Politics & Government

The setup is familiar for those who are, or were once, members of the evangelical community. Pastors from out of town, preaching their version of the good news for four hours, raising the spirits and testing the stamina of the faithful. This weekend, the Red Letter Christians are having a…

You know, maybe things just worked out exactly as they should have in the Amazon HQ2 story. Amazon, of course, made a big deal out of what any city would need to do and to be and to offer and to promise in order to be worthy of becoming the…

Election night was just a week ago. Votes — in Florida, Arizona and California — are still being counted and recounted.The calendar hasn’t even flipped to December and still, among a certain set of political diehards and fan boys, one question dominates the conversation: Is Beto O’Rourke going to run…

Since opening in 2012, Klyde Warren Park has been a pleasant addition to downtown Dallas. The park, filled to the brim on weekends and still busy on weekdays and nights, is a friendly patch of green between downtown and Uptown, a good place to take your dog on the far…

Barring something completely unforeseen between now and January, Dennis Bonnen, a long-serving Republican from the Houston area, is going to be the next speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. “We’re here to let you know that the speaker’s race is over,” Bonnen said at a press conference in Austin…

The nation seems to be splitting in half, so why shouldn’t journalism? Right now we seem to have two camps — the half of the craft that recognizes the kind of lying crooks they’re dealing with and knows what it will take to beat them and the other half, the…

As Beto bumper stickers and yard signs are peeled off of cars and removed from front lawns of O’Rourke supporters who are waking up hung over from the midterms, some millennials are wondering what’s next for O’Rourke and a Texas that’s a little more purple than it was a week…

Despite clear Democratic gains, much will be the same when the Texas Legislature convenes for the 2019 session. Republicans will still hold clear majorities in both the Senate and the House and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, thanks to his 4-point win in his re-election race with Mike Collier, will preside…

Last week I wrote about Dallas City Council member Jennifer Gates, who is white, appearing on her own Facebook page dressed in a Halloween costume as a caricatured Mexican man in a sombrero with a black mustache. Later Sharon Grigsby at The Dallas Morning News wrote a thoughtful column taking…

Significant local and statewide races remained in the balance Tuesday night as polls closed at 7 p.m. in Dallas County and much of the rest of Texas. Results of the approximately 5 million early votes cast around the state are trickling in. In Dallas County at least, the so-called blue…

At 7 p.m. Tuesday when polls close throughout the state of Texas — with one notable exception, but we’ll get to that — only one thing will be left to do if you’re the slightest bit politically inclined. No more doors to knock on, texts to send or votes to…

Heather Hacker, Texas’ assistant solicitor general, made it clear from the start Monday that one of the most controversial provisions of Senate Bill 8, Texas’ latest and greatest piece of sweeping anti-abortion legislation, isn’t about protecting women’s health, as Texas Republicans have so often argued when they’ve defended anti-choice laws in…

Of all the races on Texas’ midterm ballot Tuesday, the one that’s built up the greatest disparity between the attention paid to it by the media, the Observer included, and its potential effect on the lives of everyone who lives in the state is the battle between incumbent Lieutenant Governor Dan…

Dallas City Council Member Jennifer Staubach Gates, whose name has been mentioned recently as an establishment candidate for mayor in 2019, announced the end of her political career in novel fashion the day after Halloween by posting photos of herself dressed as a Mexican man in a sombrero with a…

Halloween and rain don’t make for ideal voting conditions. Just more than 26,000 people showed up to cast early votes in Dallas County on Wednesday, the second-lowest total so far in 2018. The depressed turnout was just a blip on a radar full of good news about civic participation so…

A lot of the time, probably too much, we talk about the Dallas City Council strictly in terms of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, death, famine, war and conquest. There’s more to it than those four guys. A recent debate about a run-down apartment complex in far West Dallas…

Another day, another promise from President Donald Trump to his base ahead of next week’s midterm elections. Tuesday, rather than issuing more wisdom about the caravan of Central American migrants that’s still hundreds of miles from the U.S. border, Trump declared that he’s considering ending birthright citizenship with an executive…

It’s remarkable we’re here. For decades, Texas political junkies looking for action on the eve of a general election either had to look really small, to one of the few competitive Texas legislative races that might crop up now and then, or outside the state to one of the national…

A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows El Paso U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke closing in on incumbent U.S. Senator Ted Cruz as the two candidate embark on their last full week of campaigning. Quinnipiac’s previous poll two weeks ago showed O’Rourke trailing Cruz by nine, seemingly having lost his momentum…

U.S. Representative John Lewis had some cautionary words for his Dallas supporters on Saturday. “We must take our country back and save our democracy,” Lewis said. “I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward and create one America.” Lewis said our differences don’t matter because we’re all living…