I was raised under a big sky, on a long flat prairie. As a child, my parents taught me to stick out my tongue when anyone said the name "Bill Clinton." Everyone I met, everyone I knew and loved for my whole entire childhood, was a Republican, except for the few libertarians. Sure, people may have grumbled about our invariably Republican elected officials—be it Bush or Perry or Abbott—but they still voted for them. Republicans ruled Texas in the same inexorable way the sun rises each morning. The alternative was basically unthinkable. Until last night, when all of a sudden it wasn’t.
I knew the place where I grew up was changing. But as the returns came in Tuesday night, I felt like I’d been hit by lightning. Steve Kornacki pointed at my home county, Denton, and declared that James Talarico was up by almost 13 points in the early returns. That margin wouldn’t stay, but the lead did. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Talarico won Denton County with a little over 53 percent of the vote. And it wasn’t just him. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, took Denton County by a narrow margin. Both took the state.
They were not alone. In every statewide race in Texas, the Democratic candidate won. As Forrest Wilder wrote in Texas Monthly on Wednesday, “It seems like Texans went into the voting booth with a vengeance, voting against anyone with an R next to their names.” In addition to the national Senate seat and the governor’s mansion, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has been an incredibly adept and evil politician my entire adult life, got destroyed by Vikki Goodwin. Democrats won the attorney general’s office, the comptroller, the railroad commissioner, and the fucking agriculture commissioner. They flipped suburban counties, including Paxton’s own home county of Collin.
Most of the close Texas House races have not been called yet, but if results hold, Democrats will take control of the House for the first time since 2003. Four seats on the Texas Supreme Court were up for grabs this year, and it looks like Democrats are going to win them all. They also won seats on the Court of Criminal Appeals and the 15th Court of Appeals. They won seven seats of the 15-seat State Board of Education, and there are still two seats up for grabs. A man who called himself “MAGA Mayes” got absolutely stomped by some guy named Nathan Johnson. A Tejano musician won his U.S. House race in the Rio Grande Valley. Vicente Gonzales and Henry Cuellar held South Texas seats that had been gerrymandered to hell by Republicans. Democrats won seats in which they hadn’t been viable contenders for four decades. They won Brazos County, for fuck’s sake, the county where Texas A&M is located. Democrats haven’t held this much power in Texas since the 1990s.
Overnight, everything has changed. It’s not just one seat, or a blue governor. Texas is a blue state.
Texas is in every part of me. It’s in my voice, in the fucked-up way I say “tour,” and call them “blow-off” classes, and say “all hat and no cattle.” It’s in my muscle memory, where I’ve stored “quick, quick, slow, slow.” It’s in my heart, which Texas has broken a million times.
The love I have for the place has felt, for most of my life, unrequited. I left Denton County the minute I was able, and drove as fast as my car would go down I-35 to Austin, where I went to college and met people who believed that things should and could be different.
After graduating, I left. Almost all of my friends left too, moving to places where we were less likely to see someone open-carrying in a Walmart. But other people stayed, and they kept on believing. They canvassed in tiny towns, fundraised for decades. They lost, and lost again, and kept on trying. They ran campaigns that failed but got a little bit closer each time. Talarico and Hinojosa don’t win without the Beto O’Rourke campaign’s efforts in 2018, without the cursed failure of Wendy Davis’s campaign for governor in 2014, or without the thousands of hours spent and doors knocked by people who care so deeply about the state that they are willing to put up with all of the slights and psychic damage it inflicts. I am so happy for them, and so grateful.
For more than a decade now, there has been hope that Texas might flip a seat or two for Democrats. This year, the conditions just happened to be right. This win was the result of a combination of a national blue wave and some particularly terrible Texas Republican candidates. Texans are furious at Donald Trump. Gas prices are high. Inflation is out of control. They hate the data centers being built in their backyards, the Flock cameras tracking them through their days. In South Texas, where Trump did well in 2024, ICE raids tore apart families.
In the Senate race in particular, Ken Paxton—who won the nomination after Trump endorsed him against incumbent John Cornyn—is about as detestable as they come. He’s withstood what feels like countless scandals, impeachments, and a marriage that very publicly fell apart on “biblical grounds.” He fought his own party, and almost lost that primary despite Trump’s endorsement. Even among Republicans, he stood out as a crook and a creep; for Republican women, a Texas political operative told Christopher Hooks, “Paxton represents what they don’t want from their husbands.” (That operative also told Hooks that Paxton’s strongest constituency “is the men that want to be him.”)
Talarico, Hinojosa, and the Texas Democrats ran campaigns that focused on making regular people feel heard. They told stories of the Texas days of yore, of Ann Richards and a state that cared more about its citizens than about the billionaires who seek to gut the state for its resources. Hinojosa, in particular, hit Abbott hard on data centers, private school vouchers, and corruption. Elon Musk spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-Talarico advertising, but the old culture-war standbys didn’t work this time: Talafreako won in the end.
How does it feel to see Texas go blue on the map? It feels like jumping into ice-cold water on an unbelievably hot summer day—a euphoric jolt. To be honest, it still doesn’t quite feel real.
Texas has been a one-party state all of my life, and, in a turn that makes me dizzy to consider, it still is. These Democrats have no experience leading in Texas. They have been the minority party for so long that it’s impossible to predict how they will behave now that they hold the majority. But there is plenty of possibility. They can repeal Abbott’s long-hated private school voucher program. They can fight data centers. They can try to expand Medicaid, give more money to public schools, and repeal some of the atrocious anti-trans laws that have been passed in the last five years. They can save the lives of women who would otherwise have died because of the state’s draconian abortion laws. They could, if they have the courage, make anti-woke comedy clubs illegal. They can try and make the state better for the people who live and work there, and if they can succeed a little, it will really fucking matter.
Texas could become the next Georgia, a historically red state on the precipice of a real and lasting shift toward a more humane and inclusive political reality. It will take a lot of work, but the people who got us to this morning aren’t scared of that. They have already proven that another Texas is possible.
