Book traces the working-class tradition from fence-cutting cowboys to Lampasas
Austin-based political commentator David Griscom published “The Myth Of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, And Class War In The Radical South” earlier this year to tell the story of economic populism in Texas. In an NPR interview with Rob Schmitz, Griscom said the 2026 Democratic victories represented, in many ways, a return to their roots. He said many people forget that Texas was once “the hotbed of kind of left-wing, pro-working-class politics.” “Going all the way back to the 1890s, we were the heart of the populist movement,” he said. Griscom added that it was “no accident” that James Talarico, Clayton Tucker and Gina Hinojosa “all call themselves populists.”
Schmitz framed the results against Texas’s reputation for being reliably red but said the state was more complicated. He said Texas politics also often are associated with oil billionaires, conservative evangelical voters and the Republican establishment. Griscom said his book chronicled a working-class populist tradition that is often overlooked. “There’s multiple phases of this,” he said, adding that it was “an entire kind of generation or tradition in Texas politics that has been forgotten.”
On election night Tuesday, Schmitz said the Democratic “blue wave” did not stop at the border of the Lone Star State. Democrats swept the top races in Texas, with Talarico winning a Senate seat and Hinojosa winning the governor’s race. Griscom was perhaps not as surprised to see his state flip.
Griscom qualified his assessment of the candidates’ populist rhetoric twice. “Using this kind of rhetoric, I think, really focuses on the billionaires and the folks who are harming our democracy,” he said. “And I think that gave a lot of people who might have been waiting for an excuse to maybe buck the Republican Party, which has dominated state politics here for so long, the opportunity to do so.”
The history in Griscom’s book connects resistance to barbed wire with the populist movement he says was born in Lampasas. The book opens with barbed wire, an emblem Griscom said Texans associated with the state and fiercely resisted when it first arrived. In an episode called the Fence Cutting War, working-class cowboys across the state got together and cut down new barbed-wire fences because they saw them as “a tool that was being used to dispossess them.”
That conflict flowed into the populist movement. In Lampasas, farmers gathered and asked themselves why “those who work most get least and those who work least get most.” They then identified “the monopoly powers, the power of the banks” and “the corruption of the politicians” as the explanation.
Schmitz said Governor-elect Hinojosa had embraced the populist label with open arms and played an archived recording from her pre-election interview with The New York Times. Hinojosa said: “Populism is about economic power. We see that things are so stacked against working people in this country. Fighting culture wars at this time is not a winnable fight, and that is not the fight of 2026.”
Schmitz said Hinojosa’s and Talarico’s approach separated them from Democrats elsewhere who had “sort of engaged more in identity politics,” and he asked whether something uniquely Texan was at work. Griscom answered, “Absolutely.” He said Texas had seen major swings before, when everyday working people, including cotton farmers, Black and white, united “the vast majority of people” around messages about how they could improve their lives. “That’s what Gina and James were able to do,” Griscom said. “They didn’t run a partisan message,” he added, describing that approach as a long tradition in Texas.
Griscom invoked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s argument after 2024, saying she had made a strong point about the effectiveness of some anti-trans ads the Trump administration put out. He summarized the message: “They are for they/them, Trump is for you.” Griscom said Ocasio-Cortez considered it a problem for Democrats that, when people were feeling economic pain, they did not consider the party’s priorities immediately important to their lives.
In the 2026 Texas election, Griscom said, “the table was kind of reversed” because all of the ads in Texas were about anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans issues. In this case, he said, Republicans were the ones emphasizing those subjects. For people struggling to get by, he said, the messaging showed “these folks are out of touch with your economic needs,” and he said it “really helped Gina and James, for sure.”
Asked about his own week, Griscom said, “It’s been a really wonderful past few days.”