The Texas Legislature is preparing to enter its 89th session on Tuesday, and Houston Democratic Rep. Gene Wu, the new chair of the House Democratic Caucus, says that lawmakers have their work cut out for them.
In a pair of phone interviews with RA News on Thursday, Wu discussed what he took away from the 2024 election, how he plans to lead his party in the House, the ongoing speaker race and where bipartisanship will be needed most in a highly divided Legislature.
Losses in 2024
Texas House Democrats will announce press conferences to be held on Sunday in Dallas, North Texas and the San Antonio area, and on Monday in Austin, to more clearly articulate the party platform to citizens — “basically,” Wu said, “to talk to the community about why we’re going to Austin, right? Like, what’s the point?”
That’s a direct response to underperformance by Democrats in key elections last year, which Wu attributed to poor messaging about new programs and expansions that made material improvements in peoples’ lives.
“There’s no one to blame, not even Donald Trump. There’s no one to blame but ourselves, because that’s, that’s … on us, because we are the ones who failed to communicate to the public our message, what we are, what we have been doing, what we have accomplished for them,” he said.
Democrats in the US joined in the ranks of other incumbent political parties around the world that suffered heavily in elections last year, fueled in part by persistently high prices in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You had Donald Trump … promising to deliver things that people want, but … he has no way to actually deliver it,” he elaborated. “And then you have Democrats who just completely failed to talk about those issues and failed to acknowledge that people feel that things are bleak, failed to acknowledge that people feel like there’s no hope for the future, and failed to say, ‘This is what we’ve done, this is what we’re going to do.’”
Wu also was adamant that the party must reclaim its reputation as the party that is serious about solving problems with research and expertise.
“Somebody told me, the public perception of Democrats is that we’re know-it-all school hall monitors, right? We’re the … nerdy kids in class that everyone hates. They always have their hand up. They always have the answer. Right?” he said. “And that’s fine. I don’t think that’s going to change, because that’s who Democrats are. Democrats are informed. They’re well educated, they’re well read, … they’re knowledgeable about the issues. They know what they’re talking about. The difference is, we’ve never tried to go and talk to the public and explain to them what we know, explain to them why this is happening … and do it in a way that they can actually understand.”
When looking for doctors, lawyers and engineers — “people that you are trusting with your life,” he said — “You don’t go find the popular kid who … got bad grades. You go find the smartest kid in the class, right? And that’s what we want people to see again: that Democrats are the only people in this room who are serious, who are actually knowledgeable, … who did research, who prepared, who got ready to do all the things that you want us to do, and we did them. That’s what we need to go back to.”
Caucus chair
As the newest chair for House Democrats, Wu said he plans to help herd his party members in the same broad direction while giving them the freedom to pursue their own legislation and agenda.
“The members don’t need [me] to lead them,” he explained. “They know where to go on their own. They just need somebody to make sure that all the carts are working and all the horses are tied together.”
He elaborated: “I don’t see my role in this as being some kind of grand marshal of, ‘I’m going to lead you to victory,’” he explained. “I’m not your hero — I’m here to make you the hero. That’s my goal. I’m here to … help the other members pass their bills, I’m here to help other members achieve their priorities, because their priorities are my priorities, right? … I’m here to look after the people [of] the state of Texas, right? And to keep people unified, to keep us going in the same direction, to keep us marching toward our goals, to be disciplined about messaging, to be disciplined about our actions and preparedness. That’s what I’m here to do.”
Speakership race
Two conservative Republicans are in contention to be the Speaker of the House this session: David Cook of Mansfield and Dustin Burrows of Lubbock. Both claim to have enough votes to be elected, but Burrows’s support would rely on Democrats who believe that supporting him could put them in a better position to pass their own legislation.
Wu on Thursday was sympathetic to those in his party that have pledged to support Burrows — “At least he didn’t say, ‘I will pass every Republican bill before I pass any Democratic bill’, which basically translates to, ‘I will not pass any Democratic bills’” — but he said he isn’t telling members how to vote.
Asked how he expects the race to play out — who will prevail, how long it will go — he declined to speculate.
“I have no real way of predicting that, because I can’t tell you what 150 people are going to do, right?” said Wu. “I can vouch for myself, and that’s it. We’ve watched speakers’ fights go exactly as we predicted, and we’ve watched speaker fights do completely weird stuff, right? I don’t know, and the best I can do is make sure that no matter who becomes speaker, that we make sure that they respect the will of not Democrats, but of the people of the state.”
In other words, Democrats are “preparing for the worst but hoping for the best,” this session, he said: hoping that Republicans will agree to share power in the House, but prepared to take the mantle of “opposition party” depending on the outcome of the speaker’s race.
“We don’t want to be relegated down to being just an opposition party,” Wu said. “But if we do become just an opposition party, we will be the best damn opposition party that Texas has ever seen, right? And if we are in a place where we can keep this shared power, bipartisan-style government, then we’re going to do the best job we can and fight for everything we can while in that position. And we definitely think we can do more in that position.”
Big issues
Regardless of who becomes the next House speaker, this session, lawmakers will need to work together to address large problems that can’t be ignored, especially public education funding and affordable housing, said Wu.
“The 900 pound gorilla in the room is education funding,” said Wu. “And I don’t think the public fully appreciates how dire it is. It was already dire in 2023.”
Public education funding was a defining issue for lawmakers last session. School officials had asked the state to set aside more money for each public school student by increasing the basic allotment, to raise teachers’s salaries and to overhaul the state formula for public school funding.
Meanwhile, Gov. Abbott, a Republican, threatened to veto any increase in public school funding that didn’t include money to help parents send their children to private schools, a policy that critics have argued would divert much-needed funding from public schools.
Ultimately, the Legislature didn’t pass any of those policies, and schools have been left struggling to cope with acute teacher shortages and rising costs of living.
“The schools, in the last two years since then, have basically done every single thing they could to survive,” said Wu. “Rural communities have gone from … five days a week down to four days a week. They fired bus drivers, or are having teachers drive the buses instead, and all sorts of things like that, right? And this time, there’s no there’s no safety net anymore, because the schools have used up all their tricks, fired all the people they could fire, cut all the salaries they could cut, and they’re not even sure they’re going to make it as is right now, right? And if we don’t come through and fund public education, it’s done.”
Wu also said work must be done to make homeownership attainable, which he said is being hampered by insurance companies that are no longer offering home insurance coverage in Texas. Last year, Progressive announced that it would not write any new home insurance policies in Texas to reduce its “exposure to coastal and hail-prone states.” Without home insurance, banks are reluctant to give loans, exacerbating Texas’s shortage of affordable housing, he said.
“This is something that even Republicans will have to address, because it affects their people too. They can say they don’t care about trans people or trans kids because they don’t think it’s real. They can say all these other things, but like, you have to deal with schools, you have to deal with housing, you have to deal with food prices, you have to deal with insurance, because that affects everyone, Wu said. “And if they spend all their time and all their energy doing red meat issues that don’t amount to [a] hill of beans and don’t affect people’s actual lives, they’re going to pay for it. The voters will remember.”