After a morale-shattering performance at the 2024 ballot box, a panel of Texas Democrats are about to choose the party’s next leader, someone who they hope will put back the pieces and restore faith in its future.
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The State Democratic Executive Committee will meet on Saturday to elect the successor to party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa and complete the remainder of his term. He served nearly 13 years as the party figurehead leading Democrats’ efforts to end more than two decades of Republican control in Texas.
That goal seemed within reach in 2018 and 2020. But after President Donald Trump’s resurgent victory in November, and as Hispanic voters in South Texas drifted further to the right, Democrats worry they’re losing ground on the gains they made throughout Hinojosa’s tenure.
“We’re at a crossroads right now,” said Texas Democratic Party Treasurer Odus Evbagharu. “We know that we’re the right ones in this moment to lead, but in order to do that, we have to win, and we have to go get power. That’s why this TDP chair race is so important.”
Hinojosa announced his resignation shortly after the election last year, acknowledging Democrats’ dismal performance up and down the ballot.
“It is imperative that our Democratic leaders across the country reevaluate what is best for our party and embrace the next generation of leaders to take us through the next four years of Trump and win back seats up and down the ballot,” he said at the time, calling on Democratic leaders “at all levels to join me in lifting up the next generation in order to unite our party.”
Matt Angle, a veteran Texas Democratic operative and director of the Lone Star Project, said the leadership race gives the party an opportunity to reset and elect someone who can “internalize the responsibility to help other people get elected.”
“The expectations are not that any chair — regardless of who wins — is able to turn everything around on their own,” he said. “It’s a matter of being able to create a sense of confidence that the party is run competently, to create some financial stability and to create a real incentive for others to step up and do their part.”
Because Hinojosa resigned before the end of his term, his successor will be decided by the party’s 121-member governing board, rather than a larger group of delegates at the party’s convention.
Eight candidates are running for chair.
The top candidates
The leading contender is Kendall Scudder, the party’s current vice chair for finance and an East Texas native from a family with lesbian moms. He said he comes from the type of nontraditional family Democrats should be advocating for. He worked in affordable housing and real estate analytics, and came onto the state party stage through the executive committee.
Scudder says his role would be to listen to the will of the party and build confidence that the party is advocating for working-class people.
But Scudder also has a reputation among some in the party as being divisive, including for his past willingness to criticize leadership for not listening to the grassroots.
“It’s important that our leadership listens to activists and grassroots on the ground when they tell us things are important to them, and that hasn’t been happening,” Scudder said.
In May, Scudder was elected to the Dallas Central Appraisal District board after two unsuccessful bids for the Legislature. However, he resigned that seat on Thursday to quell concerns after the Texas Democratic Party’s lawyer issued an opinion saying he couldn’t hold the DCAD and run for party chair at the same time.
Scudder’s top opponents include Lillie Schechter, who chaired the Harris County Democratic Party from 2016 to 2020, and Patsy Woods Martin, who for four years led Annie’s List, an organization that helps elect progressive women in Texas.
Schechter, a native Houstonian and 7th generation Texan, pointed to her experience flipping local elected seats blue, reaching voters and fundraising as chair of the Harris County Democratic Party during the 2018 and 2020 elections.
She said she was “devastated” by Trump’s reelection, and felt the Texas Democratic Party wasn’t acting as the “central hub” for organizing and volunteers that she thought it could be.
“We need to continue to show Democratic voters that they have an alternative,” she said. “We can’t just be the minority party. We need to be the opposition party.”
Her roadmap to power for the state party stretches through 2032, when she hopes Democrats will have a “fighting chance” after redistricting in 2031 and gains over the next two election cycles. She wants to turn the party into a “year-round organizing machine,” breaking the state down by region and population to meet and galvanize voters in their communities.
Woods Martin began her career in politics as a state Senate campaign volunteer in Lubbock and later worked with Ann Richards before she became governor. Since her time with Annie’s List, Woods Martin helped launch a political action committee for state House Democrats in 2020 and was former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s finance chair at the start of his gubernatorial campaign.
The party needs to provide help, assistance and guidance to Democratic activists, she said.
One of her top priorities is to address the party’s losses among Hispanic voters in South Texas, but also in cities. She plans to do that with year-round investment and organizing.
“My sense is we have taken our voters for granted,” Woods Martin said. “We have not listened to them. We have talked to them with a more nationalized message than we should have.”
Thanks to her time at Annie’s List, she boasts being the only party chair candidate who “has run a winning Democratic statewide organization” and has a track record of raising millions of dollars, an important point at a time when the party is strapped for cash, and donors could be weary about a change of personnel at the party.
What makes this race different
Most party chair races are decided in midterm election years on a loud, bustling convention floor where thousands of delegates gather to vote. The election becomes a contest shaped by region and race. This time, however, Democrats will meet at a union hall in Austin at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, where only the 121 members of the SDEC will cast a vote in the party chair pageant.
“If you are on a convention floor or in an election writ large, you can sort of speak in platitudes and really try to jazz people up and get them excited,” Scudder said. “But here you are held accountable to intricacy, and that is, I think, to the advantage of the party — not to the advantage necessarily, if you’re wanting someone that just feeds a bunch of red meat.”
By contrast, chair candidates will have to speak to party governance, party finances and the programs that the party should invest in.
The group casting votes on Saturday is an insular one, and many members are progressive activists dissatisfied with the direction of the party. That electorate changes the nature — and possible outcome — of the race.
“It’s an insidery game,” Evbagharu said, while noting that SDEC members were elected in 2024 to represent broader delegations in situations like this.
The party has gradually expanded the SDEC to include more stakeholders, and in 2022, it shifted the SDEC’s building blocks from the 31 state Senate districts to Texas’ now-38 congressional districts. Additionally, the SDEC added state Democratic National Committee members as voting members, together opening up more than two dozen new SDEC seats. The expansion plus “redistricting,” which forced other members off, brought young blood onto the panel.
André Treiber, a staffer for Austin City Council member Zo Qadri, speaking in his capacity as a DNC member and an SDEC voting member, helped put together the “redistricting” rule, which took effect at the 2024 TDP convention.
“There’s a lot of fresh voices on the body, which I think is good for our party, ultimately, but it does also mean that some of these folks are learning the ropes,” Treiber said. “Now they’re thrown into probably the most consequential vote that they will ever cast in this term. That’s definitely got to be quite the whiplash for a new member.”
UPDATE:
New Leader of the Texas Democrats
The Texas Democratic Party’s governing board on Saturday elected Kendall Scudder to lead the party forward as its new chair after a devastating performance in November and years of electoral defeats.
“The challenge that we’re facing right now is terrifying for this country and for this state, and a lot of people are counting on us to come together and do the right thing and make sure that we are building a Texas Democratic Party that is worthy of the grassroots in this state,” Scudder said upon taking the gavel. “Let’s build a party that the working men and women of this state can be proud of.”
Scudder took 65 out of 121 votes, an outright majority in the seven-way race.
Scudder will take over as chair of the state party at a moment when Democrats are grasping for a way forward after blowout losses up and down the ballot last year, including President Donald Trump’s victory and a surge to the right by traditionally Democratic groups, such as Hispanic voters in South Texas.
After proclaiming Texas a competitive state where Democratic candidates had a fighting chance of winning statewide for the first time in three decades, party leaders instead watched as Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz trounced their Democratic challengers by roughly 14 and 9 percentage points, respectively. Democrats also ceded ground in the state Legislature and lost nearly every contested state appellate court race, in addition to 10 judicial races in Harris County — eating away at years of Democratic dominance in Texas’ largest county.
That left many Democrats concerned that, after appearing to come within striking distance of winning statewide in 2018, the party was back at a sobering low.
Longtime Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa announced his resignation shortly after the election, acknowledging the party’s poor performance and a need for a new direction.
That push for a fresh vision defined the race for party chair. Scudder will be the incumbent come 2026, when a broader group of delegates will elect the next full-term chair at the party convention in Corpus Christi. The 121-member State Democratic Executive Committee chose Hinojosa’s successor at the Saturday meeting, its first quarterly meeting of the year, because he resigned in the middle of his four-year term.
During his campaign, Scudder, an East Texas native, emphasized the importance of listening to the “grassroots.” Even before he launched his candidacy, he had accused party leadership under Hinojosa of ignoring those voters and activists. He wants to “recalibrate” the party toward a focus on working people.
“The reality is simply that Democrats on the ground don’t have a lot of confidence in party leadership anymore,” Scudder told The Texas Tribune in an interview on Thursday.
He wants the party to pay attention to areas he says it has previously written off, like rural communities, and put a priority on Spanish-language communications.
Scudder has worked in affordable housing and real estate. He came onto the state party stage through the SDEC, although he began his political activism with the Texas Young Democrats and the Texas College Democrats.
Scudder’s leading opponents, former Harris County Democratic Party Chair Lillie Schechter and former Annie’s List Executive Director Patsy Woods Martin, had offered similar but competing visions to re-establish Democratic credibility on kitchen table issues and reconnect with voters in their communities. During the campaign, Schechter and Woods Martin emphasized their experience getting Democratic candidates elected.
The SDEC hosted a candidate forum in Austin on Friday evening before toasting Hinojosa, the outgoing chair.
There, and at the panel’s meeting on Saturday, party insiders discussed how to rebuild credibility with working class voters, engage young people, fundraise and build a party infrastructure that better facilitates elected officials’ involvement in races around the state.
“The problem is that every Democrat thinks that if they had 10 more minutes, they could explain it to you,” Scudder said on party messaging during the forum. “We’ve got to get to a point where we’re speaking to people at their gut, because people vote with their guts and not their brains.”
While most party chair contests are shaped by region and race and decided at the party’s convention during midterm election years, this race was a more insular affair whose outcome was determined by a small group of the party’s activists, many of whom are progressives dissatisfied with the party’s strategies and operations.
Although the SDEC was prepared to go multiple rounds with their ranked choice ballot, Scudder’s 65 allowed him to win in the first round. Woods Martin took 27 votes, and Schechter took 26. Denton County Democratic Party Chair Delia Parker-Mims took two votes, and Meri Gomez rounded out the count with one vote. Eight candidates appeared on the ballot, but one dropped out before the election.
As the votes were tabulated, members passed out to-go shots of blue liquor — and non-alcoholic options — in an effort to liven spirits after a difficult 2024 election and an unprecedented chair race.
The candidates were largely aligned ideologically. And they especially all agreed on the need for change in the party’s direction.
“We are at an inflection point right now,” Schechter said, “and if we don’t learn lessons from the last election, and continue doing things status quo, we’re never going to win in Texas.”
This article was originally published on the Texas Tribune website and parts of it are republished here, with permission under a Creative Commons license. See our third-party content disclaimer.