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Steelworkers union leader Marcos Vélez has emerged as a dark horse candidate in the Democratic race for lieutenant governor, receiving the bulk of his financial support from a donor trail that leads back to the Texas Democratic Party’s top campaign partner, Texas Majority PAC.
Over the weekend, Vélez’s campaign received another major boost: a coveted endorsement from the Texas AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education, the political arm of the largest labor union federation in the state whose backing is among the biggest a Democratic candidate can land.
The mix of labor support and big money is presenting an opening for Vélez in his primary against four-term state Rep. Vikki Goodwin of Austin. Whoever earns the nomination will no less face an improbable battle to unseat Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the powerful and popular presiding officer of the Texas Senate with nearly $40 million in his campaign coffers.
Less than 40 days from the March 3 primary election, Vélez has been raking in endorsements from labor and beyond, including one from the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, the oldest civil rights organization in the south dedicated to LGBTQ issues. In a statement Monday, Vélez said he was “honored to have the support of the Texas AFL-CIO and their hundreds of thousands of union brothers and sisters.”
“While I might not be a career politician, I am the candidate in this race who understands the struggles of working Texans and who will address them when in office,” said Vélez, the assistant director of the United Steelworkers union’s District 13.
A Pasadena native who is relatively unknown among voters, Vélez has also hauled in cash from an eyebrow-raising source, at least indirectly.
Since mid-2025, shortly after Kendall Scudder was elected Texas Democratic Party chair, the TDP has worked with the Texas Majority PAC as a coordinated campaign dubbed Blue Texas. TMP, a Houston-based organization backed by liberal megadonor George Soros, came onto the scene in the 2024 cycle and has focused on making gains for Democrats outside big cities, with the broader goal of flipping the state.
As a general rule, the group remains neutral in the primaries, but recent campaign finance reports show TMP indirectly supporting Vélez.
On Dec. 23, TMP gave $60,000 to a PAC called Houstonians for Working Families. A week later, the PAC donated $30,000 to Vélez’s campaign and spotted him another $25,000 for his campaign launch video the following day.
TMP’s $60,000 to Houstonians for Working Families accounted for two-thirds of the group’s receipts in the second half of 2025. And the $55,000 HFWF gave to Vélez — plus $3,900 earlier in December — accounted for nearly three-quarters of the total fundraising haul he has reported since launching his campaign on Nov. 17.
Still, Goodwin had a significant cash advantage over Vélez at year’s end, disclosing a $161,000 war chest to Vélez’s $51,000 cash on hand. The Austin Democrat also vastly outspent Vélez over the back half of the year, $492,000 to $6,000. A third candidate, Courtney Head, reported having $17.35 cash on hand.
Goodwin said in an interview Monday that she spoke with Scudder, the party chair, on Friday night, after the Tribune first reported on TMP’s contribution. She said Scudder assured her TMP is not directly working with Vélez and that he is focused on rebuilding the party and not picking sides in primaries.
“People can donate the way that they want,” Goodwin said, adding that she was focused on building trust and connecting with voters and donors around the state. “A statewide race is tough. It’s a big state. There’s a lot of people.”
She said she remained confident the nominee would receive total backing from TMP in the general election.
Texas Democratic operatives told The Texas Tribune they were shocked by the appearance that Texas Majority PAC is supporting any candidate in a contested primary, particularly against a Democrat who already holds an elected office.
TMP executive director Katherine Fischer denied that the PAC was officially or unofficially supporting Vélez.
“We’re not endorsing anyone in that race,” Fischer said. “I think he’s a very exciting candidate, but we are primary-neutral.”
Notably, Vélez’s campaign manager, Plácido Gómez, recently worked for TMP as a grants manager and training director.
Asked whether TMP was formally supporting his campaign, Vélez deferred to TMP.
“I can tell you that they’ve been extremely warm in the reception of my idea to run,” Vélez said. “I feel like they’re the ones best positioned to speak on where they stand on my campaign. But as a candidate, I’ve found that they’ve been very receptive to the idea of labor candidates.”
In a half-hour interview last week before he received the AFL-CIO endorsement, Vélez said he would use the lieutenant governor’s office to help working-class Texans as they struggle with rising everyday costs, which he said were erasing their hopes of economic prosperity.
He pointed to public sector employees he’s represented, through his union role, who have master’s degrees and earn $40,000 to $50,000 a year. He also said the state is not tapping into potentially rich revenue sources, like hemp-derived THC products and casinos — two ideas that put him in direct contrast with Patrick, who is for an all-out ban on the THC products and opposes the legalization of gambling.
“We realized we are never going to be able to advance the interests of working-class people unless we have someone that understands those issues actually in office,” said Vélez, a former mechanic and oil industry worker. “I started looking at the race and I felt like there was an opportunity to actually run a platform based on my actual values, and so I threw my name in the hat.”
Vélez added that worker protections pushed by his union have routinely failed to clear the Legislature’s upper chamber, which has been pushed far to the right under Patrick’s tenure.
Should the Democratic nominee unseat Patrick, they would face another challenge once in office: The lieutenant governor’s most important powers are set out in the Senate rules approved by the chamber at the start of each regular legislative session. Republicans will retain a comfortable majority in the Senate when lawmakers return to Austin in January, meaning they would likely rein in those powers — which include creating and appointing committees and deciding where to send bills and when to bring them to the floor — if a Democrat takes over the lieutenant governor’s office.