Texas Democrats Aim to Reconnect with Working-Class Voters in 2026

Texas Democrats running in the top 2026 statewide races agree on one thing: the party has lost touch with voters living paycheck to paycheck, once its base and now a cornerstone of Republican dominance.

"We are the party of the New Deal and the Great Society," state Rep. James Talarico said in an interview during the run-up to his formal entrance into the U.S. Senate race last month. "We're the party of the of the working man and the working woman, the party of the little guy. And we've lost that in recent years, especially in the national Democratic Party."

That homage to Democratic former Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt has been echoed by Talarico's rivals, former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred and retired astronaut and Air Force officer Terry Virts, and by entrepreneur Andrew White, who so far the only high-profile Democrat to formally announce for governor.

Texas' latest incarnation of Democrats as "the working family's friend" might have been started by the new party chairman, Kendall Scudder, who leaned heavily into his own blue-collar roots when the state party's executive board plucked him out of relative obscurity in April to run the party that hasn't won a statewide race since he was about 4 years old.

"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 at the time. "It's not what we stand for."

Communicating "what we stand for" has been among the Texas Democrats' most elusive challenges as they try to reconnect with people whose livelihoods aren’t tied to a college degree.

For Allred — the former NFL player who, like Talarico, was raised by a single mother — that means reminding working voters he has walked in their shoes.

"I want to make sure that what we're doing is showing, not telling, people what I'm focused on this election, which is a laser focus on affordability, on working people, on what they're going through," he said. "That's my story. That's where I come from."

Virts, a political novice, pointed out that because he'd never run for office before, he's never been caught up in the Democrats' habit of checking the box of every possible subgroup, where each new alliance risks fracturing an old one.

"I guess you could say I'm a John Glenn Democrat," Virts said, referencing the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth before winning a Senate seat from Ohio in the 1970s. "He won in kind of a Republican area, and he focused on working-class people first."

White, who was in grammar school when his father Mark White served as governor from 1983 to 1987, is decidedly the product of a white-collar upbringing. But as someone who has started businesses that made money, he has actually been an employer who put people looking for work on his payroll. He warned Democrats against offering lip service to blue-collar workers while demonizing the industries that provide them jobs.

Put simply, he said, Democrats cannot afford to be seen as the enemy of energy in a state like Texas.

"Both these things have to coexist," he said of the energy and environmental sectors. "They can work together. I own a clean tech business and I own an oil and gas business. They both serve markets. They both serve needs."

While restitching the fabric that once connected the party to the working class has been Texas Democrats' Rubik's Cube since the days of Mark White's governorship, a few examples in other states show it can be done.

In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection by a close but comfortable 5 percentage points in 2023 — in the same state that a year later gave Donald Trump a 65-34 victory in the presidential election. Asked by NBC's late-night comedian Seth Meyers to unmask the mystery, Beshear made it sound easy.

"Let's start talking like normal human beings — not talking at people, but talking to people," said Beshear, who's testing the waters for a possible presidential run in 2028. Instead of leaning on white-paper jargon about "food insecurity," he told Meyers, Democrats should simply say what they mean.

"If I tell you more seniors or more children are going to be food insecure, that's not going to have an impact. But if I tell you they're going to go hungry when they go to bed at night or wake up in the morning — the last part, I think, is the most important," Beshear said. "People are looking for authenticity."

"Democrats are really good at the policy position: Point two, sub-point three, bullet-point four," he added. "But we're very bad at talking about our why — why we made a decision."

As the 2026 campaign accelerates toward the March 3 primary and beyond, Texas Democrats will test whether they can deliver that message — and whether working-class voters will buy it.