Democrats exceeded their wildest expectations Tuesday night, flipping every statewide office in a state where they’ve been shut out for more than three decades.
Further down the ballot, they also made gains in areas that have been out of reach for even longer — like a Northside Texas House district once represented by Republican House Speaker Joe Straus (R-Alamo Heights).
In deep blue San Antonio, residents haven’t seen their values represented in top state leadership in many years. Honking could be heard downtown starting around 10 p.m. as residents cheering the state’s first Latina governor, the end of one-party rule and a decisive rejection of President Donald Trump’s return to office.
Local voters also played a major role in shifting majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate, plus new dynamics within the Texas Legislature.
A host of local races and school finance issues were also on the ballot, and were dealt some unexpected results.
Here are the top takeaways from a historic night.
1. Top leaders with San Antonio ties
San Antonio didn’t put up any candidates for statewide office this year, but Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico both have deep ties to the community.
Hinojosa is a Brownsville native whose mother lives in the King William neighborhood.
Talarico taught at Jeremiah Rhodes Middle School on the West Side in 2011 — right after the Texas Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public education to address a budget shortfall.
Both served in the Texas Legislature before these races and campaigned here aggressively in the final weeks, featuring performances by Tejano bands and guests who were among their closest political allies.
“Imagine the day when we have a governor of Texas and a senator in Texas that both say their roots are in San Antonio, Texas,” former San Antonio Mayor and incoming Bexar County Judge Ron Nirenberg said at a campaign rally on the first day of early voting.
Some worried going into the night about slow results and legal challenges, but the two races weren’t even close.
Both Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton conceded their races to their opponents.
2. Democratic majorities in D.C.
Democrats flipped the U.S. House as expected, but in a move that few expected several months ago, they also took the U.S. Senate, putting the brakes on Trump’s previously unchecked power in Washington.
Leading into this election Trump pushed Texas to redraw its congressional maps to help Republicans shore up their narrow U.S. House majority.
The result was expected to net the party as many as five seats — but Democrats actually wound up gaining ground in this part of the state, flipping two GOP-held districts and hanging onto their own redrawn seats.
- Democrats held the new 35th Congressional District on San Antonio’s Southeast side, deemed the “whole enchilada” of the GOP’s redistricting gambit.
- In the race to replace disgraced former U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-San Antonio), Democrat Katy Padilla Stout defeated gun YouTuber Brandon Herrera.
- Republicans did add one new member representing Bexar County, former MLB Player Mark Teixeira, who won his race and will replace U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Dripping Springs).
- Republican U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Edinburg), who gave up part of her district to create the new 35th, lost her reelection race to Tejano star Bobby Pulido.
- In two other targeted South Texas races, Democratic U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo) and Vicente Gonzalez (D-McAllen) were reelected.
3. Shifting power dynamics at the Texas Capitol
In the Texas Legislature, Democrats’ faced a more daunting task. Most districts are too gerrymandered to be considered competitive, and even winning all of Democrats’ ambitious 12-seat target map wouldn’t have flipped an 88–62 seat majority.
Texas House Speaker rolls into town as local Republicans brace for tough election
Even so, they made up enough ground to shift the chamber’s dynamics.
Bexar County is represented by a total of 10 Texas House seats.
Going into the night, three were held by Republicans and seven were held by Democrats, but Democrats flipped two of them, with the third separated by just a few hundred votes.
- A GOP-held seat on the South Side, Texas House District 118, flipped back to Democrats’ control when Kristian Carranza defeated conservative school voucher architect Jorge Borrego.
- San Antonio’s Texas House District 121 hadn’t elected a Democrat since 1981, but in a blue wave Tuesday night, first-time candidate Zack Dunn toppled incumbent state Rep. Marc LaHood (R-San Antonio).
- A third GOP-held seat, Texas House District 122, represented by state Rep. Mark Dorazio (R-San Antonio), was still in a close race as of 3:43 a.m. Texas Republicans spent more than a half a million dollars on Dorazio’s behalf in the final month, while his little-known Democratic opponent, Shelly Nickels, spent just $5,600.
- One new face was elected to replace a retiring Democrat in Texas House District 125. SAISD union leader Adrian Reyna won the race to succeed state Rep. Ray Lopez (D-San Antonio).
The battle for Texas House control was still undecided at of early Wednesday morning.
4. Republicans nearing extinction in San Antonio
Republicans were already down and out in blue Bexar County, but after Tuesday’s results, their numbers are truly decimated.
In addition to Teixeira and Dorazio, they have Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) and state Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels), who were not up for reelection this year.
The list of casualties this year include LaHood, state Rep. John Lujan (R-San Antonio) who ran unsuccessfully for Congress, former U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (San Antonio), who resigned amid scandal, and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Dripping Springs), who ran for Attorney General and lost instead of reelection.
Ousted U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) also got his start in San Antonio, but became the first sitting Texas senator to lose his primary.
In nonpartisan offices, the San Antonio City Council still has two conservative members, Marc Whyte (D10) and Misty Spears (D9), and one conservative Bexar Central Appraisal District board member cruised to reelection unopposed Tuesday night.
5. Nirenberg’s next chapter
Bexar County elected a new generation of top leaders on Tuesday night, with former San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg claiming the county’s top leadership role.
After terming out as mayor last year, Nirenberg raised eyebrows by launching a Texans for Ron Nirenberg PAC, writing a political memoir and reportedly considered a gubernatorial bid.
In the end, the politically ambitious Texas Democrat chose to stay local and pursue the county’s top leadership role, once held by his political mentor Nelson Wolff.
Commissioners Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2) and Tommy Calvert (Pct. 4), who were up for reelection this year, were reelected easily.
6. Progressive District Attorney replaced
Bexar County also elected a new District Attorney to replace a progressive who rode in with more than $1 million in help from George Soros in 2018.
Incoming DA Luz Elena Chapa keeps the office in Democrats’ hands, but she’s vowed to overhaul the office retiring DA Joe Gonzales has led for eight years.
In a nod to the different styles, Bexar County leaders have already worked to save one of Gonzales’ top lieutenants from the presumed house-cleaning they expect from Chapa.
She singled-out several of them during a hard-fought Democratic primary, where she emerged despite never having worked as a prosecutor.
7. A new Fourth Court of Appeals chief justice
Republican Bert Richardson, who is retiring from a higher court, was trailing Democrat Antonia “Toni” Arteaga, one of Bexar County’s longest-serving district court judges, for the chief justice opening on the influential Fourth Court of Appeals.
The court is located in San Antonio, but judges have to campaign across a 32-county voting base that includes parts of the Hill County and South Texas and has swung between supporting Democrats and Republicans in recent years.
The regional appellate court elected three new Republican judges last election cycle — at a time when the local GOP had completely given up on trying to flip the county’s district court bench seats.
This year Democrats appear likely to hold the one open position on the ballot, despite Republicans’ best efforts to recruit a strong candidate.
8. Appraisal district seats swing left
Two years ago Texas added elected members to county appraisal district boards, and put them on the ballot in May.
Though the roles are nonpartisan, some were still surprised to see the blue county elect two candidates with conservative backgrounds.
Now on the ballot in November, this year voters seemed to resume their normal patterns.
They elected former Democratic state lawmaker Diana Arévalo over a conservative candidate in an open race, and booted one of the board’s most experienced members, Erika Hizel, to elect challenger Leticia Anguiano, who ran a low-visibility campaign.
Hizel helped pass the county’s first one-year appraisal reprieve, which was scrapped this year amid pushback from the chief appraiser.
9. Mixed night for education funding
San Antonio voters overwhelmingly approved a 20-year extension for Pre-K 4 SA funding, as city leaders hoped would happen in a high-interest election.
Yet four local school districts that asked voters permission to raise revenue through a higher tax rate saw their requests shot down. The fifth was too close to call.
San Antonio City Council is about to put its own bond out to voters in May, and has already been worrying about public perception in a tough economy.
Elsewhere in the state
- Democrats swept every statewide office, including filling Paxton’s AG seat with state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas), who flipped a Republican-held state Senate seat in 2018.
- They also won the race for the Texas Railroad Commission, where Republican Bo Frenchgrabbed national headlines for a viral social media post many in his own party have decried as racist, causing some to abandon him in an already unusual election cycle.
- In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, the Republican county judge who faced backlash for closing a number of polling locations lost his reelection race.
- Democratic state Sen. Taylor Rehmet (R-Tarrant County), who national headlines in January for swinging a deep red seat more than 30 points in a special election runoff, won the race to keep his seat in the general election.
