I was born in Texas—but it’s been a while since I’ve found myself choosing it. From rolls of razor wire being installed along the banks of the Rio Grande to the destruction of Big Bend National Park and the stripping of a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, the Friendship State has felt less and less friendly recently.
But last night, James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa accomplished what long felt to me like an impossible feat: In January, Texas will be blue. Not a sort-of shade of light blue, but bright, bold, Yves Klein blue. Texas will have Democrats as governor and senator, but also as lieutenant governor, railroad commissioner, attorney general, comptroller, and agricultural commissioner.
None of this seemed possible to me as a girl growing up in Dallas, the city I called home until 2017. My dad used to joke that I was born liberal—never more so than when, at age 12, I declined to shake then-president George W. Bush’s hand at our local country club. At 17, I skipped school to watch future president Barack Obama speak at a campaign rally and during my college years I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. None of this kept me from loving my Republican friends and family members, even when we disagreed. Being from a red state, navigating those differences was just a part of life.
But some time not so long ago, I couldn’t help but notice those Republican friends and family members begin to change. The GOP was undergoing a shift and not all Texans liked it. At first, the hints were subtle. Friends began to reach out to talk about how President Trump’s remarks (about immigrants, “beautiful” tariffs, the war in Iran, or just politics in general) didn’t resonate. After the fall of Roe, Texas women I knew began to support women’s health organizations for the first time in their lives.
All of these people were good people, they always had been. But the feeling of sharing common ground with them? That was new. When I went home to celebrate my nieces’ birthdays in September, and discovered that the ultra-conservative neighborhood of Highland Park, where I’d grown up, was filled with signs for James Talarico, I felt like I was hallucinating. In Austin, I drove by a new community-run Narcan vending machine and watched grassroots volunteers stand on street corners registering people to vote. I heard Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott publicly boo-ed. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders voted to unionize. I nearly gasped.
