When Lesley Guilmart’s cellphone rang Wednesday afternoon, she almost didn’t answer the unknown number.
“I’ve been getting interesting calls from folks since last week’s win,” said Guilmart, who on Nov. 4 was elected to the Cy-Fair ISD Board of Trustees. “And so I was like, ‘Oh, why not? Let me answer this.’ ”
None of the calls were as interesting as Wednesday’s. On the other line was former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I was stunned and said, ‘I’m sorry, madam vice president?’ ” Guilmart said.
Harris called to congratulate Guilmart on her election to the school board, according to Guilmart. She, alongside Kendra Camarena and Cleveland Lane Jr., ran together as a slate of candidates challenging politically conservative trustees. Conservatives won a 6-1 majority on the board in 2023 and subsequently implemented a slew of right-wing policies, asserting more ideological control over library books and textbook content and restricting campus discussions about gender identity.
Camarena, Guilmart and Lane each had to win their races in order to break the conservative majority in Texas’ third-largest school district. And they did, sending shockwaves across the Houston area, the state and all the way to Harris — the Democratic nominee for president last year who lost to Donald Trump in her bid to become the first woman elected to the White House.
[…]
School board races across the country in recent years have started garnering national attention after a wave of conservative campaigns took control of what are designed to be non-partisan boards. In the Houston area, Clear Creek ISD, Fort Bend ISD and Katy ISD saw conservative board members win seats, but then lose their reelection bids.
The wins by Camarena, Guilmart and Lane were years in the making. On the morning of Election Day in November 2023, Odus Evbagharu, who worked this year as a strategist and consultant for their campaigns, woke up in Cypress ready to have tough conversations with his colleagues.
“They all asked me, ‘Are we going to win?’ And I said ‘No,’ ” Evbagharu said. “We had to lose. We had to fail before we were gonna succeed because we had to learn a lot of lessons.”
Evbagharu grew up in Cypress and knows the area well. He served as Cypress-area state Rep. Jon Rosenthal’s chief of staff and recently launched his own campaign for Rosenthal’s seat. Evbagharu is the former chair of Harris County Democrats.
He was right about the 2023 election. Christine Kalmbach, Todd LeCompte and Justin Ray, all Republican-backed candidates, won seats on the Cy-Fair ISD board to lock in the conservative majority and radically change the direction of the suburban district in northwest Harris County.
Julie Hinaman also won her bid for reelection in 2023. Since then, she often has been the lone dissenter during school board votes.
“This isn’t the PTO or PTA anymore,” Evbagharu told his Democratic colleagues. “The other side is running a full throttle campaign. We’ve got to get there. We’ve got to fundraise.”
Evbagharu says he began working on the Cy-Fair ISD school board campaigns for 2025 then and there, with more than 700 days before the election.
In those two years, he and several local leaders, local political action committees and even national organizations worked to retool the makeup of the Cy-Fair ISD board.
Tara Cummings, partner in the Cy-Fair Community Voices coalition and a board chair for Cy-Fair Strong Schools, says reflecting over the last two election cycles was key.
“We looked at the data and from all the different kinds of factions who had been involved,” Cummings said. “What worked and what didn’t work.”
The changes for 2025 included interviewing and screening several possible candidates to back, investing heavily in canvassing efforts in targeted underrepresented areas, choosing a slate representative of the community and making literature available in several languages.
They also stuck to their main message.
“Folks wanted the school board to be boring again and that was the pitch,” Evghabaru said.
It worked. The surprising sweep broke the board’s conservative majority and ousted the current board president, Scott Henry, and vice president, Natalie Blasingame.
See here for a bit of background, and read the rest, there’s plenty more. One must acknowledge that the prevailing environment has an outsized effect on any reasonably competitive election – and, if the environment is extreme enough, on races you may not have realized were competitive. It’s hard to separate out that effect from any of the others. That said, having good candidates backed by good organizing and running on a good message goes a long way towards maximizing the effect of a positive environment. (Or minimizing the effect of a bad one.) There’s no question that the Cy-Fair slate had all the qualities they needed, and they deserve full credit for taking advantage.
One thing I’m curious about is the assertion in the subhead to the story that “Recent election wins by a slate of candidates backed by Democrats have reverberated across the Houston area, the state of Texas and beyond”. I’d like to think that election results like these and the one in SD09 have given Republicans a bit of a scare, but I can’t say I’ve seen any evidence of it. There were no quotes in the story from Republicans or “Republican strategists” that declared these elections to be a cautionary tale for them. There’s certainly no evidence of any of them moderating their positions in ongoing campaigns. (*) If anything, they’re leaning even harder into maximalism and Trump-enabling. We all know what this article looks like when it’s the Dems that get whupped – we read (hell, we’re still reading) a million of them post-2024. Good luck finding the analog for Republicans here.
Now, maybe these conversations are happening, just not where folks like us can hear them. I can totally believe that the Republican operatives have less need to process trauma in public than Dems do. I’m just looking for some objective evidence of things that I’d like to be true before I believe them. That too is probably more of a Democratic thing. Franklin Strong has more.
(*) OK, fine, Ted Cruz was out there criticizing Tucker Carlson the other day. Dan Crenshaw tut-tutted about it, too. That these are the counter-examples further enhances my point.
The blue wave has its limits (cf. all 17 constitutional amendments and the overwhelming defeat of Austin’s city bond proposal).