8 APRIL 17-23, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS ing books and braille libraries,” Lowe said. “So there’s a lot that the state library does that isn’t immediately being impacted, but we may feel the pinch of it a year or two down the road.” Though there’s never a good time for a li- brary system to get hit with funding woes, now is especially inopportune for the Dallas Public Library. Last April, the Dallas City Council adopted a 20-year library facility plan that calls for expanding or replacing 12 library branches across the city. While $41 million was earmarked in the 2024 bond for updates or overhauls at three library branches, funding for the other nine branches needs to be sourced “creatively,” Lowe said at the time of the plan’s adoption. Now, chaos in D.C. is resulting in the up- heaval of the funding the library thought it could count on. “We’re an extremely efficient municipal government department with pretty slim margins,” Lowe said. “So any challenge to our funding does require us to think harder about the services that we provide and try and pivot to address changes.” . POLITICS NEW DEM IN CHARGE DEMOCRATS WERE CALLING FOR A SHAKE-UP AFTER THE NOVEMBER ELECTION, AND KENDALL SCUDDER THINKS HE MIGHT JUST BE WHAT THE PARTY NEEDS.BY EMMA RUBY K endall Scudder was having a beer at Lakewood Landing on Nov. 7 when he heard that Gilberto Hinojosa, the longtime leader of the Texas Democratic Party, was stepping down. Scudder’s eyes grew to the “size of half dollars” as he looked across the table, where Rep. John Bryant was nursing his drink. “My political hero is state Rep. John Bry- ant, and he looked at me and he was like, ‘There’s just so much good you can do here,’” Scudder told the Observer last week. “We kind of looked at each other that night, and we were like, is this about to happen?” On March 29, six months after that night at Lakewood Landing, Scudder was elected chair of the Texas Democratic Party. His win was decisive, taking 65 out of 121 votes in the seven- way race. In his mind, it’s a new dawn for the state party that has underperformed for too long. He’s a “progressive millennial” whose ob- session with Democrats — their policies and their history — is hard to rival. His office, headquartered enviably close to Jimmy’s Food Store in one of East Dallas’ many quaint, historic storefronts, is covered from wall to wall in the memorabilia of prominent Democrats past. An oversized gouache-painted portrait of Ann Richards smoking a cigarette has a spot of honor across from the office’s front door. There are two original portraits of William Jennings Bryan, the “inherent populist” who was the Democrat’s presidential nomi- nee in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Displayed side by side in a “real gaudy, beautiful” gold frame are matching portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and his Vice President John Nance Garner. Scudder has been collecting the posters for years, and until now, they’d been shoved under his bed or into desk drawers, accumu- lating dust. “Estes Kefauver was the vice presidential nominee under Adlai Stevenson, and he was the only Democratic senator from the South who supported anti-lynching,” Scudder says, pointing to one of the frames at the dis- play’s center. “They kicked him out of the Southern caucus for it. And so, for him, he’s the center of the wall. Because he’s a re- minder every day that courage of convic- tions is what’s most important.” ‘I’m Mr. Democrat’ At his core, Scudder brands himself as a public school advocate, something he thinks aided him electorally in his chair campaign. Looking at the ongoing Texas Legislative session, Scudder doesn’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that Repub- licans will be able to successfully dismantle public education this year. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s priority voucher bill, which will use public tax dol- lars to fund private school tuition for some students, advanced out of a House commit- tee last week and is now set to be voted on by the full House floor. If the bill passes, it would be the first voucher bill to pass through the body successfully, but Scudder believes Democrats still have time to fight the policy that he describes as “welfare for the well-off.” “Seventy days is a long time in the Legis- lature,” he said. It’s key for Democrats to continue ham- mering on evidence from other states that show vouchers are an expensive and inef- fective tool for managing education, he said. Arkansas adopted vouchers in 2023, but data from the 2024-2025 school year showed that 82% of the stipends disbursed were used to supplement the tuition of stu- dents already enrolled in private schools. Only 5% of Arkansas voucher recipients moved from a public school to a private school, the ideal that school choice propo- nents tout as the most significant benefit of a voucher system. Texas school advocates have warned that vouchers will pull needed funding and re- sources from public schools, something Democrats “can’t stand for.” Scudder believes the party needs to spend the next few months of the session relentlessly emphasizing the relationship between a sound public school system and upward economic mobility, a re- lationship he feels he embodies. Scudder grew up in New Boston, Texas, a town so small that Texarkana is the nearest major reference point. His family was more focused on farming purple hull peas than politics, but Scudder was drawn into the fray in the early 2000s when Republicans began a campaign that labeled LGBTQ+ individu- als as unfit to be parents. “As somebody that had lesbian moms, that was a problem,” he says, so he started knocking on doors to encourage community dissent. He was around 12 years old, the age “you start to kind of realize what’s going on.” But without public schools, that kid probably wouldn’t have made it off the farm, much less “become the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party.” “I worked at a Dairy Queen when I was in high school, and I waited tables to put my- self through college. I was the first one to do it. It has a big impact on your life and the way you view the world,” Scudder said. “And so everything that we do, I think, how does this impact that little boy in East Texas with farm calloused hands? And how do we make sure that we’re setting him up to be able to have an opportunity?” A pervasive messaging problem At some point, it can be argued, Democrats stopped thinking about new ways to reach voters. In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign for Presi- dent “changed the way” politicians viewed social media. Democrats were the Facebook party, adopting the platform early on to reach new American masses. Seventeen years later, though, Democrats are still the Facebook party. On the other hand, Republicans, espe- cially representatives of the party’s most conservative wing, have taken to dominating podcasting and social media. During the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump spent two and a half hours on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast that isn’t inherently political but is one of the most listened to in the world. On YouTube alone, the interview has 57 million views. “Democrats have traditionally been afraid to go places that aren’t safe. They’ve been a safe party where they’re trying not to offend, and they’re trying not to step out of bounds. You will not see that with me as chair. I’m not afraid of Fox News. I’m not afraid of conservative radio. I’m not afraid to go on Joe Rogan,” Scudder said. “We have to start meeting people where they are and bringing our message to people who haven’t had an opportunity to hear it.” In some cases, he thinks that combat- ting the increasingly conservative online sphere may be as simple as looking to the parts of the state where Democrats are flailing and, “for the cost of a micro- phone,” propping up a Democratic influ- encer for that area. Scudder is practicing what he preaches, too. While he no longer records episodes of his show Pod Bless Texas, a Texas-centric progres- sive podcast that Scudder started after mount- ing an unsuccessful challenge against Texas Sen. Bob Hall, half of his office space is dedi- cated to podcasting equipment. The day we sat down with him, our interview was squished between appearances on two shows. He said the days of writing a press re- lease, popping onto MSNBC, and calling it a day are over. The Texas Democratic Party will also be reevaluating its central message. Until now, he feels Democrats have relied on policies that make a lot of sense if you give them 10 minutes to explain them. But who really has 10 minutes to sit through a lecture on the ef- ficacy of vaccines? “What we need to be doing is speaking to what people feel. And we can get into public policy, I’m not saying to stop being academics. I’m not saying that we should stop caring about making sure that policy is good,” Scudder said. “What I’m saying is that you don’t lead with being the smart- est person in the room when you walk in the door.” Looking ahead to the 2026 election, Scudder wants to instill the message that voting for Texas Democrats means voting to keep taxes low “for working folks,” vot- ing for the best-funded schools possible and voting for public safety. The latter is an issue Scudder doesn’t understand why Democrats have walked away from. He be- lieves that Abbott and other bigwig Repub- licans should be raked over the coals for failing to pass firearm legislation that would keep guns out of the hands of Mexi- can cartels. Democrats are traveling a rocky road go- ing into the next election. Texas saw a signif- icant dropoff in voter turnout for the 2024 presidential election compared to 2020, and a vast majority of that dropoff — about 1.1 million people, Scudder estimates — were Democratic voters who said the party “wasn’t worth their time.” Not only is Scudder charged with bring- ing those voters back into the fold, but the party is also hoping to re-carve inroads with Latino voters in South Texas who turned to the Republican side of the ticket in historic margins in November. Republi- cans have made a 27-point swing with Texas’ Latino voters in the last decade, a shift primarily fueled by trust in the Repub- lican party’s handling of the economy and the border, data from the Texas Politics Project shows. Scudder thinks it was a mistake that Democrats didn’t talk enough about the economy in 2024, but it’s a mistake the party won’t be making again. As middle-class Tex- ans start to feel the ramifications of Trump’s reciprocal tariff policy, Scudder wants Dem- ocrats to be ready to welcome the disgrun- tled to their table. “Insurance rates are through the roof. Your rent is constantly going up, which you have to pay because you can’t afford to buy a home because interest rates are through the roof. The economy is not working for us,” Scudder said. “So life is not going to get eas- ier for you, it’s about to get harder. And if [Democrats] aren’t standing on the front lines of that and showing that that matters to us and that we care about it, then why would [voters] trust us?” Unfair Park from p7 Hector Mendez Kendall Scudder has “never told the [Democratic] party no” before, so why start now?
