Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Rep.-elect Greg Casar (D-TX) speaks during a press conference on new-member priorities for Congress’s lame-duck session, December 2, 2022.
“I never thought I would be signing up for a Russian lit class,” said Greg Casar, a representative-elect from Austin, Texas, referring to his undergrad years. Casar, now 33 and soon to represent Texas’s 35th District, is one of the newest members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and last week ran unopposed for the caucus’s whip position. Casar called the Prospect on the day that the newest lawmakers had selected their offices. “We’ve got a good office right up the hallway from Robert Garcia, a progressive freshman classmate of mine,” he said. (Garcia, currently the mayor of Long Beach, was just elected to California’s 42nd District.)
Since the early 2010s, Greg Casar has been a social movement, labor, and immigrant rights organizer. In 2014, he officially entered public office as a city council member representing some of the poorest and most racially diverse residents in Austin’s northeastern side.
But before Casar entered the Austin political scene, he was a student organizer at the University of Virginia, trying to figure out his future: “I was choosing between whether or not I wanted to be a schoolteacher or community organizer.”
I found a college paper Casar wrote in an unorthodox literature class called Books Behind Bars; he and his classmates read iconic works from Russian authors alongside young incarcerated juveniles. The final product was a paper titled “Brothers Behind Bars: Salvation, Insult, and the College Education.” Casar expressed no embarrassment when I asked him about the class or paper. “I believed then as I believe now that we over-incarcerate our young people, and especially people of color.” That paper, written more than a decade ago, from a macro perspective outlines the beginnings of the sort of self-empowerment through community organizing mode of politics Casar would later embrace.
He didn’t downplay what these young men had done to land themselves in jail. “If upon reading this you wish to claim that I am naively romanticizing and idealizing these young men—and perhaps I am,” Casar wrote, continuing to describe the extreme circumstances the juveniles committed their crimes under—“these young men do not need saving”—then pivoting to how well-to-do suburbanites like himself are the ones who actually needed salvation, for turning a blind eye to economic, racial, and housing injustice.
Casar, instead of lamenting over his economic and social privilege—Casar’s family home in Houston is appraised at $1.7 million and his father is a physician—channeled his discontent with the status quo into becoming a community organizer.
Now, almost ten years later, Casar has racked up several local progressive victories across affordable housing, labor, criminal justice, and immigration rights issues by cultivating strategic alliances with forces inside and outside of government. But can he scale up that approach amid a slim, unstable Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a generational changing of the guard in House Democratic leadership? He and his early supporters seem to think so—though it won’t be easy, and it might require the return of Democratic majorities.
“We would support workers who sometimes worked weeks, and in other cases months, who were illegally not paid at all.”
“CAFETERIAS IN VIRGINIA WERE THE FIRST PLACES that I learned to organize,” Casar said. That experience would push Casar to intern with the Workers Defense Project in 2010, a worker organization that is quite distinct from a traditional labor union. As the Prospect previously covered, worker centers are organizations created for workers who do not have a path to unionization because of the limitations in the laws that govern collective-bargaining rights. These groups have typically organized Black service sector workers, care economy workers, and other immigrant laborers found at the fringes of the workforce.
Casar after graduation joined the Workers Defense Project as a policy director. “Over the summers, I’d put in 50 to 60 hours a week at Workers Defense, and this really is my political home,” he said. “My first time setting foot inside the U.S. Capitol was alongside members from Workers Defense Project asking for immigration reform back in 2012.”
But at the day-to-day level, Casar described his primary role as helping workers with about the most basic possible demands. Rather than raises, it was about getting them base pay that had been promised. “It may not all be useful for your piece, but I’ll give you a sense of the work … We would support workers who sometimes worked weeks, and in other cases months, who were illegally not paid at all.”
“In the summers, [workers] would be put up on a scaffold early in the morning and then weren’t allowed to come down until the end of the day,” Casar said. His first campaign at the Workers Defense Project was securing water breaks for construction workers. “We had members and members’ family members who died on job sites because they suffered from heatstroke.”
That experience translated into Casar’s first campaign he led while serving in Austin City Hall; he organized a thirst strike where he and hundreds of others sat in the hot Texas sun demanding that the city pass a law guaranteeing construction workers a water break. “We successfully got that passed back in August 2011,” he said.
Casar also served as a liaison between the worker center’s membership and the building trades unions within the AFL-CIO. Solidarity was fragile then. In this role, Casar was tasked with convincing the broader labor movement that immigrant workers, and particularly undocumented workers, were a labor priority just as much as unionized workers. “You can’t talk about the needs of working-class people in Texas without talking about immigrant rights.”
The opportunity, as Casar saw it, was convincing the labor unions that it would be best for them to support the water breaks campaign as a matter of law rather than something just for their contract. “So we actually organized that first strike alongside our building trades.”
Further nurturing that relationship, Casar described an instance where the city gave a subsidy to a massive hotel developer that had prevailing-wage requirements. Organizers discovered that law wasn’t being followed. As a tactical concession, the developer offered to raise wages for the lowest-paid, often immigrant workers, while ignoring the requirements for trade workers. “It was a tactic to divide us,” Casar said. The developer saw that if it offered immigrant workers higher wages, they would “stop protesting and leave the IBEW out to dry.”
The non-union workers unanimously rejected this gambit, Casar said. They believed that the developers needed to be held accountable, regardless of the immigration status or classification of workers. In the end, the developer paid back $2.4 million to the city.
“When I first announced I was running for city council, LiUNA [a laborers’ union] was the first union to endorse me,” Casar said. “My first campaign contribution came from the IBEW business manager, and my second one from the head of our teachers union.”
Aside from labor, Casar pushed affordable-housing reforms while on the city council. “Housing is the most important issue for working people,” he said. “We thought it was really important for us to develop a constituency around housing investments.” He described an instance where other members of the city council wanted to put a moderate housing investment proposal on the ballot. Instead, his theory was a maximalist one: The higher the proposal, the more likely it would be to drive turnout.
He turned out to be correct. In 2018, voters overwhelmingly passed a $250 million affordable-housing proposal. And in 2022, a similar $350 million proposal for affordable housing passed too.
Casar has straddled two sides of the housing and development debate. In 2019, he said, “We must be both pro-housing and anti-gentrification.” I asked him what this meant; he gave the example of when he organized with trailer park residents who years later bought the park back from the owners who once tried to evict them and talked about the potential of converting traditionally high-income areas into mixed-income ones.
Party solidarity will be tested as House Democrats’ ideological and strategic fractures emerge in the coming Congress.
“[CASAR] HAS HIS ROOTS IN ORGANIZING,” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, told me over the phone. “His trajectory is emblematic of the type of candidates Working Families is investing in all across the country.”
During the primary, Casar’s opponent, state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, pitched himself to voters as a “progressive that actually gets things done.” He touted his nearly two-decade career in Texas politics, while lambasting Casar’s efforts to reduce Austin’s police budget and repeal the city’s public camping ban (i.e., homeless encampments). The latter was overturned by voters early last year. Still, Casar overwhelmingly beat Rodriguez by 45 points.
“He is emblematic of what a clear, unabashed progressive looks like,” Mitchell said, speaking to Casar’s blowout primary victory. However, he hedged his point: “It was a competitive race … there were a lot of people with deep pockets that did not want Greg to win the primary.” That primary win guaranteed Casar he’d be going to Congress in January.
Governing from the minority is tough, but key moments will still arise as House Republicans will have to pass critical government funding bills. But Mitchell said that aside from holding out votes for Democratic priorities, progressive lawmakers like Casar should focus on developing a platform that convinces the public to vote for Democrats in 2024, creating another “governing moment,” as Democrats had earlier this year.
It should be expected that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will struggle wrangling an unruly, slim majority. So I asked Mitchell what opportunities that dynamic creates for progressives and their relationship with the broader Democratic Party. He took a deep breath: “Whenever there’s a leadership transition, it’s a moment for resetting the dynamics in the [Democratic] caucus.”
Following the midterm elections, Democrats rejoiced in unity as they fended off what many strategists and the media expected to be a disastrous red wave. However, that solidarity will be tested as House Democrats’ ideological and strategic fractures emerge in the coming Congress. Before November’s election, as the Working Families Party juiced voter turnout across New York City, the Brooklyn Democratic Party was nowhere to be found. In the end, one of the borough’s leaders, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, inherited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s throne.
That tension is playing out elsewhere. Just last week, centrist Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) beat progressive Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) to serve as the newly created leader of the “frontline” bloc of Democrats who won in the tightest elections. The ramifications are still to be seen. But it’s likely that this new leadership position will have a large say in determining Democrats’ messaging, and thus their policy ambitions.
Mitchell continued to talk about the significance of House Democratic leadership changing. Pelosi’s ability to maintain discipline in the caucus came from her decades of building relationships with other lawmakers by offering compromises in exchange for loyalty. Under new leadership, “it’s going to have to basically start from scratch,” Mitchell said. That opens an opportunity for lawmakers like Casar to reset how progressives are regarded by the caucus at large.
When I asked Casar about the new House Democratic leadership, he responded: “We have clear evidence that people that ran on progressive platforms or were for working families won competitive elections … For too long, there has been a backwards D.C. idea that progressives shouldn’t run in competitive districts.”
As the Progressive Caucus’s number three person—and while the body is bigger than it has ever been—his commitment to reshaping the Democratic Party is yet to be seen. But if Casar’s ascent and the victories he has helped secure for working people over the last ten years are any indication of what he can accomplish at the national level, his future is promising.
