“I’m about to get pulled over,” Kendall Scudder, the new chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said one morning in September, as he raced north on Highway 87 at ninety miles an hour. In his rearview mirror, he saw a Texas Highway Patrol S.U.V. flash its lights. A young officer in a khaki uniform and a cowboy hat approached Scudder, who typically drives a pickup truck but had folded all six feet three of himself into a rental Nissan Altima. “I shouldn’t have been doing that,” Scudder muttered under his breath.
The patrolman, whose nametag read “HAINES,” told Scudder that he’d committed two infractions: first, he’d been speeding, and, second, he’d been cruising in the left lane. Haines studied Scudder’s license and glanced at the rental agreement on the chairman’s phone. Then he fixed his attention on a gold pin attached to Scudder’s plaid navy blazer: a red-eyed donkey in a fighting stance, wearing boxing gloves. “What does that little pendant on your lapel mean?” he asked.
This cycle, Scudder, with help from the political-action committee Texas Majority, set out to make sure that no race in the state went uncontested, and successfully recruited candidates for each of a hundred and thirty-seven seats. Before he was pulled over, he was trying to get to a meet-and-greet with Diana Loya, a public-school instructional-support coördinator and a state legislative candidate, at a coffee shop in Dumas, Texas. One of the people who trickled in, Joni Denning, explained that she couldn’t talk about being a Democrat at the kennel and veterinary clinic where she works—the television is set to Fox News all day. She hadn’t heard much about James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate, except for attack ads. Denning had come to see if she could meet other people like her. “I don’t really know where they are,” she said.
Democrats around the country dream of a blue wave in Texas, but Party activists and voters describe needing something more akin to an irrigation system. Two-thirds of Democratic precinct chairs were vacant when Scudder became chairman. More than one-fifth of Texas counties have no Democratic Party county chair, a lack that he says makes it harder for candidates to tap into state-Party funds and reach voters. “The Democratic Party has abandoned Texas—or at least this part of Texas,” Aaron Hart, a horse-and-cattle rancher in the Panhandle, told me. “Everybody is pissed off, fed up, and where are you?” The state’s politics now follow a biennial weather pattern: polls show Democrats coming close to victory, and a late surge of Republican voters washes it all away.
“We put out these candidates and we don’t build on the infrastructure that they build,” José Loya, Diana Loya’s husband and the political director for Gina Hinojosa’s gubernatorial campaign, which has surged in recent polling, said. “Their campaigns are done, and then they just go out the wayside, and then they have to start all over.” (A formerly undocumented immigrant from Mexico, Loya once supported Trump, but renounced him after Jim Mattis, who commanded his Marine regiment during the Iraq War, broke with the President.) Tayhlor Coleman, a Democratic content creator who travels the state registering voters and living out of a van, said that she doesn’t tend to rely on local Party officials when organizing trips to rural areas. “Churches are my first call,” she said.
In 2024, as the Democrat Colin Allred challenged Ted Cruz for his Senate seat, Gilberto Hinojosa, who was then the chair of the Texas Democrats (and is Gina’s father), told me that he saw rural counties in Texas as perpetually red. His efforts to set up local Democratic Parties there had been futile, he said. “Those people are never, ever going to change. They’re ninety-per-cent white. They won’t vote for a Democrat,” he added. Coleman, who spends her days trying to give apathetic Texans a reason to register to vote, said that this attitude hurt the Party’s brand. “When you’re able to write off large portions of the population in places that are hard to win, then you don’t have to come up with a campaign message that provides any compromise, to reach across and build coalitions with people who think differently from you,” she said. “And that’s why we’re losing.”
Scudder’s strategy is to cede less territory. “They should have been doing this a decade ago,” he said. Besides recruiting new candidates, he’s opened a regional office in Amarillo, a place that he says Democrats have treated like “no man’s land,” despite the fact the city has a population of two hundred thousand. (A nearby nuclear-weapons-assembly plant employs more people than the school district does teachers.) Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of roughly four hundred there in mid-October; Talarico has also held events in Amarillo twice, and his campaign pointed to polling that showed him ahead of Allred’s 2024 performance there. Gina Hinojosa, who has filmed campaign videos in Amarillo, has leaned into the issue of data centers when talking to rural Texans, holding them up as signs of Republican corruption and corporate plunder, and down-ballot candidates have adopted similar talking points.
Scudder believes that when the Electoral College reapportions its votes after the next census, in 2030, Democrats will depend on Texas to elect a President. “The Party does not have a way to survive if you don’t become competitive in Texas,” he said on the road one night. “It’s a very urgent thing.” Scudder can’t control whether the big state campaigns, including Talarico’s, will get sidetracked or entirely derailed. Instead, he’s hoping that the local campaigns can act as land surveyors—that they’ll identify where supporters live and create a record for future elections, so that future candidates don’t have to start from scratch. Perhaps searching for votes in counties where Democrats lose by thirty points sounds desperate. But Democrats in Texas just might be.
In Dumas one Saturday morning, Scudder parked his rental car on a residential street, right behind a massive Ford pickup. Diana Loya emerged from it, wearing heels and holding a stack of campaign literature. Last election, she voted for Trump—“If you love God and love your country, you must be Republican,” she recalls thinking—but her views changed as a result of the President’s campaign to deport undocumented immigrants. “I honestly see this as kind of like trick-or-treating,” she said, before ringing the doorbell of a red brick home. When a woman opened the front door, the candidate introduced herself without saying that she was a Democrat. Loya asked the woman what she thought were the biggest issues her community was facing—“Data centers?” she offered.
The woman laughed. “Girl, I’m all for data centers,” she said, before shutting the door.
Loya and Scudder cut across the lawn to the next house. “I’ve never heard that before,” Scudder said.
The Texas Panhandle was once overwhelmingly represented in Congress by Democrats. “ ‘You don’t have enough money to be a Republican,’ ” Dustin Sanders, a rancher running for Armstrong County commissioner, remembers his grandfather telling him when he was growing up. By the nineteen-nineties, Karl Rove, the architect of many of George W. Bush’s political triumphs, had identified it as a culturally conservative place that could flip for the G.O.P. In 1992, Potter County split the ticket, electing George H. W. Bush to the White House and Bill Sarpalius, a Democrat, to the House of Representatives. By the next election, in 1994, George W. Bush had visited each of Texas’s two hundred and fifty-four counties in his campaign for governor; Potter County awarded that office, the Senate seat, and the House seat to the Republicans. “What Bush contributed was the solidification of rural Texas,” Rove told me.
That year marked the last cycle a Democrat would be elected to statewide office. “We as a party grew because we were open and inclusive,” Rove said. “We took longtime Democrats who felt they were conservative and that their party had left them, and we took Tejanos, and Asian Americans.” He added, “Republicans are in danger if they forget that.” (Lately, Rove has become the target of the President’s online barbs, after saying that he’d be voting for the Democratic railroad-commissioner candidate because of bigoted remarks the Republican hopeful made online. When I asked Rove if he was supporting Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and G.O.P. candidate for the Senate, he said, “Well, I’m going to avoid that question.”)
As Republicans consolidated wide victory margins and Bush ascended to the White House, Democrats retreated in Texas; this, in turn, made it seem impossible for them to win rural counties. Sonya Letson, a former county attorney who began chairing the Armstrong County Democratic Party last year, said that Republicans outworked her party. “The Party began to concentrate on the urban areas where they had more voters that were essentially easier to get to, and so the rural areas began to be organized by the Republican Party fairly heavily,” she told me. The previous Armstrong County Party chair died in 1994, and the position sat empty for decades because no one was willing to step up.
The current enthusiasm for Talarico and Hinojosa in Texas seems to have been built on the unresolved frenzy of other lightning-rod Democratic campaigns in the past decade or so: Wendy Davis’s campaign for governor, in 2014; Beto O’Rourke’s bid for Senate, in 2018, and governor, in 2022; and, Allred’s campaign for Senate two years ago. After those losses, the state experienced a drop in fund-raising and an exodus of campaign talent. Luke Warford, a former Texas Democratic Party staffer who founded the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, is trying to attack the problem outside of the formal Party apparatus, launching a six-million-dollar effort this cycle which includes recruiting candidates and training (and retaining) campaign staff. “If you were running a door-to-door sales company and you were not making any sales, you wouldn’t just knock on more doors,” he says. “You’d be, like, ‘Oh, do we have a product problem?’ ” The rural appeals that Scudder is making, Warford said, have the potential to move “tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of votes.” Yet Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott are still favored to win there. “The Panhandle votes Republican because the people there produce what this country runs on: oil and gas, cattle, and crops,” Madison Cercy, Paxton’s spokesperson, told me in a statement. “Democrats haven’t lost rural Texas because they didn’t visit enough. They’ve lost it because of what they believe.”
In a sense, Scudder agrees that Democrats’ message could use some quality control. “Any time that the Party moves away from economics, they’re losing the plot,” he told me. “Who cares if Trump’s name’s on the Kennedy Center?” He sees the work of a professional Texas Democrat as a balancing act: don’t be so strident that you turn off persuadable moderates, but prove to apathetic voters that you’re willing to throw down for them. “When you have 1.1 million people who voted in 2020 and stayed home in ’24, they’re telling you you aren’t worth voting for,” Scudder said. The Democrats are trying a new message: casting themselves as co-conspirators in a fight to protect a certain way of life.
On September 12th, about two hundred Democrats filtered into the Amarillo Civic Center for a fund-raising dinner put on by local Party chairs. A promotional flyer advertised it as “a nod to the 90’s,” and guests could pay forty dollars for bottle pulls. A live miniature donkey named Stu was available for petting, though he soon had to leave to attend a wedding.
During the opening remarks, an m.c. announced a special video appearance by Talarico. “Hey, Texas Democrats!” Talarico said. “Thank you all for being here today and for showing up for your county convention.” Some in the room thought the video message, which made no specific mention of the Amarillo Democrats, was recycled from earlier this year. “The disrespect,” Scudder said. He scanned the room of eager Democrats eating pasta and salad off paper plates. “These people are working their asses off for you, and you can’t make a fucking video?” he said, before attempting to take that remark off the record. (After I reached out to Talarico’s campaign for comment, Scudder called me to say that a county chair had mistakenly saved two videos with the same name.)
A few tables away, Dustin Sanders, the rancher running for Armstrong County commissioner, sat with Aaron Hart, his husband. Sanders, who is the first Democrat to run for the seat in decades, has gained traction in part because of his viral social-media posts criticizing data centers. Earlier this summer, he had sat on the front porch of his family ranch in Claude, Texas, where he raises show lambs, and posted a photo of a cluster of bright lights in the distance. “Just sitting on the porch after a 105 degree day with no power or water because the grid is overloaded,” he wrote. “We are all ok though as we sit here and look at this beautiful data mine lit up 3 miles from home. . . . Texas can do better!! Deregulation sucks!!!” “Just bitchin’, is all I was doing,” he recalled. But since then his campaign has been buoyed by anger from residents over a six-building data center that Google is putting up near his home. He started adding hashtags such as #saveourwater and #saveourranchers to his missives; soon, they were being shared thousands of times.
“He’s an influencer now,” Hart said, facetiously.
“I know!” Sanders said. “And I don’t even have to take pictures of my feet, which is amazing.”
Onstage, Sanders, who needs only about a hundred and thirty votes to win, said the data center had changed the county “overnight.” “When people went to ask the commissioners and the judge about what is happening with this project, and how it is going to affect the county, they were met with what I would consider ‘Daddy answers,’ ” Sanders told the crowd. “ ‘Don’t worry, Daddy knows what’s best. Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.’ To me, that is not how local government works.” (Google declined to comment; in an e-mail, a spokesperson for Crusoe, the company building the data center, wrote that it “followed all regulatory processes” and that nearby wind farms help power the complex.) Sanders later clarified that he wasn’t against data centers, just the way the county handled it—plus, he joked, if Google came asking, he’d sell the ranch for the right price.
After dinner, Sanders and Hart took me to a speakeasy in the basement of a hotel on Amarillo’s main drag. The two ranchers met online, a few years ago, when Sanders was a Republican county commissioner. (He was really a Democrat, he said, but he would have had to organize his own Democratic ticket, since there was no local Party, and no one would want to vote for a Democrat anyway.) Sanders later divorced his wife, came out, and married Hart, a former Trump supporter who has since changed his mind over rising fuel costs. Living in a county where Trump won ninety-two per cent of the vote, Hart said, it’s harder to publicly support Democrats than it is to be openly gay. “Being gay is old news now,” he said, in between sips of his beer. “But they think that because we’re Democrats, we support murdering babies and letting boys in girls’ sports, letting a ten-year-old decide to have a sex change. That’s the mentality here.”
Recently, as early voting began, Sanders and others in Texas received mailers purporting to advertise a “Texas Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guide,” a move that some Democrats believe is designed to gin up conservative fervor. “Now the MAGAs think I’m trying to push an agenda and are running me off their porches,” Sanders said. ◆
