Texas Democrats had largely abandoned their long-held dream of flipping House District 121 — until Gov. Greg Abbott’s school voucher campaign thrust it back into the spotlight this year.
Now an unlikely coalition of public education supporters, including House Democratic leaders, the state teachers’ union and even Rep. Steve Allison (R-Alamo Heights) — the ousted Republican incumbent — are working together to help little-known Democrat Laurel Jordan Swift in her uphill race against conservative Marc LaHood, a voucher supporter who emerged victorious from the Republican primary.
The group’s urgency was on full display Wednesday night, as state Reps. Gina Hinojosa (D-Austin), James Talarico (D-Austin), and House District 121’s soon-to-be-former state Rep. Allison all huddled in San Antonio for a public education forum Swift hosted with state Rep. Diego Bernal (D-San Antonio).
In a highly unusual move, Allison, who drew Abbott’s ire when he joined Democrats in shutting down a school voucher program last November, unabashedly joined the Democrats’ call for a cross-party effort to stop the use of taxpayers funds for private school tuition at all costs.
He called out Abbott, suggesting that the governor may have overplayed his hand when he aimed at fellow Republicans in the name of his school voucher plan earlier this year.
“We can’t lose sight of the big picture… we’ve got to protect public education,” Allison said to the room of mainly San Antonio-area educators. “The governor thinks he has the votes [on vouchers]… and this election is one of those key three to five [seats] to flip that’s going to make all the difference in the world.”
In an interview after the event, Allison, a former Alamo Heights ISD board president who has represented the district since 2018, said he believes Swift now has a real chance at a seat that’s long eluded Democrats.
“I’m supporting her, and urging others to do the same,” said Allison, who still counts himself as a Republican.
An uphill race
Flipping the seat is tall order for Swift, a first-time candidate running in a district that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Austin in the 21st century.
Democrats tried and failed twice in recent years, including expensive back-to-back races for education nonprofit leader Celina Montoya in 2018 and 2020, before largely leaving their candidate to fend for herself last election cycle.
The district only grew redder in redistricting after the 2020 Census, to the extent that under its current boundaries, it would have supported former President Donald Trump by 2.3 percentage points, according to a Republican strategist who crunched the district data.
Against that backdrop, Democrats didn’t even have a candidate this election cycle until local political operative Ana Ramon, who helped out on Montoya’s campaigns, met Swift at a social event and recruited her for a race no seasoned candidate would sign up for. Despite having identified as a Republican until 2016, Swift defeated one other little-known candidate in the Democratic primary.
“My husband’s a Republican. Most people I know think they’re Republicans. So I kind of get it,” Swift said of the challenging district, where she grew up and raised her five children.
After Abbott-backed candidates defeated a number of anti-voucher Republicans in the March primary, public education advocates have been desperate for allies who could help them hold the line next year — even if it means sinking money into an uphill contest.
In the past six months, Democrats have been pouring money, staff and other campaign resources in to help Swift — whose most recent campaign finance report indicated the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee and Texas Democratic Party contributed $135,000 to her race.
By the time she took the debate stage with LaHood this week, Swift hardly sounded like a newcomer, weaving personal stories about raising five kids in the district and caring for family members with mental illness to make her case for stronger social safety nets, like expanding Medicaid and pumping money into public schools.
“Laurel fell into our lap,” Hinojosa, who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign arm, said in an interview Wednesday. “We were so busy with all the extra special sessions that we didn’t get the time to do candidate recruitment … but we couldn’t have asked for a better candidate.”
A turning point on school vouchers
LaHood embraced the party’s conservative wing and won decisively in the primary.
At Tuesday’s debate, he didn’t shy away from those values, suggesting public schools already have the resources they need, but waste it on bloated administrative budgets instead of spending it on students.
“It’s going be a stair-step implementation,” LaHood said of his vision for a voucher program. “I believe that if the funds are there, if we can make it universal, we will, and if not, then we start with the lowest income, and then incrementally jack it up.”
Swift is leaning hard on the idea that Republicans might be feeling alienated by the party’s rightward shift — with vouchers being the final straw.
The district includes the type of highly educated suburban voters who have been trending toward Democrats in other parts of the state, and yet stayed loyal to this area’s more moderate Republicans like Allison and his predecessor, former Texas Speaker Joe Straus.
In an impassioned speech on Wednesday, Allison gave some credence to that idea, saying that many business-minded Republicans know a school voucher program would drain resources from the public schools to help the lucky few in private schools — devastating workforce development and hamstringing the state’s overall economic engine.
“What irritates me is some of my colleagues on the Republican side — although I don’t recognize that party much anymore — some of the crazies say, ‘Well, we’re going to fund [public] education [along with the voucher program],’” Allison told the audience. “Yeah right… we’re looking at peanuts, like what was in [the House proposal last session].”
He went on to suggest that despite his loss in the primary, everything he’d seen in his time representing House District 121 indicated residents wanted him to defend their public schools.
“I was one of the 21 Republicans that voted against the voucher provision, and I paid for it,” he said. “I think that’s OK. I think we’ve got to take a stand for what’s right.”