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Former Harris County Dem Chair Aims to Lead State Party

The former chair of the Harris County Democratic Party last week announced that she is running to be the next chair of the Texas Democratic Party.

Lillie Schechter chaired Houston’s county party from 2017 to 2021, during Trump’s first term in office, and has been a longtime political strategist, fundraiser and organizer in Texas politics.

In a pair of phone interviews with RA News, she explained that she wants to examine the state party at every level to understand how to make gains and win more elections.

In her written announcement, Schechter criticized the party for complacency, and vowed that if elected, she would examine every level of the party to see what needs to be changed, from its structure to its staff.

Democrats nationwide largely suffered in the 2024 general election, both up and down the ballot, a trend that also was reflected with the incumbent parties in many democracies around the world.

“The brutal truth is that the establishment political class has lost touch with voters in every corner of our state,” Schechter wrote in her announcement. “As a proud Democrat, I know we are on the right side of history, but it’s no longer enough to assume we can win based on that — we have to reconnect our party with the millions of people whose lives are better because of our policies.”

“I’m running because I believe our party deserves a leader willing to fight for what we believe in while conducting a sober, 360-degree assessment and taking action to change,” she continued.

Missing the mark

Asked what specifically went wrong for Democrats in last year’s election — and how she would hope to lead the party to avoid similar losses — she said that she didn’t feel that question was productive, before later offering issues that she felt were misplaced.

“I’m not gonna do the finger pointing to look backwards at the party right now. I don’t think that’s beneficial to this conversation. I do think doing an evaluation to figure it out, an internal one, makes a lot of sense,” she said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Schechter said she felt that local messaging in the 2024 elections “missed the mark” more than in prior years — “that we have been in the habit of rinse-and-repeating different campaign tools and tactics for a while because they’ve been successful, especially here in Harris County.”

For example, she noted that Democrats this past election cycle campaigned hard on anti-Trump and abortion protections messaging. “Abortion is an incredibly important issue, but it can’t be our only issue,” she said.

And when party officials after the election met with the party’s newest phone bank volunteers, “what was very clear in some of those conversations is, they were scared of Trump, they kinda liked Kamala, but they didn’t know what the Democratic party stood for at all. And I think we need to dig into that, figure out why and how we’re missing the mark on communicating with voters.”

More broadly, she said, “it is time for us to do a real evaluation of the party structure, the party staff, the party revenue stream, the party relationships with its county party chairs, with its state Democratic executive committee, and really just do a 360 evaluation to see what we’re doing well and what we’re not doing well, see if we have the right people in place and see how we’re gonna build to meet the moment when we are ready to flip Texas.”

Prior experience

Schechter said that she decided to run after former gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke dropped out. She ran because she felt that she would bring more experience to the state party’s leadership: Harris County is the third-most populous county in the United States and the largest in Texas.

“I … have a great understanding of what it’s like to pull together and lead a coalition around a winning vision to win elections,” Schechter said in a phone interview on Monday. “And on top of that I’ve worked on every aspect of a campaign, from being a statewide scheduler to building a budget, to building a plan and executing a plan.”

She added: “I’ve been working in and around the state for the last 15 years, around the party, in the party and outside of the party, and I think all of those things make me incredibly qualified for this position.”

Schechter’s press release made the same case.

“Running a state party of our size is a serious endeavor that requires someone with a history of doing the work it takes to win campaigns,” her release stated. “As the only candidate in this race who has successfully run a large party organization in Texas, I’m excited to start making my case to fellow Democrats so we get to work electing progressive candidates across Texas.”

A big tent

Harris County also has a diverse electorate: “One of the things I’ve really focused on as party chair, and what I’d continue to focus on as TDP chair, is building a coalition, and making sure that our party leadership, our party infrastructure … all looks like our electorate.”

“I wanna make sure that we have a party that is as large and inclusive and as transparent as possible,” she added later. “So I wanna make sure that we … start building out our team that tackles the issues of messaging and fundraising in a kind of collaborative way with everyone that’s working on the ground already.”

Elaborating on the topic of inclusiveness — whether that would emphasize the party’s commitments to historically marginalized groups, or aim to cast a broader net to persuade more moderate voters — “I mean it in every way,” she said.

“I mean, I do think we are a big-tent party,” she explained. “I think we are a coalition of people all over the state that are all different — you can be progressive, you can be moderate, you can be establishment, you can be urban, you can be rural, I think you can be Latino, [Asian-American or Pacific Islander], African-American, Black, whatever it is — but at the end of day, we are all Democrats, and figuring out where we have commonalities and come together around a shared vision, versus picking on the edges of the things that separate us.”

The election will be decided by members of the State Democratic Executive Committee in Austin on March 29.

Sam Stockbridge
Sam Stockbridge
Sam Stockbridge is an award-winning reporter covering politics and the legislature. When he isn’t wonking out at the Capitol, you can find him birding or cycling around Austin.

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