ROAD MAP

Texas Rep. Greg Casar has a plan for a progressive comeback. Step one: Survive the present.

- By Tim Murphy

This was not how Greg Casar planned to spend his recess.

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-August, as the clock ticked down on the first special session of the Texas legislature, the 36-year-old second-term Democratic congressman was sitting at the head of a small wooden conference table, commiserating with the legislator on the other end of the phone about the mess their Republican colleagues had foisted on them. Casar, the youngest-ever chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had hoped to visit a swing district to hammer Republican Medicaid cuts during the summer break. Instead, he was holed up in the capital, trying to fend off a power grab that threatened to upend both the midterms and his career.

We were at his district office in an unmarked building in East Austin. The sparsely decorated walls and bare concrete floor gave the place a transient feel. On the table sat a dozen tubs of Play-Doh. "For our anxiety," shouted a staffer from a cubicle by the wall. When his call was over, Casar, dressed casually in an untucked short-sleeved button-down and bluish-gray chinos, put down his phone with a "Tuck Frump" sticker on the case, and filled me in: A state senator from Houston wanted to grab him for an event—details to come.

"I'll do whatever she wants to," he said, with a laugh. "I'll be in whatever she wants."