Gathered in San Antonio on Saturday, candidates vying to chair the Texas Democratic Party laid out a litany of shortcomings they say are responsible for the party’s now three-decade losing streak at the statewide level.
Namely, the party has ignored the state’s rural parts in favor of its urban centers, failed to develop a bench of strong candidates, missed the ideological shifts among Latino voters and allowed their agenda to become increasingly unrelateable to working-class voters, according to the seven candidates on stage at Our Lady of the Lake University’s Thiry Auditorium.
“Like everyone else on this stage, I’m tired of losing,” said Patsy Woods Martin, a longtime Democratic organizer and political ally to the state’s last Democratic governor, Ann Richards, who left office in 1994.
Texas Democrats face numerous opportunities in 2026, when its governor, lieutenant governor and nearly all other statewide offices are up for reelection, as well as one of its two U.S. Senators, John Cornyn (R-Texas). And even the national party has acknowledged Democrats’ progress in Texas is critical to the party’s overall longterm health.
But at Saturday’s candidate forum — one of the final ones before a new state party chair is chosen on Saturday — the path to a more successful future was unclear.
Texas Democrats’ previous party chair Gilberto Hinojosa held the role for 12 years but resigned in November after party activists panned his suggestion that Democrats’ electoral losses were a reflection of their embrace of transgender rights and other progressive issues.
Such ideological disagreements remain fresh headed into the chairmanship election, with one candidate at Saturday’s forum accusing the party of allowing its activists to craft a brand around social issues rather than the “kitchen table” issues on voters’ minds.
“[Democrats have focused on] everything but a job, everything but affordability, everything but education… everything but health care,” said Steve Miller, a pastor from Northeast Texas. “The issues that really matter to what happens to a person each and every day, … we don’t care. That’s why we’ve been losing.”
Meet the Democratic chair candidates
A total of eight candidates are running for the position, with backgrounds ranging from former candidates to fundraisers to political strategists.
Woods Martin, who grew up in San Antonio, raised tens of millions of dollars for Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign and served as the executive director of Annie’s List, which helps elect Democratic women in Texas.
Two candidates who’ve run large county parties, Delia Parker-Mims from Denton County and Lillie Schechter from Harris County, are running on their experience turning out hard-to-reach voters and building future talent within their parties.
Meanwhile two other candidates campaigned unsuccessfully for their party’s nomination in the 2024 U.S. Senate race — including San Antonio veteran Aaron Arguijo, who was kicked off the ballot in Democrats’ 2024 U.S. Senate primary, and tax consultant Meri Gomez, who took 4.6% of the vote in that race.
The winner will be chosen by the roughly 120 party activists on the State Democratic Executive Committee who are gathering at the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union Hall in Austin this weekend for their quarterly meeting.
They’ll use ranked choice voting to select the new chair on Saturday, allowing for much politicking on the day of the decision.
Among some of those voting, chair candidates’ political ideology has taken a back seat to how they’ll manage more strategic aspects of the job, like keeping or firing existing staff. The old leadership’s political director, San Antonio strategist Ryan Garcia, has already departed for a new job, and some SDEC members want even bigger changes.
“That was my number one issue going into this race, who’s going to hold the people working at the party accountable?” said Cole Bowles, an SDEC member representing Congressional District 20, who said he’s supporting Woods Martin.
Other strategy deliberations included whether to invest limited resources in overwhelmingly red districts, or risk leaving those parts of the state behind.
“I was nominated for the Texas Senate in one of the most conservative districts in the state of Texas, where I felt disrespected and ignored by a party apparatus that did not care about communities and forgotten parts of the state,” said Kendall Scudder, a chair candidate who has since moved to Dallas and won a seat on the county appraisal board.
A lack of candidates for 2026
Among the more pressing matters that most candidates could agree on was a lack of candidates lined up for the many races on the horizon.
The first statewide office to come open in years, state comptroller, has drawn multiple serious GOP candidates while the Democrats have yet to produce anyone compelling, they pointed out.
“Whether you like Beto O’Rourke or you like Colin Allred — everyone loves one, hates one — we can all recognize what they both did is they raise about $100 million for each of their elections in order to flip the state,” said Schechter.
Several candidates questioned where the party will continue to find more O’Rourkes or Allreds willing to put themselves up for statewide office with almost no state party apparatus to help.
“This time next year we have a primary coming up for governor and lieutenant governor and all down the ticket,” said Miller. “Can anybody tell me who the candidates are for governor right now?”
A focus on South Texas
Aside from the upcoming statewide races, candidates also spent significant time on how Democrats can stop the progress Republicans made in South Texas during the 2024 election.
President Donald Trump won 55% of Latino voters in Texas last year, nearly sweeping the state’s traditionally blue border counties and shifting the political landscape all the way up to Bexar County, where he and Republican state Rep. John Lujan both carried a majority-Hispanic state House district that President Joe Biden had won two years earlier.
“Bexar County is ground zero if we ever want to get to a point where we’re gaining seats in the Texas House,” said Scudder, who suggested that Democrats shore their standing here by expanding their appeal with veterans around the city’s military bases.
In Harris County, Schechter said Democrats already have a model for improving their performance with Latino voters, which could be expanded elsewhere in the state.
“We actually spent years leading up to the elections working together with labor, and with other organizations around the county to make sure that we met voters where they’re at,” she said. “We had staff that looked like our electorate and we talked to them about the issues that they cared about.”
Woods Martin, meanwhile, was the only candidate to acknowledge a more immediate threat to local Democrats.
On the heels of their 2024 victories in South Texas, Republicans are not only going on offense in two Congressional seats this election cycle, but Gov. Greg Abbott is also trying to elect a conservative candidate in San Antonio’s mayoral race this year.
“That cannot happen. We have got to support our Democrats in these local races and be prepared to take these Republicans on,” Woods Martin said. “They’re coming after us, and they’re coming after you in San Antonio, and we’ve got to say, ‘No… We’ll fight you.’”
