Rep. Mihaela Plesa survived a heated GOP challenge. Here’s how she thinks Democrats can prevail.

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Less than a week before Election Day, Gov. Greg Abbott dropped $19,000 on advertising to boost Republican Steve Kinard in what appeared to be an increasingly competitive race for a North Texas House seat.

In the end, it didn’t work. Rep. Mihaela Plesa, D-Dallas, kept her seat.

“Ya missed one,” she gloated in a social media post taunting Abbott. She was responding to the governor’s own post on X, claiming that all of the Republicans he backed for the House had won.

In total, Abbott spent nearly $37,000 to unseat Plesa — one of four House seats he tried in earnest to flip from blue to red this cycle.

Not only did she win her seat targeted by Republicans, but she grew her win margin this election compared to her race in 2022 when she ran the first time and became the first House Democrat to represent a part of Collin County in decades. She credits her victory with emphasizing bipartisanship on economic issues and listening to constituents who might not agree with her — something Plesa thinks Democrats should do more often.

Now, the first-generation daughter of Romanian immigrants could play a bigger role in what’s in store for Texas Democrats in the legislative session that starts this month. Democratic House lawmakers unanimously voted Plesa vice chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus. The sophomore lawmaker joins leadership ranks as Democrats are poised to have even less power than they did in the last legislative session, with two fewer Democrats and as Republicans are emboldened by a strong electoral showing up and down the ballot.

“The Texas Democratic Party needs to remind the state of Texas and the nation what it means to be a Texas Democrat,” Plesa said in an interview.

Plesa said Texas Democrats need to go on the offensive and make the case that they are the party trying to better the lives of everyday Texans. At the same time, she said Democrats need not get distracted by culture war issues.

“I don't think that [voters] really cared about some of the stuff that we’ve been hearing,” Plesa said. “They care about: Can I pay my car insurance? Can I go to the doctor and it be affordable?”

Plesa said she ran a campaign that tried to connect with voters on issues that mattered to them, like public education and the rising cost of utilities. She said Democrats were otherwise overconfident about their polling and the positive “vibes” they enjoyed after Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee.

“I tried to explain not only to my county party, but to the state party as a whole,” Plesa said. “They call it political science, not political vibes.”

Plesa said she did a lot of block walking and could see the tide turning for Democrats ahead of Election Day, which made the results less shocking to her.

“I knew what people felt like because I was knocking on their door every day, asking them,” Plesa said. “[Democrats] need to knock on more doors and start having more of those hard conversations and not so many internal conversations with ourselves because Texas is so much bigger than the conversations we're having internally.”

UT-Dallas student Pranav Gehlot, a volunteer block walker for Plesa, said voters want more politicians who are willing to compromise, listen to their constituents' needs, and take on issues that help their constituents’ wallets.

“Other [Democrats] should learn from her charisma to inspire and draw people,” Gehlot said.

Plesa said Democrats down ballot must stop relying on national talking points and instead talk to their own constituents.

“The bottom of the ballot is closer to the front doors of our constituents,” Plesa said.

Across the aisle

Plesa wasn’t always politically involved.

She helped run a swimsuit company with a friend in the early 2010s. But that changed after she watched President-elect Donald Trump win his first term in 2016. Plesa felt “empty.” She said protesting and activism weren't enough. So, she quit her job and became a legislative director for Rep. Ray Lopez, D-San Antonio, for roughly four years.

Then in 2022, she ran against Jamee Jolly for House District 70, a year after it had been redrawn by the Legislature to make it easier for a Democrat to win. It went from a district that favored Donald Trump to one where Joe Biden would have won the district by 11 percentage points in 2020. Plesa won by a slim 900 votes.

But this year, she expanded her lead and won by 3,100 votes, even as Collin County overall went further for Trump this year.

Collin County has seen an increase in Asian and Black people over the past decade, according to census data, but the county is still majority white. Derek Ryan, a veteran consultant and adviser to GOP campaigns, said it isn't a surprise that Plesa was able to win since her district leans Democrat.

The House districts that Republicans were able to flip were majority Hispanic ones in South Texas. Ryan also noted that roughly 17% of all votes in the district came from voters who had registered to vote in the last two years.

“A lot of new voters helped make the difference,” Ryan said.

While Plesa was a target of Republicans this election cycle, Abbott was spending more resources in those South Texas races which were seen as more competitive. Plesa ultimately outraised Kinard in total fundraising. Plesa, in her first freshman term, filed around 55 bills, ranging from ​​topics on state health services to public education. Two of them became laws.

One of the bills that she passed made it easier to impound a vehicle used in illegal street racing or certain reckless driving exhibitions, which Abbott signed into law in 2023. It was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, one of the more conservative Republicans in the Senate during the last session.

“I think that we have to understand and respect each other's chambers,” Plesa said. “When you understand that, I think you can get some really great legislation out.”

Plesa joined the Republican governor for the bill signing ceremony, where he thanked her and other lawmakers for carrying the bills. For her freshman efforts, the Texas Legislative Study Group, a policy-focused group, named her the “freshman of the year.”

Plesa thinks Republicans and Democrats can work together on issues such as water infrastructure and taxes during this upcoming session.

“I hope to be able to put campaigns in the past and move forward with my colleagues,” Plesa said. “I really want to work together.”

At the same time, she has plenty of criticisms about the GOP. She said Texas Republicans were effective at distracting the public with debates about trans children in sports, when Democrats should have been hammering them about their own failures — like when Texas opted out of a federal summer school lunch program because “the state would not have enough time to organize the program before summertime begins.”

“These are failures of the Texas Republican Party,” Plesa said. “They're using a very small population of people to distract us from the fact that lots of Texans are suffering,”

In the coming session, Plesa said she is focused on getting more money for public schools.

Plano ISD, which is in her district, has closed four schools this year. Lawmakers tabled a bill that would have increased public school funding because a provision to fund private school vouchers was spiked.

Abbott said he would veto any education funding legislation that didn’t include vouchers during the last session.

“When I would knock in that neighborhood where that school is shutting down, parents were upset and afraid because they love their schools,” Plesa said.

The governor has repeatedly said he had enough votes in the Texas House to pass a school voucher program, which would allow parents to use public money to subsidize private school tuition. Plesa said her No. 1 priority in the session is to add as many guardrails as possible to any school voucher legislation.“I'm always going to stand for public education,” Plesa added.

Jasper Scherer contributed to this report.