Why the Texas Democrats’ Walkout Worked

Opinion|Why the Texas Democrats’ Walkout Worked

Recently the Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives tried to stop Republicans from gerrymandering the state’s congressional map. They left the state, denying Republicans a legislative quorum, but returned a couple of weeks later. The gerrymandered map passed, clearing the way for Gov. Greg Abbott to sign it into law.

During the two weeks that the Democrats held up the proceedings, the Texas gerrymander, which had at that point garnered little attention, became big news. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mobilized the State Legislature to counter the Texas move with a plan to redraw his state’s own districts.

The Texas Democrats lost. But they drew attention to Republicans’ efforts — undertaken at the behest of President Trump — to put their thumb on the electoral scale going into the 2026 midterms, and demonstrated a valuable tactic for galvanizing their beleaguered party.

They lost, but they lost loudly. Losing loudly has been a crucial feature of successful political movements.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Washington in 1993, one of the largest single-day protests in American history. In the short term, there were setbacks: the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and a raft of state bans on same-sex marriage. But the fight for same-sex marriage was later won with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

John Lewis and other civil rights heroes led peaceful marchers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The marchers knew the likely outcome. They would be savagely beaten and tear-gassed. And indeed, many of them were. No law was changed the next day. But a few months later the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. Mr. Lewis, who died in 2020, served in Congress and was awarded the presidential medal of freedom.