Democrats seized control of the Texas House in Tuesday’s midterms for the first time in more than two decades, capping a night in which voters ousted Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and left Republicans reeling in a state that has long anchored national GOP politics.
With Gina Hinojosa headed to the governor’s mansion, Democrats have broken the Republican trifecta that has governed Texas since 2003, the year the GOP took control of the lower chamber. Republicans held onto the state Senate, denying Democrats a trifecta of their own, but the party will have more power to set the state’s agenda than it has had since the mid-1990s.
Democrats entered the night with 62 of the House’s 150 seats, needing to flip 14 to claim the majority. By early Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press had called 11 Republican-held seats in their favor, and GOP incumbents had conceded in three others. Democrats led in at least seven other GOP districts where all Election Day returns had come in — positioning them to net 21 seats, barring changes from recounts or provisional and mail-in ballots that could still be tallied.
If those results hold, Democrats would enter the next legislative session in January with 83 seats to Republicans’ 67. And with her defeat of Patrick, Democrat Vikki Goodwin is poised to serve as the Senate’s presiding officer, though the GOP majority was expected to consider limiting her powers by approving new rules for the chamber.
The House flip caught many of its own members by surprise, Democrats and Republicans alike. But not everyone was totally blindsided. During a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival in September, House Democrats’ caucus chair, Houston Rep. Gene Wu, predicted his party would flip the House. State Rep. Christina Morales, who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm, last month made a “conservative estimate” that her party would flip five to eight seats. But speaking with The Texas Tribune shortly after midnight, she said flipping the House “has been our goal from the very beginning.”
“We feel as though we may have control of the House, but we’re cautiously optimistic,” the Houston lawmaker said.
GOP data consultant Ross Hunt, unsurprisingly, had a more pessimistic view for his party.
“We don’t yet have a complete picture of the scope of Republican losses in the state House and statewide,” Hunt said. “We do have enough to know that it looks like Republicans are going to lose control of the Texas state House of Representatives.”
Election Day votes, where Republicans typically outpace Democrats, would not be enough to reverse the number of races where Republicans were behind.
Among the Democratic pickups was Tarrant County’s House District 93, where Democrat Ericka Lomick received the most votes in both the general election and a special election to serve out the last several weeks of former GOP Rep. Nate Schatzline’s term, after he stepped down earlier in the year. But Lomick suspended her campaign in September after facing questions about her eligibility to serve, only to remain on the ballot because it was too late to remove her.
It’s unclear what will happen to that seat, Allison Campolo, Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair, told The Texas Tribune, noting that lawyers were examining the matter.
In April, Patrick became the first to hint at looming trouble in the lower chamber, saying Republicans were “going to have a tough time” holding onto their majority.
The GOP’s House losses were widespread. Republican state Reps. Janie Lopez of San Benito and Denise Villalobos of Corpus Christi lost battleground South Texas races. In the Southside of San Antonio, Democrat Kristian Carranza flipped a seat held by Rep. John Lujan, who ran for Congress instead of seeking reelection. Elsewhere in San Antonio, Rep. Marc LaHood lost.
Democrats also picked up several seats in Harris and Tarrant counties. In Dallas County, Rep. Angie Chen Button of Garland was unseated, a coup for Democrats who had tried and failed to unseat her numerous times during her nine terms in the House. Rep. Ben Bumgarner, R-Flower Mound, conceded in his Denton County race.
But Republicans did not lose every contested race. San Antonio Rep. Mark Dorazio won reelection, as did Houston Rep. Mano DeAyala, despite Democrats flipping or leading in almost every Harris County swing district. University Park Rep. Morgan Meyer won by double digits in a Dallas County district Democrats have long targeted.
House Speaker Dustin Burrows and Republicans entered Election Day seemingly prepared, having learned from the wave cycle of 2018, when Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s late surge in the U.S. Senate race caught off guard the GOP, which let 12 House seats slip. Republicans and their allies spent millions across more than 30 GOP-held House districts.
Republicans outspent Democrats in most competitive races.
In 2020, the last time Democrats aspired to take the House, national Democratic groups spent millions trying to win the chamber ahead of a critical redistricting year. The effort yielded no net gain in seats, a deflating result for Texas Democrats in a year the party made gains nationally. This cycle marked the first since the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the arm of the national party that focuses on state legislatures, named the Texas House a target. The DLCC targeted 12 potential flips and promised to capitalize on a “once in a generation” favorable political environment.
“Tonight’s victory is earth-shattering,” DLCC President Heather Williams said in a statement. “What happened in the Texas House isn’t just an upset — it is a seismic shift that proves no statehouse is out of reach when you invest to build change from the ground up.”
Despite the renewed interest, little national money flowed in, and House Democratic campaigns struggled financially.
“A lot of our candidates ran their races on a shoestring without any support from the national organizations, and we struggled to raise money, but they still managed to move the needle,” Morales said.
In Tarrant County, for instance, Rep. John McQueeney, R-Fort Worth, appeared to lose his seat to a Democratic opponent, Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin, whom he outspent 30-to-1 from July onward. McQueeney trailed by over 1,000 votes in unofficial results that included all Election Day returns.
With races decided by slim margins, both parties are already considering whether Democrats could retain their new seats in 2028, when the party may not be able to count on another generational blue wave.
“If we do flip the House — it seems more realistic now — we need to hold on to it,” Morales said Tuesday evening. “We need the infrastructure in place to be able to hold on to it.”
Hunt said there were warning signs, but Republicans and Democrats alike were surprised by how poorly the statewide Republicans performed. Losses by everyone from Abbott to U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton trickled down the ballot in calamitous fashion for the GOP.
At the same time, Democrats appeared to come up just short in a handful of districts where their nominees ran barely visible campaigns.
“If they had known things were this close, there would have been a lot more investment in the in races up and down the ballot on the left,” Hunt said.
Even with the deluge of flips in the House, the line in the Texas Senate appeared to hold firm at 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats.
Sen. Taylor Rehmet, D-Fort Worth, held onto his seat against Republican Leigh Wambsganss, who he defeated in a special election upset in January that offered a harbinger of Tuesday’s wave. With his victory on Tuesday, Rehmet won a full four-year term representing the district President Donald Trump carried by 17 points.
With the House under Democratic control, the Senate is positioned to be the one GOP-controlled body in a divided government. Six Senate districts were unexpectedly close races, but the Republicans there, including Sen. Charles Schwertner of Georgetown, led.
“Texas stands as long as the Texas Senate Republican caucus holds the line,” Schwertner posted on X shortly before midnight. “We will.”
Democrats’ agenda in the House will come into focus in the coming weeks and months, starting as soon as next week when lawmakers can start filing bills for the upcoming session. Hinojosa will also play a role through her power to designate “emergency items,” historically an agenda-setting exercise for governors, in the early weeks of the session.
Morales said the new House Democratic majority’s early priorities would include expanding Medicaid, repealing school vouchers and “repealing all of the awful legislation that passed to attack immigrants and people with brown skin.”
The race for the speaker’s gavel was already underway Tuesday night. Rep. Senfronia Thompson, a Houston Democrat who has served since 1973, announced her bid for speaker before midnight with the backing of at least 11 Democrats, including Wu, the caucus chair.
Known to colleagues as “Ms. T,” Thompson is the longest-serving woman and Black lawmaker in Texas history, a status that garners her respect from members in both parties. In a statement, she said the party now has “enormous responsibility to deliver for the people we serve.”
“I am grateful for the support of my colleagues, and I am ready to lead this House with the experience, respect, and determination this moment demands,” Thompson said. “This is an opportunity to turn the page, bring people together, and get to work for every Texas family.”
Hunt and a Democratic Texas House staffer, who was granted anonymity because of their position in the lower chamber, said Speaker Pro Tempore Joe Moody was also in the running. Moody, an eighth-term Democrat from El Paso, has been a key partner of GOP House leadership and could court Republicans to help win the gavel. That strategy would be akin to how former Rep. Joe Straus, a moderate, lifted the speakership from fellow Republican Rep. Tom Craddick after the 2008 Democratic wave left the GOP with a 76-74 majority.
“Speaker Pro Tem Moody is really setting himself up to possibly be the Democratic Straus, which I say in a fully complimentary way,” the Democratic staffer said.
Morales was not on Thompson’s initial list of 10 supporters, but told the Tribune she was backing the 87-year-old House dean.
“Anything I was doing was to make sure that she would be the first woman person of color speaker of the Texas House of Representatives,” Morales said. “She has 100% of my support, and I don’t see any reason why she wouldn’t be the speaker of the House if we do reach the majority tonight.”
Hunt said there was already consensus building on the right that the GOP would need to redefine itself to hold Texas as the state changes and becomes more competitive.
“That moment has come a lot sooner than Republicans anticipated, and Republicans are going to have to really reinvent their party here in the state if they wanted to be able to go back and contend again for the territory they’ve lost tonight, and to battle for what is now certainly a swing state coming into the next presidential election,” Hunt said.
Sneha Dey contributed to this report.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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