Scudder’s strategy was to cede less territory. “They should have done this ten years ago,” he said. In addition to recruiting new candidates, he has opened a regional office in Amarillo, which he said Democrats view as a “no man’s land” even though the city has a population of two hundred thousand people. (A nearby nuclear weapons assembly plant employs more workers than school district teachers.) Bernie Sanders drew about 400 people there in mid-October; Talarico also held two events in Amarillo, and his campaign pointed to polls showing him ahead of Alred’s performance there in 2024. Gina Hinojosa, who was filming the campaign in Amarillo, tends to talk about the data center issue as a sign of Republican corruption and corporate looting when she talks to people in rural Texas, and candidates down the ballot have adopted similar talking points.
Scudder believes that when the Electoral College redistributes votes after the next census in 2030, Democrats will rely on Texas to elect the president. “If it’s not competitive in Texas, the party has no way of surviving,” he said on the road one night. “This is a very urgent matter.” Scudder has no control over whether large state campaigns, including Talarico’s, will go off the rails or be completely derailed. Instead, he wants local campaigns to serve as land surveyors who will determine where supporters live and create records for future elections so future candidates don’t have to start from scratch. Maybe it sounds desperate to find votes in a county where Democrats lost by thirty points. But that may be the case for Texas Democrats.
One Saturday morning, Scudder parked his rental car on a residential street in Dumas, behind a huge Ford pickup truck. Diana Loya emerged, wearing high heels and holding a stack of campaign materials. She voted for Trump in the last election—“If you love God and love your country, you must be a Republican,” she recalled—but her views changed due to the president’s campaign to deport undocumented immigrants. “Honestly, I think it’s kind of trick-or-treating,” she said, ringing the doorbell of the red brick house. When a woman opened the front door, the candidate introduced herself but didn’t say she was a Democrat. Loya asked the woman what she thought was the biggest problem facing her community — “Data centers?” ” she suggested.
The woman smiled. “Girl, I have everything for Data center,” she said, closing the door.
Loya and Scudder crossed the lawn to the house next door. “I’d never heard of it 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 1890s, Karl Rove, the architect of many of George W. Bush’s political victories, thought it was a culturally conservative place that might support the Republican Party. In 1992, Porter County split the vote, electing George HW Bush to the White House and Democrat Bill Sarpalius to the House of Representatives. By the next election in 1994, George W. Bush had visited every one of Texas’ 254 counties during his campaign for governor. Porter County gave the office, Senate seat and House seat to Republicans. “Bush’s contribution was to strengthen rural Texas,” Rove told me.
That year marked the last cycle in which Democrats were elected to statewide office. “We have grown as a party because we are open and inclusive,” Rove said. “We picked long-term Democrats who considered themselves conservative and their party had left them, and we picked Tejanos and Asian Americans.” He added, “If Republicans forget that, they do so at their peril.” (More recently, Rove has been the target of the president’s online vitriol over the Republican candidate’s bigoted comments online that he would vote for the Democratic candidate for rail commissioner. When I asked Rove if he supports Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, he said, “Well, I’m going to avoid that question.”)