Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
It’s a big primary night tonight in the Midwest. To sum it up:
In Michigan Abdul El-Sayed looks likely to secure a double-digit win over Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary.
In Missouri, voters rejected the GOP’s regressive plans to eliminate the state’s income tax AND make it impossible to pass constitutional amendments.
This is all good news, and we’ll talk more about it in upcoming issues. Tonight, we have the full interview with Texas Rep. Gene Wu, who is leading a spirited, novel effort to organize Southern Democratic lawmakers against encroaching GOP fascism — and maybe even flip their states.
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In June, Democratic legislators gathered in Atlanta to compare notes and exchange tips about how to survive — and maybe even one day win majorities — in hostile terrain. It was the first meeting of what Rep. Gene Wu, the Texas state House minority leader, is calling the New Southern Strategy, a nod to the racially inflammatory, divide-and-conquer approach adopted by Republicans in the 1960s and ‘70s, which helped turn the region from a Democratic stronghold to solid red.
“I'm so sick of it, I want to throw all this crap back in their faces,” Wu, who represents a district in Houston, told Progress Report. “All the propaganda they spin against us, all the things they've done against Americans. I want to take that language and take what they're doing and just throw it back in their face. And this that, not just to spite them, but to actually do something.”
The idea came to Wu after Texas House Democrats broke quorum and left the state last August in an attempt to prevent Republicans from passing an extreme partisan gerrymander at Donald Trump’s request. Monday was the one-year anniversary of the exodus, which drew national attention and galvanized Democrats elsewhere to resist the unprecedented mid-decade redistricting designed to cement Republican control of Congress.
Texas Democrats received outsized support from other state Democratic caucuses during that time, and after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callis spurred other Republican states to redraw their Congressional maps, Wu found himself providing advice and resources. At some point, it dawned on him that in the world of low-budget legislative minority politics, interstate collaboration could be key to scaling up in these underdog battles.
“Texas ain't that much different than Georgia or Alabama, so we can just share materials,” Wu said. “And it kind of made us think: All these attacks on our community, whether it's ICE, whether it's redistricting, whether it's anti-Asian attacks, whether it's anti-Sharia attacks, all these different things, they’re coming from the same source. They're unified in their attack of our communities, in the destruction of our nation. So why shouldn't our defense be unified?”
During the fight over Texas’s gerrymandering, Democrats protested the GOP’s limited public hearings on the proposed new maps by holding their own shadow hearings, with testimony from angry citizens and redistricting experts. Those events turned out to be a cheap, easy way to gather reams of evidence for the lawsuits that followed, which were initially successful until the Supreme Court intervened. Wu shared that strategy with other Democrats in a conversation that took place at the New Southern Strategy’s inaugural meeting.
The goal is to eventually flip these legislatures, which will require ongoing coordination and vigilance in the face of further attacks on democracy.
Democrats have spent years trying to flip Texas, believing demographic shifts would — it’s now a majority-minority state — would prove to be destiny, inevitably turning the Lone Star State blue. That hasn’t happened, in part because Hispanic voters shifted heavily to the right in 2024. Wu suggests that there is more than a bit of buyers’ remorse there, especially as the ICE raids ramp up and turn deadly in Texas, and he gets fired up when discussing the boot on the neck of middle and working class constituents.
“This is the laboratory for evil,” he says of Republican-run Texas. “This is the laboratory for every twisted, amoral, unethical, illegal, unconstitutional thing you can think of. If it has been done, it was tried here first.”
The New Southern Strategy is an attempt to unwind the root causes of the success enjoyed so frequently by “evil” lawmakers. At the same time, Wu was realistic about the sort of racial divisions that he thinks have kept so many minorities siloed and unwilling to collaborate with one another, including the friction that remains between Asian and Black communities since the conflagrations of the 1990s.
But he’s hopeful that the twin crises of affordability and freedom — Texas, as we discussed, just banned THC, drawing mass outrage — will prove more pertinent to voters this year. With that in mind, I was interested to know whether he thought that Republicans’ would be successful in their inevitable attempts to weaponize the rise of leftists such as NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and likely Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
Wu didn’t mince words — it’s his own party that he is concerned about being bamboozled by the far-right outrage machine: “What I'm worried about is that we were to fall for that again,” he said. In fact, Wu doesn’t think Democrats should run away from leaders in the Mamdani mold; if anything, they should seek to emulate their ambition and constituent services.
“For the last 30 years, the way that Democrats have screwed themselves is by not listening to the people, and instead listening to the pundits and the experts and consultants who say like, ‘oh, you need to run to the middle,’” Wu lamented. “The Republicans never run to the middle. The Republicans run as far right as they can possibly go every single time and they win every single time.
“And Democrats,” he continued, “instead of doing the things that the people actually demand, like fixing healthcare, fixing education, having freaking actual public transportation, simple things that people all around the world have, Democrats say, ‘I don't know. They might call us socialists. They might call us communists if we said we should have healthcare.’ We shoot ourselves in the foot.”
You really ought to watch the entire conversation, at the top of this email, partly because Wu had a lot to say about Texas AG Ken Abbott, a scandal-scarred lunatic who is now the party’s nominee for US Senate. He was fired up throughout the conversation, and it provided the hope that after years of tantalizingly close (and frustratingly far) misses, Democrats might be getting their act together in the South.
If Wu is any indication, they’re definitely not in danger of being milquetoast, dispassionate political bystanders.
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