Texas’s Flip Was a Decade in the Making

Derrick Osobase is the organizing and political director of the Communication Workers of America and has been organizing workers in Texas for 20 years. Since 2014, Osobase has been focusing on work with independent expenditure organizations and helping build the political infrastructure that contributed to Tuesday’s Democratic wins in Texas.

Osobase also worked on the “Contract with Texas’s Working Class,” a set of policy commitments signed by both Senator-elect James Talarico and Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, as well as numerous down ballot candidates. The contract was part of an effort from organized labor in Texas that also included outreach to 2 million working-class Texans ahead of the midterms.

The document, Osobase explained, lays out a roadmap for what Democrats will need to do both in Texas and in Washington, D.C., in order to keep the Lone Star State competitive in future elections and to keep the backing of the movement that helped elect them in 2026

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

I wanted to start by asking you about the role of union and labor organizing in the elections in Texas. A lot of political reporting on the races, some of my own included, has focused on the candidates, the stories they’re telling, and especially the spending in Texas. I’m hoping you could describe the landscape of labor organizing in 2026 there because my understanding is that this is something bubbling up there for a while. 

This election didn't just start with these two very good personable candidates. We’ve been building, and the ‘we’ has been the CWA, the SEIU, AFT, United Here, and the Texas Organizing Project, which is a community organization. We’ve been doing independent expenditure work here in Texas since 2014.  

The way that this all came about, for the names I just said in particular, is that we recognized that organizing the South was not easy and that we had to pair our organizing with also ensuring that we are building a better political environment in order for us to not only grow but to have policies that ensure we are able to fight our employers without being disadvantaged by our Republican rule of making it very easy for companies to come into Texas and screw over their workers. 

In 2014 there was a group who really sat down and said that we needed to build an independent structure that is able to communicate not just with our members but with the general public and that is something that labor hasn’t quite focused on in the past. We talked to our members but we started to realize that that wasn’t enough to win wide and deep and that this project of organizing working class folks who aren’t aligned with or in a union was critically important.

We put our first independent expenditure together in the Houston mayoral race in Harris County, and we won. And what we saw out of that was that to build a deeper connection and engagement with one Latinos in the state and African Americans in the state of Texas and workers just in general. So we started building these infrastructures and we called it the ‘Cities Out’ strategy in 2015, where we understood that in order to win statewide, we were going to need to build in the cities where we had a Democratic infrastructure. We spent the years from 2014 to about 2017, 2018 building programs and organizing working class people, and predominantly those folks were Latinos and African Americans.

We knew we were on the right track when Beto O’Rourke got about 200,000 votes away from Ted Cruz, and the makeup of that electorate were the very people who we had been engaging for the last 4 years.

In 2026, this was the biggest program we ever ran. We engaged over a million people, knocking on doors, canvassing on phones. We had over a million calls. We had a digital program that reached almost 600,000 people talking about the Contract with The Texas Working Class.

Leading up to this election we sat down and found our targets around who we wanted to talk to and we said we needed to talk to working class Latinos and African Americans in the state. We went not only wide but deep with targeting over 2 million people with organizations like Texas for All. 

What we found in those conversations is that people were very clear that their economic conditions have increasingly gotten worse, not just during this administration but over the 30 years of Republican rule in the state of Texas.  We had a governor and a legislature who were hell bent on giving more tax breaks to rich corporations and tax breaks to folks like Elon Musk, saying that it would make our economy do better.

We hadn’t seen that and that’s what we were getting at the doors and what people were specifically saying was that healthcare and housing have gotten completely out of control and that they don’t make enough to support their family. The last thing is that there was a clear chorus around corruption within the Texas Republican Party and their rule.

I wanted to ask you about what's being done to keep the organizing infrastructure that helps fuel winning campaigns in the state, but it sounds like you guys already have kept that in mind along the way from the beginning.

Yes, we knew that we couldn’t just build a voter engagement program around voting for just Democrats. That actually is part of the reason that most working class people have drifted away from Democrats because, we can't just say we want to elect the party just just because of their party identity. This program kind of went beyond party politics and actually spoke about what are the things that individual Texans needed to ensure that they could have an economic future for them and their family that isn't just you know getting by.

So the contract with the Texas Working Class was just really clear on the set of things that we needed these folks to to actually fight for and deliver. Both Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico signed it, along with all the other statewides who won.

We were super clear with them: this isn't just a laundry list that you can just sign and just go on to the next thing. Like this is the agenda of working class people in Texas. This is the thing that they identified when we had these conversations that they want you to not only just try to pass. We want you to actually deliver on these economic items, and we didn't want them to sign it if they weren't going to take it seriously.

It sounds like there’s an understanding that these politicians being in power is contingent upon their pushing for a pretty specific set of agenda items. I'm looking at the Contract with Texas’s Working Class right now, but the agenda items are quite clear in terms of material demands.

When we approached our statewide and the congressional members who signed it, we made it clear that this didn’t come from a think tank. This came from conversations with people either at their doors or phone conversations or from people who have engaged with our digital program. These are things that regular Texans need them to deliver on in order to change their conditions. It couldn’t have been clearer. 

The last thing I want to touch on is what you see as the biggest obstacle to accomplishing what’s in the Contract with Texas’s Working Class. Framing this I want to make clear that some of this is going to be tackled at the state level but some of it requires action from Congress, like Social Security adjustments, for example. What we’ve seen, even before this election, was a debate beginning over what to do with a congressional majority. I believe it was Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) who said that it would be a waste or energy to pass legislation that Trump is guaranteed to veto. I’m curious to get your thoughts on this strategy in terms of both lawmaking and the political signal it sends. 

Excuse my language but I think that's bullshit. What working class people want to see is Democrats to put forth a bold agenda that transforms the economy and ensures that it includes them. For the last 40 years, we've had an economy that has been measured by how Wall Street is doing and how much we can give either CEOs or tech billionaires. I think this was a rebuke of that theory of change and the idea that if you continue to enrich the very top 10% or 1% that somehow working class people are going to benefit from it.

I think it's been a failed project, and what I think workers and working class people have said and what this movement is building around is an economy that serves everybody. I think the biggest obstacle is really our lack of imagination and courage to do what’s right and what actually the voters said in an overwhelming historical and transformational election cycle. 

Anyone who says that this election is about moderation, I think they are completely wrong. I think you know if Democrats don't act boldly and with some imagination of changing this economy to help serve the majority of working class people. They're going to find themselves back in the wilderness. They're going to find themselves losing elections in the next two years. So, I think the lesson to be taken from this election cycle is to have courage and imagination, and do what the voters actually sent you there to do. They wouldn't have voted in the overwhelming numbers if they did not want you to take the risk and have the courage to change their economic conditions in a fundamental way.