As Dems target the Texas House, GOP Speaker Dustin Burrows is campaigning like his gavel’s at stake

By Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune
October 28, 2026

It was the first week of June, and dozens of Texas Republicans, some of whom had been their party’s state House nominees for only a week, were at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown for a summit convened by Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows to game plan the general election five months away.

The message from the top, according to attendees: Don’t let us care about your campaign more than you do. The political environment will be difficult. Every Republican, even ones who’ve won their districts by decisive margins before, has to run a real race.

Amid intense political headwinds, Burrows has spent his first election cycle as speaker waging an expensive and unusually visible effort to defend the GOP majority. He has deployed millions of dollars to his party’s most vulnerable members, headlined fundraisers for them and stumped in their districts, most recently as part of his ongoing bus tour. And, according to Republican strategists, he has pushed candidates even in seemingly comfortable red districts to run like their seats are in play.

“It’s night and day,” said state Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Plano. “He’s transformed what a speaker does to make sure his members come back.”

Republicans have controlled the Texas House since 2003 and won at least 83 seats, out of 150, in every election since 2010. They now outnumber Democrats 86 to 62, with two vacancies in red-leaning districts last occupied by Republicans. Democrats would need to flip 14 seats to retake the lower chamber.

But Burrows, a sixth-term legislator from Lubbock, has a lot riding on next week’s midterms beyond just preserving the GOP’s House majority. The size of it will likely decide the scope of Republicans’ conservative policy ambitions in next year’s legislative session, along with the overall tenor of the 140 days under the Pink Dome.

If Republicans hold the House, their margin could also determine how secure Burrows’ own grip on the gavel is. A thin GOP cushion could invite a challenge from a more moderate Republican backed by Democrats, the playbook used after the GOP came out of the 2008 election with a 76-74 edge. And even if Burrows avoided a repeat of that scenario, a closely divided House could complicate partisan legislative battles if he can afford only a few defections on party-line votes.

“Speaker Burrows knows this is no time for half-measures,” Burrows spokesperson Kim Carmichael said in a statement. “He understands what it takes for members to run effective campaigns and continue serving their communities. Speaker Burrows firmly believes that standing behind members and actively supporting their campaigns is a fundamental responsibility of the speaker, regardless of the political climate, and that members deserve nothing less.”

Democrats hope 2018, the last time they made real gains in the state House, offers a preview of next week’s down-ballot races. Eight years ago, the only other midterm election with President Donald Trump in the White House, Democrats flipped a dozen seats in the lower chamber — and did so without the benefit of this year’s coordinated effort run by the state party, two of Texas’ largest Democratic political groups and House Democrats’ campaign arm. The Republican-led Legislature responded with a 2019 session defined by school finance and property taxes, while polarizing red-meat issues took a back seat.

That history, and the favorable political environment driven by Trump’s low approval numbers even in Texas, has Democrats feeling hopeful they can meaningfully puncture Republicans’ margin — or even flip the chamber on the crest of a monumental blue wave.

State Rep. Christina Morales, chair of Texas House Democrats’ campaign arm, said her party’s goal “has always been to flip the Texas House,” but under their conservative estimate, they at least expect to pick up “anywhere from five to eight” seats. National Democrats are targeting 12 flips, which would give the GOP just a two-seat majority.

“We have been playing defense in Texas for 30 years, but now we have the Republicans on their heels,” Morales, who represents Houston, said on a press call last week featuring top Democratic challengers. “They’re having to spend money in every district. Democrats are competing across the board, and we will win in places that haven’t been won in a long time.”

Burrows, Republican candidates and strategists said, has taken the threat seriously. So too have Republican incumbents even in districts that once seemed like remote possibilities for Democrats. Candidates like state Rep. Ben Bumgarner, who won his North Texas seat by 11 points in 2024, and state Rep. Jeff Leach, who carried his district with 60.3% of the vote, significantly ramped up their fundraising over the last month; both more than doubled their hauls from the prior campaign finance reporting period, despite having only one-third as much time to bring in the cash.

“They have taken this substantially more seriously than the threat of 2018,” said Enrique Marquez, who served as chief of staff to former House Speaker Dade Phelan. “They have a coordinated and consolidated effort, led at the top by the Speaker Burrows apparatus, and they have been extraordinarily data-driven and very generous with candidates because the stakes are so high for them not to take it seriously.”

Since the runoff election in late May, Burrows, through his main leadership PAC Texas Conservative Majority, has raised almost $8 million and distributed roughly $10.3 million to 38 Republican candidates in the form of direct contributions, canvassing, polling and advertising, according to campaign finance reports. Texas Freedom Alliance, another group in his orbit, spent $1.6 million on digital advertising and text messages supporting House Republicans.

In a sign of how Republicans are bracing for impact, Burrows’ outlays since the runoff have gone to candidates whose districts went for Trump in 2024 by as little as one percentage point to margins as high as 35. They include six-figure contributions to Republicans like state Rep. Candy Noble, whose Collin County district Trump won by 17 points, and who received over $205,000 from Texas Conservative Majority. The group also kicked in $384,000 to state Rep. Brad Buckley, whose Bell County district broke for Trump by nearly the same margin.

Beyond the money, Burrows’ political operation has also worked with candidates on their campaign messaging, helped them manage their budgets and paid for polling and field operations. They have polled even historically safe Republican districts, where incumbents might otherwise feel comfortable, to gauge how GOP candidates are faring, said Craig Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist involved in several Texas House races.

“Everybody knows that there’s a wolf at the door, so it forces you to concentrate,” Murphy said. “The speaker has probably been more central than ever in terms of coordinating everything and making sure everybody is doing it and there were no stragglers.”

Burrows’ operation has paid particular attention to Republican House districts Trump won by fewer than around 12 percentage points last election, regularly checking in to ensure the campaigns are doing the work to shore up their vote, GOP strategists said. And when early voting kicked off last week, so did the “Speaker’s Strike Force,” a bus tour Burrows launched to hit more than two dozen House districts and help get out the vote.

This election has ushered in the most active Texas House landscape since 2020, when Democrats eyed major gains but failed to net any seats. That election was the second in a row to take place while the House was led by a retiring speaker, leaving it to a constellation of Republican-leaning groups to help bankroll battleground campaigns. In 2022, his first cycle as speaker, Phelan played defense for incumbents against hardline primary challengers, then headed into the fall with his GOP majority a virtual lock as Democrats battled midterm headwinds.

That leaves Burrows as the first speaker in recent memory who is spending his fall effectively campaigning for the right to extend his speakership.

“He’s been very proactive,” said state Rep. Mano DeAyala, whose Houston seat is among Democrats’ top targets, and whose campaign has received north of $300,000 in support from Burrows’ leadership PAC. “His help has been very important — it’s helped me get the message out, it’s helped me be able to fund some of the things that I need to fund to get it done. I don’t think I’d be able to do that nearly as successfully without the help of the speaker.”

Both parties expect that, like in 2018, the neck-and-neck U.S. Senate race will lift the blue team further down the ballot. Looking to ride Senate nominee James Talarico’s coattails in his run against Republican Ken Paxton, Democrats are running candidates in nearly every state and federal race on the ballot, an achievement the party hopes will also help drive turnout across the board and maximize their chances of winning down-ballot upsets. (The Democrats’ sole uncontested legislative race is in House District 93, a north Tarrant County seat for which the Democratic candidate dropped out in late September.)

“No Republican gets a free ride in Texas,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said last year. “If you are a Republican and you want to hold public office in this state, you’re going to have to fight us for it.”

The most competitive House seats are concentrated in the suburbs of large metro areas and in South Texas, where large populations of Latino voters swung to the right in 2024 and now seem poised to shift back to the left.

That expected reversion, captured in polling throughout the midterms, has Democrats bullish about their chances of recapturing a Corpus Christi district flipped two years ago by GOP state Rep. Denise Villalobos. The seat went for Trump by just over 1 point in 2024 and for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in 2018 by over 16 points. Democrats are also targeting state Rep. Janie Lopez, R-San Benito, in the Rio Grande Valley.

In the suburbs, state Reps. Morgan Meyer and Angie Chen Button, both Republicans whose Dallas County districts broke for Trump by under 6 percentage points in 2024, remain perennial targets for Democrats. And Republicans in districts around Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth are also on defense.

Even if Democrats gain seats in the House, hard-right Republicans have suggested they’ll push the lower chamber to maintain an attitude of partisan dominance. That was a prevailing theme of last year’s session, when, under Burrows, lawmakers pushed through a laundry list of hard-right priorities and further marginalized the minority party.

Shaheen said he had not heard backlash from voters to the lower chamber’s hard-right turn. He argued that Republicans’ legislative achievements last session, including to lower property taxes, bolster workforce development in higher education and “[protect] children from being sexualized,” gave members a strong record to run on in their districts.

“We’re doing things that the vast majority of Texans want,” he said.

But a narrower GOP majority would likely complicate efforts to continue governing by partisan domination. Eight flips — the high point of Morales’ more cautious goal — would leave the House at an 80 to 70 partisan split. In that case, it would take only a handful of Republican defections to sink party-line votes.

For Burrows, the next hurdle after Election Day will be holding onto the speaker’s gavel, which will be decided by a vote of the full House when the Legislature convenes in January. He first clinched the post two years earlier after a contentious race that left dueling factions of the GOP bruised.

His efforts on the campaign trail could bolster his bid to consolidate Republican support — especially from the members he helps bring back. One of Burrows’ erstwhile critics, former Texas GOP general counsel Rachel Hooper, praised the speaker for stopping in her Houston-area district earlier this week, calling his bus tour “not the usual stop and wave” and adding that a sitting speaker “rarely does that kind of work for Republican candidates.”

“There is nobody that can accuse Dustin Burrows of not ensuring that he is protecting his members, period,” Marquez said. “That is the most important thing to trying to achieve the 76 votes needed to become speaker again.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.