Can Texas Turn a Greener Shade of Blue?

[Mike Siegel campaign website]

By Samantha Grasso

Two years ago, Mike Siegel ran for Congress in TX-10 and raised eyebrows by halving the winning margin of 15-year Republican incumbent Michael McCaul. Now, the progressive endorsed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren plans to finish the job of flipping a longtime red district of nearly 900,000 people that spans between Austin and Houston. 

I interviewed Siegel earlier this month about what’s changed in the past two years, and the prospects for progressive politics in Texas.

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

What pushed you to run for Congress? And after you lost in 2018, what made you want to run again?

The most encouraging and inspiring moment was my work as the lead attorney for the city of Austin in the fight against Texas Senate Bill 4, a “show me your papers” law that demonized our immigrant community and encouraged the profiling of Hispanic Texans. That just gave me so much inspiration and hope that this idea that Texas is a red state is not true, that there is this beating progressive heart in the cities and in rural areas, even.

We had activated people in parts of this district where Democrats hadn't campaigned in decades. My wife is basically a partner in all of this. She owns a veterinary practice in Austin, and we have two young children, and so it really was this conversation of, can we handle doing this again? And ultimately where Hindatu and I ended up is, well, we invested so much to create all of this momentum that it would be a shame to walk away from it.

What has changed in Texas and nationwide since 2018 that might improve your chances of winning this time?

Certainly we laid the foundation in 2018 — my campaign, Beto’s amazing statewide campaign, statehouse races. We activated people, for example, in the suburbs of Harris County in Houston, where voters hadn’t been touched by the Democratic Party, and reached Black workers, Latinx community members, South Asian folks. A really diverse array of people were activated. 

Another extremely important factor was just proving the viability that a Democrat should win. I can't tell you how many conversations in 2018 I had where I would call folks or outside organizations for support, and they would say, “You seem like a great guy, Mike, but you don't have a chance of winning. I'm going to invest in Beto [O’Rourke]’s or MJ [Hegar]’s campaign.” This cycle, when I emerged from the primary, it was just completely different. I already had the support of national leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and major national groups. Between July 1 and September 30, I was able to raise $1.07 million, and that was over twice as much as I raised the whole 2018 campaign. Just the level of belief, the amount of investment in this race has been exponentially greater.

For so long, Texas was perceived to be so dominated by the Republican Party that a lot of people had given up and disengaged. And so what you have now is essentially four years of continuous work, this continuous effort to register more voters, contact more voters and create this ethic of being engaged in the electoral process. The first three days of Texas early voting have set a record every day. And I do think it's part of the “success begets success” idea where, “Wow, we just broke another record. Call your friends, call your neighbors. Let's do it again.”

Day one in office, what action will you immediately take? What’s your first priority?

We are in a moment of overlapping crises — health pandemic, jobs crisis, climate crisis, attacks on democracy, a system of unequal and racist justice. But to me, the first bill in the next Congress in 2021 should be the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, because if we can prevent states like Texas from suppressing the vote a hundred different ways — gerrymandering, voter ID cards, closing polling places, limiting drop box locations — that will then create the foundation for much greater participation in our elections and the opportunity for a long term Democratic majority that could pass many layers of legislation.

For my district, the issue that I'm most poised to be a leader on is essentially addressing climate change through a national jobs program, such as the Green New Deal. I'm proposing to represent a district that connects an environmentalist hub in Austin, a coal plant in the rural area in Fayette County, annual flooding and an oil and gas sector in Houston, and widespread fracking. We've lost 50,000 oil and gas jobs in Texas since the pandemic started, and the Republican Party, for all their talk of loving oil and gas, hasn't done anything for those displaced workers. And I would love to get an initial jobs bill that brings some of these jobs to Texas, whether it's transitional training and apprenticeship for displaced workers, or immediately creating new jobs.

What is your plan for crafting and implementing plans like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal while working under a Republican government that’s hostile to these efforts? What are your thoughts on the popular conservative rebuttal that these platforms, along with progressive positions on criminal justice and policing and housing, won’t fly in Texas?

We need to break down this hashtag and turn it into components of legislation that are very specific. Houston unions are majority fossil fuel worker units, and these folks are supporting me not because they like this idea of a Green New Deal, but because they trust that I'm going to bring the voice of the workers to the table. I've heard union members say, “They talked about this idea of a just transition for the coal miners, but what a crock of sh*t.” The government has failed to deliver on this promise of a transition. It's extremely important that we lead with taking care of the people that have already lost their jobs to the pandemic, and the fatal response to it. And then maybe those first 100,000 jobs build trust and momentum for the next 100,000. I'm running on these big ideas, but we also have to break it down for the people so they can really understand what we're doing.

If I can get these conversations happening on a national level, where labor is alongside the environmental movement, and we're proposing very specific legislation that brings jobs back to Texas then, OK, we've got a bill. It’s going to bring 200,000 jobs to Texas for this renewable economy. Are Dan Crenshaw and Ted Cruz going to vote against a jobs bill for Texans? That'll be at their risk. And so it’s my job to do everything I can to set that moment up. And then if Republicans are on the wrong side opposing jobs, to spite themselves, basically on some sort of principle that's really loyalty to their corporate donors, then to me that's just going to create more opportunity there. They're going to face even tougher reelection battles if they’re still in office.

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