Transcribed from Progress Texas’ Daily Dispatch Podcast segment, click here to listen!

A strange sensation crept across all of progressive Texas on Sunday, and that was the unfamiliar sensation of victory. Democrats and progressives won elections all over the Lone Star State this weekend, and here’s a quick, comprehensive recap. 

North Texas Wins

In Tarrant County, voters completely shut out county GOP and Patriot Mobile-backed candidates. Bud Kennedy of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, trolling Tarrant County Republican Party Chair Bo French on Twitter, called it an 0-11 shutout of GOP candidates in that county’s three largest cities, including the Fort Worth, Arlington and Mansfield City Councils and School Boards, plus Keller ISD. The vast majority of those GOP losses were suffered by candidates backed by Patriot Mobile, a notorious DFW area virtual network operator and mobile phone service provider that gives a portion of its profits to conservative causes and candidates. All of their picks lost - notably Tammy Nakamura, who also had been backed by the True Texas Project, an anti governmental group flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center, failed in her bid for re-election to the Grapevine Colleyville School Board, losing to Matt Foust. 

A pattern emerged—not only in DFW, but statewide—in which school board members and candidates who had taken part in the MAGA trend of banning books found themselves losing the favor of voters. For North Texas, this included former Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Deborah Peoples winning outright from a field of six candidates a seat on Fort Worth’s City Council, and MAGA wannabe Julie Short, having been roundly criticized for enlisting outside right wing money in her bid to unseat Mansfield Mayor Michael Evans, fell well short of that goal (if you’ll pardon the pun). 

DFW and North Texas friends, keep the party going and please mark your calendars for Monday June 9, that’s our 15th Anniversary Celebration in Dallas! We look forward to seeing you there, and click here to RSVP early!

Houston Wins

Meanwhile in the Houston area, Katy School Board Candidate James Cross, a longtime local educator who will soon have a local elementary school named after him, defeated the incumbent, Katy ISD Board President Victor Perez, who’s not only been big on banning books, he’s also pushed policies that require teachers and administrators to report students who identify as transgender to their parents—Perez, books bans, and bigotry are out.

San Antonio Races

The San Antonio Mayoral race was expected to result in a runoff, and it did—of the 27 candidates in the race (wow!), former Under Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and longtime Democratic notable Gina Ortiz Jones drew a bit over 27 percent of the vote, while Republican Rolando Pablos, former Texas Secretary of State under Governor Greg Abbott, reigned in just under 17 percent. Keep an eye out for a spirited partisan runoff phase in Alamo City over the next few weeks—that runoff is in just over a month on June 7. It wouldn't surprise me to see even bigger interest in the runoff than the initial election, which saw historically low turnout of less than 10 percent, potentially due to the annual Fiesta celebrations happening at the same time, or perhaps again, due to the likelihood of a runoff happening anyway. 

Plus, Progress Texas is proud to welcome San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg as our guest for a live podcast taping at our Party For Progress this coming Tuesday evening, and you’re invited! We look forward to a long-overdue visit to Alamo City - on Tuesday May 6, live pod taping with Mayor Ron Nirenberg and good fun with you in San Antonio! Thanks to Austin Kaplan And The Kaplan Law Firm, Nicolette Ardiente, Shannon Hrncir, Wil Jeudy, James Lifshutz, Traci Miller, Jeremy Nelson, Julianne Reeves, Patricia Smothers, Holly Taylor, and more for their generous support of our San Antonio Party For Progress. Join the ranks today, and support progress in San Antonio by clicking here!

Austin Area Wins

I attended a picnic yesterday in Lakeway, hosted by the Lake Travis Democrats, where that aforementioned unfamiliar, but highly enjoyable vibe of success was very much in the air, for smaller towns too. The Lake Travis School Board added two Democrats, making four on that board for the first time in about a quarter century. The signs for the defeated Republican candidates are still littered all over Lakeway, some obviously transphobic, and it’s great to see candidates dealing in MAGA ugly take a loss. To those folks we say, the election is over and your gross signs are now not only trash, they’re litter.

Michelle Davis at Lone Star Left in election coverage called the May elections a very bad night in Texas for MAGA, and a statewide rejection of extremism. She heaped praise upon the organizing efforts of the Tarrant County Young Democrats, who said that “[they] didn’t just show up, they organized, knocked on doors, made calls, and fought for every single school board seat they were targeting. And guess what? They swept them all. That’s the kind of ground game that wins elections. That’s the kind of energy we need to keep building.” Davis also noted major Democratic strides in the supposedly-red Collin County, home of Ken Paxton. The Collin County Democratic Party listed 16 wins for the area, including a new mayor in Richardson: Democrat and former City Council Member Amir Omar unseated incumbent Republican Bob Dubey.

What Now?

Local elections matter, and in fact, have a greater impact on our daily lives than anything happening at the state and federal level. Still, we must note that all of this is happening as all kinds of ugly is coming out of the Texas Legislature, and also as Donald Trump’s ratings on his first 100 days are at historic lows. All of this progressive success is great, and we should enjoy it, but we should view it pragmatically, as the sign that the tide is turning - but still, this is going to be a long fight—almost permanent in nature. We’ve seen that solid, smart action on the ground matters, and that it works. At this point, progressives and Democrats need to savor and remember these wins, and work even harder for the goal of even bigger wins in November of 2026, when we’ll have a chance to put a real check on Donald Trump. That is a battle we cannot afford to lose. It’s time to take these local wins and scale them up to new heights. Congratulations everybody - to the candidates, the activists, and especially, to the voters.

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