Texans showed up and asserted control. Now the work begins. We must build a future in which the most vulnerable among us are no longer attacked or made to feel less-than human
The week before the midterm elections, I wrote that, “as Texans, we have a massive opportunity in front of us. I encourage Texans to see a different path forward.”
And wow. I didn’t fully realize just how many millions of us felt much the same way.
I’m so proud to be a Texan right now, but I’ll be the first to admit that I held some strongly guarded optimism before Election Day results started to come in. We’d seen candidates come close before, including El Paso’s own Beto O’Rourke coming within three points of defeating Senator Ted Cruz in the 2018 Senate race. So to say that last Tuesday’s results in the Lone Star State were shocking is an understatement the size of Texas itself.
I had faith that the people of our state understood that the leadership in Texas wasn’t cutting it. People in Texas are struggling. We have an affordability crisis in our state, we have ICE running rampant through our communities, our neighbors being shot and killed in the streets, and billionaires are trying to buy our elections. Not to mention one of the most corrupt politicians in our state’s history was chosen by Trump and Republicans to be their nominee for the U.S. Senate.
Needless to say, Texans locked in and showed up. Every single Democrat running a statewide race won. I feel like I need to repeat that to truly underscore the seismic shift in our state: Every single Democrat running a statewide race won! And won handily. In our U.S. Senate race, former Texas House member James Talarico defeated soon-to-be-former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by 12 points! In a state that President Trump won by almost the same margin just two years ago!
I’ll freely admit, some tears were shed. As I watched results coming in, I thought of Izel, my young daughter, who was asleep at that point, and cried at the excitement of telling her in the morning the new direction of our state. Did she fully understand what all of this meant? No. She’s five after all. But was I excited to share the news with her? You better believe it.
As I mentioned in my pre-election piece, I think many Texans thought about our future as we voted, and the future we’re leaving for our children, including Izel. We’re an immigrant family living in El Paso, in the shadow of border barriers stretching as far as we can see. Izel goes to a public school in the city, one in which, like the majority in the state, is struggling. Our lives are as political as it gets.
And I think there are some major lessons and takeaways from the results in Texas. First, is that Latinos, especially those living along the border, responded in numbers we had never seen before during midterm elections. Just look at Hidalgo and El Paso counties, the two most populous border counties in the state.
In 2022, during our last midterm election, O’Rourke, who was then running for governor, received 82,671 votes in Hidalgo County and beat Governor Greg Abbott there by 18 points. And in El Paso County, O’Rourke received 105,156 votes and won the county by 29 points. Now take a look at results from the Senate race this year in those counties.
In El Paso, Talarico received 160,395 votes and won the county by 48 points while in Hidalgo, Talarico received 146,763 votes and won the county by 46 points! These are presidential vote numbers for a state like Texas. Just as a reference, the most votes ever received by a Democrat in Texas were the 5.2 million that went to President Joe Biden in 2020. Talarico received 5.4 million this year, the most votes ever for a Democrat in the history of Texas.
And so much credit needs to be given to both candidates as well as organizations on the ground, who have been tirelessly doing the work of talking to voters, understanding the issues impacting them. And it didn’t stop with Talarico. Texas has also picked Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, a Latina from Brownsville and also a former member of the Texas House, who has already committed to reshaping the future of our state to one that isn’t bogged down by the obsession that Republicans had with culture wars, but instead is focused on the future for our kids, and not selling us out to billionaires like Elon Musk.
Second, we must also fully acknowledge the impact that other voters of color have had in our state, but especially Black voters. Poll after poll shows how Black voters in Texas stand against the anti-immigrant chaos our state has unleashed in numbers higher than any other race or ethnicity.
And we must also acknowledge how young people in Texas drove every single one of our 254 counties towards Democrats, compared to 2024. This shift also meant that the Texas House is now controlled by Democrats, for the first time since 2002.
But the work isn’t simply to elect a new batch of leaders in Texas. Sure, that’s the first step in changing how our state works for us, but the work of governing a new path forward, both at the state and federal levels, begins now. We can’t become complacent as Texans, and it’s just as important to ensure that our new leaders are also held accountable to the future of the state that they promised. A future that will work for all of us and a future in which the most vulnerable among us are no longer attacked or made to feel less-than.
We owe it to our kids a promising future, one that frankly was hard to imagine before Tuesday, Nov. 3, but that now feels closer than it’s ever felt in my lifetime.
