Scudder’s strategy is to cede less territory. “They should have been doing this a decade ago,” he said. Besides recruiting new candidates, he’s opened a regional office in Amarillo, a place that he says Democrats have treated like “no man’s land,” despite the fact the city has a population of two hundred thousand. (A nearby nuclear-weapons-assembly plant employs more people than the school district does teachers.) Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of roughly four hundred there in mid-October; Talarico has also held events in Amarillo twice, and his campaign pointed to polling that showed him ahead of Allred’s 2024 performance there. Gina Hinojosa, who has filmed campaign videos in Amarillo, has leaned into the issue of data centers when talking to rural Texans, holding them up as signs of Republican corruption and corporate plunder, and down-ballot candidates have adopted similar talking points.
Scudder believes that when the Electoral College reapportions its votes after the next census, in 2030, Democrats will depend on Texas to elect a President. “The Party does not have a way to survive if you don’t become competitive in Texas,” he said on the road one night. “It’s a very urgent thing.” Scudder can’t control whether the big state campaigns, including Talarico’s, will get sidetracked or entirely derailed. Instead, he’s hoping that the local campaigns can act as land surveyors—that they’ll identify where supporters live and create a record for future elections, so that future candidates don’t have to start from scratch. Perhaps searching for votes in counties where Democrats lose by thirty points sounds desperate. But Democrats in Texas just might be.
In Dumas one Saturday morning, Scudder parked his rental car on a residential street, right behind a massive Ford pickup. Diana Loya emerged from it, wearing heels and holding a stack of campaign literature. Last election, she voted for Trump—“If you love God and love your country, you must be Republican,” she recalls thinking—but her views changed as a result of the President’s campaign to deport undocumented immigrants. “I honestly see this as kind of like trick-or-treating,” she said, before ringing the doorbell of a red brick home. When a woman opened the front door, the candidate introduced herself without saying that she was a Democrat. Loya asked the woman what she thought were the biggest issues her community was facing—“Data centers?” she offered.
The woman laughed. “Girl, I’m all for data centers,” she said, before shutting the door.
Loya and Scudder cut across the lawn to the next house. “I’ve never heard that before,” Scudder said.
The Texas Panhandle was once overwhelmingly represented in Congress by Democrats. “ ‘You don’t have enough money to be a Republican,’ ” Dustin Sanders, a rancher running for Armstrong County commissioner, remembers his grandfather telling him when he was growing up. By the nineteen-nineties, Karl Rove, the architect of many of George W. Bush’s political triumphs, had identified it as a culturally conservative place that could flip for the G.O.P. In 1992, Potter County split the ticket, electing George H. W. Bush to the White House and Bill Sarpalius, a Democrat, to the House of Representatives. By the next election, in 1994, George W. Bush had visited each of Texas’s two hundred and fifty-four counties in his campaign for governor; Potter County awarded that office, the Senate seat, and the House seat to the Republicans. “What Bush contributed was the solidification of rural Texas,” Rove told me.
That year marked the last cycle a Democrat would be elected to statewide office. “We as a party grew because we were open and inclusive,” Rove said. “We took longtime Democrats who felt they were conservative and that their party had left them, and we took Tejanos, and Asian Americans.” He added, “Republicans are in danger if they forget that.” (Lately, Rove has become the target of the President’s online barbs, after saying that he’d be voting for the Democratic railroad-commissioner candidate because of bigoted remarks the Republican hopeful made online. When I asked Rove if he was supporting Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and G.O.P. candidate for the Senate, he said, “Well, I’m going to avoid that question.”)
