Out Of The Blue

 This year, a surge of Democratic candidates is challenging Republicans in places—and races—where progressives usually fear to tread.

- Tim Murphy

BEFORE SHE COULD talk about her campaign for the Texas House of Representatives, Lisa Seger needed to check on her goats. Seger, who lives with her husband and 30 goats on a farm outside Houston, had a doe in the maternity stall that was due any minute. “Spring is kidding season,” she explained.

If elected, the 47-year-old Seger, a sustainable agriculture proponent who got into farming after reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, would likely be the only member of the Legislature with her own brand of yogurt. Her crimson-dyed hair and floppy-eared companions not withstanding, Seger’s political origin story is unexceptional in 2018. After President Donald Trump announced his “Muslim ban” early last year, she drove to George Bush Intercontinental Airport to protest. A week later, she was back in Houston demonstrating outside the Super Bowl. She joined a local chapter of the progressive grassroots group Indivisible and kept going. “I’ve become the cliché,” she says.

But what makes Seger really stand out in the state’s 3rd District is her party affiliation—she is the first Democrat to run for the seat since 2010. The incumbent, Cecil Bell Jr., received 100 percent of the vote in 2012 and 2016. Seger’s Republican state senator also ran unopposed in her last election. “I couldn’t remember the last time I was even able to vote for a Democrat in one of our elections here,” Seger says.

Meanwhile, 500 miles away in West Texas, two millennial friends, 26-year-old Armando Gamboa and 24-year-old Spencer Bounds, are running for neighboring state House districts where Democrats had gone awol. No one has contested Gamboa’s district in Odessa since 2004; Bounds’ opponent in Midland is a 50-year incumbent who last faced a Democrat in 2008.