Dispatch from Texas: The Left Has a Lot of Work to Do

Shadowbanned is back from Texas, and what a venture it was!

In case you missed it, Shadowbanned headed down to Texas from October 27 to November 4 with a mission: to help protect voting rights, ensure people on the ground could exercise their right to vote, and make sure voters had the information they needed. We spent our time tabling, distributing voter education materials, talking with communities, and even driving people to the polls.

What started as an effort to support voters turned into an eye-opening experience that challenged some of our assumptions about political organizing, community, and the state of the American left.

We learned a lot from our trip. As a New York-based media organization that spends a considerable amount of time covering movements and people within the leftist political sphere, it was a powerful exercise to get outside our “bubble” and see where everyday people actually stand when it comes to leftist politics. Our time in Texas made one thing abundantly clear: there is so much work to do.

Many of the people we spoke with seemed pretty removed from the political system altogether. A common sentiment was that both sides are bad and corrupt, which, frankly, is a valid observation. However, recognizing that the system is corrupt doesn’t necessarily translate into class consciousness or even an understanding of the mechanisms that make it corrupt in the first place. For many people, the system feels far bigger than themselves, and they’re simply focused on surviving it the best way they can.

But if people can’t properly identify the problems within the system, how can we expect them to overthrow it? And how can we give them enough confidence that whatever replaces it, hopefully socialism to start, will actually be any better?

Obviously, building trust and developing relationships is one of the most important parts of organizing. However, in a place like Texas, that presents its own challenges.

I’ve been to my fair share of places. I’moriginally from Virginia, so I’m familiar with rural areas and the South. I also recognize that much of America is car-dependent, with cities and suburbs divided by sprawling infrastructure. Still, I found Texas to be particularly unique.

Maybe it’s the sheer size of the state, with long stretches of land where there’s seemingly nothing. Or maybe it’s the endless sprawl dominated by the same ten chain stores no matter where you go: Ross, Target, Walmart, Hobby Lobby, and so on. Even in a city like Dallas, I was surprised by how little street life there seemed to be, even during working hours.

Between the sprawling superhighways and the big-box stores dominating the landscape, the environment feels almost perfectly designed for alienation. You couldn’t blame people for developing an almost parasocial relationship with the corporations that dominate their surroundings.

Of course, Dallas has its pockets of small businesses, art spaces, and recreation centers. But from what I saw, these spaces felt few and far between, often concentrated in more expensive neighborhoods.

There was, however, one institution that seemed impossible to escape: the church.

Churches reign supreme in Texas. Billboards, advertisements, churches next to churches. At one intersection, I counted a church on every corner.

Historically, churches have served as places for people to meet, access resources, find support, and participate in recreational and community activities. I know firsthand how important these institutions can be.

I grew up Christian, and coming from a low-income household, churches were truly a saving grace for my family and me. There were many times when we depended on food kitchens. When my family eventually became members of a megachurch in Northern Virginia, the resources available to us became even more abundant.

We developed a network of people who helped my mother find employment, provided pro bono financial advice, made it possible for me to go on trips, and offered free care for my brother, who has severe autism.

The church was a lifeline for our family and helped change the trajectory of our lives.

These institutions, even when they aren’t overtly political, often operate in ways that government services should. They provide resources, support, and a sense of belonging that many people struggle to find elsewhere.

However, churches can also become places where political education and organizing come to a halt, or, depending on the institution, where people are introduced to and recruited into right-wing political movements.

Take Mercy Culture Church, which we had the “pleasure” of visiting while we were in town (we’ll be diving into that experience in a separate article).

My point is that these institutions can provide people with meaningful support while simultaneously reinforcing the political status quo. And I think leftist organizers could learn a great deal from the infrastructure churches have built.

I’m well aware that mutual aid is exist within leftist organizing but, how do we take them to the next level?

How do we build institutions that people can consistently rely on, that offer tangible support, foster community, and create opportunities for political education? More importantly, how do we make those spaces accessible without the barriers to entry that leftists sometimes unconsciously create?

Too often, people are written off because they haven’t read the right theory, don’t have the correct political vocabulary, or fail to meet someone’s standards of ideological purity. That kind of gatekeeping does very little to expand a movement.

Of course, building this infrastructure takes money and resources, two things notably absent from much of leftist organizing. But it’s worth considering how we can adopt some of these practices to make our movement more powerful and give people opportunities to feel empowered outside the institutions they currently depend on.

A Firsthand Look at Democratic Organizing

Another major takeaway from our trip was getting a firsthand look at what organizing within the Democratic Party actually looks like in a state like Texas.

We attended James Talarico’s final Texas rally before the election and even spent some time canvassing for his campaign.

When we pulled up to the Dallas County Democratic Party headquarters, I have to admit, I was a little underwhelmed.

For context, this wasn’t some makeshift campaign operation. The Dallas County Democratic Party is an established county-level organization, with a network of precinct chairs, volunteers, elected officials, and dedicated staff responsible for organizing and voter protection. The party maintains two offices, including its main headquarters on North Washington Avenue and another in southern Dallas County. Its local operation is distinct from the national Democratic National Committee, although both operate within the broader Democratic Party structure.

Perhaps things would have been different had we visited Talarico’s campaign headquarters in Austin. But the office we arrived at, while full of enthusiastic volunteers, didn’t seem to have much work prepared for people who were eager to help.

One day, we were tasked with organizing door tags and assembling yard signs. Another day, we did some canvassing.

The volunteers seemed genuinely excited that we had shown up and were willing to knock on doors. We were assigned to a predominantly Latino neighborhood that, by the campaign’s own admission, had not yet been contacted. We were also told that several other neighborhoods were in a similar situation.

When I asked about the neighborhoods we were assigned to, one of the canvass organizers explained that these were people the campaign believed would vote Democratic or had voted Democratic in the past.

Mind you, this was just two days before early voting ended.

We were introduced to an app called MiniVAN Touch, which we would use to track our interactions with voters, given a script, and sent on our way.

While reviewing the script, I noticed something pretty glaring: it was only available in English.

Anticipating that we would encounter Spanish-speaking residents, I proactively translated the script myself.

Come to find out, had I not taken that initiative, we would have struggled to communicate with many of the people whose doors we knocked on.

Even more concerning was that several residents appeared to be hearing about the campaign for the first time. Some weren’t even sure whether they were registered to vote or eligible to cast a ballot because of various circumstances.

This was happening just days before the end of early voting.

Obviously, these shortcomings didn’t prevent Talarico from winning. His victory over Ken Paxton was historic, delivering Democrats their first U.S. Senate win in Texas since 1988 and their first statewide victory since 1994.

But, would Democrats have been able to win Texas if this wasn’t such a high-stakes election and people weren’t so frustrated with Republicans? Would Democrats be able to win again when voters aren’t nearly as energized?

One of my longstanding critiques of the Democratic Party, and even organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is their inability to consistently reach beyond their existing base.

There are entire communities of people who might be receptive to their politics if someone actually took the time to engage with them, explain what they’re fighting for, and develop meaningful relationships. Instead, these populations are often overlooked, or their votes are simply taken for granted.

Do these organizations really expect people to show up and vote for them after receiving a single visit from a campaign volunteer a couple of days before an election?

I was surprised by the apparent lack of sustained engagement in the neighborhoods we visited.

Why weren’t there more opportunities for repeated contact? Food drives, concerts, community events, neighborhood offices offering services, or other grassroots initiatives that would allow campaigns to establish relationships with people beyond asking for their votes?

What Happened to the Grassroots Campaign?

While visiting a polling location, I spotted someone wearing a DSA pin and decided to strike up a conversation about what organizing in Texas was actually like.

His name was Axel Torres, a 29-year-old organizer from Arlington, Texas, involved with DSA Fort Worth. He had also worked as an outreach coordinator for Celina Vasquez’s campaign.

Axel told me that DSA Fort Worth was slowly beginning to grow. Even local candidates had started reaching out to the organization in an effort to build relationships, which seemed promising, especially in a place like Texas.

When I first approached him about his pin, he was surprised.

“Wow, no one knows what this pin even is,” he told me.

It was a small interaction, but one that spoke to both the challenges and opportunities facing leftist organizing in the state.

Axel had also worked on Talarico’s campaign during the primaries. When I described my experience canvassing, he was equally surprised.

It was, in his words, “the total opposite of what I experienced.”

According to Axel, the primary campaign had been deeply rooted in grassroots organizing. There were food drives, mutual aid initiatives, and sustained community engagement.

But he said things changed after Talarico secured the Democratic nomination.

The group chat connecting primary campaign volunteers reportedly went silent before being abruptly shut down. The kind of grassroots work that had helped build momentum during the primary seemed to come to a halt.

Eventually, Axel decided to part ways with the campaign and focus on other races where he felt his efforts were more urgently needed.

It sounded to me like the Talarico campaign had fallen into a familiar pattern: a grassroots movement builds momentum, wins a nomination, and then gets absorbed into the Democratic Party’s traditional campaign machinery.

Take Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama’s victory was made possible, in part, by an enormous grassroots organizing operation. Millions of people donated, volunteered, and organized events in their communities. It was a movement that promised to fundamentally change how ordinary people participated in politics.

But what happened to that movement after he won?

In a 2020 essay for The American Prospect, political writer Micah L. Sifry examined how Obama’s grassroots operation was effectively demobilized after the election. Its infrastructure was folded into the Democratic National Committee, while the administration increasingly relied on conventional Washington political strategies under Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Sifry also describes how members of Obama’s original organizing team became frustrated with the shift. Kate Albright-Hanna, who helped build the campaign’s digital operation, recalled watching the culture of grassroots engagement give way to a technocratic approach driven by data and centralized decision-making.

Axel also shared a similar frustration from the volunteers and even some of the candidates themselves about the shift after the primairies.

One of the people who accompanied us to Texas was a former seafarers’ union organizer who had worked in Houston during the 1980s and prefers to remain anonymous.

He described encountering similar dynamics decades earlier: a party unwilling to listen to its volunteers, repeatedly failing to reach new people, and falling back on the same strategies and institutional structures while expecting different results.

What’s particularly frustrating is that these criticisms aren’t new. Texas Democrats have been having versions of this conversation for decades.

In a 2006 investigation published by The Texas Observer, journalist Dave Mann examined how the party had continued relying on a precinct-based turnout strategy dating back to its sweeping victories in 1982. The strategy largely involved identifying reliable Democratic voters and concentrating resources on getting them to the polls.

“The old precinct approach has been focusing on an ever-shrinking pool of reliable Democratic voters,” Mann wrote.

This directly mirrored my experience canvassing in Dallas twenty years later.

Nearly two decades after Mann’s article, in 2024, former Texas Democratic Party chief strategy officer Luke Warford was making a very similar argument. Announcing the launch of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, Warford called for the party to “move past the boom-and-bust cycle of excitement and momentum that centers around specific candidates.”

The organization was established to address persistent gaps in the party’s infrastructure, including shortages of trained campaign staff, inadequate voter research, and the tendency for campaigns to build their operations from scratch every election cycle.

At this point, none of this is revelatory. In fact, it’s at the center of what increasingly resembles a Tea Party-style insurgency within the Democratic Party. There is a real push to get rid of these establishment and consultant-based operatives within the party and make room for a new generation of organizers and candidates that are focused on populist and grassroots politics.

This is clearly playing out in the growing calls to replace Hakeem Jeffries as speaker of the House and Chuck Schumer as Senate Democratic leader. According to Axios, Democratic lawmakers and members-elect have been inundated with calls urging them not to elect Jeffries as speaker, with some offices reporting hundreds of calls in just a couple of days.

The question is whether this growing insurgency will actually transform the party or whether, once again, the establishment will manage to absorb the momentum and carry on with business as usual.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Overall, the Texans we met were amazing people, many of whom are navigating a political system that feels fossilized on both sides of the aisle.

This is a state where religion maintains an enormous presence in public life, conservative institutions wield significant cultural influence, and the physical landscape itself can make building community and class consciousness feel like an uphill battle.

Yet many of the people we encountered seemed to recognize that something wasn’t working. They knew they wanted something different, but who could offer it, what would it look like, where could they find it, and why should they believe in it?

And that’s precisely where I think the left has an opportunity, if we’re willing to do the work.

Progressive electoral victories may be a first step, but they aren’t enough on their own. We need to build the relationships, resources, and institutions that allow people to see a tangible alternative to the systems they’re already living under.

That means getting outside our bubbles, meeting people where they are, and recognizing that political education alone isn’t enough. We also have to improve people’s material conditions where political institutions have failed them, much like churches have done for generations, and use that as the foundation for building trust, community, and sustained political organizing.

It means making space for people who don’t already speak our political language and understanding that a movement cannot grow if participation is reserved for those who already agree with us.

Most importantly, it means showing up for communities long before we need something from them.

I encourage everyone, especially those of us already involved in leftist politics, to get outside our bubbles and start bridging the gaps in knowledge, support, and resources that keep us disconnected from our fellow comrades.

Because if we want people to believe that another world is possible, we have to give them something worth believing in, and something they can actually participate in building.

At Shadowbanned, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. We’re building a leftist media and cultural ecosystem that extends beyond publishing, creating spaces for political education, community engagement, and opportunities for artists, organizers, and cultural workers.

We’re doing it on a very small budget, but we’ve already seen what’s possible. With more support, we could do so much more.

If you believe in what we’re building, consider becoming a member or subscribing. Your support doesn’t just go toward one media personality. It helps sustain an entire community of contributors and cultural workers who are trying to build something bigger than themselves.