Texas's Incoming Democratic Leaders Are Hiring Republicans. The GOP Still Holds the State Senate.

Come January, Texas will have a Democratic governor, a Democratic lieutenant governor and, if the House vote goes the way everyone expects, a Democratic House speaker. That hasn’t happened since 1995. The first thing all three of them did this week was call Republicans.

Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa named a former Republican state representative to co-chair her transition. Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin brought on two former Republican state senators. And presumptive Speaker Senfronia Thompson of Houston put together a team of six former House speakers, three Democrats and three Republicans, according to The Texas Tribune.

That’s not charity. It’s arithmetic. Republicans still hold the Texas Senate, 19 seats to 12, when the new Legislature meets in January, Texas Public Radio reported. Nothing becomes law in Texas without getting through that chamber, and nothing gets through that chamber without Republican votes.

The Senate is where this gets real

In Texas, the lieutenant governor isn’t a ceremonial job. Whoever holds it runs the state Senate, writes the budget, picks committee chairs and decides which bills ever get a floor vote. For years that was Dan Patrick, and he ran the place with a firm hand.

Now Goodwin, a Democratic state representative from Austin, takes the gavel on Jan. 19, and she’ll be presiding over a chamber full of Republicans who didn’t vote for her agenda. Patrick is already telling them not to roll over.

“Vikki Goodwin won, but she doesn’t have the majority of votes on the floor,” Patrick told radio host Mark Davis this week, as reported by CBS Texas. “So, I believe, and I support the Republicans standing up for their voters.” He said Senate Republicans should change the chamber’s rules. Which rules, nobody has said yet.

That’s a real card to play. The Senate writes its own rules at the start of each session, and a 19-member majority can rewrite how much power the presiding officer actually has. If Senate Republicans decide to trim the lieutenant governor’s grip on committees or the calendar, Goodwin could walk into the most powerful office in Texas politics and find a lot of it gone.

Who Goodwin picked, and why it matters

Goodwin seems to know that. Her transition is chaired by Democratic state Rep. Chris Turner of Grand Prairie, with retired Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte and Austin Mayor Kirk Watson as co-chairs. But the names that jumped out were two Republicans who spent years in the very chamber she’s about to run: former Sens. Kel Seliger of Amarillo and Tommy Williams of The Woodlands.

Seliger served in the Senate for 19 years and called himself a “very proud Republican.” He also spent a lot of that time fighting with Patrick, who stripped him of a committee chairmanship. Williams served 10 years in the Senate after six in the House, advised Abbott, and later spent several months as interim president of Texas A&M, The Texan reported.

Retired Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips, also a Republican, is on the team too. Angela Hale, a longtime operative who once worked for Republican Speaker Joe Straus and for Abbott when he was attorney general, is the executive director.

Seliger put the deal in plain terms at Tuesday’s news conference. “Starting on Jan. 19, 181 members of the Legislature, lieutenant governor and the governor all have issues of importance to them and agendas,” he said. “If they’re going to be successful in any measure, they have to cooperate.”

Goodwin said she’d lead differently than Patrick. “It’s not going to be one person’s agenda,” she said. “It’s going to be formed by all of the senators.” Her stated priorities are more money for public schools and health coverage. She also said she won’t push a full ban on THC products, which Patrick tried to pass last year.

Hinojosa’s pick says a lot about schools

Hinojosa’s Republican co-chair is former state Rep. Ernest Bailes, who served in the Texas House from 2017 to 2025. Bailes is best known for fighting Abbott’s school voucher push alongside Hinojosa when they both served in the House. He lost his 2024 primary after Abbott backed his opponent.

“I believe in Gina,” Bailes said. “We will put partisanship aside. We will work together for what is best for the kids of the state of Texas.”

Hinojosa called him a “champion for public schools, a small-business owner, a Republican,” and said the whole thing is meant to be “a transition for the whole state of Texas.”

For school-choice families, that pick is worth watching. Any change to how Texas funds schools would still have to clear that 19-member Republican Senate.

The House speaker race

Thompson, a Houston Democrat who has been in the House for decades, says she has the votes to become speaker when the session opens Jan. 12. If she wins, she’d be the first woman and the first Black speaker in Texas history, CBS Texas noted. Her advisers include Republican former speakers Joe Straus, Dennis Bonnen and Dade Phelan.

“Democrats and Republicans working together, we can make a difference in the state of Texas and the lives of the people that we represent,” Thompson said. “I don’t have a dictatorship that I’m going to tell people what to do.” She said she’d go back to the old House tradition of naming members of both parties as committee chairs, and wouldn’t try to “punish” Republicans.

Not everybody on her side likes that. Progressive commentator Michelle Davis wrote that activists didn’t do all that work “to hand back the keys” and called for Republicans to be shut out of committee chairmanships. That tension between the new leaders and their own base is going to follow them all session.

Texas has seen this movie before, just with the parties flipped

When Rick Perry became the first Republican lieutenant governor since Reconstruction in 1998, he kept some Democratic staff from Bob Bullock’s office. David Dewhurst later hired a former Democratic lawmaker as his chief of staff. As governor, Perry even made Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, secretary of state.

Republicans built a 30-year run in Texas partly by doing exactly that, reaching across while they learned to govern. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and Republicans have more leverage than the headlines suggest. They hold the Senate. They have former leaders sitting at every transition table. And Patrick, on his way out, has already told them to use it.

Even U.S. Sen.-elect James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, warned his own party against “assuming that Texans all of a sudden became partisan Democrats.” He said the state “voted for change” but “not necessarily for one party over the other.” That’s the honest read. The voters handed Democrats the top jobs and handed Republicans the Senate. Everything that gets done in Austin next year will need both.