When it came time for Mihaela Plesa, the vice-chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, to decide whether to flee the state with dozens of her fellow Democratic legislators, earlier this month, she felt torn. On the one hand, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, had proposed a radical plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Republicans. By leaving the state, Plesa and her colleagues could deprive the Texas House of the two-thirds quorum required to approve the maneuver. On the other hand, Plesa wondered how she would explain a step that could undercut the appeals to bipartisanship that had helped her win election in a politically divided district anchored in Plano, a Dallas suburb. She also was skeptical that escaping the state was a winning tactic. Any success in denying Republicans a quorum would almost certainly be temporary.
As Plesa waffled, her husband put on the song “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” by the Clash. It was a joke, and they laughed, but one lyric resonated: “If I go, there will be trouble / And if I stay, it will be double.”
Plesa went. That’s how she found herself at a union hall in a Chicago suburb the other day, standing in front of a large Lone Star flag, and attacking Abbott’s tactics as a “power grab.” The Governor’s move, undertaken at Donald Trump’s behest, was a clear ploy to help Republicans preserve their narrow majority in the House by increasing the likelihood of the Party capturing five additional congressional seats in the 2026 midterms. The redistricting was made even more controversial by the fact that it was happening long before the next census. “This is not just about Texas or Texans,” Plesa said in front of a battery of television cameras. “This is about the pillars of democracy as we know it.”
More than fifty Democratic legislators decamped on August 3rd in what is known as a quorum break. (The tactic was first used in Texas in 1870 by thirteen state senators who objected to a Radical Republican plan to create a state militia and increase the governor’s powers in a time of lawlessness and anti-Black violence.) What started as an attempt to pressure Abbott into withdrawing the redistricting plan has since become a mission with all the subtlety of Paul Revere’s ride, as the Texas lawmakers shout a warning to all who will listen. “We’re no longer on the path to authoritarianism. We are there,” Representative Gina Hinojosa told me after flying from Chicago to Sacramento to meet with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, and other prominent Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi. “The only way that we have any hope of getting out of this is if every freedom-loving American does everything in their power to push back.”
The plan was to stay out of Texas until August 19th, when Abbott’s thirty-day special session was scheduled to end. Plesa had packed a large suitcase, a smaller carry-on, and a work bag that included her cords and chargers; she’d brought contact numbers for constituent services and professional clothes for being in the public eye. She also had made sure to bring an intricately etched Romanian gold coin that once belonged to her grandmother, who had emigrated from Bucharest as Nicolae Ceauşescu consolidated one-party rule. To Plesa, recent moves by Abbott and Trump echoed stories that she had heard while growing up, and the coin telegraphed her grandmother’s spirit, helping to keep her grounded. “She was a little bit of a rabble-rouser and a rule-breaker,” Plesa said, “and she always told me, ‘Don’t make yourself smaller or softer for the world.’ ”
The majority of the Texas Democrats had flown by charter plane to Illinois, and were bused to a conference center in St. Charles, about forty miles west of downtown Chicago, but Plesa had flown commercial to Albany, where she and several colleagues met with Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor. Plesa quickly discovered that the exodus was big news. She spoke at a press conference, seated beside Hochul, and appeared on several cable and network television shows. As a self-described “small-town politician out of Dallas,” she found it surreal. “I mean, people had heard of us,” she said. After she met the Reverend Al Sharpton and appeared on his radio show, she thought, “Oh, my God, this is insane.”
Plesa then joined her colleagues in Illinois. She arrived late on August 5th and fell into her bed at the hotel where many of the Texas legislators were staying, only to wake early the next morning to a bomb threat that forced the evacuation of the building. “I always knew this was serious,” she said later, “but I never thought, Wow, my life is actually going to be in danger.” It was the first of two bomb threats, amid other forms of intimidation and harassment.
Despite being away from home, the Texas Democrats say they have been working harder than ever. Plesa’s days have been dominated by media appearances and strategy sessions, twice-a-day remote meetings with her four staff members back in Texas, and conferences with two sets of attorneys, who offered advice when the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit to declare thirteen Democratic seats vacant, including Plesa’s. Gene Wu, a Houston representative who chairs the Democratic caucus, pointed to the circles under his eyes and told me that he is sleeping no more than four hours a night. “Every five seconds, there’s either a crisis or another interview,” he said. “Everyone’s very, very tired.” He noted that the legislators are paid just seventy-two hundred dollars a year—“pre-tax,” he added—and “if they’re not at home, they’re not making money.”
From the beginning, as Abbott criticized the departed Democrats as “derelict,” Plesa realized that she needed to make calls to constituents, to let them know “that I haven’t abandoned them.” She described what she was doing and why, telling her precinct chairs that Abbott had wrongly made redistricting his top priority after a call from Trump. Her pitch: “Are we working for the people of Texas or are we working for Donald Trump? We had nine hearings on redistricting. We had two on flooding. That tells you the priorities.” She pointed to the limited national attention given to the 2023 redistricting effort in North Carolina, which, in a narrowly divided state, turned a U.S. House of Representatives delegation of seven Republicans and seven Democrats into a G.O.P. majority of ten seats to four, enough to give control of the House to the Republicans. (Opponents are contesting the G.O.P. move in federal court.) “It’s like that famous quote—you know, ‘First they came for this group, and I said nothing,’ ” she told me.
At the press conference at the union hall, Wu opened by laying out the latest developments: John Cornyn, the Republican U.S. senator from Texas, had announced that the F.B.I. would help locate the Democrats, and Paxton, who will challenge Cornyn in next year’s primary, had declared that he would seek their arrest. Wu called the moves “laughable.” Plesa pointed to Vice-President J. D. Vance’s trip to Indiana, where he lobbied Republicans to redistrict, and she noted the counterattack in Democratic-run states, such as an effort by Newsom to create new maps likely to produce five Democratic seats in California. (A few days later, Newsom confirmed that he will ask voters in a November special election to abandon the current maps for the next three congressional elections. “We cannot unilaterally disarm,” he said.)
To demonstrate that the fight had grown beyond Texas, the lawmakers then directed their media audience to two large screens that showed a live stream of a press conference in California, where Newsom, Pelosi, and the Democratic leadership of the state legislature had just met with a half-dozen Texas lawmakers. Representative Ann Johnson, the first Texan to speak, warned of “the danger that is coming” by appeasing Trump, and drew a comparison that Plesa had also been making to reporters. “You-all remember,” Johnson said, “that Trump called Georgia and said, ‘Boys, I need eleven thousand votes.’ To their credit, those Republicans said, ‘No, we’re not doing that. That crosses a line.’ When Trump called Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans and said, ‘Boys, I need you to steal five seats,’ they said, ‘Does July work for you?’ ”
