ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID PLUNKERT^ MAY  JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES^7

OUTFRONT

WAVE THEORY

OUT OF THE BLUE

This year, a surge of Democratic candidates is challenging Republicans in

places—and races—where progressives usually fear to tread.

BY TIM MURPHY

before she could talk about her campaign for the

Texas House of Representatives, Lisa Seger needed

to check on her goats. Seger, who lives with her

husband and 30 goats on a farm outside Houston,

had a doe in the maternity stall that was due any

minute. “Spring is kidding season,” she explained.

If elected, the 47-year-old Seger, a sustainable-

agriculture proponent who got into farming after

reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma,

would likely be the only member of the Legislature

with her own brand of yogurt. Her crimson-dyed

hair and floppy-eared companions notwithstand-

ing, Seger’s political origin story is unexceptional in

2018. After President Donald Trump announced his
      “Muslim ban” early last year, she drove to George
      Bush Intercontinental Airport to protest. A week
      later, she was back in Houston demonstrating out-
      side the Super Bowl. She joined a local chapter of
      the progressive grassroots group Indivisible and
      kept going. “I’ve become the cliché,” she says.
      But what makes Seger really stand out in the
      state’s 3rd District is her party ailiation—she is