“If we fall short, that’s the end of the ball game.”

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For months, political fighting in Texas consumed the nation’s attention, as Republicans, at Donald Trump’s insistence, redrew their state’s electoral map in a bid to hold more seats for the GOP. It was part of a larger struggle over control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections, but now the conflict has broadened: to California, where Gavin Newsom’s Democrats are trying to squeeze more Democratic seats out of their map; to Indiana, where Republicans are hoping to repeat what they did in Texas on a smaller scale; and to other states across the country.

But back in Texas, this clash has had significant consequences, including for high-profile Democrat Beto O’Rourke, the former member of the U.S. House and former candidate for the U.S. Senate and the White House.

For months, O’Rourke and his group Powered by People have been under attack from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (Paxton is most generously described as a character. Less generously, but accurately, he can be described as one of just a few Texas statewide officials in history who have been both impeached by their own party and indicted on felony charges while in office. Nevertheless, he is also a primary candidate for the U.S. Senate.)

The case nominally centers on Powered by People’s actions during the redistricting battle, when it made no-strings-attached financial contributions to state lawmakers as they fled Texas in a bid to bring more national attention to the issue. Paxton accused O’Rourke’s group of paying “Beto bribes,” and for weeks, across social media and in press releases, the state attorney general mustered all of his name-calling bravado, claiming that he would put Beto behind bars and shut down his “radical left-wing” organization. But this was ultimately about trying to leverage the power of the state to impose consequences on one’s political opponents for the “crime” of pushing back against your agenda.

Fortunately for O’Rourke and for the Constitution, Paxton’s suit has flopped. In September, an all-Republican-appointed Texas court ruled unanimously against the Republican, deeming the lawsuit against O’Rourke’s nonprofit a violation of free speech.

“Two-hundred forty-nine years into this experiment,” O’Rourke told Slate, “this idea that we are a government of, by, and for the people, well, that still stands. And it stands whether the judges are Republicans or Democrats or in Texas or somewhere else. So that really felt good.”

Now O’Rourke is back in the fray in Texas, amid a struggle that may determine control of Congress for years to come: The state is expected to gain four more House seats as a result of the 2030 census, while California’s population is expected to drop.

“There’s a time and place for rallies,” O’Rourke said, “but it’s really powerful when you bring every voice into the conversation, including—and importantly—voices that may disagree with you or see things from a different perspective. That’s what we’ve been doing across Texas for a long time, and what I’m increasingly doing across the country.” He added, “We’re really going everywhere and trying to bring everybody in.”

More immediately, however, he is focused on next year’s midterms, warning that losing them could be “the end of the ball game” for our democracy.

Slate caught up with O’Rourke after the ruling to discuss why his recent legal win matters in the face of ever more powerful institutions’ willingness to bend the knee to Trump, why Texas has yet to turn purple, and what can be done to change that. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: How do you feel now that Texas’ 15th Court of Appeals voted against Ken Paxton and his plans to shut down Powered by People?

Beto O’Rourke: I feel good, but honestly, I was somewhat surprised. Every one of those justices was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott. This was a court set up by the Legislature specifically to hear these kinds of cases that involve the state of Texas. So Paxton had home-court advantage. And we had really struggled in the Fort Worth court, in Tarrant County. We had a temporary restraining order that froze our organization’s assets. They tried to freeze my personal assets, and they significantly restricted our ability to raise money. Paxton was promising that he was going to put me behind bars, and he filed criminal contempt charges to do just that. He went after our license to do business in the state, and we’re the largest voter-registration program in Texas. It was not looking good. But we have an extraordinary legal team, and they filed a mandamus with the 15th, this newly set-up court, and they came back, and the opinion, if you haven’t read it yet, is worth scanning. It’s just scathing.

Can you give me the gist?

It’s a 23-page opinion in its indictment of Paxton. Here’s a quote: “Powered by People and Beto O’Rourke assert that the trial court’s modified restraining order violates their rights to free speech under the Texas Constitution and United States Constitution and must be vacated for that reason. We agree.” But we’re not out of the woods yet because they haven’t rendered a final decision. And even if that decision is in our favor, it can be appealed to the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court. So we will see. But, yes, that was a really good sign.

Had you known all the threats and legal fees you would face, would you still have helped the Democratic legislators in their quorum break?

“If we fall short in 2026, that’s the end of the ball game.”

Yes—they had the courage of their convictions, and they did this not for partisan advantage but, kind of going back to what the 15th Court of Appeals did, they did this to uphold the idea of self-government and to try to stop a blatant power grab. I mean, Trump is very clear about this, right? There was never a pretense that the existing districts were unconstitutional; they were drawn by the Republican majority in 2021 for their own benefit. Trump just said, “I won big in Texas in 2024. I deserve five more seats.” These Democratic legislators tried to stop that. But you can’t do that on your own, and you need everyone in the fight. And so our organization was able to raise and donate more than $1 million to support groups such as the House Democratic Caucus, the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus. This sort of political expression is our right as free people in a free country, confirmed by that appeals court decision.

Paxton has embraced Trump-style bullying and name-calling in his attacks against you. Among other things, he has called you a fraudster and a failed political has-been, but you’re not responding in kind. Can politicians still show character and play fair, or is good sportsmanship these days a one-way ticket to political failure?

So we really want to be known by the work that we do. There are some people who are all about bluff and bluster, and I guess that’s fine and works well on Twitter, but there are others who are keeping their eyes on the prize. And for us, that means winning political power with a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives in 2026. Because I think if we fall short of that, that’s the end of the ball game. The consolidation of authoritarian power in the hands of the president will be unstoppable. You can kiss this Constitution goodbye—there’s nothing that I believe more firmly than that.

On the other hand, if we are able to win a majority in the House, then there will be a check on the president’s lawlessness and accountability for his crimes, and there will remain the possibility of free and fair elections in 2028.

And so the president gets this, right? You’ve never had an American president turn to the governor of a state and say, literally, “Find me five congressional seats.” And the reason he’s taken this incredibly unprecedented step is that he understands those very same stakes. He recognizes that he is unpopular in America right now, that the polling for his individual initiatives, like the One Big Beautiful Bill or his warrantless plainclothes masked immigration and U.S. citizen roundups, is not good. Folks don’t like this stuff, and he’s not going to hold that majority on this current trajectory. Therefore, in Texas, in Indiana, in Florida, and in so many other states, he’s turning to their governors to try to grab more power to insulate him from the consequences of his actions and the accountability of these voters. I’m focused on that.

Ken Paxton has a different job. He’s focused on winning the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, and I get that. And so, in that world, all his bluff and bluster and name-calling scores points, perhaps in his primary contest against Sen. John Cornyn. But I don’t have to worry about that stuff. I’m just focused on the really big prize, which is making sure that we save this country in 2026. And to do that, you’ve got to put in the work now, in 2025.

You’re looking at $400,000 in legal fees. Does it hurt to waste so much money to fend off Paxton rather than doing the voter-outreach work?

Yes, this is costing us a lot of money. But the Texas Democrats, too, did this at great personal cost. But here’s the thing, and this is why it’s even more important that we do this regardless of cost: The most powerful in this country—the big law firms or the Ivy Leagues or Paramount, CBS, or Disney/ABC, who just canceled Jimmy Kimmel—every entity that actually has the resources and capacity to fight back against authoritarianism is instead bending the knee. They’re practicing this anticipatory obedience. There was no executive action ordering Disney/ABC to cancel Kimmel, but they knew that Trump wanted them to do it, and so they did it for his pleasure and for their own profit.

Nexstar, one of the big local TV providers, which has a significant part of the market already, is planning a merger, and that merger needs to be approved by Trump’s FCC chairman. And they understood that canceling Kimmel was going to make it more likely that they could grow their business. So, as all of these powerful people and institutions—the tech moguls, the traditional centers of power—as they bend the knee, it’s ever more important that everyone else, regardless of how powerful or powerless you think you are, stand and fight.

On a more local scale, 10 years ago, there was a lot of talk about the inevitability of Texas’ turning purple. What went wrong?

It’s a good question, and I understand it because of all the hope that Texas presents, and I think that it also comes out of the fact that in 2018, not only did I get so close to Ted Cruz, but in that year we picked up 12 state House seats. That’s huge. We picked up two really-close-to-impossible congressional seats, including the one that Colin Allred won against Pete Sessions. That was really huge. I think 19 Black women were elected to judicial positions in Harris County. We won appeals court races. I mean, we ran the tables in Texas.

And so the question is: Well, then, why didn’t you just keep running the tables year after year after year? And here’s the thing. Republicans who had every major lever of power—the state House, Senate, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, on down the line—saw how transformational 2018 was and recognized that their purchase on power was very precarious. And so they immediately began changing the election laws in the state to make it harder for a Democrat to win.

They closed polling locations. In just the past 10 years, I think, more than 750 polling locations have closed in Texas. And if anything, Texas should be adding polling locations. It’s one of the fastest-growing states in the union, but it’s closing more polling stations than any other state by a Texas mile. And almost every single one of those polling place closures has occurred in a fast-growing Black or brown neighborhood.

But it’s got to be more than just polling locations.

It’s voting rights overall. In 2022, when I ran for governor, during the primary—this is staggering—13 percent of mail ballots were rejected by the state. In Texas, you have to qualify to vote by mail. So you have to have a disability, be over the age of 65, or be a service member deployed overseas. College students who go to school somewhere other than the county where they’re registered have to vote by mail. The previous high-water mark for ballot vote-by-mail rejection in Texas was 1 percent. Thirteen percent is on par with a third-world pretend-democracy dictatorship. It’s not what we expect from the United States of America.

You believe that the state’s low voter turnout is because it’s hard to vote in Texas?

Yes. In 2018, when I ran for Senate, we had one of the highest levels of voter turnout in Texas history, bar none. Then, in 2022, when I run for governor, you have 9 million registered Texans who don’t even cast a ballot, even though you have the most obscene abortion ban in America, even though you have 19 kids and two teachers slaughtered in Uvalde and you just had a failure of the electricity grid that killed 700 people. So I know that there are some who want to pin this on Democrats or messaging or tactics or personalities. But no, this is what happens when you don’t have voting rights. You get what you are seeing right now in the state of Texas. And it culminates in this mid-decade gerrymander of five congressional districts that just took place last month.

Can you and other Democrats in Texas still turn the state purple? How?

Yes, we can. Here’s something that should give people some hope and some faith, and I know we all, myself included, need it right now: The reason why Trump is trying to steal these seats in Texas, the reason why Ken Paxton is threatening to put me in jail, the reason why Greg Abbott is trying to remove all these Democratic legislators from office is that they are panicked. In 2021 Texas Democrats left the state, breaking quorum, and Powered by People raised $600,000 to support them in that fight. There were no suits filed; there was no effort to remove people from office. There was none of this stuff.

The reason they’re doing it all right now is because everything that I just shared with you is on the line, and the stakes and the consequences for each side could not be greater. In other words, they wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t panicked. And that should give us some hope. And why are they afraid? Because we know that, traditionally, the party of the president in power suffers huge electoral losses in a normal midterm. But on top of that, this is no ordinary midterm. This is a midterm in what is essentially the second term for Trump with polling numbers that are as bad as, and in some cases worse than, they were on the eve of the blowout that he suffered in 2018. Again, remember, I lost just by a little more than 2.5 percent to Ted Cruz. And, just as importantly, underneath me on the ballot, you had Democrat after Democrat win what were thought to be impossible races. So that was the first midterm of Trump’s administration.

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We’re now in the second midterm of Trump’s administration, and whatever you thought was chaotic or unconstitutional or just downright evil before, like separating kids from their parents or putting them in cages or describing immigrants as “animals” or all the other stuff he did, it is 10 times worse in America right now. And on top of all that, inflation is continuing to spike.

I just read in the Wall Street Journal that you have record levels of joblessness, especially among young people, among African Americans. Homeownership is as out of reach as it has ever been for people who are in their 20s and 30s and, increasingly, in their 40s and 50s. In other words, this country is absolutely on the wrong track, and it will be looking for change. So, under those conditions, and then given some of the talent that we see out there right now, people who’ve put their name in for Senate, folks who are running for Congress across the state, I feel really good about our chances. Not that we are certain to win, not that this is a slam dunk—it’s just that we have an opportunity to do this. And the only way that we’re going to get there is if everyone, first, believes that and, second, does the work to ensure that what we believe comes to pass. And that’s of course what I’m focused on here in Texas.

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