Intro to Chronicles of a Dallas County Democrat

A former software engineer gets into local Texas politics and has... thoughts

Well, this is my first Substack post. Here goes nothing.

A little about me: I was a software engineer for 12 years before slowly transitioning into local politics here in Dallas, Texas. I started volunteering for campaigns in 2018 (at the time Beto O’Rourke was running for Senator) before becoming a Dallas County Democratic precinct chair in December 2019.

I really had no clue what I was doing as precinct chair, pretty much winging it and piggybacking off the much wiser and more competent precinct chairs in my community of Far North Dallas. They were organizing a meet-and-greet for a candidate running for Texas House? I made sure to tell neighbors in my precinct. They needed to make sure people in the community were OK during the beginning of the pandemic? I dialed phone numbers for an hour only to get maybe two people on the line. They needed to have face-to-face conversations with complete strangers about why they should vote for Democrats? I slathered on some sunscreen, headed out on a 90-degree Texas summer day, push cards in hand, braving the “No Soliciting” signs, to have someone tell me through their doorbell camera to just leave the literature at the door. (If none of this sounds appealing to you and you were thinking of getting involved, I didn’t mean to discourage you. It is true that a lot of political volunteering looks like this, but the positive conversations, even with just a handful of voters, and the simple fact that you’re taking part in something bigger, more than makes up for the, well, possible scenario that a car just raced by you on a rainy day and doused you with puddle water. I’m not helping, am I?)

After my last software engineering job in November 2022, a year in which I had organized three meet-and-greets, twice-a-month postcard parties, a Halloween party, and served as Field Director for a Texas House District campaign in Denton County, I decided to leave software and embark on a full career switch. In March 2024, the Dallas County Democratic Party, a party for which I had essentially worked for free for over four years, granted me one of their fancy, brand spanking new positions of Organizing Manager. The transition was complete, and I felt like Thanos collecting the final Infinity Stone.

But enough about my personal story. There’s a lot there that I might explore in other posts, but we’re here to talk about other stuff. And let me start this next segment by saying this: the Democratic Party used to be the party of messaging and data. I remember when then-Senator Barack Obama, the first person I ever voted for, attended an event hosted by Google. Then-CEO Eric Schmidt jokingly asked him “What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?” Schmidt, realizing one of the frontrunners for President of the United States might not understand the question and potentially cause a gaffe, quickly apologized and tried to pivot to a more serious question. Obama declined his polite offer, and confidently stated, “I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go,” to a loud cheer from the crowd of techies. Obama for America, which later turned into Organizing for America, sat on the cutting edge of both technology and its approach to garnering possible new Democratic voters, using new media to disperse the president’s agenda to grassroots progressives across all 50 states.

Fast forward a decade and a half later, and Democrats find themselves a step (or two) behind Republicans on these two fronts. One might think that this is only a messaging issue, but if your messaging resonates with people who represent only 226 electoral votes in the 2024 presidential election, then it’s also bad data because you didn’t survey enough, or the correct, groups of people on their most important issues, thereby crafting possible policy solutions. Now, obviously, the Republican Party has no actual policy solutions of their own, opting instead to pass a “big, beautiful bill” that would harm lower- and middle-class people and save those at the top. But I guess I’m different from a lot of my Democratic friends and colleagues in that I tend to focus much more on what we as a party must do as opposed to what the other side is manufacturing. Whataboutism works best when the other side is clearly shitting the bed, as we’ve seen this past weekend with the No Kings marches, a response to Trump enforcing his fascist principles on innocent Americans. But what if it wasn’t Trump? What if it was a Republican much more politically refined, someone able to give the impression that they’re working with Democrats on key issues important to everyday Americans? A politician who has the wits not to dispatch ICE agents to brutally terrorize honest, working immigrants? Would we be up in arms about the technical details of an otherwise boring bill that the Congressional Budget Office has deemed would further tank the economy? Or would we be the frog in boiling water, believing everything is fine until it’s too late?

This Substack won’t be about national politics, per se. There are much smarter and more capable people who speak on national issues. It’s not even about the state of Texas, hardly. Again, much smarter and more capable people. I’m boring. And I like niche. I’d rather argue the merits of dense housing and comprehensive public transportation than regurgitate what astute observers remark about our nation’s political atmosphere. But, alas, Ray Delahanty and Dave Amos, among others, are the ones I go to for topics relating to urbanism, so I can’t beat them there either. My aim with this Substack is to try to figure out how we as Democrats, and progressives more generally, can bring about meaningful and long-lasting change at the local political level. My specialty, obviously, is the Dallas County Democratic apparatus, but I hope my stories, insights, and proposals won’t be so circumscribed to this county that what I write will have no meaning anywhere else. Real change comes from the bottom up, but we must operate with intentionality, identify pain points (and pain people), construct solutions, and, most importantly, stay consistent and remain unwavering in our belief that we will one day see a future the next generation will admire.

And if this Substack actually takes off, I can paywall the shit out of you motherfuckers and buy a private island in the Pacific. Because that’s the American way.