Samantha Lopez-Resendez Credit: Brant Bingamon

Some big-name musicians, when they’ve got a packed show, don’t let anyone in the club see them until it’s time to go out and play. It makes their entrance more dramatic. Maybe that’s what was going on with Samantha Lopez-Resendez at the Pflugerville Democrats watch party on Tuesday night. Lopez-Resendez was the front-runner in a six-person race to succeed James Talarico in Texas House District 50. It was 8:30pm, early voting numbers were expected to drop any minute, and no one had seen her yet.

Claire Reynolds and the Pflugerville Dems had gotten to the election party at 7, sitting at a long table with pizzas and beers, cellphones in hand. For over an hour, Reynolds waited to see the first voting numbers in U.S. House of Representatives District 11, a conservative district in West Texas which Republicans redistricted last year to include Pflugerville. Reynolds had no money for polls, so she didn’t know how she would fare against her opponent, Pete Ruiz, an Odessa native endorsed by the Chronicle. 

Reynolds said the endorsement had felt like a punch to the gut, since she had assumed the Chronicle always endorsed the more progressive candidate. She talked about campaigning in the West Texas towns of San Angelo, Midland, and Odessa. “I have learned that if you are a Democrat in a red rural district, you are a badass,” Reynolds said. “I’ve been meeting a lot of super young people, like college students at Angelo State, and my goal is to make them feel seen and heard and to let them know that there are Democratic candidates in their area that represent their values. My goal is just to stay true to those values and, win or lose, I’ll be able to sleep at night.”

“I have learned that if you are a Democrat in a red rural district, you are a badass.”

Claire Reynolds

The Chronicle headed next to the watch party of Lopez-Resendez’s opponent, Jeremy Hendricks, held at La Palapa restaurant on Highway 290. Like the Pflugerville Democrats, Hendricks’ supporters sat at a pair of long tables, waiting for the early voting numbers to be announced. Hendricks said he would consider the race a success if he were able to squeak into a runoff with Lopez-Resendez. “If we make it to a runoff, we’re confident that we’ll win,” he said. “But we’re happy. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done.”

Jeremy Hendricks Credit: Brant Bingamon

Hendricks spoke about the sense of hope that pervaded election day and about Taylor Rehmet, a Democratic labor leader from Fort Worth, who unexpectedly won a Texas Senate special election in January and was recently sworn in on the floor of the Senate. “To be on the floor with labor, with every minority community, with everybody locking arms and celebrating his swearing in, it just gave me such hope for the power of what could happen,” Hendricks said. “We’ve never been in that building before, where we felt like that.”  

Back at the Pflugerville Democrats party, the voting numbers were coming in. It was clear Reynolds would beat Pete Ruiz handily. Samantha Lopez-Resendez appeared, ebullient and, she admitted, extremely nervous. She said she had spoken to her boss, Texas House Rep. Donna Howard, who had helped her calm down. “She said, ‘How are you feeling? Are you feeling balanced? Are you feeling aligned?’ And I just told her, ‘I’ve never felt more in alignment with my purpose in my life.’”

Soon, the numbers showed that Lopez-Resendez would win enough votes to avoid a runoff with Hendricks. She will, like James Talarico before her, begin serving District 50 at a very young age – 30, in her case. She said she knew when she got hired as one of Howard’s assistants six years ago that she wanted to run for office herself one day. 

“However, I always thought it would be in my 40s,” Lopez-Resendez said. “And I thought I would have had children by then. And I thought it would be for school board. But life turns out very differently, and when Rep. Talarico announced for U.S. Senate, I thought, ‘I’m young, I don’t have children, I have the capacity to do this work, I love this work, and I am completely committed to it.’ So I said, ‘It’s time.’”

This article appears in March 6 • 2026.

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Brant Bingamon arrived in Austin in 1981 to attend UT and immediately became fascinated by the city's music scene. He's spent his adult life playing in bands and began writing for the Chronicle in 2019, covering criminal justice, the death penalty, and public school issues. He has two children, Noah and Eryl, and lives with his partner Adrienne on the Eastside.