A new day in Texas. We can breathe now.
In 2018, I was a new, first-time candidate for Texas House in a deep red district here in northern San Antonio and Bexar County. It had been eight years since a Democrat ran for that seat, and that person received 20% of the vote.
I won 38% of the vote in 2018, and 40% in 2020, after which I was proud to hand my district off to the next brave Democrat who ran and pushed the district a little bit more toward the left.
Two nights ago, my district almost flipped blue. By the time I went to bed Blue Horizon candidate Dr. Shelly Nickels for House District 122 was still ahead by 900 votes. Sadly, the late vote broke for the Republican incumbent, and Shelly was just shy of the votes she needed.
But as the world knows by now, almost two dozen Democratic challengers prevailed, and we flipped the Texas House–not to mention every single statewide office, the State Board of Education and numerous county-level offices.
That year of my first campaign, was also the year of the tragic shooting at Santa Fe high school, and it was the year I first met two other inspiring women who won races on Tuesday.
Soon after the horrific shooting, which followed so closely on the heels of the Parkland shooting, I co-led a coalition of state house candidates running in red districts across the state to issue a joint letter demanding our state government take action for sensible gun legislation.
Following that letter, we held a press conference on the Texas Capitol Steps.
That was the day I met today’s Governor-elect of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, at the time a first-term state representative from Austin, who joined our press conference in support.
It was also the day I met the now Lt. Governor-elect of Texas, Vikki Goodwin, who like me was running in a Republican-held district for the first time. In November of 2018, 12 Democratic challengers for Texas House flipped their districts and joined Gina to serve in the Texas House. Vikki was one of those 12.
As those who know the Blue Horizon origin story, it was also during that 2018 campaign that I met and became dear friends with my sister candidate and rural district organizing champion Stephanie Phillips.
She had started a Facebook group for the rag-tag bunch of Democrats who were written off as running impossible races, a Facebook group called Team Blue Texas that became the inspiration for the eventual Blue Horizon candidate community.
From our own experiences in that campaign, we knew there was a better way to support candidates doing the important and hard work in districts like ours, work that was necessary to grow a blue Texas. After our 2020 campaigns, we launched Blue Horizon Texas to support candidates just like we had been, just like Vikki had been.
And Vikki became one of our biggest supporters, headlining one of our very first webinars for the first cohort of Blue Horizon candidates in 2022.
She later joined the board of Blue Horizon Action Fund, our civic education and candidate/leadership pipeline nonprofit. Over the last several years, Vikki became a champion of countless state house candidates across the state, helping them when few others would. That work and her tireless organizing and leadership across the state is an important part of the Democratic sweep our state saw.
That sensible gun legislation that Gina and Vikki and I and dozens of other Democratic candidates advocated for back in 2018, never emerged.
But today is a new day in Texas. We can breathe. We have an incoming government who will truly serve the people.
We have leaders who will stand up for our safety and for our rights rather than threatening them;
who will put science and books back into our classrooms rather than Christian nationalism;
and who will take practical steps to address the affordability, health care, and climate crises rather than lining billionaires’ pockets.
At Blue Horizon, we’ve always been about supporting the candidates running in the impossible races, both because those candidates are heroes doing thankless work with almost no money and little other practical support, and because we knew that some day the impossible would be possible.
But only if we had led, and organized, and recruited, and supported candidates along the way to be ready when the tide turned.
For years we have avoided the language “blue wave” because it relied on assumptions that one perfect hero would flip the state.
The truth is that the wave starts at the bottom. It requires hundreds, thousands, of grassroots candidates, activists, and volunteers organizing in communities. And that’s where we’ve been for the past five years, helping momentum build until the wave crashed over the top.
This month marks Blue Horizon’s fifth birthday. So this week and next week and probably the one after that, we are celebrating.
We are celebrating Gina and Vikki and the rest of our statewide slate.
We are celebrating the 25 Blue Horizon candidates with confirmed wins, plus 2 others in races still too close to call. See them all here.
We are celebrating the rest of our endorsed candidates and all the other impossible candidates across Texas who didn’t win, but who moved their districts by double digits and gave voters a candidate to organize around, sometimes for the first time in decades.
We are celebrating eight years since the last big election for Democrats in Texas when we ran our first campaigns.
And we are celebrating five years of growing the Blue Horizon across Texas.
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