In historic first, women poised to hold top three leadership positions in Texas government
By Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune
November 6, 2026
When Senfronia Thompson was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1972, there were only two women in the entire Legislature.
Five and a half decades later, a lot has changed. Tuesday’s historic election swept in the state’s first Latina governor, Gina Hinojosa; the first female lieutenant governor, Vikki Goodwin; and enough Democrats to secure House speaker naming rights.
On Friday, Thompson announced she had the votes to become speaker when the Legislature convenes in January under its first Democratic majority since 2003.
If Thompson’s coalition holds, Texas will have its first all-female “Big Three” — governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker. Two women, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson and Ann Richards, have served as governor. No woman has ever held the other two jobs.
“It’s time — well past time — for women to lead in Texas, and Texas has spoken in electing these women,” said state Rep. Christina Morales, a Houston Democrat. “Look at these women’s records. You can see that they are qualified and now they’re going to be in charge of Texas.”
Each of the jobs that make up the “Big Three” is influential in its own right. But together, they have massive power over what bills become law. For the last dozen years, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have occupied two of the three spots at the top of state government, with a rotating cast of white male House speakers filling out the roster.
When the Big Three have shared goals and work well together, the whole legislative session tends to flow more smoothly. When they find themselves at odds, the inner workings of the Legislature can grind to a halt. A test case of the latter came in 2023, when Patrick and then-Speaker Dade Phelan deadlocked over property tax cuts and the House failed to pass a school voucher program sought by Abbott and Patrick.
Had Patrick and House Republicans held on, as pre-Election Day forecasts projected, Hinojosa would likely have faced a contentious relationship with Patrick and GOP House Speaker Dustin Burrows, who could have bottled up Hinojosa’s progressive agenda and seen their own conservative bills die by her veto pen.
That’s all different now. Goodwin will still face a hard road overseeing a Senate where Republicans hold 19 of 31 seats. But Democrats are hopeful that having a politically and personally aligned trio at the top will help the party make the most of its strongest grasp on power in three decades.
Jennifer Clark, a political scientist at the University of Houston who studies women in politics, said research shows female lawmakers from both parties are more likely to be collaborative and bipartisan than their male colleagues.
“Certainly, compromise is going to be the name of the game, especially with Republicans still in control of the Senate,” Clark said. “It’s really going to be key that they can work together with each other and across the aisle.”
At a news conference announcing she had enough votes to secure the speaker’s gavel, Thompson said she intended to run the House in a bipartisan manner. She emphasized her long history in both the political majority and minority and made clear GOP members would not be sidelined the way Democrats were in last year’s session.
“It’s gonna take all of us working together. The expertise of the Republicans and the expertise of the Democrats, working as a unit to get the things done for this state,” she said. “I’m not here to punish anybody. I did that when I was a parent, and all of my children are adults now.”
Hinojosa, Goodwin and Thompson served in the Legislature together, overlapping for the last eight years and working together on legislation about school funding, women’s health and human trafficking. On the campaign trail, Hinojosa called Thompson a “living legend.” Goodwin and Hinojosa are both members of the Austin delegation and represent House districts that border one another.
During the 2021 legislative session when Democrats left the state to deny the House the headcount needed to pass a bill that would have restricted voting rights, Goodwin quoted Thompson on social media.
“The Dean of the TX House Dems, Rep. Senfronia Thompson said something that stuck in my mind,” Goodwin wrote. “She said there’s a difference between a politician & a statesman. A politician acts based on how it will impact her next election; a statesman takes actions that serve the greater good.”
In a contentious election cycle where Democrats tried to focus on affordability, neither Hinojosa nor Goodwin made their gender a central plank of their campaigns. In August, Hinojosa shrugged off the significance of her run while speaking to KUT, saying it should be “natural and normal that there would be a Latina governor for Texas.”
But Thompson, 87, came up in a very different climate than Hinojosa and Goodwin, who are both in their 50s and entered the Legislature in the last decade. When Thompson started, she faced both racism and sexism, like when a male colleague called her his “beautiful Black mistress.” She gave a speech on the floor protesting his comments, and after that, she told Texas Monthly, all her bills were killed.
“I wasn’t able to get anything done for some time,” she said in 2023. “I had stepped into a man’s world to tell them I was not going to take this s— off of anybody, and that was a no-no for women to do.”
Now, Thompson is poised to make history as a series of firsts: the first female speaker of the Texas House, the first Black speaker and the first speaker to be part of an all-female Big Three.
Having diverse representation in the highest echelons of power can usher in a major shift, not just in the policies that get passed but in Texans’ understanding of who deserves to be a leader, Clark said, adding that it can inspire other women to consider running for office.
As Morales was leaving the Capitol Friday afternoon after Thompson’s press conference, she saw a group of little girls on the grounds with their mom.
“I thought, I wonder if they know they could be the governor, the speaker, the lieutenant governor,” she said, choking up at the memory. “It just dawned on me that Texas is going to be different for those little girls.”
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