Texas Democratic Party Chair to step down after brutal defeats

In the aftermath of his party’s brutal shellacking in the 2024 elections, Texas Democratic Party chair Gilberto Hinojosa has announced he will step down in March.

Over his 12-year tenure, Hinojosa has faced fierce criticism from within the state party for its failures to build up permanent party infrastructure, build independence from the national party and develop messaging and policies that address the needs of Texans.

His replacement will be chosen at the State Democratic Executive Committee meeting in March.

In his resignation letter on Friday, Hinojosa addressed some of these critiques.

“On Tuesday, the Democratic Party suffered devastating defeats up and down the ballot in Texas and across the country,” he wrote. “Voters sent a clear message to our party and our country that they want our leaders to talk to them about issues that they care about most, including the economy.”

Hinojosa added that “in the days and weeks to come, it is imperative that our Democratic leaders across the country reevaluate what is best for our party and embrace the next generation of leaders to take us through the next four years of Trump and win back seats up and down the ballot. 

In interviews with The Hill the day before Hinojosa’s resignation, Texas Democrats intimated that something big was going to have to change.

“We have an economy — either in Texas or across the country — that is in good shape, but we lost this election statewide and nationwide, in large part because we weren't talking about that,” state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who challenged Rep. Colin Allred for the party’s nomination for Senate, told The Hill.

The failure, Gutierrez argued, had been ceding key strategic ground to the Republicans. The sense of prices rising out of control — in areas from insurance to groceries — is, he argued, “a Republican problem. This is something that they have created in Texas. And for the life of me, how we weren't able to communicate this in a specific manner is concerning.”

That, Gutierrez argued, was in part an issue of messaging. “But I think that we absolutely need some personnel changes within the party — and it's my hope that we'll see that here in the very near future.”

And Carroll Robinson, a Houston Democrat who challenged Hinojosa in 2022 for the party chairmanship, called on the state Democrats to become “an actual statewide organization, and not just an office in Austin.”

The party, he said, was “disjointed, unconnected — and even though we start supporting any campaign early this year, you never truly have a fully integrated, coordinated party” able to build and maintain the year-round infrastructure that would let it contest elections statewide.

Since losing control of statewide office in the 1990s, Southern Methodist University historian Cal Jillson told The Hill, state Democrats “never really built that kind of infrastructure” necessary to rebuild the party's standing in the state.

Instead, he said, the party has “been trusting in demographic change,” and in particular the state’s growing Latino share of the population, to deliver them long-term victory.

Now, he said, Trump’s overperformance among Latinos had caused “real existential angst, because if the Hispanic population is changing out from under them — rather than becoming a critical part of their base. You know, where next? What are you going to do now? So I think they're, they're in, in real disarray.”

In his letter, Hinojosa argued that his successor would have the tools necessary to move the party forward. 

“I hope my successor will take on the job with the energy and creativity we need to build something new, but they will not start empty-handed. Over the last twelve years, the Texas Democratic Party, in partnership with countless allies, has put Texas on the battleground map and has made significant progress toward electing Democrats at every single level,” he wrote.

The party, he said, has also worked to modernize every face of its organizing.

All of these tools, he said, would be needed for the gargantuan task that now faces the party.

“We need to continue the progress to reach the millions of eligible Texans who decided not to vote in the 2024 election,” he wrote, “as well as millions of potential young voters as they age into the electorate every cycle.”