The new TDP Chair would like to improve the party’s performance in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.
Democrats are ready to fight for South Texas.
That is the message Kendall Scudder, the new chair of the Texas Democratic Party, shared last weekend as he visited the Rio Grande Valley for the first time since being elected in March.
Scudder held two town hall events in the region — once considered a Democratic stronghold — on Saturday as part of a series of town halls he plans to host across the state to declare a new day for Texas Democrats.
Speaking to a crowd in the McAllen public library’s auditorium, Scudder, 35, said the party will throw punches, not just take them.
“If we keep moving backward here, we don’t just lose votes, we start losing sitting electeds that are good people that are fighting for their communities down here,” Scudder said during an interview before the event.
“This is a place that we have to be showing up in and fighting back, and we got into this mess because we weren’t,” they said.
Scudder replaced former Democratic Chair Gilberto Hinojosa, a Rio Grande Valley native, who stepped down in November after 12 years that included last year’s devastating election cycle.
All four Valley counties voted for President Donald Trump, including Starr County which hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in more than 100 years.
To begin making inroads, the party must fill vacancies in their ranks, including precinct chair and county chair positions which are 50% and 20% vacant, respectively, Scudder said.
The goal is to have more people on the ground who know what is happening in their communities and who can help the party reach more voters.
He knows Valley voters have felt that the Democratic Party has taken them for granted, but he hopes to rectify that by focusing on economic issues such as increasing the minimum wage and improving working conditions.
“I think this area has felt kind of abandoned by our party for a while and I want to make sure that it is crystal clear to folks that the Valley matters to us,” Scudder said. “The working people down here deserve advocates who will fight to make sure they get fair wages for working conditions.”
I believe the new TDP Chair will have to solve some fundraising issues to fully realize this goal, but it’s a good goal to have. And I hope we put in commensurate amounts of effort and resources into other parts of the state as well.
One specific thing to focus on as part of this new effort is that new perennial target, CD15.
National Democrats are planning to target U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz in next year’s midterms, putting the Edinburg Republican in their crosshairs for the second straight election cycle as the party looks to rebound from a disastrous showing in South Texas.
De La Cruz’s 15th Congressional District was the only Texas seat included on the initial list of 2026 targets unveiled Tuesday morning by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of U.S. House Democrats. The announcement signals that national Democrats are poised to put money and other resources into flipping the district, a longtime Democratic stronghold before De La Cruz brought it under GOP control in 2022.
De La Cruz was also the DCCC’s lone target in Texas last year, reflecting the lack of competition that has endured since Republican state lawmakers redrew the state’s political maps to protect endangered incumbents. In 2024, De La Cruz won reelection with 57% of the vote — the only one of the state’s 25 GOP-controlled congressional seats where the Republican nominee failed to net 60%.
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In a statement, DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene, a Washington Democrat, made clear the party would target De La Cruz over the economy.
“Monica De La Cruz is running scared, and she should be,” DelBene said. “From tanking the economy, gutting Medicaid, abandoning our veterans, to making everything more expensive, she’s broken her promises to Texans, and it’s going to cost her her seat.”
The DCCC “is already working to recruit authentic and battle-ready candidates in Texas who reflect this community and will work to better Texans’ lives,” DelBene added.
Yes, we noted one of those recruiting efforts already. We’ll see how that goes. There are also some legislative targets, and plenty of things for them all to talk about. I really hope the DCCC is also looking at CD24, which isn’t as close on paper as CD15 is but which is in a part of the state that (pre-2024, at least) had been rapidly trending blue.
And we can’t talk about South Texas without talking about Henry Cuellar, unfortunately.
Former Rep. Mayra Flores, a Republican who is the first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress, announced on Tuesday that she has switched districts to challenge Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, in 2026 as Cuellar awaits the start of his criminal trial.
Less than three hours after her campaign launched on social media, Flores’ team announced that the former congresswoman has been hospitalized.
“We pray that Mayra will return stronger than ever, ready to continue her unwavering commitment to serving our country,” the team wrote on X.
Flores has been discharged from the hospital, according to a sister who responded to questions from The Texas Tribune.
A statement Tuesday evening from the campaign said that Flores is “now fully recovering and feeling stronger than ever” and will be back on the campaign trail soon. These statements did not provide additional details.
Flores, 39, represented Texas’s 34th district for about six months after she won a special election in June 2022.
She lost her reelection in November 2022 to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen. The pair ran against each other again in 2024 — when Flores lost by less than three percentage points.
I’m of the opinion now that Cuellar is some kind of ancient eldritch being that cannot be killed. Honestly, it’s the only sensible explanation I can think of. He’ll be fine. And that’s all the time I have to think about Henry Cuellar.