I felt the first glimmers of hope this summer, waiting in line at the visitors’ center in Big Bend National Park, in Texas. A couple in front of me bought an annual parks pass. The plastic card depicted George Washington and a glowering Donald Trump. The couple looked at the card with dismay. “Doesn’t it usually have a picture of a park on it?” the man asked. In 2025, the pass had featured a roseate spoonbill in Everglades National Park; in 2022, the Milky Way over San Juan National Forest.
The ranger’s shoulders tensed; this was not the first time he’d been asked this question, it seemed. “We’re not supposed to talk about politics,” he said.
A bearded man in motorcycle gear was next in line. He radiated the kind of spiky, aggressive energy that I associate with the President’s most fervent supporters, and, as he stepped up to the counter, I braced for conflict. “It’s ridiculous that I’m paying four dollars a gallon for gas and he’s still putting his face all over everything,” the man said. “I’m not getting a pass if he’s on it.” The ranger allowed himself a small, brief smile. Oh, Texas, I thought. It’ll always surprise you.
Hope is treacherous for Democrats in Texas; live through a few elections and you learn to mistrust, even dread, it. My first big election in the state was the 2014 governor’s race, when Wendy Davis, in her pink sneakers, energized an army of Texas women fighting for reproductive rights. She lost to Greg Abbott, then the state’s attorney general, by twenty points. Four years later, my friends and family living elsewhere were confident that there was no way Texans would choose a toad like Ted Cruz for senator over the radiantly charismatic Beto O’Rourke. I read a million articles about the demographic destiny that would turn Texas blue, and allowed the tendrils of optimism to unfurl within me, even if by then I was jaded enough not to admit it out loud. I spent another Election Night with that queasy plummeting feeling that the world was a worse place than I had thought, and that I needed to revise my expectations downward again.
Republicans in Texas have a tendency to act as though they were a permanent and ineradicable fixture of the Texas landscape, the expression of a deeply rooted and unchanging Lone Star essence. This is an absurd thing to assert in a state that has produced Lyndon B. Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, and Molly Ivins. But, in the past thirty-some years, the overwhelming dominance of Republicans—and, in the past decade, of the far-right Christian-nationalist wing of the Party—has bolstered these claims of inevitability. Their power persisted despite proliferating school shootings, the devastating failures of the state’s electrical grid, the preventable deaths of pregnant women, and other scandals, disasters, and tragedies. Hard-right politics came to feel like a weed that had choked every other kind of political expression. Lifelong Republicans who didn’t fall in line were mercilessly attacked. Many people I knew—activists; immigrants; advocates for public schools; college professors; parents of trans kids; women who were, or wanted to be, or didn’t want to get pregnant—questioned whether they could still feel at home in Texas. A number of them moved away. I understood why they thought that only one form of life could thrive here.
The state became a kind of national laboratory for MAGA policy: even before Trump’s second term, Texas had been busy investigating some gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse, banning D.E.I. in public higher education, and cruelly cracking down on immigration. In the run-up to the 2024 election, I saw people wearing “Make America Like Texas” shirts, and I felt a familiar sense of impending doom. When Trump won, my despair was laced with a nihilistic satisfaction: now the rest of the country would know what it felt like.
