Newcomer Kendall Scudder to lead Texas Democratic Party

As a self-described "scrappy underdog," Kendall Scudder appears well-suited to the job he was awarded just over a week ago — chair of the perennially out-of-power Texas Democratic Party.

And anyone who thinks of modern Democrats, from Texas or anywhere else, as a collection of elitists or urban snobs would likely not be referring to the 35-year-old Scudder.

Instead, the new Texas Democratic Party chairman is a product of a working-class family from rural Northeast Texas and a first-generation college graduate. He worked at Dairy Queen and waited tables to put himself through Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, about 150 miles east of Austin.

Kendall Scudder is the new chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. Courtesy of Hector Mendez via the Texas Democratic Party

"For some people, they may turn their nose up at a school like Sam Houston State, but for a kid like me, it might as well have been Harvard," Scudder said in an interview with the American-Statesman three days after the State Democratic Executive Committee on March 29 elected him on the first ballot to succeed Gilberto Hinojosa, who announced shortly after the 2024 election that he'd be stepping down.

Scudder, a small-business owner and a "Volunteer In Patrol" for the Dallas Police Department, takes over a party that once dominated Texas politics virtually unchallenged for more than a century. But its modern iteration has not elected a governor since Scudder was 10 months old and hasn't held a majority in either chamber of the Legislature since he was 12.

A Democrat has not carried Texas in a presidential election since a decade before Scudder was born.

Because no Democrat holds a statewide office, their chairman serves as the de facto face of the party.

His first task, Scudder said, is to focus the party's attention on the needs of working-class Texans and not to write off any potential voter, no matter for whom they voted in last year's presidential election.

"We're going to be showing up in places that people don't see Democrats visit," he said. "We can either argue with them and tell them that they're wrong, or we can just look in the mirror and realize that we as a party need to make some adjustments. So we're going to start being present and be active."

He also said the party can't afford to write off any region in the state.

"You're going to see Democrats running for office all across the state," he said. "People don't hear your message and they don't vote for you. So no one should be shocked that we were losing these areas where we weren't even showing up. I'm here to fix that."

If addressing those problems were a tall task for the state Democratic Party for pretty much all of Scudder's life, it became an even taller task after the November 2024 elections. Not only did Democrats lose seats in both the state House and Senate, they lost more than a dozen counties in deep South Texas that had all but been ceded to them by Republicans for generations.

And many working-class Hispanics, like many working-class white voters did beginning in the 1980s, migrated away from the Democratic Party and into the arms of the GOP in the last election.

Scudder said he's clear-eyed about the challenges he's facing just as the behind-the-scenes jockeying gets underway for the 2026 midterm elections.

"I'm concerned anytime that there is a voter that feels our party is out of touch, because that's not who we are," he said. "It's not what we stand for. To me, the Democratic Party is the party that fights to keep working-class people's taxes low, fights to make sure that your public schools are funded and fights to make sure that your roads are safe.

"That should resonate across the board to everybody. Maybe we haven't been conveying that message clearly enough. We'll do our best to try to reset and move forward."

Asked why he would even want a job that comes with no pay at a time when he is building his land-acquisition business and while he and his wife are expecting their first child in June, Scudder said he felt a sense of duty to step forward.

"I never tell folks 'no,'" he said. "I'm always happy to knock on doors or clean bathrooms or do whatever you got to do."

Asked why he thought the party turned to him when they had six other announced candidates to choose from, Scudder said it was likely because of his upbeat nature.

"I think that the grassroots of our party wanted somebody who was scrappy and willing to step up and get the job done," he said.