ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
As the votes came in on election night Tuesday, some of the most shocking results were in Texas. The blue wave did not stop at the border of the Lone Star State. Democrats swept the top races in Texas with James Talarico winning a Senate seat and Gina Hinojosa winning the race for governor.
Austin-based political commentator David Griscom was perhaps not as surprised to see his state flip. Earlier this year, he published a book titled "The Myth Of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, And Class War In The Radical South." He joins us now. Welcome.
DAVID GRISCOM: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a really wonderful past few days.
SCHMITZ: What great timing, with a book title like that. Texas, obviously, as you've written, has a reputation for being a reliably red state, but as we've seen, it's a lot more complicated than that. How did Texas Democrats pull this off?
GRISCOM: Well, I think in a lot of ways, you saw Texas Democrats returning to our roots here. You know, many people forget this, but Texas was once the hotbed of kind of left-wing, pro-working-class politics. Going all the way back to the 1890s, we were the heart of the populist movement, and it's no accident that James Talarico, Clayton Tucker and Gina Hinojosa all call themselves populists.
Using this kind of rhetoric, I think, really focuses on the billionaires and the folks who are harming our democracy. And I think that gave a lot of people who might have been waiting for an excuse to maybe buck the Republican Party, which has dominated state politics here for so long, the opportunity to do so.
SCHMITZ: Let's go back in history a little. You know, Texas politics are often associated, you know, with oil billionaires, conservative evangelical voters and the Republican establishment. You know, your book, "The Myth Of Red Texas," tells the story of, you know, working-class, populist tradition that oftentimes goes overlooked. Tell us a little bit about that.
GRISCOM: So there's multiple phases of this. It's an entire kind of generation or tradition in Texas politics that has been forgotten. My book opens up talking about barbed wire, which we all associate with Texas. But when barbed wire first comes to Texas, it was fiercely resisted. There was an episode called The Fence Cutting War, and this happened all across the state, where working-class cowboys got together and they started cutting down these new barbed wire fences because they saw these as a tool that was being used to dispossess them.
This then flows into the populist movement, which was born right here in Texas in Lampasas, where a bunch of farmers got together and they started asking themselves why those who work most get least and those who work least get most. And they started to look around and realize that it was the monopoly powers, the power of the banks, and it was the corruption of the politicians.
SCHMITZ: I want to dig in a little bit on that and the populism aspect of this. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has embraced the populist label with open arms. You know, I want to play a clip here from an interview that she did before the election with The New York Times.
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GINA HINOJOSA: Populism is about economic power. We see that things are so stacked against working people in this country. Fighting culture wars at this time is not a winnable fight, and that is not the fight of 2026.
SCHMITZ: And that's really interesting. I mean, she's separating her and Talarico's style of politics from Democrats elsewhere, who have sort of engaged more in identity politics. Is there something uniquely Texan about Hinojosa's or Talarico's approach as Democrats?
GRISCOM: Absolutely. So again, you know, Texas has had major swings before where everyday working people - cotton farmers, Black and white - they were able to unite working people, the vast majority of people, on messages about the ways that they can improve their life. And that's what Gina and James were able to do. They didn't run a partisan message, and that is a long tradition that has existed in this state.
I'd also add, if I could, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - after 2024, she made a very strong point about how effective some of the anti-trans ads that the Trump administration put out were - you know, they are for they/them, Trump is for you. And AOC said, like, this was a problem with Democrats. When a lot of people were feeling economic pain, they felt that the things that Democrats were interested in weren't immediately important to their lives.
And in this election, the table was kind of reversed because all of the ads in Texas were about anti-LGBTQ things, anti-trans. And when somebody's talking about that - in this case being Republicans - when you're really struggling to get by, it does really show that these folks are out of touch with your economic needs, and that really helped Gina and James, for sure.
SCHMITZ: That is David Griscom, author of "The Myth Of Red Texas." David, thank you.
GRISCOM: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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