle will come down to a standoff between Garcia and Carlos De La Cruz in November. De La Cruz beat state Representative John Lujan handily in the Republican runoff for the seat. He’s the brother of Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, who has represented some of the counties that now reside within the 35th. He is an Air Force veteran and founder of a kickboxing gym in San Antonio who notably won the endorsement of President Donald Trump, vowing to be his “wingman” in Congress.

Garcia’s platform focuses on lowering costs by ending Trump’s tariffs, renewing Affordable Care Act subsidies, and expanding Medicaid. He says he believes in creating orderly pathways to citizenship while protecting communities from gun violence and crime. As a young man, he worked in construction and plumbing before joining the Bexar County Sheriff’s office “to keep the lights on.”

Throughout the race, Galindo frequently targeted Garcia’s law enforcement background. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office oversees one of the deadliest jails in the state and entered into a limited 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in January. Garcia has asserted that he brought more transparency to the department as its public information officer, but investigations by the San Antonio Express-News accuse the jail of being a “black box” with “public information scattered across multiple agencies.”

Still, Garcia believes his nearly two decades in law enforcement taught him to put people over politics.

“When I was responding to a call for service in my community, I never asked dispatch once whether that home I was headed to was Democrat or Republican,” Garcia said in an interview with KSAT 12. “I responded like lives were on the line—and we know in this midterm election cycle, lives are on the line.”

Garcia was also backed by the Blue Dog Democrats, which spent over $1 million boosting his campaign. In nearby Congressional Districts 28 and 34—which are also in South Texas—Blue Dog incumbent Congressmen Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez are also hoping to hold onto their seats in the face of Republican gerrymandering. They are considered among the most conservative Democrats in the U.S. House, and they managed to defeat Republican challengers in recent years. Just two weeks after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, they both voted with Republicans to approve funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

In debates, Garcia sounded ideologically somewhat distant from typically conservative Blue Dog policy stances on matters like abortion and immigration enforcement. He said he was adamantly pro-choice, and he wouldn’t accept ICE attacking and dividing his community. Still, he proudly accepted the Blue Dog PAC’s endorsement.

“I’m a proud Blue Dog Democrat because I’m ready to get to work and deliver common-sense solutions for hard-working Texan families,” Garcia said.

Like District 35, the new boundaries for 28 and 34 would have handed a victory to Trump by 10 points in 2024. The 70-year-old Cuellar has held his seat since 2005, but he may face a unique challenge in this general election warding off Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who represents the core base of the district. Gonzalez will face Eric Flores, an Army veteran and lawyer from Mission. 

If they’re lucky, Garcia may find himself joining the ranks of those two remaining Texas Blue Dogs in Congress—but it will be an expensive uphill battle to avoid being swept aside in what is now more favorable red terrain in November.

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