This morning, after I dropped the kids off for school, I decided to take a history expedition to Dallas and visit a few famous gravesites. And on my way home, as the dashboard of my car kept drawing my eyes to that 115° temperature, I reminded myself how everything is political. And many of the political problems we have are the same political problems we faced in 1979, 1951, and 1934.

My first stop was in West Dallas, at Bonnie Parker’s grave.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bonnie Parker’s history, her origin story is poverty. Her mother was a widow and a seamstress, but Bonnie dropped out of high school and married her first sweetheart (not Clyde) just days before her sixteenth birthday. And perhaps it was growing up in poverty that set her on the path she wound up on, which led to the end of her life at only 23 years old.

Poverty is political.

Of course, that was around 100 years ago. In 2024, the state’s poverty rate hit 13.4%, the lowest on record since 2010. Sounds like progress. It is progress, technically. It’s also 4.1 million people, and it’s still worse than the national average of 12.4%.

Child poverty sits at 17.9%, which is real improvement from 24.6% a decade ago, and it still means almost one in five Texas kids is growing up the way Bonnie did. Poverty among adults over 65 is going the wrong direction entirely, up from 10.9% to 12.3% over that same stretch. The people who built this state’s boom are aging into the same hole its children are being born into.

Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country, for kids and adults both, and it’s not close. 21.6% of working-age adults and 13.6% of children were uninsured in 2024, both roughly double the national rate. Texas is one of only ten states that still refuse to expand Medicaid, which means there’s a whole tier of Texans who make too much for Medicaid and too little to afford ACA coverage. That’s a policy choice, renewed every session.

Texas has no state minimum wage above the federal $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. Full-time, that’s $15,080 a year, which doesn’t clear the poverty line for a parent with one kid, let alone two. A widowed seamstress raising a daughter in West Dallas in the 1920s and a single mom working full time in West Dallas today are closer to each other, financially, than either of them is to the Legislature that sets the rules.

Other Texas statistics about poverty you should know:

• Texas now leads the nation in food insecurity for the third straight year, with a 19.4% rate affecting 6.06 million people. Source

• Texas has surpassed California for three consecutive years as the state with the largest food-insecure population in the country. Source

• 1 in 4 children in the Dallas-Fort Worth area now face hunger. Source

• Texas has the highest rate of senior food insecurity in the nation, at 13.6%. Source

• Texas’ SNAP payment error rate could cost the state up to $709 million a year starting in fiscal year 2028 under new federal cost-shifting rules. Source

• More than half of Texas’ 4.1 million renters are now “cost-burdened,” spending over 30% of income on rent. Source

• Median rent in Texas grew 9.1% (inflation-adjusted) over the last five-year census period, while median household income grew just 3.1%. Source

• 81% of extremely low-income Texas households spend more than half their income on housing. Source

• For every 100 extremely low-income renter households in Texas, only 26 affordable homes are available. Source

This is what thirty years of Republican rule has done to Texas.

The next stop on my list.

I have an ancestor buried not far from the cemetery where Bonnie Parker is buried, and at that same cemetery is the final resting place of famed baseball legend Mickey Mantle. So, I stopped by my relative’s grave, then headed to the mausoleum to see the final resting place of the New York Yankees Hall of Famer.

Mickey Mantle’s plaque calls him “the most popular player of his era.”

Maybe that’s true if you don’t ask who his era left out.

Mantle came up in 1951, four years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Brooklyn. The Yankees didn’t field their first Black player, Elston Howard, until 1955, one of the last teams in the league to integrate, and only after ownership ran out of excuses.

That’s the thing about golden eras. They’re only golden for the people the camera was pointed at.

Popularity is political.

Trump built an entire movement on that exact sentiment. “Make America Great Again” never specifies which America. Clean-cut, small-town, God and country, before things got complicated. Complicated, in this case, meaning Black players in the majors, women in the workforce, anyone visibly queer, anyone who wasn’t white and Christian getting a say in what “American” meant.

In December 2025, Governor Abbott stood at the Governor’s Mansion and announced a statewide partnership to put Turning Point USA chapters, branded “Club America,” in every high school in the state. He said it was about a “restoration of who we are as a country.” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick put a million dollars of his own campaign money behind it. There are already more than 500 chapters in Texas high schools, and Abbott made clear that any district that resists should be reported to the Texas Education Agency for meaningful disciplinary action.

Restoration means backward. You restore something back to what it already was. Abbott is telling you the destination on purpose.

This is the same governor pushing a mandatory conservative youth club into every high school in the state, having signed Senate Bill 12 earlier that year, banning LGBTQ+ student clubs outright. One kind of student organizing gets a governor’s mansion press conference and a state agency’s enforcement muscle behind it. The other gets legislated out of existence. That’s a state government deciding which kids get a restoration and which ones get erased, in the same calendar year.

Mickey Mantle’s plaque says “the most popular player of his era.” Some would argue it was Jackie Robinson. Texas Republicans have already decided which kids get to be on the plaque.

Then there was the one I stumbled on by accident.

At the same cemetery as my ancestor and Mickey Mantle, I was driving out when I stumbled upon this grave. Of course, I had to stop. It was huge and fancy, but also very cold and uninviting. The one thing that stood out most to me was that, unlike the other graves I visited, there were no flowers. It was the grave of Ross Perot.

A lot of us (depending on your age) remember Ross Perot as that big-eared guy who ran for president in 1996. But long-time Lone Star Left readers know that I’ve long had a personal beef with Ronald Reagan, and when I think about Ross Perot, I think about the 1980 presidential election and the Iranian Revolution.

In December 1978, two of Perot’s employees at Electronic Data Systems were jailed in Tehran, swept up in the unrest leading into the Iranian Revolution. Perot asked the State Department for help. They moved too slowly for him. So he built his own operation, hired retired Army Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons, trained a team of his own employees at his lake house outside Dallas, and personally flew into Tehran under a cover story that he was delivering NBC news tapes.

The rescue plan itself fell apart, but the men got out anyway. A mob, organized in part by an EDS employee, stormed the prison during the chaos of the revolution, and Chiapparone and Gaylord walked free and made their way to Turkey.

Perot said private citizens have “an obligation” to act when the government won’t.

Within weeks of the November 1979 seizure of the US embassy and its 52 hostages, NBC reported that Perot had been quietly pulled into informal, unofficial rescue-planning schemes for the new crisis, including a scrapped plan to hide tracking signals inside donated Dallas Cowboys game tapes.

Those embassy hostages stayed captive for 444 days, through the ugly final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, through his loss to Ronald Reagan that November, and were released within minutes of Reagan’s inauguration. Perot became the guy private industry could point to and say, “Look, when the government fails you, a rich man with a chartered jet can just go get it done himself.”

It’s also the exact logic every billionaire has used since to justify substituting personal wealth for public institutions, and Texas didn’t have to wait for Elon Musk to see it happen at home.

Money is political.

In 2021, Governor Abbott announced Texas would crowdfund its own border wall after the Biden administration paused federal wall construction. The state’s private donation fund stalled at about $1.25 million for two months. Then one man, Timothy Mellon, a Wyoming billionaire and grandson of a former Treasury Secretary with no ties to Texas, wired $53.1 million in stock. That was 98% of the entire fund.

By early 2026, the wall was finished, well 82 miles of it, at a cumulative cost north of $2.5 billion, funded by a mix of state appropriations and donated money, Mellon’s stock included.

It didn’t stop at the border.

This month, the Texas Comptroller’s office released the first hard numbers on the state’s brand-new voucher program, officially called Texas Education Freedom Accounts, the $1 billion program Abbott spent three legislative sessions ramming through. 70% of students had already been attending private school or being homeschooled before a dollar of public money touched them. Only 30% came from public schools, the group the program was supposedly built to rescue.

I told you so. Actually, I told you so four separate times.

In January 2025, before the bill even had momentum, I wrote that SB2 would disproportionately benefit wealthier families who could already afford private school tuition, and that the $10,000 to $11,500 grants would fully cover tuition for exactly the families who needed it least. In February, when SB2 cleared the Senate on a party-line vote, I flagged that Senate Republicans were deeply tied to the billionaire donors and special interests pushing vouchers, and that every Democratic transparency amendment got voted down in lockstep. In March, during the 23-hour House committee hearing, we watched Gina Hinojosa force a GOP witness to admit the whole program would create a stratification system where access depends entirely on what a family can already afford. And in April, when the House passed its version, I called it a billion dollars in public money handed to private schools and unregulated vendors with no income cap and no fraud protection strong enough to matter.

It was the plan working exactly as designed.

Money is still political.

And back to that 115° temperature gauge.

In 2021, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that Texas produced 663.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), 13.5% of the country’s total. This is more than double the carbon emitted by California, the second-largest producer. Texas’s CO2 levels have increased by almost 85% since 1970 across all sectors, including transportation, homes, and businesses.

Texas emits more CO2 than Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, and many other countries.

The State of Texas is disproportionately responsible for climate change, more than any other state in America and much more than many countries.

But Texas Republicans refuse to act because, since 2014, the oil and gas industry has handed Greg Abbott more than $26 million, Kelcy Warren’s pipeline company made $2.4 billion off the 2021 blackouts that killed over 200 Texans, and the industry showers legislatures with campaign cash the moment each session ends.

Climate change is also political.

I drove home past three graves and one thermometer, and every single one of them told me the same thing.

Politics isn’t something happening to you from far away. It’s the temperature. It’s the wage. It’s who gets remembered as popular and who gets left off the plaque. It’s who gets to play private hero and who gets stuck holding the tax bill. It’s a $1 billion voucher program disguised as choice and a border wall bought by a man in Wyoming who’s never seen it.

Poverty is political. Popularity is political. Money is political. Climate change is political. Every damn thing is political, whether you clock it or not, and pretending otherwise is just letting someone else decide for you.

So vote. In every election, every year, all the way down the ballot, not just the ones with a president on it. Because if you don’t, I promise you, Texas Republicans will find a new way to screw you next, and they’ll make sure it’s legal, funded, and somebody’s already gotten rich off it before you even notice.

Rest in peace, Bonnie. Rest in peace, Mickey. Rest in whatever you’re resting in, Ross.

The rest of us have work to do.

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Internal Republican polling must be really bad. I mean really bad, because Greg Abbott just pulled a stunt that can only be described as “desperate.”

After sitting on a Senate vacancy in SD22 for 84 days, he declared a special election yesterday afternoon, giving candidates only TWO DAYS to file. The special election will take place on November 3, the same day as the general election. Since both Republican and Democratic candidates are already on the ballot for the general election on November 3, the SD22 seat will appear twice.

Texas law requires the special election to land on the next uniform election date, and thanks to how long Abbott waited, that date was always going to be November 3 no matter what.

Nobody tied his hands on the other 84 days.

Brian Birdwell resigned in May. Abbott had from Memorial Day to Labor Day to call this election with normal notice, the way his own office has done for other vacant Senate seats this cycle. Kelly Hancock’s SD9 seat was eight days from resignation to proclamation, with a filing window of over two months. Brandon Creighton’s SD4 seat was two weeks to proclamation, with filing lined up with the regular primary so nobody had to scramble.

SD22 got 84 days of silence and then a filing deadline that landed before half the district knew there was a race to file for.

If this sounds familiar, McLennan County, it should. You already lived through it. In 2024, Abbott gave Doc Anderson’s House District 56 seat a three-day filing window after Anderson resigned. And Anderson said, on the record, that the head start would let his successor walk into Austin more senior than every other freshman in the building. It’s just a maneuver, run in the open, and now it’s being run on you again.

This stupid, f*cking district.

(I’m not cursing.) But look at this.

Circled in red is where 360,000 people live, and that part of the district is nearly 70% non-Anglo. It also happens to be the part of the district I live in.

Then, circled in pink is a sundown town county, where they’ve been running Black people out of that area since 1886. They had a billboard sign warning Black people not to go there all the way until the 1970s, and even today the Black population of Comanche County is 0.2%.

Here’s why this is a problem. A State Senator’s incentive to serve a constituency is downstream of whether that constituency’s votes matter to their reelection. Officeholders are responsive to the electorate that can hire or fire them. When SD22 packs 360,000 people in a diversifying, 70%-non-Anglo slice of Tarrant County into the same district as eleven rural counties that are, on average, 75-80% Anglo, including one where the entire premise of the county’s founding-era social order was making sure Black residents didn’t live there. Tarrant’s votes get diluted by design, every cycle, by a bloc of counties large enough and reliably red enough to make the outcome a foregone conclusion regardless of what the 360,000 people in Mansfield and Arlington want.

The mechanism matters more than the history, but the history tells you the mechanism isn’t an accident. A county that organized itself in 1886 around excluding Black residents, and whose current 0.2% Black population shows that exclusion basically held for 140 years, isn’t a district that’s going to outvote Tarrant’s diversifying precincts by coincidence. Strip Comanche and the other rural counties out, and Tarrant’s slice alone starts looking like a seat Democrats can actually win. Leave them in, and the Senator elected from this district never has to answer to the fastest-growing, most diverse part of it.

That’s the actual argument, and it’s the one worth making instead of “sundown county bad.” The sundown history is evidence for why the map works the way it does. It shows the rural anchor counties have a specific, documented history of organizing their communities around excluding exactly the population Tarrant’s slice is diversifying with. The district’s whole structure guarantees the Senator’s actual accountability runs toward Comanche, not Arlington.

What would David Cook get for winning the two-day sprint?

In the Texas Senate, unlike the House, there’s no seniority formula for committee assignments. Dan Patrick picks who chairs what, whenever he feels like announcing it. Which means the real currency Cook is buying with Abbott’s two-day filing window isn’t a title. It’s time in the room.

Pre-filing for the 90th Legislature opens November 9. Only sitting senators can pre-file. A senator elected in the regular November 3 general doesn’t exist as a senator until January 12 and can’t file a single bill before then. Cook, if he wins the special election, gets sworn in weeks before pre-filing even opens. He gets to walk his priority bills in first, claim the low numbers, and spend two full months as an actual member of the Texas Senate, sitting through interim hearings, in the room while Patrick is still deciding who he trusts with what. And that changes if Vikki Goodwin beats Dan Patrick, too.

That’s the whole play. A two-month head start on being someone Dan Patrick already knows by the time assignments get made. In a session that’s going to fight over redistricting fallout and data center regulation, arriving as a known quantity instead of a stranger is worth more than people give it credit for. It’s just how power actually accumulates in that building.

What happens when a voter in SD22 actually opens their ballot on November 3?

They will see David Cook’s name and Amy Martinez Salas’s name. Then, somewhere else on that same ballot, they will see David Cook’s name and Amy Martinez Salas’s name AGAIN.

Same two people. Same office, more or less. Two separate contests, because Texas law treats a special election and a general election as two legally distinct elections even when they land on the same day, for the same seat, with the same candidates.

Texas got rid of straight-ticket voting in 2020. You no longer get to hit one button for your party. You vote race by race, one at a time, top to bottom, making an individual decision on every single line. That means every voter in SD22 has to consciously stop, twice, on what looks like the exact same contest, and decide whether that’s a mistake, a misprint, or something they’re supposed to do on purpose.

Now think about who absorbs that confusion and who doesn’t. A voter who shows up already knowing exactly who they’re voting for and why, because a campaign with money reached them beforehand and told them “yes, you’ll see this twice, vote both times,” sails through it. A voter who’s mildly engaged, intends to vote Democrat, sees the same two names pop up again three lines down, and assumes the machine glitched or they already did this? It’s what “roll-off” is. It’s a documented, decades-old phenomenon in elections with confusing ballot structures, and a doubled-up contest with no advance notice is a textbook trigger.

Abbott built a situation where confusion breaks one direction. The candidate with money to run a “you’ll see my name twice, vote for me twice” education campaign eats the roll-off. The one who doesn’t, doesn’t. Guess which side of SD22 has more money sitting around eighty-four days after the vacancy opened and two days after everyone found out about it.

Amy Martinez Salas is going to need money.

Now. This week. She has to file by tomorrow. The filing fee alone is $1,250. Then she’ll have to educate voters to vote for her on the ballot twice.

She was already running one race, the one that’s been building since March, the one with a filing deadline that gave her normal time to plan a budget, hire staff, and build out a mail program. That race didn’t go anywhere. It’s still happening November 3, same as always.

• Meet the Candidate: Amy Martinez Salas

Now she’s also running a second one. Same seat, same day, filed on a scramble, with a filing fee she wasn’t budgeting for this week, in a race that opened and closed its filing window before most of the district even knew it existed. She had to drop what she was doing and get to Austin today.

And because both races are now stacked on top of each other, she needs two voter education programs, explaining to the same voters why they’re going to see her name twice and need to vote for her twice, because if enough of them get confused and only vote once, David Cook doesn’t even need the seat to be safe, he needs enough of SD22 to shrug at a ballot that looks like a printing error.

Cook has Abbott’s office handing him the runway, the built-in name recognition of already being a sitting state rep, and a party apparatus that’s had this play in the playbook since Doc Anderson ran it two years ago. Amy’s got a former staff job, a boss who’s letting her take a few days off to fight for this, and whatever she can put together in the next 76 days.

So here’s the ask:

Donate to Amy Martinez-Salas here.

Share it. Tell people they’re going to see her name twice on the ballot, and both times mean vote for her. Every dollar for Martinex Salas NOW does more work than a dollar in October, because right now she’s fighting on two fronts with a budget built for one.

She’s running twice as hard on half the notice. The least we can do is show up.

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Texas has 5.1 million people walking around without health insurance. That’s more than the entire population of South Carolina. It’s more people than live in the city of Los Angeles proper. And for over a decade, the official position of the Republicans running this state has been, “too bad.”

We’ve watched Texas Republicans do this dance since 2013. Somebody proposes taking federal money to cover working people who can’t afford insurance. Somebody else calls it socialism, or a slippery slope, or fiscally reckless, and then everybody goes home and the Rainy Day Fund gets a little fatter. Meanwhile, a waitress in Amarillo skips her mammogram because she can’t afford the copay, and an electrician in Lubbock rides out a kidney stone because the ER bill is less terrifying than the one from an actual doctor’s visit, and rural hospitals keep closing their doors one county at a time. And each year hundreds of Texans die because they didn’t have access to healthcare.

So here comes Vikki Goodwin, with an actual plan. A three-tier system with a funding mechanism, an enrollment structure, and a plan for exactly who gets covered and how.

I’m going to walk you through what it does, what it costs, and what Republicans in this state have turned down to avoid doing something like it for the last thirteen years.

Note: While universal healthcare is the preferable option, that has to come from the Federal Government. And until we kick the Republicans out of DC, Vikki Goodwin’s Texas Care Plan is the best and most viable option we have in front of us.

The Texas Cares Plan.

Today, Vikki Goodwin unveiled her Texas Cares Plan and will tour the state this week, talking about her plan and access to healthcare.

Let’s start with the basics. Three tiers. Here’s what each one does.

Tier I: Medicaid Expansion. Covers Texans making up to 138% of the federal poverty line. The federal government picks up 90% of the tab. Texas covers the other 10%, plus administrative costs. This is the same deal 40 other states already took, and Texas Republicans have spent over a decade refusing it out of what I can only describe as pure ideological spite. More on that in a minute.

Tier II: Lone Star Basic. Covers Texans between 138% and 200% of the poverty line, the people who make too much for Medicaid and not enough actually to afford what’s on the marketplace. This one’s funded through the federal Basic Health Program, which is a mechanism that already exists and that Texas has never bothered to use. Currently, federal subsidy dollars for these folks flow straight to private insurers. Under Lone Star Basic, 95% of that money would go to the state instead, to fund the program directly. Same federal dollars, just cutting out the middleman who’s been profiting off it.

Tier III: Lone Star Preferred. Open to all Texans, not income-restricted. This is the actual public option, a state-run plan that competes with the private market instead of just subsidizing it. It’s funded by a one-time draw from the Rainy Day Fund, which currently sits at a record $25 billion and does nothing but collect interest, plus ongoing revenue from a new tax on legal cannabis sales (which Democrats will legalize once in office). Premiums scale with income. The idea is that once enough people opt in, the program pays for itself through premiums and cannabis tax revenue.

Now, I want to flag something here. The cannabis tax revenue figure attached to this tier, $267.7 million, comes from a Whitney Economics study commissioned by the Texas Hemp Business Council. That’s an industry-funded estimate, not an independent fiscal note. It’s not disqualifying, but it’s not neutral either.

Put together, the three tiers are aimed at the 5.1 million Texans currently walking around without coverage of any kind.

The whole plan leans hard into preventative care, and there’s a reason for that beyond the usual “an ounce of prevention” throat-clearing you hear from every candidate with a health plan. Under Lone Star Preferred, an annual checkup comes with no copay and no deductible, because the design philosophy is to catch problems in a doctor’s office instead of an emergency room. The plan also puts specific emphasis on maternal health, with early and continuous prenatal care aimed at closing the gap in outcomes for Black women in Texas, who have been dying and nearly dying from preventable complications at rates that should embarrass every single person who’s ever stood on a courthouse lawn talking about “protecting life.”

The money Republicans left on the table.

Texas is one of ten states left in this entire country that still hasn’t expanded Medicaid. Ten. As of 2023. North Carolina, a state that has spent years trying out Texas on culture-war nonsense, managed to expand Medicaid before we did.

The result of that decade-plus of refusal is exactly what you’d expect. Texas has an 18% uninsured rate. The national average is 8.6%. We are the worst, by a wide margin, in the richest country on earth, in a state that never stops bragging about how well things are going here.

The commonly cited number is that Texas is leaving $10 billion a year in federal Medicaid money on the table. That number traces back to a 2013 projection from Billy Hamilton, a former deputy comptroller of Texas, commissioned by Methodist Healthcare Ministries. PolitiFact rated the broader $100 billion claim built on that number “Mostly True” when Beto ran on it, so it’s not junk. But it’s over a decade old, and more recent research from the Bush School and the Episcopal Health Foundation puts the current figure closer to $5 to $6 billion a year.

So which number’s right? Depends on what year you’re modeling and whose spreadsheet you trust. I’m not going to pick the bigger, scarier number just because it makes a better pull quote. The honest answer is Texas is forgoing somewhere between $5 and $10 billion a year, and even the low end of that range is real money that could be covering real people instead of sitting in Washington waiting for a state that’s too proud to ask for it.

Either number you land on, the underlying fact doesn’t move. Republicans have had over a decade to take this money and chose, over and over, not to.

Rick Perry called the Affordable Care Act a “criminal act” back when the ink was still wet, and that framing Texas Republicans have repeated ever since. Greg Abbott picked up that same line running for governor in 2014, and he has not moved an inch since. Not during a pandemic. Not during a rural hospital closure crisis.

Here’s the part that should make you angriest, though, because it’s not even a story about Republican obstruction anymore. It’s a story about Republican obstruction with actual bipartisan cover, ignored anyway.

In 2021, 76 members of the Texas House, a majority of the chamber, signed onto a bill to draw down Medicaid expansion funding. That’s not some fringe progressive wish list. That’s a working majority of the people’s elected representatives saying yes, let’s take the money. It never got a floor vote. Never got a hearing. Leadership declined to let it happen, because in this state, having the votes has never been the same thing as having the power.

And it’s not a one-time thing. Every session since has run the same play. File the bill, watch it die quietly in committee, repeat. The last time Medicaid expansion even got a real hearing at the Capitol was 2019. That’s how far removed this issue is from anything resembling live debate in Austin, even though most Texans, including plenty of Republicans, want it.

How Goodwin proposes to pay for it.

Here’s where I want you to pay close attention, because this is the part Republicans always skip when they start clutching their pearls about “fiscal responsibility.”

Tier I costs Texas nothing new. Zero new state dollars beyond the standard 10% match that comes with any Medicaid expansion, which, again, is money we’ve been eligible to draw down since 2012 and haven’t. This isn’t a spending proposal. It’s a proposal to stop leaving federal money on the table out of spite.

Tier II isn’t new spending either. It’s a redirect. Right now, 95% of that federal subsidy money flows straight to private insurance companies as a thank-you for covering people in the marketplace. Under Lone Star Basic, that same money goes to the state instead, to fund coverage directly. Same dollars, different destination, and the destination this time is actual Texans instead of a shareholder report.

Tier III is the only piece that requires the state actually to put skin in the game, and even then, it’s a one-time draw. It comes out of the Rainy Day Fund, which currently sits at a record $25 billion, plus revenue from a new cannabis tax to keep it running afterward.

Twenty-five billion dollars. Sitting there and earning interest. While Republicans in this state have spent over a decade telling you, with a straight face, that covering 5.1 million uninsured Texans is too fiscally reckless to consider. Meanwhile, hundreds of people die in Texas each year without access to healthcare.

Republicans hoard a record surplus and call themselves the party of fiscal discipline while an 18% uninsured rate sits parked in the highest slot in the entire country. 🙄 That’s a choice. Goodwin’s plan is asking Texas to spend a sliver of its own savings account on its own people, one time, and then let the program largely pay for itself in the future.

Here’s your choice.

Vote for Vikki Goodwin, and you get a Lieutenant Governor who wants to legalize cannabis and use the proceeds to make sure poor and working Texans can see a doctor before their treatable condition turns into an emergency room bill they’ll spend the rest of their life paying off. That’s it. Cover people. Stop wasting money prosecuting a plant.

Vote to keep Dan Patrick in that seat, and you get a man who wasn’t even born in this state throwing felony charges at nineteen-year-olds for a joint in their pocket, while cancer patients who can’t afford treatment die in the streets. Not hypothetical. That’s happening right now. In the richest state in the union, under his watch, that’s the deal on the table.

November’s coming. Don’t sit this one out.

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Earlier this year, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) approved a new required reading list that includes Bible stories and passages for all public school students from first grade through high school. The SBOE has a history of placing inappropriate lessons in our school books for our children and politicizing their education, thanks to the J6ers and far-right extremists elected to this board. The forced religious indoctrination may be the most egregious act this board has yet taken.

While we can only assume they will keep the Bible verses for our children tame and mild, I’d like to tell you a story that comes from the same book the verses they’ll be placing in the math workbooks come from.

🚨Trigger warning. Levite’s concubine, Judges 19. A man is traveling with his concubine, and while staying at a random man’s house one night, a mob surrounds the house and demands that the man come out so they can rape him. Instead, the host offers up the women. The concubine is thrown out and gang-raped all night. She dies on the doorstep. The man takes her home, cuts her body up into twelve pieces, and sends them to the tribes of Israel as a call to war.

And while it’s safe to assume that particular story won’t make it into kindergartners’ schoolbooks, it comes from the same book of the “versus” that will. And there are plenty of other stories in the Bible that don’t have a moral takeaway and are violent and obscene. It’s perfectly logical to question whether those obscene stories will make it into high school curricula.

This isn’t a new problem.

Back in 2015, a Pearland mom named Roni Dean-Burren caught her ninth-grader’s McGraw-Hill textbook describing the Atlantic slave trade as bringing “millions of workers” to the South. The publisher eventually apologized and fixed the caption, but only in the digital edition. Kids reading the print copy got the sanitized version for another decade, because that’s how the reprint cycle works. The board approved that textbook.

Fast forward to 2023. The board is reviewing eighth-grade science textbooks that, for the first time, must mention climate change. Members rejected seven of twelve, several because the publishers dared to maintain an ESG policy. Julie Pickren, the Pearland J6er Republican who represents District 7, killed Discovery Education’s textbook over that exact complaint. Fort Worth’s Patricia Hardy tanked one from Green Ninja because it dared suggest people warn their families about extreme weather. And Frisco’s Evelyn Brooks, mid-discussion about the origins of the universe, asked the room, “What about creation?”

Which brings us to this June. The board gave final approval to a reading list that requires Bible stories, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Eight Beatitudes, and more, in classrooms serving five million Texas kids of every faith and none. In the same sitting, they gutted sixth-grade World Cultures and beefed up the unit on anti-communism, scaling back world history and diversity content across the board.

In 2024, this board approved its own homegrown curriculum, Bluebonnet Learning, and told Texas it was ready for classrooms. It wasn’t. Texas taxpayers are now on the hook for up to $8.4 million to fix somewhere between nineteen hundred and forty-two hundred errors, copyright violations, busted answer keys, and formatting so broken teachers couldn’t follow their own slide decks.

The only way Republicans can continue winning is by having an uneducated base, and they know this. Which is why the SBOE has been working double-time to make sure Texas children don’t receive a world-class education.

We can change this. We can flip the SBOE. THIS YEAR!

There are 15 SBOE seats. Nine are on the ballot this year. Three are already blue and expected to stay blue. Those are:

• SBOE-04: Dr. Coretta Mallet-Fontenot

• SBOE-05: Allison Bush

• SBOE-13: Dr. Tiffany Clark

If we didn’t flip ANY seats at all, the makeup of the SBOE would be Republican 10/Democratic 5. So, we need to flip AT LEAST three seats to take control.

These are the Democrats running for Republican held seats (and we’re about to get to a breakdown):

• SBOE-02: Thomas Ray Garcia

• SBOE-06: Michelle Palmer

• SBOE-07: Tiffany Perkinz

• SBOE-08: Dr. Dana Van De Walker

• SBOE-09: Ericka Ledferd

• SBOE-14: Amy Taylor

We have six opportunities to flip three seats. This year, with a wave election expected, can we do it? Who has the best chance? And what do these districts look like? Let’s get into it.

SBOE-02: Thomas Ray Garcia vs. Victoria Hinojosa.

LJ Francis once held this seat until his wife outed him as 🏳️‍🌈 during their divorce proceedings. The Republicans then shunned him. Actually, I think they came after him with pitchforks. Why LJ Francis wanted to be a gay, Black Republican is a mystery only he knows the answer to. Needless to say, he lost his primary.

Victoria Hinojosa won the primary. She is the wife of State Senator Adam Hinojosa. Which, yuck, we should all hate. It’s like the Paxtons, when the wife doesn’t have her own personality, so she follows her husband into politics. No, she isn’t an educator. According to BallotPedia, she is a customer service rep for Wells Fargo. But she’s a staunch Conservative, which makes her perfect for preparing the next generation of The Handmaid’s Tale.

By contrast, Thomas Ray Garcia is an educator, author, and entrepreneur with 13 years of experience in K-12 and higher education. He taught in the classroom and spearheaded programs for high school students and parents. Garcia is a community college professor, a former high school teacher, and a former director of a college readiness program that has impacted thousands of students.

This is a Hispanic-majority seat, which includes the Coastal Bend region and the Rio Grande Valley. This district has typically seen low voter turnout, especially in midterm elections. However, if the “blue bounce” we saw in the primary in the RGV is any indicator, this may be one of the closest SBOE seats we have to flipping.

Garcia received 107,999 votes in the Democratic primary. Hinojosa received only 47,537 votes in the Republican primary. Fewer than 81,000 Republicans voted in the primary in this district.

SBOE-06: Michelle Palmer vs. Tiffany Nelson.

This seat used to belong to Will Hickman (R). He retired (or something). Good riddance, because he was as dumb as he was ideologically pure. The Republican who won in his place this year was Tiffany Nelson, who describes herself as a “woman of faith, family, and service.” According to her website, her experience with public education is having six kids who went to public school. And since she’s from Conroe and deeply religious, she’s now ready to rewrite your kids’ school books.

Michelle Palmer has been a teacher since 2009 and has taught Mathematics, ELA, and Social Studies. One of her campaign promises is to ensure Texas’ core curriculum is based on scientific and historical facts. She’s currently working on a Master’s in American History and Government to help students better understand how this country was built and how our government functions.

You know, while we can’t really say that primary turnout indicates general election turnout, both Democratic and Republican primary races in this district saw almost even turnout. If Democrats are looking at a wave year, that may also be good for this district.

SBOE-06 is split between Montgomery and Harris County. It’s 46.4% Anglo, 53.6% non-Anglo, with Hispanic at 29.5% and Black at 13.0%. This district is going to be the heaviest lift of the six, but if Palmer focuses on Harris County and the non-Anglo vote, as well as her challenger’s lack of qualifications, she may have a shot.

SB07: Tiffany Perkinz vs. Julie Pickren.

Julie Pickren attended the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, DC. She tried to help thousands of crazed right-wing lunatics steal democracy for a dictator who poops in his pants. She never apologized. Instead, they elected her to the SBOE. Which, really, more than anything, should tell you about the state of the Republican Party.

Since then, she attempted to implement the highly propagandized PragerU into Texas schools, an act that failed but further shows how this woman has no business at all in public education.

This district includes the Golden Triangle, Jefferson, Orange, Hardin, Liberty, Jasper, Newton, Tyler, plus Brazoria, Chambers, most of Fort Bend, and Galveston. Anglo 45.2%, non-Anglo 54.8%, with Black at 19.4% and Hispanic at 24.6%, the highest Black population share of the six districts, concentrated in Jefferson County (Beaumont/Port Arthur), a historically Democratic industrial county surrounded by rural, heavily Republican counties.

This area has been plagued by low voter turnout in recent years. However, I’ve been watching some of the activity down there this year and am hoping this is the year they turn it all around.

The Democratic primary here was the most contested of the cycle, five candidates, going to a runoff that Perkinz won by less than one point. This seat had real primary energy and a genuine coalition fight, which can cut either way. However, Perkinz has been going the extra mile to make herself visible with Democratic clubs and on social media and has a good leg-up going into the general election.

If Democrats in Jefferson County can up their turnout from recent years, this seat is a real plausible pick-up.

SBOE-08: Dr. Dana Van De Walker vs. Audrey Young.

Young is the incumbent, first elected in 2020, and has Houston Chronicle’s past endorsement on record. Which is not to say for much, considering how far to the right the Houston Chronicle has seemingly been leaning lately. But she was a Republican sitting on the SBOE when the Republicans attacked climate change and put Bible verses in our schools, so that’s multiple strikes against her.

Dr. Dana Van De Walker is an educator with nearly 20 years of service. She taught elementary and middle school English as a Second Language (ESL) before earning her Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) in Higher Education Leadership. Currently, she oversees a large student program at Lone Star College.

This district is Northeast Houston, extending into the Piney Woods, including Walker, Polk, Trinity, San Jacinto, Grimes, Waller, plus parts of Fort Bend, Harris, and Montgomery. Anglo 37.5%, non-Anglo 62.5%, with Hispanic at 35.0% and Black at 16.7%.

Republicans’ only defense here is that they might say Young is a “more reasonable GOPer,” especially in comparison to the other Repubes on the SBOE. But again, she was there when the Bible verses and climate denial were implemented.

SBOE-09: Ericka Ledferd vs. Kason Huddleston.

This district has the biggest geographical footprint of the six. Deep East Texas (Angelina, Cherokee, Gregg, Nacogdoches, Smith, etc.) plus, critically, Kaufman and Rockwall counties and a slice of Dallas County, fast-growing DFW exurbs. Anglo 51.7%, non-Anglo 48.3%, Black 17.4%, Hispanic 24.5%.

Incumbent Keven Ellis is retiring. Huddleston is the one to watch here. He’s A pastor and former Texas GOP chaplain, one of four Christian conservative candidates this cycle endorsed by Abbott, running explicitly on “combating woke education.” 🤮 It really is astounding how many Republicans either sit, sat, or are running for the SBOE who have no business being within ten miles of public education.

Ledferd, an education advocate with SMU’s TRIO program, ran unopposed and campaigned on protecting neighborhood school funding amid school choice expansion and shaping financial literacy and early reading standards.

And considering that more than half of Texas schoolchildren can’t read, that’s your choice. A chaplain who wants to make sure kids don’t learn about civil rights or an educator who wants to make sure kids can read.

This district is a genuine wild card because it stitches together deep-red rural counties with rapidly diversifying DFW exurbs. Flipping this district will absolutely take driving up the numbers in Dallas, Rockwall, and Kaufman.

SBOE-14: Amy Taylor vs. Mindy Bumgarner.

Mindy Bumgarner is the wife of State House Representative Ben Bumgarner. And just like Angela Paxton and Victoria Hinojosa, her entire personality hinges on being a Republican politician’s wife. (Well, not Angela Paxton anymore. Pour one out for her identity crisis.) But like Victoria Hinojosa and most of the other Republican candidates on this list, she doesn’t have any real educational experience. However, according to her website, she’s written plans and supports funneling taxpayer money to the wealthy for school vouchers.

Amy Taylor has taught in Texas public school classrooms for 16 years, most of them teaching gifted learners and English language learners in a Title I school. She’s promising to end the whitewashing of our school books at the SBOE and to get religion out of teacher instruction.

This district covers North/Central Texas, including Denton (93%), Ellis, Johnson (48%), McLennan (Waco), Hill, Navarro, Wise, plus a small slice of Dallas. Anglo 55.4%, non-Anglo 44.6%, Hispanic 22.8%, Black 11.6%.

Turnout here was 65.8% in 2024, up from 49.3% in 2022, the highest 2024 turnout rate of the six districts. Denton County carries this seat. It’s grown fast and trended less red than Collin or Tarrant’s exurban ring in recent cycles. There is absolutely a suburban flip opportunity here.

Fifteen seats. Nine on the ballot. Three already ours. Six in play.

We need three of the six to win control of a board that decides what 5.5 million Texas kids learn, what books they read, and whether the word “slavery” gets to mean slavery.

That’s three wins out of six genuine opportunities, in a year when Republicans are running a customer service rep, a pastor who wants to “combat woke education,” and a woman whose entire platform is “I had six kids, and I go to church” against actual career educators with actual doctorates in actual education.

The GOP didn’t send their best. They sent their spouses.

And look at what’s riding on it. A board that put a rape and dismemberment story’s home book in a first grader’s backpack while promising the Bible verses will stay “tame.” A board that killed science textbooks because the publisher had an ESG policy. A board that cost you, the taxpayer, up to $8.4 million to fix a curriculum they wrote themselves and couldn’t be bothered to proofread. A board that has made “what about creation?” a legitimate question during a discussion of eighth-grade science standards.

This isn’t a board of educators anymore. It’s a board of ideologues who happen to have jurisdiction over your kid’s reading list, and they got there because nobody was watching the SBOE races. Everybody watches the governor’s race. Everybody watches Congress. Nobody watches the fifteen people deciding whether Texas kids learn that George Washington owned people or that they were “workers.”

We’re watching now. Six seats. Three wins. That’s the whole ballgame, and for once, Texas Democrats don’t need a miracle. We need Jefferson County to show up. We need Rockwall and Kaufman to keep trending the way they’ve been trending. We need the RGV’s primary energy to survive to November. That’s it.

Vote like your kid’s textbook depends on it, because it does.

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Note: This week’s Meet the Candidates has been postponed due to scheduling hiccups. Will resume shortly.

Videos are circulating of bulldozers near Santa Elena Canyon. That’s happening at Big Bend National Park right now. 80 days out from the election, so let’s talk about which Texas Republicans sit on the House Appropriations Committee, and why it matters.

On June 10, the House Appropriations Committee considered an amendment from Henry Cuellar that would have told the Department of Homeland Security not to build walls in Big Bend National Park or Big Bend State Park. Cuellar wanted to ban federal wall money from touching those two parks, plus a handful of spots in his own district, including the World Trade Bridge, a couple of city parks in Laredo, a municipal golf course, and Falcon Lake.

Republicans killed the amendment. 26 to 34. Every Republican in the room voted no. Every Democrat voted yes. That’s the whole story of how this got greenlit.

Cuellar urged the committee to use cameras, sensors, or anything other than bulldozing a national park. Republicans killed it anyway.

Texas has three Republicans on House Appropriations:

• TX06: Jake Ellzey

• TX27: Michael Cloud

• TX31: John Carter

Every single Texas Republican on this committee voted for what’s happening in Big Bend right now. And every single one of them is up for election in 80 days. Here’s who’s running against them, and how you can help get them out of office:

TX06: Jake Ellzey.

Jake Ellzey is a rank-and-file Republican who names libraries in other people’s towns after dead Congressmen who participated in Trump’s attempted coup in 2021. Because he’s never been known to go against the grain, except when making promises to constituents that he never keeps, it really isn’t shocking that he participated in the regular groupthink that happens among the GOP ranks in Congress.

The Democrat running against Ellzey is Danny Minton.

• Meet the Candidate: Danny Minton

I had the chance to ask Minton directly, “Should the US demilitarize the southern border and repeal harmful immigration policies?”

Here is what he said:

“Yes. I would go further: ICE should be abolished or significantly reduced, and its budget redirected to local and state law enforcement and, where appropriate, to Border Patrol. Our immigration system must be humane, constitutional, and reflective of our values as a nation of immigrants.”

TX06 was 37.2% Dem and 60.6% Rep in 2024. But 175,870 voters that cycle didn’t vote. We have to look at the 2024 numbers, since Republicans redrew this map last year and based it purely on the 2024 numbers. 🤣 This was pretty dumb, especially for this district, because before the gerrymandering, it was my district (which is also how I know Ellzey doesn’t keep promises to constituents), and last year was just a bad year for Team Blue.

It’s about 50.7% white and 49.3% non-white by voting-age population. It’s not overwhelmingly Republican demographically. It’s not a safe Democratic seat either. It’s right on the edge. The GOP will rely on low voter turnout to win in this district. And they won’t get it.

Because I have several school-aged children, I don’t get out to too many events, but when I do, Danny Minton is always there. I swear, I’ve seen him at every Democratic event I’ve been to over the last year. So I know he’s showing up in the most important parts of the district. Flipping this district will take targeted turnout in Dallas and Tarrant County, and then running up the margins in the rest of the counties.

You can learn more about Danny Minton on his website, Facebook, and Instagram.

TX27: Michael Cloud.

Cloud signed onto the Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit trying to overturn the 2020 election. He also objected to certifying the Electoral College results, voted against a Jan. 6 commission, and kept pushing unproven fraud claims after the election. Obviously, he cares about Big Bend as much as he cares about America.

The Democrat running against Cloud is Tanya Lloyd.

• Meet the Candidate: Tanya Lloyd

I had the chance to ask Lloyd directly, “Should the US demilitarize the southern border and repeal harmful immigration policies?”

Here is what she said:

“We need a border that is both secure and humane, moving away from reactive chaos toward an orderly, rule-based system. I support investing in modern technology and increased personnel to stop illegal trafficking while streamlining legal pathways for the workers our Texas economy desperately needs. If elected, I will fight to ensure immigration enforcement does not trample over basic constitutional rights. We must hold DHS and ICE leadership accountable for abuses of power with congressional hearings and prosecutions. No more secret police.”

The district is 44% Anglo and 56% non-Anglo overall, with Hispanic residents making up 44.6% of the total population. But the voting-age population gets whiter. 48.2% Anglo, 51.8% non-Anglo, and 40.5% Hispanic. We’re going to see the Hispanic vote swing back left in November. The question is, how far left? And will it vary by district?

There is a lot of enthusiasm behind Tanya Lloyd’s race. But this district has historically struggled with low turnout. Her biggest challenge this time around is drastically increasing voter turnout margins. It can be done, though. And this district will be challenging, but not impossible.

You can learn more about Tanya Lloyd on her website, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

TX31: John Carter.

John Carter is 85 years old. He is the exact stereotype of the 1980s Republican, but he never left the 1980s. He graduated from college before desegregation, and he acts like it.

The Democrat running against Early is Justin Early.

• Meet the Candidate: Justin Early

I had the chance to ask Early directly, “Should the US demilitarize the southern border and repeal harmful immigration policies?”

Here is what he said:

“Yes. Border security should rely on smart technology, lawful processing, and accountability, not heavy military equipment or troops.”

This district is going to be more complicated. It also has historically had low voter turnout. And the demographics are majority white by VAP (about 57%), but 43% of the voting-age population is non-white, including a significant Black population (~15.5%), a Hispanic population of just over 20%, and a growing Asian population near 5%.

To win in this district, Early will have to drastically increase turnout among Black, Hispanic, and young suburban voters. There’s also a Green Party candidate running here, who has some celebrity. In fact, I have a lot of respect for the Green Party candidate and their policy positions.

We (you and I) talked about independent candidates at the beginning of the primary and ultimately decided that the Texas Progressive Caucus (which I am a long-time member of) has done way too much work to push the Texas Democratic Party left over the last several years. Justin Early is an incredibly progressive Democrat. Most Lone Star Left readers will agree with him on policy. He supports the Green New Deal, Universal Healthcare, ending qualified immunity, major tax reform, and tuition-free public college.

In fact, at a recent forum, with Early and the other candidate, you could see how many policy positions they actually shared.

My concern in this race is that the Green Party candidate’s celebrity status will affect the tight numbers needed to beat Carter. Which is why I’m reaffirming my support for Justin Early right now. 😁

You can find out more about Justin Early on his website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Ellzey, Cloud, and Carter all had a chance to keep bulldozers out of a national park. All three said no.

Now they’re on the ballot in 80 days, right when the Hispanic vote is expected to swing back, right when three different districts have three different paths to flip if turnout shows up.

Just math. And the math says these seats are winnable if the people who stayed home in 2024 don’t stay home again.

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I’ve been hearing chitter-chatter from the Democracy Summit in Austin this week. I’m not there because I live in DFW and because it’s the first week of school. But the biggest thing I’m hearing is that Democratic strategists are expecting a blue wave of epic proportions. Of course, we already knew this because Trump and Abbott are both unpopular. After all, the economy is in the toilet, and it’s a midterm year with a Republican in the White House. We still have to get out and vote.

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So, I’ve been playing with numbers today. We have to flip the Texas House. It is THE ONLY way in Texas to stop the Republican agenda. Maybe next Legislative session will be a dead stop if we do, since we aren’t going to flip the Texas Senate. But that’s better than the GOP taking more of our tax dollars to enrich billionaires, starve more children, kill immigrants on the border, and make sure we run out of water.

We need 14 to flip the Texas House. Right now, the DLCC and their $1.3 million will only flip 12 seats. But it isn’t enough. We need 14 seats to flip the Texas House, and the question is, where will those other two come from?

Here are some 🔥hot🔥 races and the numbers backing them:

By my calculations, if we really had a wave of “epic” proportions and all of these candidates were busting their ass and pulling in big fundraising dollars, we’d have 35 vulnerable seats.

That’s not realistic. Because for some reason, some of these candidates haven’t raised any money or have a social media presence. And I can’t speak for every race, but not every candidate is out there politicking as hard as they should be. That’s okay. It happens every year.

Remember this (sometimes I forget it). For every down-ballot candidate on the ticket, it helps the total number of votes at the top.

Call me bananas, but I truly think we can flip 14 seats.

With 81 days left until the election, everyone wants to know where to focus their energy.

The top of the ticket is getting lots of love, although all statewide races should be getting as much love as Talarico.

Absolutely the DLCC’s list, and I think all of these seats are going to flip.

Bell County. Bell County shouldn’t be red. It’s only red because Republicans gerrymandered it to look like a donut. But demographically, Bell is only 42.3% Anglo and 57.7% non-Anglo. That includes a population that is 21.79% Black and 25.22% Hispanic.

That being said, Bell County still has a Confederate statue on its county courthouse lawn and some of the highest rates of police violence in the state (more unarmed people killed per arrest than 84% of Texas departments). It’s an oppressed county. And with oppression come voter suppression and some of the lowest voter turnout rates in Texas.

We’ve talked about Bell County a lot over the years. HD54 needs 10,199 more Democratic votes than it got in 2022. HD55 needs 10,460. That’s 20,658 votes, combined, across one county, to flip two seats at once. Compare that to the Golden 12 seats spread across five different counties for the same kind of lift. Bell is a two-for-one if you do it right.

Sustained, year-round organizing is a prerequisite. I don’t know if that’s been going on for the last few years. It should have been. However, in 2025, there was a lot of drama with Bell County Democrats. Hopefully, they’ve resolved their issues.

Both of the candidates here, Dawn Richardson and Amelia Rabroker, are doing okay on fundraising. Republicans are going to outraise every Democrat on the ticket, so the Democrats have to outraise them.

I checked out both candidates on Mobilize. Rabroker has multiple block walks planned. Richardson’s next event isn’t until the 22nd, which is this event:

This is great. Collaborative events always help all the candidates. And Justin Early has a decent chance at flipping TX31. I wouldn’t call it a “good” chance. It’s complicated, and I plan on getting into it more soon. But he definitely needs all the Bell County votes he can pick up.

Denton County. None of the DLCC’s list is in Denton County. Why? I don’t know. I’m friends with several County Chairs, and for years I’ve watched County Chairs across Texas work, and one thing I can tell you with confidence is that Delia Parker-Mims, the Denton County Democratic Party Chair, is one of the hardest-working Democrats in Texas. Not only that, but she constantly thinks outside the box to find ways to raise money, make sure precincts are covered, and knock on doors.

When Democratic numbers across the state were down in 2022 and 2024, Denton County was one of the handful of counties that saw turnout increase. No one is expecting Denton to flip this year. No one has any of these seats on their radar.

That being said, I wouldn’t count any of these seats out.

Denise Wooten has the easiest path of the four. In fact, her flip numbers are probably tighter than some on the DLCC’s list (she should probably be on that list). If Denton flips anything this cycle, county organizers should treat it as priority one.

Detrick Deburr also has a real shot and is running against an incredibly unpopular incumbent, but needs a lot more money. Caveat. The fundraising dollars I’m looking at ended in June, so he could have raised a lot more since.

Joe Mayes and Julie Evans are more in the “watch, but don’t hold your breath” category.

I searched Mobilize for block walking and phone banking for all of these candidates in Denton County. I found some. Not nearly enough. And not enough collaborative events. In an ideal world, House candidates would campaign with Congressional Candidates, local candidates, statewide candidates, and each other at every possible opportunity.

Collin County. The politicos seem to think that Collin County could turn blue this year. I agree with them. The DLCC is already targeting HD61 and HD67 as flips and HD70 as a hold. But there’s one more that they overlooked.

When Republicans redrew this district in 2021, they only gave themselves a +7.9 advantage. But as we all know, Democrats mostly just stayed home in 2022 and 2024. In 2022, the incumbent (Matt Shaheen) won by +20.8 points. But I think low voter turnout was the biggest contributing factor.

Sandeep Srivastava has already raised over $54,000 (as of the last filing), but I’m willing to bet he doubles that by the next filing because he went viral on the right-wing mediasphere. It wasn’t good either. White supremacists attacked him, and he garnered a lot of in-county support after that.

And he’s out there doing the work.

Expect big things from Collin County in November.

Tarrant County. The DLCC has one House seat (HD94) and one Senate seat (SD09) from Tarrant County on its list. But we should also watch these two seats:

Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin has some overlap with SD09, so I hope she’s campaigning with Taylor Rehmet every chance she gets, because, like the seat in Collin County, this seat was drawn a lot bluer than it was in 2022 due to low voter turnout. She’s raised more money than some of the Golden 12, so if their argument about adding candidates to their list is about money, then she should be on the list too.

Ebony Turner is running for David Cook’s newly vacated seat. Cook only held that seat, and the Mayoral seat before that, because of name recognition. Mansfield’s demographics are changing quickly. This city is now only 53.3% Anglo, 21.8% Black, and 18.5% Hispanic. Using the same turnout-times-2021 map-split method I used for the other uncontested seats, HD96 pencils out to roughly 6,300 votes needed, which, if it holds, would make it tighter than HD97, not a long shot. That’s my estimate, not a certified number, but it’s the kind of gap that should make people pay attention.

Harris County. There are two Harris County candidates on the DCLL’s list. Here are two more:

Sara McGee is the sleeper candidate who I think will win no matter what anyone says. She’s working hard and even quit her job to become a full-time candidate. She knows what it’s going to take to win, and I think she’s dedicated to getting there. If we see a real, genuine “epic” wave this year, expect to see her in Austin next year.

Michelle Williams is running against Charles Cunningham, and while it seems like she hasn’t raised as much as other candidates. Cunningham has only raised $40,000 this cycle. Because this seat was unopposed in the last midterm, we don’t know how many votes she’ll need, but I estimate it is around 10,900 on top of the 2022 number. That would put her right in line with HD132.

We need 14 to flip. The DLCC has 12. I just walked you through 11 more.

Not some fantasy wave-election spreadsheet where every county gets a pony. Eleven real candidates, in five counties, with real 2022 numbers, real fundraising, and in more than one case, better numbers than seats already on the DLCC’s own list. Denise Wooten in Denton. Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin in Tarrant. Sara McGee in Harris. These aren’t longshots I’m talking myself into. These are low-hanging fruit that somebody forgot to pick.

We don’t need all eleven. We need two (on top of the DLCC’s 12). We have nine seats of margin for error, and we’re still acting like this is a moonshot.

So here’s the ask, and it’s not complicated. If you live in Bell, Denton, Collin, Tarrant, or Harris County, go find your candidate on Mobilize right now and sign up for a block walk. If you can’t walk, phone bank. If you can’t phone bank, and you’ve got ten bucks or a hundred, send it to Dawn Richardson, Amelia Rabroker, Denise Wooten, Detrick Deburr, Joe Mayes, Julie Evans, Sandeep Srivastava, Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin, Ebony Turner, Sara McGee, or Michelle Williams. Pick one. Pick five. I don’t care which.

We have 81 days. Tick-tock.

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• 81 days until the November election!

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Texas Election Code §255.003 - Unlawful Use of Public Funds for Political Advertising:

(a) An officer or employee of a political subdivision may not knowingly spend or authorize the spending of public funds for political advertising.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Courts call “electioneering.” But, for Republicans, it’s not corruption if you read the Court minutes with a straight face.

Today, the Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court held a budget meeting. Not too many people showed up because there wasn’t anything scandalous on the agenda, like there was for their last meeting. Just a hum-drum, normal, everyday budget meeting. Except it wasn’t.

Commissioner Matt Krause introduced a resolution to support Greg Abbott’s “Property Tax Reform Plan.” What tax reform plan? The one he’s promising this campaign cycle. You know, the one he promises every election season, even though property taxes have risen 52% in Texas since Abbott initially took office in 2014. We’ll get into how his plan is complete horse shit in a minute, just like every plan before this.

The problem with this is that the resolution was written almost word-for-word the same as the “Texans for Greg Abbott” campaign literature. Local attorney Steven Lawrence caught it and said so at the podium, brochure in hand, “It’s hard to say it’s not political advertising when the governor’s campaign himself says it is.”

This is a county government responding to a promise made by a man running for re-election, printed on a campaign flyer. The Tarrant County Commissioners took that flyer, retyped it onto county letterhead, stamped the county seal on it, and voted to endorse it, 82 days before an election.

Krause leaned into it. “He’s our sitting governor,” Krause said from the dais. “He will be our sitting governor next year.” 30 years of holding Texas hostage has Republicans too comfortable for their own good.

Of course, polling on the Governor’s race over the last week has shown Gina Hinojosa consistently within the margin of error.

• Support Gina Hinojosa

Abbott winning re-election is not a sure thing.

Here is the segment at the Commissioners’ Court where this all happened today:

Public comment opened, and the people told Republicans, to their faces, that they know exactly what game is being played.

Not one person showed up to support their resolution.

Lawrence had the actual “Texans for Greg Abbott” campaign brochure in hand and walked the resolution’s language against it, paragraph by paragraph. He reminded the Court that a violation here is a Class A misdemeanor. He reminded them there’s a TEC opinion process for exactly this situation.

Then came Ambika, who didn’t bother being subtle about it either:

“You continue to use this platform for electioneering, in my opinion, and last I checked that was a criminal offense.”

And then she did something I genuinely didn’t expect. She pointed out that O’Hare and Ramirez “aren’t pulling very well within your own GOP base.” Krause is propping up his own colleagues’ election numbers with a county seal. It’s a rescue mission with taxpayer letterhead.

Last up was David Rodriguez, who did the thing I love most in a public commenter. He read the document and asked who, exactly, Tarrant County meant by “collaboratively with many other entities across the state.”

“Is it Mercy Culture, who profits off the school vouchers? Is it the True Texas Project that both Tim O’Hare and Matt Krause have sponsored tables for? Is it Rakana Solutions, that Alisa Simmons has tried to call attention to, but Manny Ramirez made a motion to block her from being able to expose these things? Is it the Public Interest Legal Foundation that created y’all’s maps? Is it First Liberty Institute, of which you are a lawyer for?”

Rodriguez answered his own question before Republicans could dodge it:

“So again, I think that this proclamation is a farce.”

Zero coincidences. A voucher profiteer, a hate group the SPLC has formally designated as such, an entity nobody on that dais wanted Alisa Simmons looking at too closely, the outfit that drew Krause’s own precinct lines, and the law firm that signs his paycheck.

And then the vote almost happened cleanly. Almost.

It should be noted that Alisa Simmons was present today but absent from this particular vote. I’m not sure if it’ll matter in the long run if she beats Tim O’Hare in November.

After the public comment closed and the motion was seconded, Roderick Miles Jr., representing Precinct 1, which includes Stop Six, Forest Hill, and Highland Hills, spoke.

What Miles said:

“What I’m really concerned with is how this will impact people that come from where I come from, my neighborhood, my community, where I grew up. And I don’t think that it will. I don’t have confidence that it will, because time and time again it has been demonstrated that the people that look like me and come from communities where I come from are not factored into decisions that directly impact them.”

Miles recognizes the Republicans’ patterns on the Court, maybe better than most. He went on:

“We’re in an election season and now we hear about this. Where was this five years ago, ten years ago? When will we be having a meaningful discussion about this and how it affects the people that come from where I come from?”

And then, the line that should be used in every county press release that ever uses the word “collaborative” again:

“My folks don’t have the luxury or the ability to drive down to Austin and meet with legislators. They’re not going to see them. They’re not going to spend any time with them. And you expect me to believe that I was considered when this was proposed. I don’t believe it.”

Krause basically shrugged. He told Miles he “looks forward to being proven wrong.” Which, sure, Matt. That’s real easy to say when you’re the one who gets to decide what “proven” looks like, and your colleague’s neighborhood is the control group.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say plainly, so I will. This resolution was never about whether tax relief is good policy. It’s about who gets to write the sentence “we want to work collaboratively” before anyone in the room has actually done the collaborating. Krause had Mercy Culture, True Texas Project, First Liberty, and the Public Interest Legal Foundation on speed dial before he ever picked up a pen. Miles’ constituents got a resolution already printed, already seconded, and a commissioner telling them, essentially, trust me, we’ll see.

Because Tarrant County Republicans don’t truly care about all Tarrant County residents; if they did, they wouldn’t spend all of their time cutting polling locations and after-school programs for minority children. And they would do something about the jail deaths.

Here’s why Abbott’s latest tax plan is complete horse shit.

This probably deserves its own article, but it’s still hard to believe that there are still Republicans in Texas falling for the Governor’s tax lies.

Abbott’s whole plan hinges on one thing. That oil and gas revenue stays flush forever. 🤣 It won’t, and he knows it won’t, because nothing in that industry ever has.

Here’s the condensed version, in five ugly pillars.

One. It’s a $17-20 billion hole every year, forever. School property taxes fund roughly half of Texas public education, and killing them means the state permanently backfills $17-20 billion a year. Abbott’s plan to pay for it is a shrug and a surplus. That surplus is mostly oil and gas severance tax money feeding the Rainy Day Fund, which means Abbott wants to fund your kid’s school with something that is, by definition, temporary. Oil booms. Oil busts. Property taxes don’t care what OPEC decided this quarter.

Two. He already tried this. It failed. Nothing’s different now, except the climate math got worse. In 2019 Republicans tried the sales-tax swap, and it collapsed because it meant funding your tax cut on the backs of people who spend most of their paycheck at the register. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association said Texas would’ve had to double the sales tax rate. That math hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the industry Abbott is betting the whole plan on is staring down decarbonization pressure, EV adoption, and a warming planet that’s making its own long-term price stability a joke.

Three. It’s a subsidy for homeowners, funded by everyone else. Renters and businesses keep paying. Homeowners get the free pass. Abbott’s simultaneously growing a voucher program to $7 billion by 2028 while claiming he can zero out the state’s biggest school funding source. Abbott hasn’t said how those two things are supposed to fit into the same budget.

Four. The appraisal cap is Prop 13, just hotter. Cap growth at 3% and you get California’s forty-year-old mistake with a Texas flag on it. Owners who can’t afford to sell, buyers who can’t afford to buy, and even the Conservative Tax Foundation calling it “not sound policy.”

Five. The spending cap is designed to break during the exact disasters climate change is making more common. Tying local budgets to inflation plus population, whichever is lower, sounds disciplined until your county needs to rebuild a water system after a hundred-year flood that now happens every single year. Fast-growing counties, the ones absorbing climate migrants and building the infrastructure to survive Texas summers that keep getting worse, get strangled hardest. And the two-thirds supermajority requirement means all but one of the last 20 local bond elections in Texas would have failed. That’s making sure nobody can vote to fix the grid, the water main, or the floodplain ever again.

Texas is betting its entire school funding model on an industry whose own volatility is accelerating because of the climate crisis it helped cause.

Zoom out for a second, because it’s easy to lose the forest for the resolution.

Tarrant County is the largest urban county in America that Republicans still hold. That’s the whole reason Krause felt safe reading a campaign brochure into the record today. It’s why O’Hare cuts polling locations before elections instead of after. It’s why redistricting came for Precinct 2 specifically, the seat with the numbers to flip. This county is the state fight. Dallas went blue. Harris went blue. Tarrant is the last big domino, and everyone in that courtroom knows exactly what happens to Texas if it falls.

If we flip Tarrant, the “last big red county” excuse dies with it, and every statewide Republican who’s been hiding behind Tarrant’s numbers loses their cover. Flip Tarrant, and you flip the argument. You flip the premise every national outlet uses when they write “Texas isn’t really in play.” You flip America’s map of what’s possible, because if the reddest big county in the reddest big state can go blue, nowhere is safe ground anymore for the politics we watched in that courtroom today.

So here’s where you put your money and your knocking shoes between now and November:

Alisa Simmons for County Judge. She’s the one who Tim O’Hare has to actually beat, not just out-fundraise, to keep running Tarrant County like his own fiefdom.

Nydia Cardenas for Precinct 4. She’s taking on Manny Ramirez, the second vote on today’s 3-1, the guy who moved to block Alisa Simmons from looking too closely at Rakana Solutions.

Jared Williams for Precinct 2. Simmons’ old seat, freshly redrawn to be harder for Democrats to hold, which tells you exactly how worried Republicans are about losing it. Williams spent his campaign promising to actually restore public comment and bring commissioners court to the precincts instead of making people drive downtown to get three minutes at a podium.

Three seats. One county. Eighty-two days. Krause, O’Hare, and Ramirez just showed you, on the record, in their own words, exactly who they’re building this county for. Now you know who’s on the ballot to build it for everyone else.

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We live in a fascist country, but perhaps you already knew that. Simultaneously, America is suffering from a literacy crisis and one hundred years of Red Scare propaganda. That’s why the fascists will tell you that Nazis were socialists and anti-fascists are the real fascists. Although any first-year college PoliSci class will teach you the definition of these words, the fascists have now labeled colleges “indoctrination centers.”

Some people may say, “We’re fighting against the rise of fascism.” But they’re wrong, because it’s already here. In Texas, they showed up years ago, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

You don’t have to look hard to see it. You can see it when someone tells the truth in a room built for silence.

EJ Carrion hosts the 817 Podcast (one of my personal favorites), where he talks Tarrant County politics from a progressive lens and does the thing fascists actually fear most. He shows up. He shows up to Commissioners Court. He shows up to Fort Worth City Council. He shows up to Fort Worth ISD meetings, and he tells people watching to show up too. In the eyes of the far-right, that’s his biggest crime.

Last week, during the Tarrant County Commissioners Court hearing regarding Republicans closing polling locations, he used his one minute of public comment to call out the court’s Republican majority for political extremism, and he punctuated it with a word Tim O’Hare apparently finds more dangerous than a cut to voting sites. “BULLSHIT!”

Here was that one minute:

O’Hare called for him to be removed as he was already walking out. Carrion called O’Hare “a small man” on his way out the door.

Fair assessment, as it turns out, because eight days later, at three in the morning, Fort Worth police pulled Carrion over and arrested him on a warrant tied to that Aug. 4 meeting.

Twelve hours in jail.

Last night, after a long night at the Fort Worth City Council, where activists pressured city officials into a moratorium on data centers, Carrion and other activists went out for a bite to eat. He was pulled over right before pulling onto his street for failing to use a blinker. That’s when he learned he had a warrant for his arrest.

Twelve hours later, he was free.

Carrion didn’t just talk about his own arrest when he got out. He talked about who he met inside. A man held for 45 days on a trespassing charge, unable to make a $100 bond. People younger than 21 sitting in a cell over amounts that wouldn’t cover a week of groceries. Carrion was out in 12 hours because he had people outside fighting for him. Most of the people he described sitting next to don’t have that.

It’s the same machine, in Texas, in Tarrant County. The system that jails a podcaster for saying “bullshit” to a judge is the same system that jails a broke 20-year-old for weeks over a hundred dollars. The countless jail deaths stacking up at the Tarrant County Jail. This is what living in a fascist system looks like.

EJ is free. Speech isn’t. Tarrant County isn’t. Texas isn’t. And America sure as hell isn’t.

The charge is still on the books. The warrant worked exactly as designed, to remind him, and everyone watching, what happens when you say the true thing out loud in the wrong courtroom.

The only option that’s ever actually worked is to vote all of these fascists out in November.

And to the online theory-bros who spend way too much time trying to convince people that you can’t vote your way out of fascism. Greece did it after the Greek Junta in 1974. Chile did it in 1988. It’s been done.

The theory-bros will tell you those countries had something Texas doesn’t. Maybe. But Portugal didn’t wait for permission either. Neither did Argentina. Neither did South Korea. What every one of those countries had was people who kept showing up after the ones before them got dragged out by the hands and feet.

That’s the whole trick, and it’s the same one EJ Carrion is running. Fascism needs you to believe the meeting is over, that the courtroom is theirs, that the only options left are silence or a cell. But it isn’t over. It’s a Tuesday in August, and there’s an election in November.

Show up to the meeting. Say the true thing. And when they hand you a ballot, use it like you mean it.

We live in a fascist country. We don’t have to stay in one.

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Note: Cheer for the first day of school. 🙌🏻

On Monday, Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign dropped a Spanish-language ad rolling out something called “Protecting the Texas Promise,” his first real economic agenda of the campaign.

It’s actually really funny that he’s calling it the “Texas Promise,” since he was born in North Dakota and grew up in California. Transplants like Paxton don’t really know a lot about Texas. But I digress.

Pillar one of his plan is a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses, including insurance premiums, for every individual. Plus another $25,000 per dependent. So a family of four could theoretically write off $100,000 in medical costs.

Pillar two is a $50,000 deduction for first-time homebuyers, and another $50,000 down payment deduction if you’re moving to a new primary residence. Buy a house, get $50K off your taxes. Buy another house later, get $50K more.

Pillar three is a $5,000 deduction for “healthy lifestyle” expenses. Gym memberships, nutrition plans, GLP-1 medications, kids’ sports. Ozempic, but make it a tax write-off.

Pillar four is to make Trump Accounts permanent and double the Child Tax Credit.

All of this is silly, because it’s built mostly around deductions, which means the biggest dollar benefit flows to households that already have high taxable income and already itemize. A family scraping by on out-of-pocket medical costs and priced out of homeownership is the exact demographic least likely to see real money.

It’s basically the same way the Texas Legislature does business: Fuck the little people.

Paxton’s framing is, “every Texan should be able to buy a home, raise a family, and live a healthy life without the bills burying them.” Sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear from a candidate who’s spent the last decade fighting to make sure Texans have more bills to bury them, not fewer, which, funny thing, is exactly what Paxton has spent the last decade doing.

Anyway, it’s not a fiscally conservative platform. It never is with these folks.

But the bigger question is, who is paying Paxton?

The Jaffe family.

MS NOW’s reporting: the Jaffe family runs Jetran, a Texas aviation company that’s been in the business of acquiring and converting aircraft for nearly four decades. In 2016, Jetran was in talks to buy Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. The one people called the Lolita Express, the one Epstein allegedly used to ferry teenage girls and trafficking victims to his properties. Jetran walked away from the deal over “engine issues,” according to emails in the DOJ’s files.

A 2020 anonymous tip to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center names Doug Jaffe III. According to the FBI’s own log of the call, the tipster says Jaffe III invited them to a villa in Mexico in the early 2000s, co-owned by Jaffe’s aunt, where they saw a girl dressed inappropriately who Jaffe III claimed was his niece, a claim the tipster later says was false. The same tip alleges Jaffe III brought the caller to a club in Acapulco where underage girls were reportedly brought onstage and groped.

Jaffe III denies all of it. Told MS NOW he had “absolutely nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein or the Epstein files,” never met the guy, never heard of the tip. His father called the whole thing “someone trying to stir up shit.”

The point is what happened next. This spring, after the Epstein files were public, after everybody in Texas and everywhere else had a chance to read what was in them, a member of the Jaffe family cut a $3,500 check to the Paxton Cruz Victory Fund in April. A month later, in May, another $3,000 showed up in a separate FEC filing, tied to an address associated with both Jaffe men. That’s $6,500, after the files dropped, going straight into Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign.

Asked whether the campaign would give the money back, Paxton’s team didn’t answer.

This is coming on the heels of the controversy Paxton has been embroiled in over giving a plea deal to admitted child molester Adam Hoffman.

But the Jaffe family isn’t even the most lucrative relationship Paxton’s got going.

Back in February, Hood County asked Paxton, in his official capacity as Attorney General, whether Texas counties actually have the authority to block data center construction temporarily. Paxton’s public comment on the whole data center fight amounts to calling it “complicated” in a May interview.

Meanwhile, according to NOTUS’s review of FEC filings, Paxton’s political operation, his campaign, his leadership PAC, his joint fundraising committees, and the pro-Paxton super PAC Lone Star Liberty have pulled in at least $448,000 from data center executives and corporate PACs since last fall.

Some of that money should probably worry Paxton’s lawyers more than his opponents. On June 30, SAGO Energy LP, which is owned by an energy company that supplies power to data centers, wrote a $100,000 check to Paxton Victory. Corporations aren’t allowed to donate directly to federal candidates.

Tyler Winklevoss, of Gemini and Winklevoss Capital, kicked in $13,500 the same day SAGO did. Charles “Bubba” Saulsbury, whose company builds out data center infrastructure and who’s a well-known MAGA donor in his own right, gave $100,000 in June. William Kent, of Kent Companies, a data center construction outfit, gave $50,000 to Lone Star Liberty in May. CRH and Valero PACs each gave $5,000. Add in Laurie Harrison of Rosewood, Albert Huddleston of Aethon, Todd Platt of Hillwood, and a half dozen more, and you’ve got a client list.

Here’s the thing about all that money. Paxton needs every dollar of it. His Senate campaign has raised over $9.2 million total, but after burning through most of it, he entered the summer with $1.8 million cash on hand. Talarico, for comparison, is sitting on $21.5 million.

So there’s your other funding stream. Plain old pay-to-play. A sitting Attorney General takes nearly half a million dollars from an industry, sits on the one decision that industry actually needs from him, and Texas voters, who are turning against data centers in poll after poll, get to watch him call the whole thing “complicated” while the checks keep clearing.

Ken Paxton wants you to believe he’s the guy handing out $150,000 in tax deductions to Texas families.

It would really be wealthier, tax-paying families, not your average middle-class Joe. But, in reality, he’s the guy who took $6,500 from a family with an actual FBI file connecting a member to allegations involving a minor, and never said a word about giving it back. He’s the guy who took $448,000 from data center executives while sitting on the one decision his own office was asked to make about their industry, for six straight months, while Texans across the state watched data centers get built next to their neighborhoods with zero local say in the matter.

$6,500 from the Jaffes. $448,000 from data center donors. $9.2 million raised total, $1.8 million left in the bank, against Talarico’s $21.5 million. A pending decision that’s been pending for 182 days and counting. A tax plan with no pay-fors, no offsets, and no explanation of where a nine-figure-plus statewide price tag actually comes from. That’s what’s sitting in the FEC filings and on the AG’s own website, in black and white, for anybody who wants to go look.

Paxton is asking you to trust a brand new agenda he rolled out this week, in an ad aimed at exactly the voters his internal polling probably tells him he’s losing, funded in part by money he won’t explain and decisions he won’t make.

He’s betting you won’t check the math. I just did it for you.

This leaves Ken Paxton with a few questions.

Will he return the Jaffe money?

When does Hood County get its ruling?

And how, exactly, do his campaign promises get paid for? Republicans used to have an answer for this. Democrats definitely would.

Until then, the math ain’t mathing.

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This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Laticia Ambroz?

Laticia Ambroz has lived in Texas for over 60 years. She’s from Quitman, out in Wood County, deep in the piney woods of East Texas. She and her spouse raised three kids. Now she’s got eight grandkids and a great-grandbaby on the way.

Growing up, her mother taught her a simple but powerful lesson. Always leave things better than you found them. That’s her whole campaign. And when Ambroz looks at the state of Texas government right now, she says she can’t in good conscience leave it to her grandchildren, or to yours, without doing something about it.

Here’s the part that matters. Ambroz is running in Senate District 1, a nineteen-county stretch of deep East Texas covering Bowie, Gregg, Harrison, Smith, Titus, Wood and more, currently held by Republican Bryan Hughes. The last Democrat to even show up on the ballot against him was Audrey Spanko, back in 2020. This isn’t a swing district. It’s a district Republicans have gotten used to not having to defend.

So why run somewhere the deck is stacked six ways from Sunday? Because somebody has to, and because Ambroz isn’t pretending otherwise. Her pitch is refreshingly unglamorous. Revitalize the East Texas economy, fight for a living wage, get rural healthcare within driving distance of the people who need it, fund public schools like they matter. It’s the kind of platform that used to be called common sense before that phrase got weaponized by the other side. Ambroz wants it back.

The district.

Is District 1 winnable in 2026? Almost certainly not, not with the current partisan lean and Hughes sitting comfortably unopposed the cycle before. But “unwinnable” and “not worth covering” aren’t the same thing, and a Democrat willing to put her name on the ballot in a district this red deserves the same fair hearing as anybody running in a toss-up.

Here’s what these nineteen East Texas counties are actually made of. Four counties do the heavy lifting. Smith County (Tyler) alone carries about a quarter of the entire district. Gregg County (Longview) adds another 124,239. Bowie County (Texarkana) brings 92,893. Harrison County (Marshall) chips in 68,839. Those four counties together are well over half the district. Everything else, Cass, Panola, Rusk, Upshur, Wood, Camp, Franklin, Delta, Red River, Marion, Morris, Titus, Fannin, Hopkins, Lamar, is small-town and rural East Texas, none of them cracking 70,000 people on their own.

If Democrats are looking for where the bodies actually are, it’s Tyler and Longview. That’s the floor of any real strategy here.

This district is old. 18.5% of the population is 65 or older, against 13.4% statewide. Working-age adults (18-64) are underrepresented at 57.7% versus 61.6% statewide. That shows up again in the household data: 35.1% of households here draw Social Security income, compared to 25.4% statewide. This is a retiree-heavy district, and retirees vote. Reliably.

Racially, it’s 62.9% Anglo, 37.1% non-Anglo. Black residents make up 17.0% of the population, actually higher than the state average of 14.1%. Hispanic residents are 16.7%, well below the state’s 39.7%. But that Hispanic population isn’t evenly distributed either. Titus County is the outlier of the entire district: 57.1% non-Anglo, 43.8% Hispanic, driven almost certainly by the poultry processing industry around Mount Pleasant.

Spanish-surname voter registration is only 6.8% of registered voters districtwide, against a state average of 24.7%, even though Hispanic residents are 16.7% of the population. That’s a registration and organizing problem. There’s a gap between who lives here and who’s on the rolls, and closing it, even partially, is base math.

Per capita income is $33,672, a full seven grand below the state’s $40,752. Only 22.8% of adults 25 and up hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, versus 33.8% statewide. This is a working-class, non-college district, and it is not a wealthy one. Poverty sits at 14.4%, slightly above the 13.8% state rate, and single-parent families make up 51.3% of families in poverty, with women heading the overwhelming majority of those households.

2024 general election: Trump 76.6%, Harris 22.5%. Cruz 74.7%, Allred 23.5%. Down the entire ballot, every statewide Democrat lands in that same 20-23% band, Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, Railroad Commission, all of it. This is a straight-ticket district. Nobody’s splitting tickets for a good Democrat down-ballot. Turnout was 63.5%, meaning roughly 405,000 people showed up, and roughly three out of four of them voted a straight Republican line regardless of the specific race.

This is not a competitive seat in 2026.

Forget flip math. Focus on three things. First, Tyler and Longview are where turnout operations get built, because that’s where the population is and where a Democratic floor already exists at the county level even if it’s thin. Second, the Spanish Surname VR gap in Titus County and beyond is real, uncontested organizing turf, registration work that doesn’t require converting a single Republican, just registering people who are already there. Third, message on the material conditions, income below the state average, education access below the state average, a manufacturing and healthcare workforce that depends on public investment staying intact. Culture war framing is a losing bet in a district like this. Kitchen-table economic populism, rural hospital access, wages, cost of living, is the only politics that has any shot of moving a number that currently sits at 23%.

Ambroz isn’t going to flip SD1. Nobody is, not this cycle. But if the goal is building infrastructure for the next decade instead of just showing up to lose gracefully every four years, this data tells you exactly where to plant the flag.

The incumbent.

Being a third-generation city girl myself, there’s one thing in the Texas Legislature that always gets under my skin. And that’s these country hillbilly lawyers who grew up deep in Klan Country, who run for office for the sole purpose of taking our state back to Jim Crow, while enriching all of their oil-loving, country club buddies back home. And if there ever were one, that would be Senator Bryan Hughes.

In 2021, when Republicans were ramming through SB1 and all of their voter-suppression laws, Hughes spearheaded a provision to keep Black churches from voting on Sunday (Souls to the Polls). After a ton of public pressure, that provision was stripped from SB1, but by golly, he sure did try it. It was Bryan Hughes who put it there, specifically him.

In the same session, Hughes fronted the ban on teaching critical race theory in Texas schools, along with an attempt to bar Texas corporations from adopting board diversity quotas.

Some Democrats described SB7’s provisions as “the new Jim Crow,” saying the bill amounted to voter suppression targeting Black voters specifically. Hughes’s response wasn’t to engage with that. He called it unfortunate that Texans were injecting “national political stuff” into what he framed as a straightforward policy discussion.

Hughes told CNN half a dozen times that the Texas Attorney General’s office had 400 open voter fraud cases, calling it documented fact beyond question. The actual number of pending voter fraud charges in Texas was 43, with only one stemming from the 2020 election in which more than 11 million Texans voted. He inflated the crisis by nearly tenfold on national television to justify a bill critics say targets Black and disabled voters.

And really, it’s only the tip of the iceberg with Hughes. He loves to write laws that will harm marginalized communities most.

In Laticia Ambroz’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Ambroz, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

Absolutely, this is basic to helping Texas families survive. A livable wage is essential to a healthy economy. If people, moms and dads, are not having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, they have more time to spend at home supporting their children-with homework, enjoying family meals, and instilling family values. Raising the minimum wage ensures that families and individuals can afford groceries, rely less on state benefits, and can keep a roof over their heads. Increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour should just be the starting point. People need to be able to afford housing, food, and medical care, which means a wage that keeps up with inflation, and we need to aggressively figure out how to slow inflationary costs.

Q: Should Texas end tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations?

This should be #1 on our list. Texas government is selling the People of Texas short. The State of Texas is so vast and has so many natural resources; in our own right, we are a wealthy state. We need industry to continue to be a healthy and wealthy state, but careful consideration has been thrown out the window. Why are we giving everything away? Why do we continue to line the pockets of the billionaires who are bleeding us dry? If you want to do business in Texas, Corporations must pay their fair share in taxes, be responsible stewards of our natural resources, and provide good-paying jobs and benefits for the people of Texas. If corporations cannot do this, then Texas does not need them. The Lone Star State should attract corporations that want to be partners with us.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

This is the worst! 95% of our school children are in public schools. Our schools are already underfunded; the student-to-teacher ratio needs to be addressed, and teacher salaries need to be adjusted for the professionals that they are. This is our future, the future of Texas, and every child in Texas deserves the best education that we can provide. Texas is sadly lacking in education, and private and public schools are not the answer. Do not let Austin politicians run our public schools; they are not educators, and the school system should not be a for-profit entity, which is what they will turn it into.

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

Yes, Children learn better with a full belly. School breakfast and lunch should be provided. This is a very small price to pay for quality schools.

Q: Do you support closing or downsizing state prisons and redirecting that funding to community-based alternatives like mental health care, housing, and youth programs?

Yes, so many of the people incarcerated need mental health assistance, and incarceration is not the answer. Getting the help needed beforehand and assisting in therapy and training would be a good start. Addressing affordable housing is a must across the board, and keeping our youth involved, educated, and supported is essential. People are lonely and looking for a place to belong, we need to provide that place, we need to support programs that provide that place.

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

Being bold, thinking outside the box, considering all available options; actions speak louder than words.

Here’s what you’re actually looking at in SD1.

A retiree-heavy, working-class district that Trump carried by 54 points, represented by a man who spent every session trying to keep Black churches from voting on Sunday, banning honest history in classrooms, and lying to CNN about voter fraud by a factor of ten. Bryan Hughes is the honest face of what the state party has become when nobody’s forced to answer for it.

Laticia Ambroz is not going to beat him in 2026. Pretending otherwise insults both her and you. But somebody has to be on that ballot saying a $15 minimum wage isn’t a radical idea, that gutting corporate tax abatements while East Texas families choose between groceries and gas is a policy failure and not an act of God, that a fully-funded public school beats a voucher scheme every single time. Somebody has to be the name Democrats in Bowie, Smith, and Gregg County see when they open their ballot, so the muscle doesn’t atrophy completely between now and the year this district finally becomes contestable.

That’s infrastructure. It’s registration drives in Titus County where the Spanish surname numbers don’t match the population. It’s a floor in Tyler and Longview that doesn’t currently exist. It’s making sure the next Ambroz, or the one after her, isn’t starting from zero.

Hughes is betting nobody’s watching this district closely enough to notice what he’s spent a decade building. Ambroz is betting he’s wrong.

You can find out more about Laticia Ambroz from her website, Facebook, or Instagram.

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T

his series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Amy Martinez Salas?

Amy Martinez Salas learned about working families in Arlington by watching her mother work multiple jobs to keep the lights on after her mother immigrated from Michoacán and found out the hard way that this country doesn’t hand single mothers much of a safety net.

Martinez Salas’ older brother left school to help pay the bills. Her middle brother fought addiction. Those are the kinds of things that either break a family or teach it something. In Martinez Salas’s case, it taught her that people don’t need to be lectured about their struggles. They need someone who’s lived them.

Somewhere along the way, Martinez Salas figured out something a lot of Texas Republicans have never had to learn. Juggling bills, managing a family’s schedule, showing up to work exhausted and doing it again the next day, is management under pressure. Martinez Salas will tell you working women have been running things their whole lives.

She’s spent her career fighting for the people Austin likes to forget exist. Every Texan pays for that neglect eventually. They just don’t always know it.

Martinez Salas grew up watching her own mother hold a family together with grit and not much else, and that’s where she gets her theory of leadership. Women organize their way through impossible situations.

Martinez Salas’ pitch to voters is clean water, healthcare people can afford, public schools that aren’t gutted every session, and small towns that get to be more than an afterthought between Austin and Dallas.

She’s running because she thinks Texans deserve leadership that tells the truth even when it’s inconvenient, and because she’s tired of watching families get by instead of getting ahead.

The district.

This is the district I live in, and it’s pissed me off 🤬 since the day Republicans drew it, because it mixes a diverse/urban chunk of Tarrant County, specifically Mansfield and Arlington, with Waco and the sundown towns in Comanche County.

SD22 is built out of twelve counties, but don’t let that number fool you into thinking it’s balanced. Tarrant County only makes up 17% of the district geographically, but it’s carrying 359,569 of the district’s 960,493 residents, more than a third of the whole map, all crammed into the Mansfield and Arlington slice. The other eleven counties are Bosque, Comanche, Eastland, Ellis (partial), Erath, Falls, Hamilton, Hill, Hood, McLennan (that’s Waco), and Somervell. Every single one of those, outside Tarrant and McLennan, is 67% to 83% Anglo. This map exists to bury a diversifying urban core under a pile of rural counties that haven’t elected a Democrat since dial-up internet.

Districtwide, it’s 50.6% Anglo, 49.4% non-Anglo. Hispanic residents make up 25.3%, Black residents 17.5%, Asian residents 4.9%. But that districtwide number is doing a lot of work to hide how segregated this map actually is by design. Tarrant’s slice is 68% non-Anglo. McLennan is 46.4% non-Anglo. The eight rural counties are, on average, pushing 75-80% Anglo. Republicans drew this map to dilute a community.

Economically, the district trails the state on almost every marker that matters. Per capita income is $37,587 against a state figure of $40,752. Bachelor’s degree attainment is 30.3%, below the state’s 33.8%. Housing values average $331,288, about $35,000 under the state average. This isn’t a wealthy district propping up a red incumbent out of self-interest. It’s a working-class district that keeps getting talked into voting against itself, one shuttered rural hospital at a time.

Turnout in 2024: 64.1%, actually a hair above the state’s 61.3%. But Spanish surname voter registration sits at just 13.6% of the rolls, compared to 24.7% statewide. In a district where a quarter of the population is Hispanic, that gap is a target list.

In 2024, Trump beat Harris in this district 63.3% to 35.4%, a 27.9-point spread. Statewide, Trump only won by 13.7. Cruz beat Allred here 60.4% to 37.4%, a 23-point margin, compared to an 8.5-point statewide Cruz margin. This district ran about 14 to 15 points redder than Texas as a whole, on both the top of the ticket and the next one down.

Caveat. The Republican incumbent wasn’t on the ticket in 2024 (4-year terms), and the overlapping Democratic Congressional candidate lived out of district and was completely invisible.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the actual campaign lives or dies. Buried in the downballot numbers, the SD22 slice of House District 96, the Mansfield chunk of Tarrant, went for the Democrat 50.7% to 49.3%, even though that same Democrat lost the full HD96 race 34.3% to 65.7% districtwide. The SD22 portion of HD94 gave the Democrat 48.6%, a near dead heat, in a district Republicans hold comfortably overall.

(The last few SD22 candidates have strictly campaigned rural and ignored my advice to hit Tarrant County hard. Hopefully, Martinez Salas won’t.)

The Tarrant chunk of SD22 is actively blue in parts and competitive in the rest. The rural counties and even McLennan are what’s dragging the district average down to a 28-point Trump win. Strip Tarrant out and this map is deep, deep red. Strip the rural counties out and Tarrant alone could plausibly flip a legislative seat.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you a wave washes this seat blue on its own, because the math doesn’t support it. Erasing a 28-point presidential deficit or a 23-point Senate deficit in one cycle, even a good one, is not how swings work. Statewide waves move races 5 to 10 points. This district needs closer to 25.

So here’s what flipping SD22 actually requires, in order:

First, Tarrant has to turn out like its hair is on fire. The Mansfield and Arlington precincts are already performing better than the district average. That gap has to widen, not just hold.

Second, somebody has to get the missing Hispanic registrations. A 13.6% Spanish surname share of the rolls against a 25.3% Hispanic share of the population is an opportunity sitting on the table in McLennan, Falls, and Tarrant alike. Every unregistered Hispanic voter in Waco and Arlington is worth more to this race than another mailer to a Comanche County Republican who was never voting blue anyway.

Third, McLennan County needs real investment, not just Tarrant. Waco is nearly a 50-50 county on paper (53.6% Anglo, 46.4% non-Anglo) and it’s currently an afterthought in most statewide strategy.

Fourth, building infrastructure, registering voters, and running up Tarrant’s margins this cycle sets up a real shot in 2028 or beyond, especially as Mansfield and Arlington keep diversifying. Telling you this is an easy pickup because “it’s a wave year” would be lying to you.

The Republican.

Former Mansfield Mayor, now former HD96 Representative David Cook is running for this seat, since the previous SD22 incumbent Brian Birdwell took a job in Trump’s bootlicking department in DC.

He’s an anti-abortion hardliner. He voted to pass a bill banning all abortions after 6 weeks, with citizen enforcement. He sponsored a bill restricting public funding for logistical support for someone obtaining an abortion, and sponsored another banning medication abortions after 7 weeks while blocking the mailing of abortion medication. When Roe fell, he called it a “huge step forward to ensuring every unborn child is protected,” and he’s on record declaring himself “100% pro-life,” saying he has no doubt life begins at conception. He was endorsed by Texas Alliance for Life and the anti-abortion Life PAC.

He voted for school vouchers, the thing gutting rural school districts across this entire map. He voted yes on Senate Bill 2, which established the education savings account voucher program, over the objections of the Association of Texas Professional Educators. This is the same $10 billion pipeline of public money into private tuition that’s going to accelerate the shuttered-school problem we already flagged in Bosque, Hamilton, and Comanche counties. He helped build the machine that’s going to hollow out his own district’s small towns further.

He’s a Christian nationalist. He’s a member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and previously served as its Texas state chair, and was named a 2023 GOPAC “Emerging Leader”. NACL is the organization pushing “biblical” legislation nationwide, and GOPAC is the national Republican machine that grooms exactly this kind of candidate for higher office.

In Amy Martinez Salas’ own words.

Below are some questions I asked Martinez Salas, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Should Texas end tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations?

Texas should reform corporate tax abatements to ensure multi-billion-dollar corporations pay their fair share rather than shifting the state’s tax burden onto local homeowners. Any tax incentives provided must require strict accountability, transparent job creation guarantees, and direct investments back into local public infrastructure.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

Yes. I strongly oppose school vouchers and any efforts to siphon taxpayer dollars away from non-selective public schools into private institutions.

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

Yes. Guaranteeing free breakfast and lunch to every K–12 student ensures that no child sits through the school day hungry, directly improving learning outcomes and classroom focus.

Q: Should Texas end tax breaks and regulatory loopholes for oil and gas companies, including exemptions from emissions reporting and waste disposal standards?

Yes. All industries operating in Texas should be held to strict regulatory standards, complete emissions reporting, and responsible waste disposal to protect our air, water, and public health. Closing corporate tax loopholes will ensure energy companies contribute their fair share toward maintaining state infrastructure and environmental safety.

Q: Do you support closing or downsizing state prisons and redirecting that funding to community-based alternatives like mental health care, housing, and youth programs?

Yes. Texas should reduce reliance on mass incarceration and redirect state resources toward diversion programs, addiction treatment, and accessible mental healthcare. Investing in community-based support and youth programs tackles the root causes of crime while making our neighborhoods safer and more resilient.

Q: Should local police be barred from enforcing federal immigration law?

Local law enforcement should focus strictly on protecting local public safety and building community trust, rather than being forced to act as federal immigration agents. Entangling municipal police with federal immigration enforcement discourages victims and witnesses from reporting crimes, making entire neighborhoods less safe.

Bonus Question: How do you plan to engage and energize young and working-class voters?

I plan to engage young and working-class voters by leading with relatable, lived experience and focusing on everyday economic issues like a $15 minimum wage, housing affordability, and expanding healthcare access. By meeting people directly in our communities on campuses, at job sites, and through digital platforms, I will build a campaign rooted in authentic, double-strength advocacy that proves local state politics directly impacts their daily lives.

A district built to be ignored and a Republican who’s spent his career making sure it stays that way.

David Cook didn’t invent the neglect baked into SD22. He just voted for every policy that keeps it running, vouchers that starve the small towns, abortion bans that treat women like they can’t be trusted with their own decisions, and a Christian nationalist pedigree that tells you exactly whose Texas he’s building.

Amy Martinez Salas isn’t promising to erase a 28-point deficit with a good speech. Her answers are corporate tax accountability instead of subsidy giveaways. Free school meals instead of hungry kids sitting through algebra. Police doing police work instead of moonlighting as ICE. A $15 minimum wage instead of another campaign that talks about working families without ever naming a number.

Whether this district flips in 2026 comes down to the math. Tarrant has to turn out harder than it ever has. Somebody has to get those missing Hispanic registrations in Waco and Arlington. McLennan County needs to stop being an afterthought.

I’ve watched this seat get contested by candidates who ran a rural strategy in a district that was never going to reward it. If Martinez Salas runs the campaign her own answers suggest, one grounded in Tarrant, honest about the odds, and specific about what people actually get out of voting for her, this stops being a symbolic run and starts being a building block.

You can learn more about Amy Martinez Salas on her website, Facebook, and Instagram.

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We haven’t done a Texas Tidbit episode in a while, but there’s a bunch of little things going on here and there that are worth talking about.

Vikki Goodwin Beating Dan Patrick In Latest A&M Poll

In a poll released this morning from the Texas Pulse/Texas A&M Bush School, they are not only showing Talarico up +4 points over Paxton, but also showing Goodwin up +2 points over Patrick. On top of that, this poll is also showing both the Governor’s race and the Attorney General’s race within the margin of error.

It’s worth noting that this poll uses the same methodology as the NYT/Siena poll, so this is a solid poll with real numbers.

This is also the third consecutive poll showing Talarico narrowly ahead of Paxton.

It was only last week that we were talking about how we need to see some new polling on the Lt. Governor’s race, and here it is.

There is uniform movement toward Democrats across every single statewide race, Senate, Governor, AG, Lt. Governor, and generic congressional ballot, and they are all shifting in the same direction.

Why Is Texas Giving Elon Musk So Much Money?

There’s something fishy going on with the broadband situation in Texas, and Republicans are giving handouts to billionaires (more than usual).

On July 21, Dan Patrick and Dustin Burrows issued a joint statement, publicly requesting a State Auditor performance audit of the Broadband Development Office’s grant program, citing concerns from a June 24 Senate Business and Commerce hearing.

BUT, here’s the thing. On August 1, Don Huffines was sworn in as Comptroller.

Then, on August 4, Huffines basically gutted the entire Comptroller’s office. From Huffines:

In Huffines’ announcement, he stated that the Broadband Office is “being completely restructured; new leadership will be announced at a later date.”

As for the audit?

Why did Republican leadership want an audit? Because during that June 24 hearing, Senators alleged the Broadband Development Office was tilting its grant rules toward low-earth-orbit satellite providers, with testimony indicating some of those rule changes came at the suggestion of Governor Abbott’s office.

Starlink is the only large-scale LEO (low-earth-orbit) provider in Texas right now. However, Amazon’s LEO service has also applied for grants, and SpaceX received $108.8 million in 2025 grants to serve 64,000 Texas locations.

Math time. That’s $1,700 per location.

So, here is the problem. For the exact same grants, under the exact same program, here is what other states paid Starlink per location:

• Virginia: $584 per location

• Minnesota: $751 per location

Why is Texas giving more than three times the money per location to Elon Musk than Virginia gave him, and more than twice the amount Minnesota gave him?

Of course, we all know how this works. Elon Musk helps Abbott hold on to power. Abbott gives a greedy trillionaire our taxpaying dollars. Abbott has done this so many times, with so many of his donors, screwing Texas taxpayers in so many ways, we should expect it from him.

Trump Tells Abbott He’s Screwing It Up

In the same poll that came out this morning, which showed Goodwin ahead of Patrick, 65% of Texas voters said they want data centers regulated. Well, Abbott has paused data centers (until after the election), and Trump is pissed about it.

Abbott announced a statewide pause on Monday, requiring state regulators to audit any proposed data center before it can connect to the grid, checking things like how much power and water the thing will use, what kind of cooling it needs, and who actually owns it.

Trump said today, “I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers. I think it’s a mistake.” He went on to say it “could be bigger than oil.”

Here’s the thing, though, back in November, Abbott called Texas the “epicenter of AI development” when he unveiled Google’s $40 billion data center investment in the state. Nothing changed about the water usage or the power grid between November and now. What changed is all of the public polling that’s further tilting toward Democrats. You can only imagine what the Republicans’ internal polling says.

Hinojosa called him out on it, “Abbott’s call for a ‘pause’ could be for one day, and no one buys it,” her campaign said in a statement this week. “He’s taken millions from data center CEOs while giving Texans lip service to non-existent restrictions.”

So now Abbott is stuck between the guy who runs his party and the voters who are about to decide whether he keeps his job. Watch what he does when the “audit” quietly wraps up in a month with nothing found.

Ten Commandments Are Now Just... In My Kid’s Gym

I took my middle-schooler to pick up their class schedule this week, and there it was, hanging in the gym. The Ten Commandments, King James Version, courtesy of Senate Bill 10.

Here’s how we got here. SB 10 passed the Legislature in 2025, and Abbott signed it that June, requiring every Texas public school classroom to display a donated poster of the Ten Commandments, at least 16 by 20 inches. Sixteen families across 11 school districts sued, arguing it violates the separation of church and state and pressures kids to embrace religious values they and their families may not share. A federal judge agreed and blocked it in the named districts back in August 2025.

Then, this April, the full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that injunction in Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD, ruling the law doesn’t violate the First Amendment. The majority leaned on the Supreme Court’s 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton decision to argue that Stone v. Graham, the 1980 case that struck down an identical Kentucky law, doesn’t apply anymore. Six judges dissented, writing that only the Supreme Court gets to overturn its own precedent, and that the law violates “the most basic First Amendment principles.”

The ACLU said it plans to take this to the Supreme Court, and just last week, a new lawsuit landed against 11 more Texas districts, this time arguing under state law instead of the First Amendment. Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions all number and word the Ten Commandments differently. SB 10 picked one version. Which means the state decided to put its own religion in the classroom, and exclude everyone else’s.

So if you’re a Texas parent, check your kid’s classroom wall.

That’s the tidbits.

Republicans in this state are losing ground in the polls, funneling your tax dollars to their donors, and putting their religion on your kid’s classroom wall, all while telling you everything is fine. It isn’t. And for the first time in a long time, the numbers say Texans are starting to notice.

Stay tuned. There’s always more.

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Last night I attended James Talarico’s New American Dream kickoff tour in Arlington, where he unveiled his economic plans. I livestreamed the entire thing on TikTok. Here is the playback:

There were somewhere around 2,000 people in attendance. I’m not sure even this photo does justice to how packed the arena was:

But I wanted to talk about Talarico’s economic plans, because this is the part that matters way more than the crowd size. It’s about the policies that are actually going to make a difference in people’s lives.

Economic and tax policies.

Talarico started with raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay. Honestly, that’s the floor. Any and every Democrat should already be supporting those things if they put a (D) next to their name.

He wants to repeal “the big ugly bill,” the GOP tax package that handed the top 1% a windfall while the rest of us watched our grocery bills climb. Fine. Good. Take it back. But Talarico didn’t stop at repeal. He wants to take that trillion dollars and turn it into a cost of living tax cut for the middle class.

He also drew a line between small local businesses and multinational corporations, and said the tax code should treat them differently. Radical concept, I know.

Then he called for rebuilding labor unions. In Texas, where “right to work” has been gospel since before most of us were born. That’s a fight he’s choosing on purpose.

On debt, he split it into two problems and addressed both. Medical debt first. Cancel it, and rein in hospitals and insurers who let people go bankrupt for the crime of getting sick. Then credit cards. Cap the interest rates and go after the companies charging working people 25%, 30% to survive between paychecks.

And then the national debt itself. Talarico said close the billionaire tax loopholes, go after the tax cheats, and end the forever wars that have been bleeding this country dry for two decades. He explicitly rejected the idea that regular people should pay down a debt they didn’t run up.

None of this is radical.

Families, education, and housing.

Talarico leaned hard into the LBJ comparison. LBJ was a Texas schoolteacher before he was a senator. So is Talarico. LBJ used the Great Society to build Head Start and Title I, the biggest federal investment in American kids this country has ever seen. Talarico wants that same scale of ambition applied to public schools right now. It’s a big swing. It’s also the correct swing, because our public schools have been getting starved on purpose for the last few generations and everybody in this state knows it.

He called for universal child care and paid family leave, which should not still be a controversial position in the year 2026. He wants the Child Tax Credit expanded and made permanent.

On housing, he wants to cut the red tape blocking new construction. Texas loves to brag about how much we build, but we are still short on the kind of housing regular families can actually afford (starter homes cost around $500,000 these days, I hear). He also wants down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers.

And then Medicare and Social Security. He wants to protect Medicare from cuts and kill what he’s calling a tax on Medicare, and he wants the wealthiest Texans actually paying into Social Security as the rest of us do. Because right now they don’t, not past a certain income cap ($184,500).

Energy.

Long-time Lone Star Left readers know exactly how I feel about the oil and gas industry. And out of all of the policies Talarico laid out last night, this is the only one I felt like he and I differed on. And perhaps some of you, dear readers, will be more aligned with Talarico on this, and maybe some of you will be more aligned with me. (It probably depends on your career path.)

Talarico bragged about Texas being number one in oil and gas, which is true. He also bragged about Texas being number one in wind and solar, which is also true. Texas is the energy capital of America. Full stop.

He wants the Legislature to stop attacking the renewable sector. Republicans have spent years trying to punish wind and solar with fees, mandates, and grid rules that exist for no reason other than spite, even as renewables keep the lights on and keep electricity cheaper.

His actual policy ask is investment in renewable technology, done in partnership with the oil and gas industry, not in opposition to it. Not either-or. Both. He’s framing it as continuity, the same state that led the 20th century on energy leading the 21st, just with a wider toolbox.

For those of you who are more aligned with me, and want to stick solar panels on every rooftop, and replace every gas plant with a giant battery, it’s a compromise. And Talarico is making this compromise because fossil fuels still employ over 400,000 people in Texas. But one of these days, after another flood, another drought, or when the water runs out, we’ll have to stop compromising. Until then, we keep trying to push the Democrats left, because we know every single Republican has a fossil fuel executive’s **** in their mouth.

Technology and AI.

Talarico’s basic argument is that AI is shaping up to be the next arena where a handful of billionaires extract enormous wealth from the rest of us, the same playbook as the last fifty years, just running on new hardware.

Talarico is calling for an “AI dividend,” the idea that every American should get some kind of ownership stake or royalty check from AI companies, since those companies are training their models on collective human data and intellectual property that we all generated. It’s a provocative idea. In fact, I think Sam Altman or some other AI billionaire originally thought it up as a form of Universal Basic Income.

It’s also not fleshed out yet, nothing you could actually legislate tomorrow. But as a starting principle, “if they’re profiting off us, we get a cut,” is exactly the kind of thing that should be the floor of any Democratic AI policy. Especially if we’re looking at a future where the robots take all of our jobs.

He rounded it out with a call for entrepreneurship grants, public investment for people with good ideas who don’t have rich uncles or venture capital connections, pointing to Tesla and the internet as proof that public money seeding private innovation isn’t some radical new concept.

Is this a fully baked tech policy? No. But it’s a sketch pointed in the right direction, and I’d rather see a candidate name the problem honestly and admit the policy needs work than pretend he’s got it all figured out.

The argument underneath the argument.

Here’s the thing about all of those policies. Talarico built a spine underneath them, and it’s worth talking about separately, because it’s the part that’ll actually determine whether any of this sticks with voters who don’t normally read policy breakdowns.

His central diagnosis is that the affordability crisis is a corruption crisis wearing an affordability crisis’s clothes, and he backed it up with actual history. He went all the way back to 1971 and the Powell Memo, the corporate lawyer’s blueprint for how business interests could capture the media, stack the courts, and buy politicians in both parties.

From there he went after trickle-down economics directly. He called it theft. Fifty years of it. Tax breaks, bailouts, bribes, dressed up as economic theory when it was really just a redistribution scheme running in the wrong direction.

He also made a point of saying this isn’t capitalism; it’s crony capitalism, and invoked Adam Smith, joking that the man is rolling over in his grave. The argument underneath the joke is serious. Corporate markets in America reward wealth. He paraphrased Dr. King to make the same point: socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

And then the framing that ties the whole speech together. Talarico kept insisting this isn’t left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. (Which is really a leftist argument, 🤫.) Red, blue, independent, all of us getting worked over by the same people, for the same reasons.

Is it going to work? My Magic8Ball says it will, but this is only the first election cycle I’ve had this toy. But I will say this for Talarico. He showed up telling the truth about what’s broken and who broke it. That was enough to impress me on Tuesday night in Arlington.

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There was an awful lot that happened today at Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court. Somewhere in the middle of the day, I had to stop and take a kid school shopping. And big election results are happening in other parts of the country tonight (not Texas). Y’all probably already know I’m rooting for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Cori Bush in Missouri.

At the end of the seven-hour Commissioners’ Court meeting, Judge O’Hare decided that he “wasn’t comfortable with how many polling locations were being cut,” and tabled the motion to reduce polling locations. That doesn’t mean the fight is over, but it does mean it’s over for this month. Republicans may try to bring it back up again and vote on it again next month, which will be their last opportunity before the cutoff date to make changes before the elections. So, I wouldn’t call us in the clear yet.

And it wasn’t an easy day.

One of the most shocking moments was when O’Hare ordered the arrest of 73-year-old former State House Representative Lon Burnam for picking up the mic to display an ADA requirement that was previously denied to a former speaker.

Democratic candidates fighting for our votes in Tarrant County also showed up.

• Candidate for Lt. Governor Vikki Goodwin

• Candidate for Attorney General Nathan Johnson

• Candidate for TX06 Danny Minton

• Candidate for TX24 Kevin Burge

• Candidate for HD96 Ebony Turner

• Candidate for Tarrant County District Attorney Tiffany Burks

• Candidate for Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court District 4 Nydia Cardenas

(You have to turn the volume way up for this video ⬆️. Sorry I didn’t fix that.)

The Democrats in Tarrant County and running statewide are ready, actually, to fight back for the people. Everyone is sick and tired of the far-right’s authoritarian agenda.

It’s important that we all know and understand what “authoritarianism” is 😈, and I’ll get to why in a minute. But, by definition, authoritarian governments concentrate power in the hands of the elite (oligarchs) and are not responsible to the people. When they take away the means and ability for millions of people to vote, they are not responsible to the people. By the very definition, that is authoritarianism. Stick a pin in that.

Commissioner Simmons also deserves her flowers, as she does at other Commissioners’ hearings. She was the sole Commissioner who brought light to the fact that there were four more jail deaths in Tarrant County jails, again last month. That’s four more families whose loved ones aren’t going to come home.

In fact, the general opening is the only time this subject is even allowed to be talked about. And Bill Waybourn? Why would he be there to answer for this shocking new wave of deaths? Does the Republican majority even care?

Judge O’Hare had a hard time with his emotions today.

Besides having Lon Burnam arrested, he tried to get EJ Carrion with the 817 Podcast thrown out after he was already leaving.

Then, when a speaker compared the Court to Russia, O’Hare went straight Putin and had the entire court cleared.

But through all of that chaos, the most absurd thing that happened today was when Commissioner Matt Krause channeled the ghost of Joe McCarthy and laid out a resolution about fighting the “socialist, communist, authoritarian, fascist.”

Yes, he said that sentence. And those words. In that order.

Which is funny, because Matt Krause is the VERY PERSON who created the long list of library books, which included civil rights books, and investigated libraries for these books, then tried to have them removed from school under the guise of “critical race theory.”

One might call such actions “fascist.” Merriam-Webster sure would.

Republicans are just very silly, at this point.

Like Greg Abbott dropped his initiative to keep Texas affordable today.

I haven’t had an electric bill under $300 since 2021. Beef has been over the cost of minimum wage for almost six months. Texas has been in a housing crisis since COVID. The GOP doesn’t live on planet Earth. But let them scare you about “socialist, communist, authoritarian, fascist,” while your kid’s teacher is driving for Uber in the evenings. You’re keeping your air conditioning at 78° during the day, so the grid doesn’t fail. And they’re cutting polling locations to keep people from voting them out.

Come hell or high water, this year, we’re going to vote them out anyway.

Please support Alisa Simmons if you aren’t already. Flipping Tarrant County is one of the biggest tasks this year. Her website.

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• 91 days until the November election!

• Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

Republicans across Texas are scared, and in no place are they scared more than in Tarrant County. Tarrant County commissioners meet tomorrow, August 4, at 10 am to vote on this year’s polling site list. The Republicans plan on cutting Election Day sites from 316 down to 176. That’s a 45% cut. Early voting sites go from 50 to 42.

Judge Tim O’Hare admitted, last year, to racist gerrymandering, to keep Republicans in charge. This latest move by the majority-Republican court in Tarrant County, is more of the same abuse they’ve inflicted on the community since taking office.

This is happening in a county with more than 1.3 million registered voters, on a ballot with more than 70 partisan races plus nonpartisan Tarrant Appraisal District and Keller ISD seats, in a midterm year where Democrats are running their broadest slate in decades. Fort Worth Report has the full list, and it's worth reading in full, because the list of what's getting cut tells you everything about who this is aimed at (spoiler: it’s Black and brown voters).

What’s actually getting cut.

Look at the names on the list of sites going away this year. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Tarrant County College South Campus. The Maverick Activities Center at UT Arlington. Southside Community Center. Forest Hill Civic and Convention Center. Everman Civic Center.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and TCC South were on the chopping block back in September 2024 too, when O’Hare tried to sneak a vote through while Commissioners Simmons and Brooks were in Washington for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference. Community members packed that hearing for four hours and won. UTA, TCC and the Seminary stayed on the map.

They’re back on the cut list. And this time the county’s got a new excuse. A state requirement that voting equipment be stored in a locked room, which the Maverick Activities Center apparently can’t meet. A technical requirement that just happens to knock out a polling site inside one of the most diverse student populations in North Texas, two years after community testimony saved it the first time.

It’s the same pattern, with these people, over and over again.

Last August, Republican commissioners voted to cut more than 100 Election Day sites for the November 2025 constitutional amendment election. They said it was about cost, because odd-year turnout is low. Tarrant still turned out over 223,000 ballots, one of its largest odd-year turnouts in over a decade.

Now it’s a midterm year, with a governor’s race, a U.S. Senate race, and the county’s own Judge and two Commissioners’ seats on the ballot, and the excuse has shifted from “turnout will be low” to “we need locked rooms.” The justification changes. The list of what disappears looks the same. Sites clustered in Black and brown neighborhoods, sites near colleges, sites in the parts of the county that just delivered Taylor Rehmet a 13-point win in a district Republicans held for 30 years.

Here’s the thing about Tim O’Hare. He does not have a polling-site problem. He has a pattern, and the pattern is as old as America, herself.

Before Tarrant, O’Hare was mayor of Farmers Branch, where he spent his term trying to run Latino residents out of town. It cost that city millions in legal fees when the courts told him he couldn’t do that. He took that same energy to Southlake, where he led the charge against Critical Race Theory in a fight that made national news. As soon as he became judge, he led the push to defund Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, a program that serves Black and Hispanic girls. He’s taken money from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, an organization with documented ties to Nazis, and he has never denounced it.

Then there’s Alisa Simmons. In April of 2025, in open court, O’Hare told the only Black woman on the Commissioners Court to “sit down and be quiet.” Then he told her she lacked “a semblance of class.” A few months later, his Republican majority redrew her precinct to erase the seat entirely. She’s now the one running to take his job in November, which should tell you how well that plan is working out for him.

So no, this isn’t a story about locked rooms. It’s the same guy, running the same play he’s run since Farmers Branch. Find the non-white communities that threaten his hold on power, and make it harder for them to show up. Girls Inc. lost its funding. Simmons was drawn out of her seat. Now it’s TCC South and the Maverick Activities Center’s turn.

Redistricting one year, budget cuts the next, locked-room requirements this year. It’s an unmistakable pattern.

Why are Republicans in Tarrant County panicing?

This is the year, Tarant County Democrats are finally going to take the local government back. Republicans knew that, so they racially gerrymandered the Commissioner’s Court. But internal polling is looking so bad for Republicans that they have to pull out all of the stops.

• Alisa Simmons is running to unseat O’Hare himself.

• Nydia Cárdenas is running against Manny Ramirez in Precinct 4.

• Jared Williams is running against Tony Tinderholt for Simmons’ old Precinct 2 seat, the one Republicans redrew specifically to make it harder for a Democrat to hold.

• HD94 and HD96 are flip targets.

• SD09, the seat Rehmet just won in a special election landslide, is on the ballot for a full term.

Republicans aren’t favored to win any one of those seats and they are freaking out. They know, so goes Tarrant County, so goes Texas. A party that was confident wouldn’t have needed a mid-decade redraw. And it sure as hell wouldn’t be spending the summer before a midterm cutting 140 polling sites instead of making a case for reelection.

This is the behavior of a party that's already counted the votes and doesn't like what it found.

What happens tomorrow?

Commissioners vote at 10 am Tuesday at the Tarrant County Administration Building in Fort Worth. The agenda is here. In 2024, it took 160 people testifying for four hours to save these same sites once. It worked. Two Republicans crossed the aisle that day because the room made it too expensive politically not to. If you haven’t already registered to speak, they won’t let you tomorrow.

That’s the only lever that’s ever worked on this court. Showing up, in person, in numbers big enough that the vote becomes uncomfortable to cast.

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• 92 days until the November election!

• Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Laura Jones?

Laura Jones is not new to this. This is her third time running against Morgan Luttrell TX08, and if you’re wondering why, the answer is that somebody has to.

She’s a lifelong Texan, born and raised in Houston. Army mom. Small business owner. She’s chaired the San Jacinto County Democrats and worked as a Field Director for Senate District 3 under the TDP’s Rural Caucus.

Her platform unmistakenly Tesas progressive, raise the minimum wage and tie it to the cost of living. Medicare for All. Tax the billionaires and corporations.

It’s the kind of platform that I would call common sense. Jones is asking Texas to work for the people who actually live here.

The district.

Republicans redrew this district in last year’s mid-decade redistricting scramble, the one aimed at squeezing five extra GOP seats out of the state before a single vote got cast. TX08 came out the other side as a new animal. All of Waller County, 46% of Montgomery, 38% of Walker, and 8% of Harris. Morgan Luttrell, who beat Laura Jones twice in the old lines, isn’t running here again. The Republican nominee this time is Jessica Steinmann, who came out of a crowded primary to take his place. New district, new opponent.

Here’s the demographic profile. Anglo 38.8%. Everybody else, 61.2%. Hispanic residents make up 34.1% of the district and Black residents another 18.6%. Among voting-age population specifically, it’s 42% Anglo, 58% everyone else, with Hispanic voters at 31.3%. This is a majority-minority district. Republicans drew it that way on purpose and then bet they could still win it.

The partisan math, 39.3% Democratic, 58.8% Republican.

But “not a toss-up” and “not worth fighting for” are two different sentences, and here’s why.

Turnout in this district has real headroom. In the last midterm, 2022, only 45% of registered voters showed up. Presidential year 2024 hit 62%. That’s a seventeen-point gap between who’s registered and who actually turns out. Every point of that gap is organizing territory.

And the registration numbers next to the population numbers. Spanish-surname voters make up just 18% of registered voters in TX08, in a district where Hispanic residents are 34% of the total population and 31% of voting age. That gap between who lives here and who’s on the rolls is a to-do list.

Now for the environment, because context is important.

Trump nationally is sitting at a net negative 19, underwater in Texas specifically, and his handling of the state’s own mid-decade redistricting scheme he demanded polls net negative even among the people it was drawn to help.

And then there’s the Hispanic vote, which is doing something Republicans did not plan for when they drew these maps assuming 2024 was the new normal. A UnidosUS poll this year has Latino voters statewide backing the generic Democratic House candidate 54 to 27. In February, Democrats flipped a deep-red Tarrant County state Senate seat on the strength of a Hispanic vote swing, nearly 80 percent of Hispanic voters in that runoff going Democratic. That’s a trend line, and Texas Republicans built their entire five-seat redistricting gambit betting the opposite trend would hold.

So here’s the honest version. TX08 is not the district Democrats flip on hope alone. The composite lean is real and it’s steep. But it is a district built on assumptions that are aging badly in real time, in an environment where the governor is underwater, the president is underwater, and the demographic group that was supposed to cement Republican gains is swinging back the other direction faster than anybody in Austin predicted.

Flipping TX08 this year means three things. It means closing a real gap. It means treating the eighteen-point registration gap between Hispanic population and Hispanic voter rolls as the single biggest lever in the district. And it means banking on a wave that hasn’t happened yet.

That’s the district Laura Jones is running in. Not the one from 2022. Not the one from 2024.

The Republican.

Unfortunately, Jessica Steinmann, the Republican running in this district is a woman of very limited vocabulary. Her entire website basically reads as, “Trump, Trump, Trumppity, Trump, My Daddy, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.”

Yesterday, POLITICO released an article taling about how GOP veterans are increasingly alarmed how they cannot find any young, qualified staff. That young people now in the Republican Party have taken on the identity of “groypers,” white nationalist, MAGA-types, and have drifted even further right than people like Ted Cruz.

We’ve seen these white nationalist, MAGA-types at much higher levels than staffers. We’ve seen them in the Texas Legislature and in Congress. And multiple issues on Jessica Steinmann’s issue page have a white nationalist agenda.

In Laura Jones’ own words.

Below are some questions I asked Jones, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a Green New Deal or similar large-scale federal climate action plan?

Yes. TX-08 families are already paying the price for federal inaction — hotter summers, strained power grids, harder storms on the Gulf Coast, water infrastructure that can’t keep up. I support bold federal climate investment, but it has to work for working people: clean energy jobs, resilient infrastructure, and real protection for union workers, farmers, and energy workers in the transition — not just Washington talking points. This isn’t about politics. It’s about whether our kids inherit a livable future.

Q: Do you support universal, publicly funded healthcare (i.e., Medicare for All or a similar single-payer system)?

Yes — this one’s easy since you’ve already confirmed Medicare for All support on prior endorsement surveys. Here’s a draft in your voice:

I absolutely support Medicare for All. Every Texan deserves healthcare that doesn’t depend on your job, your zip code, or how much money you have — not another watered-down half-measure. In TX-08, I’ve talked to too many families skipping medications or avoiding the doctor because they can’t afford it. That’s not freedom, that’s fear. Healthcare is a right, not a privilege for the few who can pay for it.

Q: Would you support major tax reform, including raising taxes on billionaires and large corporations?

Absolutely! It’s time billionaires and large corporations paid their fair share instead of working families carrying the load. That means major tax reform — closing corporate loopholes and raising taxes on billionaires — to actually pay for Medicare for All and the social safety nets this administration has spent years defunding. We can’t keep asking working families to sacrifice while billionaires skip the bill. It’s time to invest in healthcare, schools, and the people who actually keep this country running.

Q: Do you support federal student debt cancellation and tuition-free public college?

Yes! I support federal student debt cancellation and tuition-free public college. My platform goes further — a real commitment to free education from early childhood all the way through trade school or community college. Every kid deserves a real shot, whether that’s a four-year degree, a trade certification, or an associate’s degree, without being buried in debt before their life even starts. Education should build futures, not financial prisons.

Q: Do you support ending U.S. military aid to countries with ongoing human rights abuses, including Israel and Egypt?

Yes. Human rights can’t be negotiable, and they shouldn’t come with a US taxpayer subsidy attached — that includes Israel and Egypt. I support ending military aid to any government engaged in ongoing human rights abuses. Our tax dollars should reflect our values, not prop up abuses abroad while communities here in TX-08 are told there’s no money left for healthcare, schools, or infrastructure. Accountability has to apply everywhere, not just when it’s politically convenient.

Q: Do you support expanding the Supreme Court or instituting term limits for justices?

Both. No single person can stay objective for decades while the world changes around them because priorities shift, and lifetime power on the Court doesn’t reflect that reality. On top of that, money, corruption, and undisclosed gifts have eroded public trust in an institution that’s supposed to be above politics. I support term limits for Supreme Court justices so no one appointment shapes generations of law unchecked, and I support expanding the Court to restore balance after years of political maneuvering to stack it. This isn’t about picking winners, it’s about accountability and restoring faith in a Court that answers to the Constitution, not to donors or favors.

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

In 2026, being a Democrat means fighting for the people. It means rebuilding our systems so they actually work by rooting out systemic racism, closing the loopholes that let corruption and dark money buy politicians, and building something better than what we’ve been left with. Right now, we don’t need more centrists. We don’t need more moderates willing to compromise with a regime that’s playing games with people’s lives while getting richer off the suffering of everyday Americans. We need fighters and accountability has to mean something — for everyone, regardless of skin color or social status. That’s not radical, it’s overdue and that’s just what this moment demands.

TX08 was drawn by Republicans who bet everything on 2024 being permanent.

A demographic profile that’s majority-minority by design, with a partisan lean that’s real but not immovable. A registration gap eighteen points wide just sitting there. And an opponent whose entire public platform reads like a fan letter to the führer, running on issues that echo the same white nationalist currents POLITICO spent four thousand words warning Republicans about in their own staff.

Laura Jones is running on Medicare for All because she’s watched families in this district skip medication they need. Climate action because Gulf Coast summers don’t care about your politics. Court reform because lifetime appointments and undisclosed gifts don’t restore faith in anything.

This is a district Democrats win by doing the unglamorous math. Register the voters who are already here, turn out the ones who skip midterms, and trust that a governor and a president underwater in Texas aren’t accidents either. TX08 is a long shot. It is not a lost cause. Those are different things, and this cycle, the difference is worth fighting over.

You can learn more about Laura Jones on her website, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

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• 93 days until the November election!

• Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

Lone Star Left stays free, always, no paywall. Free to read isn’t free to produce. This runs entirely on paid subscribers. No PAC money, no campaign checks, nobody’s donor class getting a vote in what gets written. If this series has taught you something about a race you’d never have heard about otherwise, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Erica Gillum?

Erica Gillum is a lifelong Texan, a businesswoman, realtor, real estate coach, and investor. She spent the last two decades building something out of not much.

She grew up watching her father, a fourth-generation small businessman. He served as Mayor of Hempstead in 1983 and later sat on the Waller County Commissioners Court. Gillum took the same path decades later, landing on Hempstead City Council in 2020 and moving into the mayor’s office in 2022, where she stayed until 2024.

While she was there, Gillum secured over $9 million in drainage and infrastructure. A deal with H-E-B guaranteed a quarter of the new distribution center jobs go to residents. Caterpillar Mustang landed in Hempstead on her watch, which she credits for strengthening the city’s tax base.

Gillum leans hard into faith and self-reliance as campaign language. The line she keeps coming back to is that the real divide in this country isn’t left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. And right now, in this moment, that’s what speaks most to working Texans.

The district.

Senate District 18 is enormous. It’s 18 counties stitched together from the Gulf Coast up through the Brenham prairie and into the western edge of the Houston sprawl. You could drive from Port Lavaca to the outskirts of Katy and never leave it.

This district has two very different economies living inside one Senate seat. Small farming and ranching counties that have voted red for a generation, and a fast-growing exurban slice of Fort Bend County that looks nothing like them.

The population is 62% people of color. Hispanic residents make up 30.6%, Black residents 17.3%, Asian residents 13.3%. On paper, that’s a majority-minority district. On the ground, it doesn’t vote like one, and we’ll get to why.

Homeownership runs at 66.7%, ten points above the state average. Poverty sits at 10.6%, well under the state’s average. It’s a district of homeowners, small business owners, and retirees. 15.1% of the district is 65 or older, compared to 13.4% statewide.

Here’s the county breakdown that actually explains the politics. The district’s single largest population center is 45% of Fort Bend County. That slice is 73.8% non-Anglo. It is also the only real growth engine in the district, with 30% of its housing built since 2010. If Democrats have a future in SD18, it lives in that Fort Bend wedge, not in the rural counties.

Victoria County, the second-biggest chunk at 91,319 people, is 43.1% Anglo and 47% Hispanic, and Hispanic voters along this stretch of the coast have been trending red for years. However, many campaigns and groups are hoping to swing them back left this year. The small counties run 60% to 73% Anglo and vote accordingly. Waller County, Gillum’s home turf and 73% inside the district, is 63.2% non-Anglo with the highest Black population share in SD18 at 28%. That’s Gillum’s actual base, and it’s a small one against the sheer size of everything else.

2024 general election, in District 18, Trump beat Harris 62.6% to 35.3%. Cruz beat Allred 59.7 to 37.8. Every appellate and Supreme Court race on the ballot broke for the Republican by 29 to 30 points. This district votes red from the top of the ballot to the bottom.

Now the flip math. Harris got 148,753 votes in this district in 2024. Trump got 263,788. A gap of 115,035 votes on a turnout of 421,232. Closing that in one cycle takes a genuinely historic swing, not a good year.

Here’s why that’s worth taking seriously anyway. In 2024, Trump won 55% of the Latino vote statewide. That shift is reversing, fast. And it’s not just polling. When Taylor Rehmet flipped SD9 in that January special election, a district Trump carried by 17 points, nearly 80% of the Hispanic voters who turned out voted for him. That’s a swing of roughly 26% off 2024.

That’s the ballgame for the coastal Hispanic counties sitting inside SD18. All counties that broke hard for Trump two years ago. If even half of the SD9 swing shows up here in November, that’s tens of thousands of votes moving back into play in a district where the Democratic floor has been mostly the same for a decade.

It still doesn’t flip the seat by itself. But stacked on top of the Fort Bend wedge and a Waller County operation that actually shows up, it starts to look like the first real dent Democrats have put in this seat in years.

And there’s a piece of this that isn’t just demographic drift. Lois Kolkhorst has a record on maternal health that directly harms a large portion of this district.

Erica Gillum is not favored to win SD18 in November. But what's different about this cycle is that the pieces required for a real dent, the Fort Bend wedge, a Hispanic vote in genuine motion, an incumbent with a terrible record, are all actually present at the same time. We should be treating this as a base-building cycle worth real investment.

The incumbent.

There isn’t one positive thing Lois Kolkhorst has ever done for Texas. Not ever. She was named one of the “Worst Legislators” in Texas by Texas Monthly magazine in 2017. And has made a career out of legislating favors for billionaires, cutting the social safety net for children living in poverty, and taking on a radical anti-Earth agenda.

Worst of all, Kolkhorst is one of the people most responsible for the piles of dead women stacking up in our state. In 2011, Kolkhorst voted to slash Texas family planning funding by 66%. Eighty-two clinics closed their doors. These weren’t abortion clinics, whatever the talking points want you to believe. They were the front door into healthcare for millions of Texas women. Cancer screenings. Birth control. STD testing.

Then the bodies started showing up in the data.

Texas maternal mortality went from 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 38.7 in 2012. It nearly doubled in two years. Researchers published the findings in Obstetrics and Gynecology and said flat out they couldn’t explain a spike like that “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval.” No other state came close. Texas hit numbers researchers said weren’t seen anywhere else in the country.

Black women paid for it hardest. They made up 11% of Texas births and nearly 29% of the pregnancy-related deaths.

Lois Kolkhorst has chaired the Senate Health and Human Services Committee this entire time. She controls nearly $80 billion in healthcare spending and oversight of every health agency in this state. She had the gavel when the clinics closed. She had the gavel when the data came out. She has the gavel right now.

This is a story about a woman who voted to gut the healthcare access of poor and working-class women, watched hundreds of them die because of it, and kept her committee chairmanship anyway. The Legislature, in its own words, mostly punted. Kolkhorst didn’t. She kept showing up, kept getting reappointed, kept voting the same way.

A body count with a Senate seal on it. And come November, she’s asking the women of District 18 to send her back to Austin to keep doing it.

In Erica Gillum’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Gillum, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

Most definitely! Yes. Too many Texans who work full-time still can’t afford the basics. With the cost of living rising while wages have remained stagnant, no one who works hard every day should have to choose between paying rent, buying groceries, or seeing a doctor. I also support a thoughtful implementation that gives small businesses time to adjust.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

Yes. I oppose school vouchers that divert public dollars away from our public schools. Education is personal to me; my daughter is an educator, my mother retired from education, and my father is a retired college professor. I’ve spent a lifetime hearing both the successes and the frustrations of our schools. We should fully fund public education, raise teacher pay, and invest in the resources every student and classroom needs to succeed.

Q: Should Texas end tax breaks and regulatory loopholes for oil and gas companies, including exemptions from emissions reporting and waste disposal standards?

Yes, End tax breaks that don’t create jobs or investment, and reinvest those dollars in infrastructure, workforce training, and energy innovation. Close outdated loopholes on emissions reporting and waste disposal so taxpayers aren’t left paying for pollution or abandoned wells. That’s a pro-business, pro-taxpayer approach that rewards responsible companies, protects communities, and strengthens Texas’s economy over the long term.

Q: Do you support closing or downsizing state prisons and redirecting that funding to community-based alternatives like mental health care, housing, and youth programs?

Yes. It’s time to stop pouring billions into a system that too often fails to make our communities safer. Downsize prisons where it’s safe to do so and redirect those resources to mental health care, addiction treatment, affordable housing, youth programs, quality education, and job training. When we invest in people instead of just punishment, we reduce crime, strengthen communities, and create lasting public safety. That’s a smarter use of taxpayer dollars.

Q: Do you support repealing all abortion bans and codifying the right to abortion in state law?

I respect the value and dignity of every human life. I also believe the best way to reduce abortion is through prevention, not punishment. That means expanding access to education, contraception, quality healthcare, and the resources families need to thrive.

At the same time, I believe decisions about pregnancy are deeply personal and should be made by individuals, their families, and their healthcare providers, not the government. We can value life while respecting personal freedom.

My goal is to support policies that prevent unintended pregnancies, strengthen families, improve maternal and child health, and protect the right of every person to make their own healthcare decisions.

Bonus Question: How do you plan to engage and energize young and working-class voters?

First, I won’t pretend to understand their struggles from a distance. I am a working-class voter myself, so I have known what it feels like to worry about paying the bills, affording healthcare, buying groceries, or wondering whether homeownership will ever be within reach. These aren’t political talking points to me; they’re everyday realities.

When it comes to young voters, we have to stop talking at them and start talking with them. Too often, people assume they know what young people need instead of inviting them into the conversation. My commitment is to listen first, to be transparent, and to meet young people where they are.

That means showing up on college campuses, trade schools, job fairs, and community events. It means engaging student organizations and speaking with graduating seniors about civic engagement and the policies that will shape their future. It also means reaching them where they already communicate, through social media and digital platforms, in ways that are informative, honest, and engaging.

Young people need to understand that the decisions made today directly affect their future. Whether it’s the cost of college and trade schools, housing affordability, healthcare access, women’s rights, voting rights, or the funding of public education, these issues aren’t problems for someone else; they will shape the opportunities available to this generation.

For working-class families, my message is simple: I see you because I am one of you. Our working class includes teachers, nurses, doctors, pharmacy technicians, medical assistants, retail workers, office staff, construction workers, first responders, and countless others who keep our communities running every day. These are the people who make our economy work, yet too many feel like government has forgotten them.

People deserve to understand how government decisions affect their daily lives, from the price of groceries and gas to healthcare costs, housing, utility bills, and the ability to support their families without having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Politics often fails because it doesn’t connect policy to people’s everyday lives. My goal is to change that. Every decision made in government has a real impact on someone’s paycheck, someone’s rent, someone’s healthcare, or someone’s child’s future. We have to communicate those connections clearly and honestly.

Most importantly, I want people to know they have someone fighting for them every single day. While you’re working, raising your children, paying your bills, and trying to build a better future, I want you to know your representative is working just as hard on your behalf.

That is how we rebuild trust. We listen. We show up. We tell the truth. We stay engaged. And we never forget that public office is about serving the people, not serving ourselves.

Erica Gillum is running on a question nobody in Austin bothers asking working people anymore. Who is this government actually for?

On one side, a Realtor and former mayor from Hempstead who knows what it’s like to worry about rent. On the other, a Senator who wears diamonds to hearings where she votes against the people, wondering if they can afford their next prescription, and who has chaired the committee overseeing Texas’s maternal mortality crisis for the entire time it’s been the worst in the country.

Nobody should tell you Erica Gillum is favored to win this seat in November. She isn’t, and I won’t do false hope. But the math here is moving for the first time in a decade. The Hispanic vote along this coastline is genuinely up for grabs, and Fort Bend keeps growing whether Lois Kolkhorst likes it or not.

If you live in District 18, or know someone who does, Gillum needs volunteers, and she needs money, and she needs both before Kolkhorst’s $3.1 million war chest gets spent on ads nobody in this district can counter. If you don’t live here, share this piece. Somebody in Victoria or Gonzales or Waller needs to hear that a Democrat is finally showing up asking for their vote.

You can find out more about Erica Gillum on her website, Facebook, or TikTok.

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Dannie Goober (stage name, Dan Patrick) was once a famed shock jock radio host in his home state of Maryland. Then, around his mid-40s, he moved to Texas, did what all good grifters do, and got involved in Republican politics. There used to be a word for that. For wealthy men who packed up their belongings and headed South to buy their way into politics. We used to call them carpetbaggers. I’m not quite sure why we stopped, because if there ever were a carpetbagger, our Lt. Governor would certainly be one.

Now, in his late 70s, he dresses like a jackass and tells people, “This is my time-traveler suit.” Then he pretends to tell people stories about Texas, but it’s actually just Johnny Cash lyrics. Seriously, it was caught on video:

And with all of the chaos happening in Texas (sometimes caused by this ⬆️ man), it’s easy to forget that he’s one of the most powerful people in our government.

Jackasses in time-traveler suits can still run your life.

Patrick’s actual job is President of the Senate, or the Presiding officer. He has control over three levers that decide whether a bill lives or dies before a single senator ever votes on it.

The first lever is referral. Every bill that gets filed in the Texas Senate goes to a committee, and Patrick decides which one. Send a bill to a friendly committee, and it gets a hearing. Send it to a committee stacked with senators who’d rather eat glass than pass it, and it dies.

The second lever is the calendar. Even a bill that survives committee needs floor time, and Patrick controls what gets scheduled and what doesn’t.

And the third lever is committee chairs. He appoints them. Every one. Which means the senators running those committees owe their gavels to him personally, and they know it.

Put those three things together, and you get the actual machine. Patrick decides what gets a green light and what dies.

Look at what’s actually passed over the last decade. The bathroom bill fights. The voucher pushes. The near-total abortion ban. The grid “fixes” after Uri that fixed basically nothing. Every one of those bills cleared Patrick’s desk before it ever got near Abbott’s. The Governor signs. Patrick decides what he gets to sign. If you want to know where Texas law actually gets made, quit staring at the corner office and start staring at the guy quoting Johnny Cash in the fringe yellow jacket.

Want to know the funny part about it? None of that power is written into the Texas Constitution. Read Article 4. The Constitution gives the Lt. Governor exactly two things. Preside over the Senate, and break a tie if one happens. That’s it.

Everything else gets handed to him fresh at the start of every single session, by a vote of the Senate itself, adopting its own rules. Patrick isn’t constitutionally powerful. He’s powerful because a majority of Republicans keep voting to hand him the keys every two years. Different Senate, different vote, different rules. Stick a pin in that. We’re coming back to it.

Now put a US Senator next to that and watch how small they get. If Talarico beats Paxton in November and heads to Washington as one of a hundred votes, in the minority party, with no chairmanship, no committee to run, no bill he can kill with a signature. He can vote. He can give a hell of a floor speech. He cannot touch a single line of the Texas Education Code, the Texas Penal Code, or the Texas Election Code.

Everything that actually governs Texans day to day, from what gets taught in classrooms to who can get an abortion to whether your lights stay on in a freeze, runs through Austin. Not DC. And in Austin, one man decides what gets a hearing and what dies.

Why do Texans know Talarico’s numbers off the top of their heads, but barely know the Lt. Governor’s race exists?

Money. It’s really as simple as that. A poll out this week has Talarico up five, 45 to 40, his biggest lead of the cycle, and it’s got Paxton bleeding independents by double digits. Every outlet from the Trib to Fox News is treating this as one of the handful of races that decides whether Republicans keep their Senate majority nationally.

None of that is wrong, exactly. It’s just not aimed at the governing body that has the most impact on your daily life.

A US Senate seat gets national coverage because it’s counted on a national scoreboard. Fifty-one seats, fifty-two seats, who’s got the gavel in DC. That scoreboard exists. It matters for judges and the farm bill and whether Texas gets steamrolled on federal funding fights, and I’m not telling you to stop caring about it. It’s still an important race.

But that national scoreboard has absolutely nothing to do with who decides whether Texas passes another abortion restriction, guts the grid again, or hands another billion dollars to voucher schools. That decision happens in a building in Austin, run by a man cosplaying a Texan, or a time traveler, or trash (it’s hard to tell). He’s up against Vikki Goodwin.

Attention and power are not the same thing, and Texas might be the cleanest proof of that mismatch in the entire country. We’ve got a state legislative office with more command over daily life in this state than a US Senate seat will ever carry, and it’s running practically dark while $68 million dollars (Talarico) and every national outlet in the country obsess over a race that, win or lose, changes nothing about who controls the classroom, the clinic, or the power grid come January.

The Texas Constitution, Article 4, Section 16, gives the Lt. Governor power to preside over the Senate and break a tie if one happens.

That’s the whole constitutional job. Everything else people call “the second most powerful office in Texas” isn’t in the Constitution at all.

Here’s how it works, and there are three separate categories, so stay with me.

Constitutional. Untouchable. No Senate vote can change it. Presiding officer. Tie-break vote. A vote on every question when the Senate sits as Committee of the Whole. First in line if the Governor dies, resigns, or gets removed. Acting Governor any time the Governor leaves the state. A seat on the five-member Legislative Redistricting Board, which draws the maps if the Legislature can’t agree on its own. It’s written into the founding document and stays put no matter who runs the Senate.

Statutory. Survives a hostile Senate, because changing it takes an actual law, not a floor vote. The Lt. Governor co-chairs the Legislative Budget Board with the Speaker, and appoints three of its ten members. The LBB writes the fiscal notes, certifies the budget, and controls what happens with the state’s money between sessions. Stripping that away requires a bill passed by both the House and Senate and signed by the Governor. Which means if Democrats hold the House, and we’re all praying they do, this one survives regardless of what the Senate does.

Senate Rules. Gone in one afternoon, whenever the majority feels like it. This is the referral power. The calendar power. The committee chair appointments. All of it exists because the Senate votes fresh, every regular session, to hand it to whoever’s presiding. Same rule that gives it can take it away, same day, same vote.

In 2015, his first session, he got the Senate to drop the vote threshold for bringing a bill to the floor from two-thirds (21 votes) down to three-fifths (19 votes). Watered down the minority’s ability to block anything. Then in 2021, he went further. After Republicans lost a seat and dropped to exactly 18 members, the Senate lowered the threshold again, this time to 18 votes. Eighteen senators, eighteen Republicans, passed 18 to 13, a number picked to match his own caucus exactly so Democrats couldn’t block a single thing even if every one of them showed up and voted as a bloc.

Which is exactly why none of that protects you if Democrats take the Lt. Governor’s office and Republicans keep the Senate. That same mechanism- majority votes- rules get rewritten, works against a Democrat exactly as efficiently as it’s worked for Patrick for a decade.

Let’s say Vikki Goodwin wins in November.

Patrick’s cosplay gets boxed up and shipped back to Maryland where it belongs, and Democrats take the office for the first time since Bob Bullock. Meanwhile, the Senate itself stays exactly where it’s been for two decades. We’re not going to flip the Senate this session. Highly unlikely. We may flip two seats, even three if we’re lucky, but that’s still not enough.

On day one of the next session, the Senate convenes, and that Republican majority adopts a rules resolution stripping the presiding officer of everything Patrick spent a decade building. It’s a simple majority resolution, the same tool Patrick himself used to build the machine, now aimed straight back at whoever’s sitting in his chair.

What survives, because it’s constitutional or statutory, the Legislative Budget Board co-chairmanship, real leverage over how the state’s money gets certified and spent between sessions, protected because stripping it requires an actual law that House Democrats can block. The Legislative Redistricting Board seat, which puts a Democrat in the room when Texas draws its next set of maps after the 2030 census, a seat that matters enormously for the entire decade after this one. Succession to the Governor’s office, and acting governor authority anytime the governor crosses state lines. And the bully pulpit, statewide elected, press access, the ability to say something publicly that forces a response.

Flipping Lt. Gov under a still-red Senate is a structural and symbolic win. It means Patrick’s machine stops being Patrick’s machine.

A Republican Lt. Gov paired with a Republican Senate is an unchecked chokepoint over every single bill that moves through that chamber for two straight years.

What does one more Talarico vote in the US Senate actually stop, if he wins? Not one thing in Texas. He doesn’t touch the Texas Penal Code, doesn’t touch the Education Code, doesn’t touch a single line of what happens in Austin. Best case, he’s a good vote on judges and a loud voice on the floor.

Ending Patrick specifically matters. He isn’t some replaceable cog. The man has spent a decade building relationships with individual senators, learning who owes him, who’s scared of him, who needs him for their next primary. Whip capacity like that doesn’t transfer to whoever else picks up the gavel. You start from zero. Take Patrick off that dais and even a Republican successor is running a weaker, less efficient version of the same machine for at least a session or two while they rebuild what he spent ten years assembling.

And then there’s 2031. That Legislative Redistricting Board seat, the one that only kicks in if the Legislature deadlocks on its own maps. It’s a direct hand on the next decade of both chambers, House and Senate, drawn after the 2030 census, the maps every single legislative race in this state runs on until 2041. A Democrat on that board is worth more to the long-term shape of Texas politics than a Senate term’s worth of federal votes on bills that were never going to touch Texas law in the first place. You’re fighting for who draws the lines that decide the next five sessions after that.

The Lt. Governor’s office carries more raw power over what happens to Texans than a Senate seat carries over anything Texas-specific, full stop.

And even in the worst case, where Democrats win the office, but Republicans keep the Senate, you’re still putting a Democrat on the redistricting board before the next map fight, still denying the GOP a weapon they’ve used without opposition since 2015. It’s still more than one more vote in the minority in a building four hundred miles from where your rights actually get decided.

You can find out more about Vikki Goodwin on her website.

Make sure to follow all of her socials, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky.

She also needs volunteers and donations.

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This week, (TPOR) dropped a poll with a few of the top-of-the-ticket races. This poll looks mighty favorable for Democrats, and the Republicans online are saying to “take it with a grain of salt, because it’s Luke Warford’s company.”

Y’all remember Luke Warford. He ran for Railroad Commissioner in 2022. Since then, he’s been working behind the scenes on polling. Now, he’s running for the Chair position of the Travis County Democratic Party. And that’s a whole other shit-show of a story, to tell you the truth, I only know bits and pieces of. From my understanding, Chair Jessica Cohen was pushed out by the elites of the County Party regarding a thirty-year-old arrest.

Regardless of what Republicans say, we should trust the TPOR poll because they are trying to build a reputation as a trustworthy polling company in Texas. And why fudge that for one poll?

Talarico vs. Paxton.

The TPOR poll has Talarico leading Paxton 45% to 40%.

That’s up from a Texas Politics Project Poll in June that had Paxton leading Talarico 43% to 42%.

And as long as we’re on the subject of Republicans, we should talk about the betting markets. Because it’s what most of them are relying on now, Kalshi, more than Polymarket, because Kalshi has spent a lot of money on advertising through right-wing influencers.

Kalshi has Paxton leading Talarico 53% to 47%.

And Polymarket has Paxton leading Talarico 53% to 49%.

So what does it all mean?

TPOR has Talarico up 5. UT/Texas Politics Project has Paxton up 1. Neither number is outside the other poll’s margin of error. Anybody telling you this race is “decided” in either direction, on the strength of one poll, is selling you something.

But before we hang our hat on the TPOR number, let’s look under the hood. TPOR’s own poll from May had Paxton winning non-college-educated voters by 21 points. Two months later, in this poll, Talarico wins that same group by 9. That’s a 30-point swing in a bloc that has been rock-solid Republican in Texas for a decade. Ted Cruz won non-college voters by 18 in 2024. He still won them by 6 in 2018, the year Beto came within three points statewide. A number that big, that fast, in a group that stable, deserves a raised eyebrow. It could be real. Realignment on affordability this cycle and TPOR’s crosstabs on cost-of-living trust are consistent with it.

Now, the betting markets. Kalshi and Polymarket are not polls. They measure where money is willing to bet. Low liquidity means a handful of big bettors can move the number more than a thousand ordinary voters could. And Kalshi in particular has been buying its way into right-wing influencer feeds, which means the “market” a lot of Republicans are quoting at you is partly a marketing campaign. Treat those 53-47 and 53-49 numbers as sentiment among people willing to put money on a Republican-coded platform, not as a competing poll.

And just for fun, I asked the Magic8ball if Talarico would win. It said, “Without a doubt.”

Hinojosa vs. Abbott.

Someone asked me in the comments the other day if I thought Gina Hinojosa could win. My response was, “Maybe.” The Governor’s race is a lot more complicated than the Senate race, mostly due to Abbott’s unlimited campaign cash. And when I say “unlimited,” I really mean “unlimited.” At any point in time, Abbott could call one of his billionaire donors and promise land, a government contract, or some favor, and wind up with a few million in his coffers. And he has plenty of billionaire buddies who are well aware of his decades-long pay-to-play schemes.

Money is the biggest roadblock in this race, but Abbott’s favorability is working against him. In June, the Texas Politics Project had Abbott’s approval rating at 46% approve vs. 45% disapprove. That’s up from October 2025, when his approval rating was just 39%.

This week, the TPOR poll had Abbott leading Hinojosa 45% to 42%, within the margin of error.

This is a move in the right direction. In June, a Texas Politics Project Poll showed Abbott leading Hinojosa 47% to 40%.

I think that Hinojosa is picking up steam, for sure, and she could win. But Democrats really need to show out in numbers in November like never before.

Johnson vs. Middleton.

This was the last TPOR poll that was done this week, and why they only picked these top three statewide races, and not the rest, I couldn’t tell you, but this race is particularly interesting. Nathan Johnson is very qualified to be our next Attorney General. Mayes Middleton is very qualified to be middle management in a Satanic Cabal. Middleton will spend a fortune trying to get elected, because he can’t get elected through the grassroots, and he has the money to throw around.

This week, the TPOR poll had Middleton leading Johnson 39% to 38%.

In June, a Texas Politics Project Poll showed Middleton leading Johnson 41% to 39%.

I’m definitely feeling good about the AG’s race for Democrats. Most people in Texas, even some Republicans, are fed up with billionaires (like Middleton) jacking up the cost of living while playing culture wars and sucking up all of our water. Plus, I asked the Magic8ball if Nathan Johnson would win in November, and it said, “Most likely.”

Goodwin vs. Patrick.

TPOR only put out polls for the last three races, so for the rest of the statewide races, I’m looking at older polls, but I didn’t think it was fair to talk about some and not others.

Soon, we have to talk about how important this seat is. Because if we flip the House, but not the Senate, we could still get a lot accomplished if we oust Dan Patrick and put Vikki Goodwin in this seat. Some people don’t know this, but the Lt. Governor is the most powerful person in the state of Texas when it comes to lawmaking. More powerful than the Governor, even.

In June, a Texas Politics Project Poll showed Patrick leading Goodwin 43% to 36%, which is way above the margin of error.

Five months is plenty of time to make up a 7-point deficit. I think the biggest challenge for Vikki Goodwin is that not enough people know what the Lt. Governor is or does. However, I’ve seen her campaigning all over the state. And if Democrats overperform in November by double digits, maybe it will be enough.

The rest.

Last week, Texas Monthly published an article calling Bo French a fascist in its headline. Which, I absolutely love seeing the mainstream calling a spaid a spaid. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any public polling for Jon Rosenthal vs. Bo French.

In that regard, I also haven’t seen any polling regarding Clayton Tucker vs. Nate Sheets or Ben Flores vs. Dawn Buckingham.

Where’s that at, ?

Between us, I’m feeling bullish about both Jon Rosenthal and Clayton Tucker.

Every top-of-ticket race in Texas is inside single digits right now, and half of them are inside the margin of error.

Talarico’s up in one poll, down a point in another. Hinojosa closed her gap by four points in two months. Johnson’s a coin flip. Goodwin’s got work to do, but we still have time, and Texans don’t know what a Lieutenant Governor does until one of them tries to burn the state down, which Dan Patrick has done frequently.

So knock on the damn doors. Make the damn calls. Give the five bucks if that’s what you’ve got. The polls tell you this is winnable. And it happens because you got off your ass.

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Yesterday, we spoke about some of the bigger fundraisers in the Texas House races. Today, I wanted to look at some of the fundraising numbers in the Congressional races. Yes, the Republicans gave us a dummymander, and they’re going to screw themselves in the long run. But how bad is it right now, and who’s actually raising the money to take advantage of it?

For each district, turnout numbers matter, demographics matter, and like it or not, money matters too. Depending on who you ask, a Congressional campaign has to raise several hundred thousand dollars to be taken seriously. I don’t know what that exact number is, though I’ve asked around and was told anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000.

So, like we did yesterday, I thought it would be fun to look at the DCCC’s target seats, the other seats which may be dummymandered, and some other possible big fundraisers.

The DCCC’s list.

Of all the seats in Texas that may be dummymandered, I find it suspicious that the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) picked the two seats with the most moderate, corporately aligned Democrats running for them. Until I looked on the About Page of the DCCC’s website and saw it was all led by corporate-aligned Democrats.

So, just know, with all of the progressives running for Congress in Texas, not supporting ANY of them was a choice.

The two seats they are supporting:

• TX15

• TX35

Bobby Pulido is running for TX15. He has a lot of star power, he’s super popular, and he’s probably going to win. Republicans were expecting to hold on to the border this year. They won’t. As of 6/30/26, Pulido has raised $2,833,608.15.

Johnny Garcia is running for TX35. Republicans only gave themselves a +4-point cushion in this district, which is 54% Hispanic. With both Trump and Abbott being so far underwater with this voting bloc, in a wave election, it’s probably not going to be enough to cut it. As of 6/30/26, Garcia has raised $923,561.41.

Other seats Republicans could lose.

There’s no guarantee that Democrats will win these seats. The factors that matter include how much Democrats overperform, how far left the Hispanic vote swings, and how much money the candidate raised to make their campaign actually viable.

I am not including the candidates who’ve raised less than $200,000.

Katy Stout Padilla is running for TX23. Republicans only have an +8-point advantage here. This district is 57% Hispanic. And it’s a border district, where Talarico is spending a lot of money to flip back blue (that helps). Also, the Republican candidate is a South Carolina-native and Nazi-sympathizer (not hyperbole) who moved to Texas for the sole purpose of running for Congress. As of 6/30/26, Stout Padilla has raised $470,799.69.

Some longer shots.

If Republicans wind up facing a total bloodbath in November (which I light a candle and pray for daily), perhaps we can flip one or more of the seats below. It’s going to take a bloodbath, and the candidates working their asses off. But it’s worth taking a look at.

Caitlin Rourk is running for TX10. Republicans have an +18-point advantage in this seat, and even though this seat is 63% white, it covers a quarter of Travis County. As of 6/30/26, Rourk has raised $363,958.97.

Kristin Hook is running for TX21. This is a 43% minority district, including 32% Hispanic. Targeting those votes is going to matter a lot for this campaign. Republicans have a +21-point advantage here, so the size of the wave will have to be big, and the Bexar and Hays County portions of this district will really have to show out. As of 6/30/26, Hook has raised $241,265.06.

Kevin Burge is running for TX24. Beth Van Duyne is the incumbent. She’s a literal monster, and Republicans tried to secure her seat with a +20-point advantage. It is going to be a harder seat to win, it’s the whiter, suburban part of DFW, but it’s not entirely impossible. Julie Johnson is threatening to run for this seat in 2028 if Burge doesn’t take it (so, let’s light an extra candle for his win). As of 6/30/26, Burge has raised $209,859.75

Surprising fundraisers.

The previous seats we talked about were “long shots,” but these Democratic candidates are pulling in some big numbers and working hard to flip their districts, and they’re notable enough to talk about.

Shaun Finnie is running for TX02. I don’t recall if we’ve ever discussed Finnie before. He’s an oil and gas guy, coming in with his own money, and he wants to expand the ACA, rather than implement universal healthcare. But that’s still better than the Republican running, which is Steve Toth, the pool boy from New York. Republicans gave themselves a +26-point advantage in this district. However, the demographics of this Harris County district are interesting, 53% Anglo, 26% Hispanic, 12% Black, 7% Asian. As of 6/30/26, Finnie has raised $765,947.65, but he has $2,729,676.76 on hand, due to a $1,961,000 personal loan.

Evan Hunt is running for TX03. This district is genuinely interesting. It’s in Collin County, just like several of the House seats we spoke about yesterday, and Republicans have spent years bending over backward to hold on to districts there, which is why this district has a +22 Republican advantage. However, I don’t think they could have predicted the rapidly shifting demographics in Collin County. Will that impact this race in November? When Republicans drew these maps last year, this district was 58% Anglo, 17% Hispanic, 11% Black, and 11% Asian. As of 6/30/26, Hunt has raised $371,505.53.

Republicans redrew this map to buy themselves five more seats and built themselves five headaches.

That’s what a dummymander does. Perfect for a Legislature full of dummies catering to the whim of the King of Dummies. You can’t manufacture five safe Republican districts from a state that would be blue if it was fair. They already redrew the districts thin, and thinner, and thinner, eventually they will crack.

We know the DCCC is only officially playing offense in two of them, TX15 and TX35, and both candidates are proving them right so far. Bobby Pulido and Johnny Garcia have raised the kind of money that says they’re taking this seriously, and the demographics in both districts say the Republicans who drew this map underestimated exactly how far underwater Trump and Abbott are with Hispanic voters.

We know the “long shot” seats are expensive. It’s going to take a real bloodbath in November to flip any of them. They’re raising real money in seats where six months ago nobody outside their own kitchen table thought they had a shot.

And we know the two “surprising” ones, TX02 and TX03, prove something Republicans really didn’t see coming.

Nothing is a guarantee.

Money doesn’t vote. Turnout does. But candidates who can’t raise money don’t get the chance to find out if turnout breaks their way, and every single person on this list cleared that bar.

Texas Republicans built a map to save themselves. What they actually built was a stress test. We’re about to find out how much weight it can hold.

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• 98 days until the November election!

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• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.