Dems Select White Male as the Party Chair
in State Where Trump Won Hispanic Vote Capitol Inside
March 31, 2025
Texas Democrats appeared to ignore the hemorrhaging of Latino support in the Lone Star State during the weekend they tapped Kendall Scudder to replace Gilberto Hinojosa as the state party chairman after a 12-year run.
Scudder, a Fort Worth product, became the Texas minority party's fourth white chair in the past 25 years when he scored almost 54 percent of 121 votes in an emergency election that the State Democratic Executive Committee conducted on Saturday. Scudder claimed the post with 65 votes while Patsy Woods Martin and Lillie Schechter were second and third with 27 and 26 votes respectively.
All of the three leading vote getters are white. The Texas Democratic Party has had one woman at the helm with Molly Beth Malcolm as state chair at the start of the current century. Hinojosa was the first Hispanic to hold the party's top leadership post in Texas.
The shift back to a white party boss may have raised some eyebrows in a state where President Donald Trump won 55 percent of the Texas Hispanic vote in November - a vault of 14 percentage points compared to the share that he received here in a losing re-election race four years earlier.
Trump flipped most of the Texas border counties from blue to red - a feat that no Republican presidential nominee ever came close to accomplishing. Trump carried Texas with more than 56 percent of the vote in 2024 after corraling 52 percent here in 2016 and 2020.
Trump's spike in support on the Texas border with Mexico caught Democrats and Republicans by surprise in light of his plans for tariffs on Mexico and other tactics that could have a devastating effect on the South Texas economy. Polls showed that Trump fared better in Texas and beyond than he had four years earlier in large part as a product of a promise to wage war on inflation.
The 2024 election in Texas had the potential to be a realignment vote in border areas that are predominantly Hispanic and had always voted Democrat. But the SDEC may have felt that it didn't seem to matter that the party had a Hispanic chairman from the Rio Grande Valley at the wheel when it had its worst showing at the polls in a dozen years last fall.
Thirty-three of the Texas House's 62 Democrats are Hispanics. Nine are white. The state Senate has 11 Democrats including six who are Hispanic. Scudder is the third white male to serve as the TDP's top leader since Malcolm left under fire 22 years ago.
“The future of this party is bright, the stakes are high, and there’s no better moment than right now to get Texas Democrats back in the business of winning tough races," Scudder said. "As we do that, we can’t leave any community in this state behind – we need to build a Texas where opportunity is not a privilege, but a promise, for all 30 million of us.”
more to come ...
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