He anxiously picked at a bowl of chips and salsa while watching two friends lose their elections. Art Pronin, a longtime activist and president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in southwest Houston, who sports well-kempt sideburns and a faintly nervous smile, had only reluctantly attended a watch party for the 2024 Texas primary. He had developed what he calls a “phobia” of such events in 2016, when he stayed up late with a group of activists only to be poleaxed by Hillary Clinton’s surprise loss to Donald Trump. This March, he had braved the trip to a Day of the Dead-themed bar in Houston at the invitation of Friend One, Todd Litton, an attorney seeking the Democratic nomination for a seat in the state senate. Friend Two, Kim Ogg—Houston’s embittered Democratic district attorney, who hosted her own election watch party that night—was vying for reelection. Pronin sulked as results showed Litton coming in a distant third and Ogg getting walloped by her former employee, Sean Teare. As a kind of olive branch late that night, he tweeted a photo of himself, taken at a party, smiling beside Ogg’s opponent, whom he congratulated on the win. (The post was later deleted on X, formerly Twitter.)
Pronin had bucked many in his party by supporting the incumbent district attorney. Harris County Democrats formally admonished Ogg in late 2023 for working too closely with Republicans and launching criminal investigations into local Democrats. During the campaign, she smeared Teare as “funded by George Soros,” a Jewish financier and philanthropist and favorite right-wing target (not to mention, also a one-time Ogg donor). She had become an enemy of many in her party.
Indeed, that same evening, in a private group chat labeled “Defeat Kim Ogg,” a cohort of Pronin’s party mates celebrated the results. Chat members—mostly activists who loosely coordinated and boosted online attacks against Ogg—reveled in her loss, joking about their thwarted opponent’s “Oggdacity” and “the Oggony of defeat.” Then, the chat’s leader, Daniel Cohen, also a longtime Democratic activist, turned discussion toward which candidate to target next. Would it be Shawn Thierry, the Democratic state representative from Houston who voted for a bill restricting trans health care for minors? Vivian King, the erstwhile Ogg staffer running for a Houston judge’s seat? Or maybe “Turd Cruz,” referring to, well, you get it.
That some activists seem as keen to attack elected fellow Democrats as the widely despised Republican senator portends poorly to longtime party leaders such as Pronin. Democrats in Houston have held onto power for less than a decade and already are turning on each other. “It’s like every week someone seems to be a target around here,” Pronin said. “That’s a real problem.” Cohen responds that blaming him and fellow progressives for sowing division is “a bit like sucker punching someone in the throat and saying, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ when they try to defend themselves.”
The two factions do not share a vision for how to maintain—let alone boost—the party’s hold on elective offices in the Houston area. To Pronin and his wing, the key to sustained success lies in wooing independents and Democrat-curious Republicans, those elusive adherents to the Bush dynasty who were turned off by Trump-style politics (including many centrist homeowners, who tend to vote more often). Catering to them means abandoning attempts to adopt policies beloved by progressives but less popular among centrists: chief among them, bail reform—a lightning rod at the center of Ogg’s time in office. To Cohen, by contrast, getting traditionally low-turnout voters to the polls and channeling younger activists’ energy for change is the only way to grow the party—even if it means censuring elected Democrats with moderate views. Caught in between are the so-called “institutionalists” who just want things to run smoothly without factional mudslinging, but discover that effectively depoliticizing a political party is easier said than done.
Any organized group of citizens requires a method of historical bookkeeping, a way to mythologize heroes and avoid repeating mistakes. The Ancient Greeks had Homer; the Harris County Democratic Party has Gerry Birnberg, a sixties anti-war activist turned Jimmy Carter canvasser turned local party mainstay. Birnberg, now 78, was the county chair from 2003 to 2011 and worked tirelessly to grow the party. His wife once asked him how they could spend more time together. “Easy,” he replied, “just start a Democratic club and I’ll be there once a month.” Now HCDP’s presiding general counsel, Birnberg serves as an ex-officio member of every single party committee, meaning he can keep track of pretty much everything going on. When he heard of the movement to admonish Kim Ogg in the lead-up to the primary, he grew alarmed.
In his view, a precinct chair should be free to endorse or denounce whomever he or she pleases, but the minute the party apparatus does so, he said, “That’s just lethal to public confidence in the integrity of the election.” (Primary elections in Texas are run by each party, not the state.) After other Houston Democrats admonished Ogg, Birnberg submitted a new proposal to the party’s rules committee requiring “scrupulous” neutrality, stipulating that the party must “avoid favoritism toward or opposition to” any candidate in any race. He later pulled the proposal because of what he called a “typographical error,” and redrafted it to mandate neutrality only in odd-numbered years—one where the races are for local offices. (He hasn’t yet submitted the revised rule for a vote.)
Birnberg’s fear of infighting comes from experience. Institutionalists remember the internal disputes of the recent past that made the party a local laughingstock. After Barack Obama bested Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary, Birnberg recalled, a sizable Houston “PUMA” (Party Unity My Ass) coalition attempted to subvert the Illinois senator’s chances in the general election by withholding its votes and even backing his Republican opponent, John McCain (who, as expected, won the state easily, by 12 percent). Birnberg also received pushback when, the same year, he asked Anglos to run for fewer local government seats to draw from a more ethnically diverse field of candidates—an experience that chastened him. “I’ve learned over the years that when the party gets involved [in primary campaign matters] it’s an invitation to disaster,” Birnberg told me.
Rose Salas, a longtime collaborator with Birnberg and a high-ranking HCDP committee member, concurred. Salas considers herself a moderate—“I’m not pro-abortion, but I am pro-choice” she says—and sees “pros and cons” with Ogg’s tenure. But she thinks the party shouldn’t be in the business of deciding between “two long-term Democrats.” To Salas, that’s what the voting public is for. She supports Birnberg’s efforts.
Many on the left wing of the party, however, see the calls for party neutrality as self-serving. Cohen doesn’t view the intraparty fight so much as a battle between “conservatives” and “progressives,” but as one between the grassroots and those who would rather keep things the same. On some level, he’s asking Democrats, who campaign on how Republicans are an existential threat to democracy, to take their rhetoric seriously—how can they provide cover for Democrats who eagerly collaborate with the right?
Birnberg, Cohen noted, led a coup in 2012 against a Democratic candidate for district attorney who had endorsed a Republican in a different local race, and removed that Democrat from the ballot. Salas was less sanguine when I asked her what her position on the party making tacit endorsements would be if the HCDP moved to admonish a member of the left wing of the party. “We have to look at the candidate and what their platform is and what they stand for,” she said. “We need to look at their voting history. What have they done in the community?”
So far, the progressives seem to be winning the debate. The overwhelming majority of the HCDP threw its support behind Teare to defeat Ogg. At the ballot box the faction’s preferred candidates also defeated state representative Thierry and won the race to replace now-mayor John Whitmire in the state Senate. But the progressives have found, much like their moderate predecessors, that governing effectively requires more than winning seats. The state Supreme Court has overturned local progressive initiatives, including ones sending financial assistance to low-income families, in effect limiting the degree to which Houstonians can govern themselves. The legislature has preempted election administration reforms the city adopted. Statewide officials have taken their time in responding to Houston’s calls for relief after natural disasters. Houston’s public officials are essentially junior partners to statewide Republicans, tasked with managing the region’s decline in living standards without all necessary tools to do so.
Democratic politicians on both sides of the party schism are unsure how to respond, and engage in some wishful thinking. Mike Doyle, the current chair of HCDP, said his team is closer than ever to achieving total victory. “Once we get one-point-one million Democratic voters in Harris County, which is reachable, we will never again have a Republican president in my lifetime,” he said. Around one in seven Texas voters live in Harris County, so if you strengthen the lead there, the thinking goes, statewide elections begin to fall within reach.
Doyle’s figure was oft recited, like a prayer, among those I spoke to on both sides of the schism. But there’s just one problem: in 2020, Joe Biden received around 918,000 votes in Harris County, 200,000 shy of HCDP’s target, but he lost Texas by about 631,000. The HCDP’s goal may be reachable, but more must change to swing the state. And then in 2022, Republicans swept every statewide race, as they have for the last three decades. However blue Houston may turn in the coming years, the local power either Democratic faction there accrues looks likely to remain just that—local.
