Every time Texas Democrats have a bad election (read: every two years), blame reasonably finds its way to a person whose title suggests quite a lot of culpability—the chair of something called the Texas Democratic Party.
In reality, this person has little control over what most critics are likely focused on: the selection of individual candidates and their ensuing policy preferences and general quality. Nor does he (lately, it has been a he) hold much sway over the forces that seem to swing modern elections. Presidential politics, the rapidity of human aging, hemispheric economic inequality, Joe Rogan.
What the state party chair does is tend the infrastructure that underlies a cycle’s more news-making aspects—administering the party’s primary elections, data operations, voter registration efforts, and other nuts and bolts. He may also attempt to set a messaging tone for the party, though, again, with minimal control over candidates and generally a duty to support nominees regardless of ideology.
Into this role of perhaps more responsibility than power steps Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old Dallasite who handily won the job in a party election this March. Scudder replaces Gilberto Hinojosa, who chaired the party through a 12-year period of brief-lived hope punctuated by profound disappointment. Hinojosa, whose native South Texas veered toward Trump last fall, resigned his position midterm.
Scudder bills himself as both a progressive firebrand and a self-sacrificing devotee of the party. His electoral history includes a successful bid for the Dallas County Appraisal District board last year (a role he resigned to run for party chair), preceded by unsuccessful runs for a solid-blue Dallas state House district, a deep-red Texas Senate seat, and positions on the Huntsville City Council (thrice). Raised in rural northeast Texas by two moms, he was drawn early to politics by attacks on families like his. After college at Sam Houston State, he worked in affordable housing, real estate analytics, and campaign consulting.
The Texas Observer spoke with him in mid-July about Bernie Sanders, the Hill Country flood, and diversity.
TO: What are two specific things you’re doing differently than Gilberto Hinojosa, who ran the party for so long before you?
Well, Gilberto’s a very nice man, and I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who disagreed with that. He did a great service to the party for a long time. I’m a 35-year-old who sees the role a little bit differently than some of the political establishment. I think that we have done a real disservice to our grass roots. We right now have half of our precinct chair spots in the state of Texas vacant. We have more than 20 percent of our counties without a county chair. If we’re not even walking in the door in these communities, then don’t put your jaw on the floor and be shocked when you start losing there. So I’d say number one is I believe that we have to build a grassroots apparatus in every corner of the state, and that is challenging in Texas because we have 40 midsize cities with 100,000 people in them.
Number two, I believe that the way we unite each other as a party is landing on a message that impacts every single member of our coalition. And so what is a message that resonates with every single person in our coalition? Well, I believe it’s that they all pay bills and they’re all struggling right now to get ahead. When I look at the party that I grew up in, it’s a party for the little people, the working poor. That’s what Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson—the party that put together big, bold progressive ideas to help working people, that is who we are. And we’ve lost sight of that. That’s where I see myself as different from the status quo of the party, that I have a laser focus on what we do every single day to help working people get ahead. And if that means taking on banks and taking on billionaires and doing whatever we have to do to flip the table, I don’t mind disrupting systems to help the little guy.
You recently participated in Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and your comments focused on that economic populist message. Looking back, do you think primary voters and party elites made a mistake in not nominating Sanders for the presidency in 2020 or 2016?
You know, I think primaries are snapshots of where people’s heads are in a moment in time. And I think if there were a primary happening today in this country, Bernie Sanders would be doing really well. And I speak as a kid from a small farm town in East Texas. It was just known that if you were a working-class person, you were a Democrat because they were the only party that fought for you, and I think we’ve gotten away from it. Bernie’s done a really good job of staying on that message. Even if you don’t love Bernie, I don’t think you’d argue he didn’t have really good message discipline, and we could benefit from that as a party.
I did read that you worked for the Michael Bloomberg campaign in 2020. Is that who you voted for then, and have your politics shifted since?
No, and I left the Bloomberg campaign whenever I saw the education platform that he put out at that point.
So you did, but it was brief and you left based on policy?
Yeah, it was very brief, and I think at that point in time, a lot of people were very anxious about Donald Trump and trying to figure out what’s the path out. And there were a lot of us—you know, admit your wrongs—that were looking at this thinking, “Here’s a guy who could probably help fund this and end some of the cash disparity that we’re going to have in resourcing this election.” And then it just became very clear to me that that was not something I was going to be able to stomach.
With this recent reconciliation bill out of Congress, President Donald Trump goes and slashes Medicaid and taxes for billionaires. But there’s another huge portion of the spending that is border and immigration policy. A historic expansion of ICE’s budget, probably enough money to wall off the entire border and put razor buoys in the entire Rio Grande. What should be the state party’s message to the millions of undocumented people and voting family members of undocumented people in Texas?
We are a party that believes that every person should be treated with dignity and respect, doesn’t matter how little they are. Whether that means you are a doctor or a janitor, or you have shown up on the border carrying a baby a thousand miles across the desert on your back, you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That’s what this country is built on, this idea of people having an opportunity to pursue a better life. That doesn’t mean we have this open-borders policy where absolutely anyone can come in at any time. But what it does mean is that if you have situations where people are denied entry, they’re treated with respect. It means if you have people who have been living here for years that haven’t been breaking the law, that have been contributing members of our society, we should do what we can to make sure they’re able to stay here because we want them here. We do not want to turn away people who are the quintessential American citizen that we’re all striving to become.
This may sound basic, but do you think the Texas Democratic Party should still be celebrating racial and ethnic and linguistic diversity in Texas as a value in itself?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s what makes Texas great. Texas is, like, like six different states with a whole bunch of different cultures in it. That diversity is what has not only made Texas this fascinating endeavor, but it’s also what has made Texas so successful. You build successful, robust economies with diversity.
To close this out, because it’s going on while we’re talking, do you have any comment on the Hill Country floods?
I think time is going to shine a really bright spotlight on the mismanagement of Republicans, not just in this one instance, but in a period of time, a cycle of bad decisions that they’ve made. From the courthouse to the White House, where they have fought to dismantle government and lost sight of the reality that those governmental systems existed because people were depending on them to save their lives in moments like this. And when you continue to do this over and over, there are going to be repercussions. We’re not talking about blame; we’re talking about accountability. We are doing a disservice to every one of those families and to everyone in the state when we sit around and say that this isn’t about politics. I’m sorry, it is about politics.
This happened because a bunch of politicians put a message they could put on their campaign mailer ahead of protecting people’s lives. We can use this moment as a pivot point to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Democrats are happy to work with Republicans to do that—or they can spend this moment all on self-preservation, talking about how they aren’t to blame and changing absolutely nothing in the way that they operate. That’s what I suspect they’re going to do. But I just think it’s shortsighted, and it is a huge disservice to Texans.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
