What Could Possibly Possess the Texas Democratic Party to Move to Dallas?

Kendall Scudder and the rest of the Dallas Blob need to think long and hard about what they’re doing

Well, I definitely didn’t plan to write this today.

But after The Texas Tribune reported yesterday that the state party is preparing to move its headquarters from Austin to Dallas, I felt the need.

A brief history of Kendall Scudder’s political career

Kendall Scudder, a young and charismatic Democratic politician from Dallas – one who’s run multiple unsuccessful campaigns for various positions before finally winning a newly created and uncontested seat for the Dallas Central Appraisal District in May 2024 – has been Chair of the Texas Democratic Party for six months. He ascended to that honor after the previous Chair underperformed for 12 years. Scudder had put his name in the hat and easily won the votes of the State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) during the special election – mostly through his energy and strength in retail politics, but also because he used to talk a bunch of shit about Governor Greg Abbott on his podcast.

Mind you, I’ve never had any real conversation with Scudder. We briefly exchanged greetings when I was working at the Dallas County Democratic Party (DCDP) last year. And I don’t have some sort of personal vendetta against him. Had I been on the SDEC this year, I probably would have voted for him. Not because he brought any unique skillset, but because I believed he was the best option at the time. In my view, the person most equipped to serve as Chair of the Texas Democratic Party is Beto O’Rourke. He’s got the insane passion and deep knowledge of Democratic politics in the entire state of Texas to be the inspirational leader that our state party needs. I still wish he can take some sort of bigger role in our politics.

Scudder’s appearance on a podcast after the news broke

Scudder, on the other hand, is from Dallas and he’s been politicking in Dallas for years. He delivered no clear reason for the move other than to mention that Dallas is bigger than Austin. That’s what he essentially said in a podcast episode yesterday, immediately after the news broke, to Progress Texas, a rapid-response media organization that purports to promote progressive messages and actions. Let’s talk about that episode.

Kathleen Thompson, Executive Director of Progress Texas and former Communications Director of DCDP, and Chris Mosser, Podcasting Director, decided to create an emergency episode just for Scudder. And boy, was it something. In the span of 18 minutes, Thompson and Mosser decided to discard any bit of journalistic integrity that they might have possessed and twist themselves into pretzels for the sole purpose of defending the state party chair’s actions.

In one instance, Thompson attempted to justify the state party’s relocation by stating that Progress Texas and ACLU Texas also moved their offices from Austin to Dallas and Houston, respectively. This is not the same thing. The state party is a political institution, with expectations of being in constant contact with state-level politicians and conducting events at or around the Texas Capitol. Pointing out two organizations that happened to move from Austin to other cities doesn’t matter in the context of a state party’s responsibilities.

In another and more unfortunate instance, Thompson, Mosser, and Scudder seemed to demean the unnamed sources in the Tribune’s article, inviting them to the podcast to essentially reveal themselves. This is crazy. We’re pretending that sources speaking on the condition of anonymity have never existed in the history of journalism. Every week, it seems, we (including, most likely, Progress Texas) rely on anonymous sources to give us peeks inside Austin’s and Washington’s corruption and bad leadership, but we retaliate at the thought that it would ever happen to our beloved Democratic Party in Texas. Thompson and Mosser know better than that.

Moreover, the three made only passing mentions of the Executive Director, Chief of Staff, and the two communications staffers departing the state party after Scudder required them to move to Dallas by November or be laid off. For a party that claims to be for the people and for labor rights, Scudder sure is acting like the stereotypical Republican CEO of a large corporation.

The possible real reason for this shakeup

You might assume that he made this move because he didn’t feel like traveling in and out of his home city of Dallas. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Scudder does claim that he’s keeping the Austin office (although not as the headquarters) and opening up more state party administrative and organizing offices around Texas. On the face of it, especially to casual political observers, this might seem to soften the initial headlines. But let’s examine that deeper.

I wrote about this next part when I discussed the role of the Party. First, the state party already has satellite offices: they’re the county party offices, and they’re staffed by the worker bees of the Democratic Party. Each county party, like DCDP, has, at the very least, a Chair and precinct chairs. They, and especially the precinct chairs, carry out the unsung work of helping get Democrats elected up and down the ballot. This system has been in operation for decades, not just in Texas but all around the nation. Your local party is your go-to source for Democratic activism.

So why then all of this movement? This next bit is going to be a little inside baseball. Let’s set aside that Scudder has deep ties to the Dallas political class, including to those at DCDP, where I met him. I, personally, am curious about how Texas Majority PAC will tie in with all of this.

I briefly brought up Texas Majority PAC, or TMP, in a previous post. It is a George Soros-funded political action committee based in Houston, whose leaders served on Beto O’Rourke’s failed 2022 gubernatorial campaign. TMP partnered with multiple county parties, including Dallas, last year to help set up and finance their organizing strategies. The problem was, as I noted in my post, they’re not the best organizers in the world.

But what I also didn’t mention is the insane blowback that DCDP and TMP received after the November 2024 election. This occurred at the County Executive Committee meeting – a quarterly meeting of the county party’s Chair, staff, and precinct chairs – in December, over the lack of transparency from DCDP, TMP, and its various consultants who received handsome paychecks while delivering less-than-stellar voter turnout results. I did not attend that meeting as I had departed DCDP, and I do not know anything about the financials of the situation. The reputations of DCDP and TMP, however, came into question.

TMP made sure to pay special attention to DCDP, though, as we were by far their biggest client. Additionally, this year, TMP launched Blue Texas, a statewide organizing strategy in partnership with the state party. So instead of teaming up with individual county parties, as it did last year, TMP, under the state party’s new leadership, has gone straight to the top. It seems that TMP has kept their clients from last year and added a few more, but still none are as big as Dallas. Blue Texas is actually currently hiring staff, so the organization is definitely gearing up for 2026.

Now let’s move on to pure speculation on my part. Those additional state party satellite offices that Scudder so proudly touted? Those might be Blue Texas offices. And let’s say that Dallas is the state party’s new headquarters precisely because of TMP and its biggest county party client, DCDP. That move makes matters easier for the state party, the state party’s organizing arm in TMP, and TMP’s biggest county party client in DCDP. Many of the main players would be located in Dallas and can more freely communicate with each other. And let’s not forget, whenever a PR crisis arises, they can drive to Progress Texas’ office.

Is it lazy? Absolutely. Is it questionable? Yes, in that Dallas would be receiving preferential treatment and would be in the room where it happens much more often. It’s that mentality that I’ve called the Dallas Blob. I borrowed the term “Blob” from Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor during the Obama administration, who used it to refer to an amorphous group of people who had known each other for years and engaged in groupthink to shape policy. When it comes to Texas Democratic politics, the Dallas Blob seems to be taking over more of the state. Texas is more than just Dallas, and good politics is more than just the friends you’ve known.

On his podcast appearance yesterday, Kendall Scudder stated that he is “not here to be the Chairman of a party that continues to lose.” With his misguided administrative and organizing decisions, letting go of high-quality staff and surrendering the organizing reins to an entity that has not yet made a meaningful dent in organizing Texas, he’s well on his way to becoming just that.