The Midweek #86: Led by Texas Voters, the Trump Fever Breaks in Favor of Democracy

“People vote their pocketbooks.”

I published that sentence last week amid the robust early voting period in Texas, recalling what a newspaper editor told me 48 years ago when I was a second-year reporter in Corpus Christi covering one of my first elections. He wasn’t wrong then, and I wasn’t wrong to recall his advice in predicting this election’s outcome.

Inflation has been felt by most of us at every turn: in mortgage costs, in the grocery store, at the gas pump. President Trump’s impulsive obsession with imposing tariffs on friendly nations while forgiving them on adversaries and his sneering dismissal of middle-class concerns about affordability drove voters to act. His unpredictable foreign policies that led to an ill-planned war with Iran, to lukewarm resistance to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the blind eye his administration has turned to the violent and often uncontrolled actions of immigration enforcement agents all added more fuel to the fire.

Trump was so wrong in his campaign lament that he was not on the ballot. He was the ballot. And people across the political spectrum sent a clear message: They have had enough of Trump as he grows more unpredictable by the day.

Texans awoke Wednesday morning to fair temperatures and a deep blue sky that stretched from horizon to horizon, a metaphor for a state and country rallying behind a democracy that has been under attack for years now and must be repaired and renewed.

Here in Texas, the decades-long stranglehold that Republicans have unapologetically held on every aspect of state government has imploded in a single explosive election. All the money in the world did nothing to stop the collapse. The time to undo the damage done by single party politics in the Lone Star state is now upon us.

I’ve become accustomed to going to bed on election nights, uncertain of the final outcome or whether democracy could withstand the political headwinds of a president and his followers unwilling to concede defeat or respect the rule of law. Americans went to bed last night knowing full well, coast to coast, that a Blue Wave had sent a clear and unmistakable message to power and money: No más. 

Billions of special interest dollars were poured into this election, much of it supporting extremist candidates unsuited to public office and undeserving of public trust. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton served as Exhibit A, not just in Texas but across the country. Yet Paxton, the flawed candidate who most benefited from Elon Musk’s grotesque and naked effort to buy this election, suffered one of the country’s most humiliating defeats in his U.S. Senate race against James Talarico. 

So far, it appears Trump and the militant fringes of his MAGA base will respect the country’s free and fair elections: No Capitol riots. No army of dissembling attorneys general and lawyers filing bogus lawsuits. No Fox News attacks on election officials and voting machine manufacturers. Let me quote former President Gerald Ford, a long time Republican Party leader, as he spoke of another vanquished president in 1974: “Our long national nightmare is over.”

As I watched Texas turn purple alongside family members and friends last night, my own long memory as a working journalist for nearly 50 years took me back to the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta when the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the runner-up candidate to the hapless Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, delivered his historic “Keep Hope Alive” speech. America was nowhere near ready to nominate a Black man from Chicago for the presidency. Still, mesmerized delegates joined Jackson in chanting the speech’s signature line, louder and louder. A political convention turned into a big-tent revival. As Jackson concluded his speech, he  ignored protocol and descended from the convention stage into the crowd. Delegates fell in behind him as Jackson marched through the hall to the collective echoes: “Keep hope alive!”

People cried with joy then, too, just like last night. The relief brought many of us to an emotional high we were, perhaps, not fully prepared for, or not quite certain such dramatic change would actually hold until morning. But it did.

The center will hold for now, in the country and in Texas. A generational correction has just occurred, and what happens next depends entirely on what the country and many of its newly-elected leaders do with it. There really is little or no time for gloating. There is only time to get to work, and to remember that while last night was a Blue Wave that will become a story passed down for generations, Texas and the country are purple. Not red, not blue. Democratic Party leaders have blown other opportunities to lead in the past. There is now an opportunity to work with Republican colleagues no longer fearful of Trump’s petty vengeance. That will be the only way to address this state’s and the country’s most pressing economic, political and foreign policy challenges.

Voters want that.

Here in Texas, we are two months and one week away from the 90th Texas Legislature, which is charged with producing a budget for the next two years and addressing what will be a whole new set of legislative priorities fashioned by Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin, and, in all likelihood, a new Democratic Speaker of the House.

The recent creation of the nonpartisan Central Texas Alliance offers the Austin-San Antonio region a sudden and unexpected opportunity to advocate for passage of laws that actually address the need for regional mass transit; policies that support housing development and rational expansion of data centers; increases in public school funding and an end to defeated Gov. Greg Abbott’s damaging voucher program as well as an end to his indefensible political attack on CPS Energy.

One way of addressing the biggest issues in Texas is to deploy the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund, more commonly known as the Rainy Day Fund. Legislators never envisioned it would grow so large when the fund was first created, and it was never meant to hoard public money; it’s meant to serve as a reserve. It is projected to reach $28.5 billion by August 2027, according to the Texas Comptroller. 

More broadly, the Democrats have a moral obligation to address multiple pressing issues:

• End gerrymandering to encourage rather than repress a return to multiparty politics. That should be a nonpartisan, or at least a bipartisan, undertaking.

• Use the state’s wealth to better fund public schools and to end defeated Gov. Greg Abbott’s billion-dollar voucher program.

• End state support of Trump administration policies demonizing immigrants and targeting citizens and others living here legally because they are not white. The U.S. and Texas economies depend on a constant inflow of immigrant labor at both the low and high ends of the economy. Comprehensive immigration reform needs to align the country’s employment needs with legal paths for workers and their families to come to this country.

• Restore women’s reproductive rights. Stop demonizing Planned Parenthood and other organizations and the state’s dedicated public health and medical workers.

• Restore academic freedom, and end extremist attacks on everyone from public school librarians to those working to make the Alamo a worthy historic destination beckoning the world to come visit.

• Address health care inequities and the state’s deplorable status as one of the 10 states that have refused to participate with the federal government in full Medicaid expansion. While the Congress hopefully addresses the Affordable Care Act subsidy cuts that caused millions of Americans to cancel their health insurance, Texas can finally tell hundreds of thousands of low-income residents here that the state will accept billions of dollars in annual health care funding and protection for their families.

The Trump era has reached the beginning of its end, even if his second term as president has yet to reach the halfway mark. The checks and balances first conceived by the Founding Fathers will now be restored, giving many of us hope that sanity also can be restored to the federal judiciary and U.S. Supreme Court, given time and opportunity.

This election, in my view, was a massive, unified rejection of Trump and his control of the Republican Party, and the elimination of so many who followed him blindly, including Abbott, Dan Patrick and Paxton in Texas. It was not a celebration of the Democratic Party. Democrats will now have to prove they deserve voter support by earning it.  As I look at the country’s unsustainable national debt and the failure of both parties to control their spending and address the future, I have my doubts.

But the time now is for joy rather than doubt. Reason and common sense have trumped toxic partisanship. People are ready for change. They voted for it. That time is now.