Texas’s 10th Congressional District stretches, improbably, from the outer fringes of the Houston metro area to suburbs west of Austin. After sending Democrats to Congress for over 100 years, it has voted for Republican Representative Michael McCaul in every election since its 2005 redistricting. Two years ago, Mike Siegel—a civil rights lawyer and labor activist running on an ambitious progressive platform—came within five points of flipping the district back to blue. This year, campaigning as a Green New Deal supporter, he’s hoping to finish the job. Influential Democratic Party groups like Emily’s List have lined up behind his primary opponent, corporate lawyer Shannon Hutcheson, who fits a more typical profile of Democrats running for red seats. Having been dual-endorsed by the Houston-based Texas Gulf Coast Labor Federation, Siegel and Hutcheson battled it out for the Texas AFL-CIO endorsement, which Siegel had won in 2018. The endorsement was announced at the regional federation’s Committee on Political Education, or COPE, Convention in Austin this past weekend, and while Siegel won it again, his harder-fought victory this cycle offers a preview of what it will take to win labor’s support for a new generation of climate policies.

Siegel and his supporters spent last weekend in nearly round-the-clock meetings with unions, some of whose international leaderships have previously spoken against the Green New Deal. “Everybody throws in something about a just transition when they talk about taking on climate change,” Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, told me. “But I think there’s concern about how central workers’ issues are going to be to that process.… It’s just really hard when you’re in that industry, particularly in a place like Texas,” Levy said of unionized fossil fuel workers in the Right to Work state. “You see all these slings and arrows headed your way to your livelihood, climate change being one of them.” The Green New Deal, he told me, “is either the panacea or the devil, depending on where you’re coming from.”

“It’s going to take a lot of real work for people advocating for this type of legislation to prove that the cost of transition is not going to be in working-class communities,” Levy added. “The way power is distributed, it’s a hard sell to say that that’s not going to be the case.”

Siegel was aware of the resistance to this core element of his platforms and worked hard to make sure it wouldn’t cost him with members. “Spent 3 days caucusing.… Only opposition was Green New Deal,” he told me in a text message after Sunday’s floor vote on the CD 10 race. “My job was to build trust and let folks know we won’t move forward until labor is on board.” It seems to have worked. What ended up winning Siegel the endorsement, Levy said, was his time spent “addressing working people’s issues, and giving them a sense that he cared about those concerns and would actively work to incorporate them.”



It was a good weekend for Green New Deal–backing candidates overall. The Texas AFL-CIO also endorsed the Green New Deal supporter, and Justice Democrats endorsed candidate Jessica Cisneros against Representative Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat representing Texas’s 28th Congressional District who has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donations from fossil fuel interests. In the 25th Congressional District, the Texas AFL-CIO issued a dual endorsement for Julie Oliver and Green New Deal supporter Heidi Sloan.