Texas Majority PAC and the Texas Democratic Party recruited 104 candidates to fill uncontested races. Gov. Greg Abbott’s strategist said it amounts to a gimmick “if they don’t back it up with serious resources.”

A Democrat is running in every state and federal race on the Texas ballot next year, the first time in modern state history that either party has fielded a full slate of candidates, according to the Texas Democratic Party.

The complete field is the result of a recruitment campaign run by a network of the state’s top Democratic groups and politicians, including Texas Majority PAC, the Texas Democratic Party, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former state Sen. Wendy Davis.

Together, the groups recruited 104 candidates to fill every congressional, state House and state Senate seat up for election in 2026. The effort also ensured that a Democrat is running in every statewide judicial and State Board of Education race.

“No Republican gets a free ride in Texas,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said in an interview. “If you are a Republican and you want to hold public office in this state, you’re going to have to fight us for it.”

The push to run a candidate for every seat — no matter how red-leaning — comes as Texas Democrats look to capitalize on turnout and backlash to the Trump administration. The theory, Democratic organizers said, is that running candidates everywhere will not only maximize the party’s chances of flipping down-ballot seats, but also increase Democratic turnout and engagement in areas that top-of-the-ticket candidates may not be able to reach — potentially creating an upstream effect to boost statewide Democrats.

“Even the most relentless statewide candidate is never going to talk to every voter that they need to,” Texas Majority PAC Director Katherine Fischer said. “We need a network of talented, compelling Democratic communicators across the state to clearly communicate the message that Republican leadership has failed us, and that Texans should consider voting differently this cycle and in the future.”

Of Texas’ 38 congressional districts, Republicans currently hold 25, with a new gerrymandered map engineered to hand them an additional three to five seats. The GOP also dominates the state Legislature, controlling 88 out of 150 Texas House seats and an 18-to-11 majority in the state Senate (where two red-leaning districts currently sit vacant). All statewide offices, including both U.S. Senate seats, are held by Republicans.

Democrats have not won statewide office since 1994. And since then, the party has left an average of 50 state and federal seats uncontested each cycle, according to the TDP. Even in 2018, the last midterm election with President Donald Trump in the White House and when Democrats flipped two congressional and 12 state House districts, the party left 20 seats uncontested.

After a devastating election cycle last year, Fischer said, the party found that to win statewide, Democrats needed to improve with “basically every single type of voter in every part of the state.”

One oft-repeated strategy for turning Texas blue is maximizing Democratic turnout in the state’s liberal metropolitan areas. But the level of turnout required to flip the state — which went for Trump by 14 points last year — is “so high that it’s, if not impossible, quite improbable” to get there through urban and suburban areas alone, Fischer said, pointing to the party’s dismal showing in rural Texas.

Why have Democrats performed so poorly in rural areas? One partial theory the party has landed on: Democrats simply haven’t been campaigning there.

“When you don’t have Democrats running, you don’t have Democrats showing up in communities telling people what we stand for,” Scudder said. “The Republicans have an opportunity to brand us and tell people what we stand for instead of it coming out of our mouths.”

Longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney, meanwhile, said the Democrats’ candidate slate was “just a gimmick, if they don’t back it up with serious resources.”

“When they start funding these outliers get back to me,” Carney, who is Gov. Greg Abbott’s chief strategist, said in an email.

At the same time, Abbott is vowing to spend big to flip Harris County red. He recruited Republicans to run in every state House seat in the county, according to the Houston Chronicle, including in safely blue districts.

Fischer said that Texas Majority PAC — one of the state’s most deep-pocketed Democratic groups, backed by millions in donations from liberal megadonor George Soros — plans to spend about $1 million between its recruitment efforts and helping candidates pay for various campaign overhead costs. If the effort garners even 2 to 3 percent more Democratic turnout, she argued, that could mean thousands of votes sent to the top of the ticket.

O’Rourke saw that upstream benefit in his 2018 Senate bid, when he lost to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by under 3 points — the closest statewide margin a Democrat has pulled off in years.

“You had people running all across Texas in places where Democrats either aren’t supposed to run or had no hope of winning,” O’Rourke said in an interview. “Oftentimes they didn’t win, but all of them brought in net new voters that I as a Senate candidate never would have met or never would have turned out.”

Still, when Democrats tried to replicate that same approach the following cycle, the trickle-up effect largely failed to materialize. The party ran a sweeping and well-funded effort to capture 10 GOP congressional seats and flip the state House; they lost every battleground U.S. House race and did not net any seats in the lower chamber of the state Legislature, while Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn cruised to a nearly 10-point win atop the ticket.

O’Rourke acknowledged it was a “tough ask” of Democrats to run in deep-red places like Amarillo or Waco, where Republicans dominate and where district lines have been drawn to make the seats all but unattainable for Democrats. But he told uneasy potential candidates that, win or lose, “just the fact that you are stepping up, putting your name on the ballot and running for office is an act of service and patriotism, and it’s going to do great things for everyone on the ticket.”

Davis, too, made calls to individual prospective candidates, specifically women who were nervous about running as working mothers. We “just really tried to inspire in people the belief that we can do this, and to cut through the cynicism that has plagued us in Texas for so long,” she said.

To recruit a Democrat for every uncontested race, Texas Majority PAC and the TDP leaned on the star power of O’Rourke, Davis, state Rep. James Talarico and former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred to bring prospective candidates out to 40 recruitment rallies the groups held mostly in rural towns across the state. In the races that proved trickiest to fill, the groups also asked local officials and community members to suggest people they thought should run.

To find and screen potential candidates, Texas Majority PAC sent 2.3 million text messages, made 105,631 calls and interviewed 1,385 candidates in target districts.

The final crop, according to Texas Majority PAC, is made up of “everyday Texans.” A third of recruited candidates work in education; 20% have worked in oil fields, chemical refineries, factories and other similar “hard labor” jobs in the state; 15% are military veterans; 10% are members of unions — and the overwhelming majority, 90%, are first-time candidates for public office.

“We were very focused on recruiting normal people, people who have some sort of compelling story to tell about how Republican leadership in Texas has failed them personally,” Fischer said.

One of those recruits is Diana Loya, an educator at Dumas Independent School District in the Panhandle, who has never run for office.

Loya, whose husband was also recruited by Texas Majority PAC to run for land commissioner, is challenging state Rep. Caroline Fairly, R-Amarillo, for her dark-red Texas House seat. Fairly won House District 87 in 2024 with 79% of the vote, while Trump carried the district over Vice President Kamala Harris by a similar margin.

While filming a campaign video for Loya’s husband, Fischer asked Loya to consider running for Fairly’s seat. At first, she declined, saying she planned to “hold down the fort” at home during her husband’s campaign.

Then, she did some research on the district’s representation in Austin — and decided she couldn’t “just sit by.”

“I’m not very familiar with politics, I’m not a politician at all,” said Loya, who grew up in the Panhandle and has taught at public schools in the region for 20 years. “But I do know the needs that we have here.”

She decided that Fairly spent too much time on banning certain books in public school libraries over more pressing education issues during this year’s legislative session.

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