The Evolution of Jill Cochran: From Stay-at-Home Mother to Grassroots Activist
By Miriam Shams-Rainey, J.J. Pearce High School
Long before I knew her as a grassroots activist or the fierce leader of local progressive organization Funky East Dallas Democrats, I knew her as “Ms. Jill”. My mother first met her at a bookstore for a meeting supporting the non-profit Save Darfur, and I met her a few months later when I accompanied my mother to an event that they were hosting. We handed out water bottles along a bike path and collected donations, and before long she was calling me “dahling” in her feigned posh accent and becoming a permanent part of our extended, chosen family.
Jill Cochran had a passion for activism from the beginning, but as a stay-at-home mother to three children — Jimmy, Johnny, and Lizzie — and a loving wife to her husband Jim, it wasn’t her full-time focus. A graduate of Southern Methodist University’s Master of Liberal Studies program with a focus on human rights and political science along with a Master of Business Administration from the University of North Texas, Cochran was involved in human rights efforts such as UNICEF and Plan International well before she first delved into politics. Working with UNICEF and Plan, her family established clinics and innovative development projects in a village in Togo where her husband had previously worked with the Peace Corps, fortunate in their ability to donate generously to these causes.
I’ve always known Cochran as a philanthropist, and her generous heart and idealist nature led her to associate herself politically with the Democratic Party, describing her politics as “very progressive.” She is passionate about ensuring anyone and everyone has a fair shot in life, something that few would have expected from her, considering her background as a cisgender, heterosexual, wealthy white woman, but that I have grown up knowing as a part of her. She was actively involved in former President Obama’s 2008 campaign and worked some with Annie’s List leading up to the 2016 election to support Victoria Neave, a Democratic challenger who unseated Republican incumbent Kenneth Sheets in the most expensive Texas House of Representatives race of the 2016 cycle (Holter).
However, despite this involvement, Cochrane, like many Democrats leading up to the 2016 presidential election, felt that there was minimal need to even campaign against Republican challenger (and current president) Donald Trump. “I think people kept telling me there was no way Trump could win, and I would listen to that…” Cochrane recollected just over two years later, sitting cross-legged on a brown couch in my living room, “[And as a result,] I didn’t do the [sic] block walking or any of that kind of stuff for [Hillary Clinton].”
This lack of action quickly gave way to grief as the election results started to roll in on November 8, 2016. As the night trailed on, the energy in the Omni Hotel ballroom in downtown Dallas, where the local Hillary Clinton election watch party was being held, slowly diminished like a candle whose oxygen was cut off. I remember taking pictures of Cochrane and her family with a cardboard cutout of Clinton, all of them clad in their red and blue “I’M WITH HER” t-shirts and “VOTE DEMOCRATIC” buttons when the night was still young, and when we still believed that despite having taken so little action to prevent the actual outcome, progressive values in America would still come out on top.
The next time I saw Ms. Jill after election night, she had cut her hair short and was convinced that she was going to up and move to Costa Rica. Fed up with American politics, she was ready to forget it all, and travel hundreds of miles from her home in Dallas to start a new life in Central America. However, it was the prospect of progressive resistance that eventually prompted her to stay. Hearing about the Women’s March, in the midst of all of the distressing news of Trump’s election, was a turning point that brought her out of her funk and put her on the path she follows today. She recollects, “[News of the Women’s March] brought me hope. And I thought to myself ‘okay, maybe I don’t move to Costa Rica. Maybe I stay here and try and fight this.”
From this newfound resolve emerged Cochrane’s involvement in local grassroots organizations, first an East Dallas offshoot of Pantsuit Nation, a progressive organization originally started on Facebook, which she eventually climbed to become a co-chair of, and then East Dallas Votes, an organization of her own making. East Dallas Votes came out of the notion that not enough voters in the Dallas area were registered and that registering new voters would lead to increased votes for Democratic candidates.
Cochrane tells stories over dinner of this era of her activism, in which she and fellow East Dallas Votes members stood outside DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) stations to catch people on their way to and from work to register to vote. This approach was seldom effective and led to some rather amusing interactions, but also to a lot of frustration on Cochrane’s part as she was forced to reexamine what it was that she could do to make an impact, to tip the political scales towards progressive values.
The product of this reexamination, along with the prodding of the Dallas County Democratic Party, was the Funky East Dallas Democrats, also known as the FEDDs, a youthful, quirky progressive organization covering an area from I-75 to 635 and around to I-30, right in the heart of East Dallas. The Dallas County Democratic Party approached Cochrane along with a few other prominent local Democrats and posed the idea for a Democratic club in the area, something that they happily obliged.
However, the county office was quickly surprised when this group began organizing on an incredible level, starting block walks, filling empty precinct chair positions, and overall uniting East Dallas in favor of Democratic ideas and candidates in ways that had never been done before in this area. Many were surprised by this newfound political energy in the area, questioning why the FEDDs didn’t just meet and discuss things. Looking back on this earlier questioning, Cochrane recounts, “We were asked ‘Why aren’t you doing what every other club does? Why don’t you just meet?’ Well, we don’t want to just sit here and complain … What we’re going to try to do is change things. And the way to change it is to talk to your friends and neighbors and finding out [sic] that there are other like-minded people out there.”
From this questioning, the FEDDs only grew, and soon they skyrocketed in membership from their initial 33 members in 2017 to over three thousand in March of 2019. Part of what makes the FEDDs unique is their philosophy and their dedication to research, to have full command of the election data they are presented with. When tasked with starting this new organization, Cochrane spent many late nights pouring over voter statistics in Dallas county, Texas, and the country as a whole to gain a better understanding of the reasons that Democrats had not been successful in recent elections. The conclusions she came to were, at the time, radical, but have been proven through her organization’s success.
“Texas is not a red state. Texas is totally a blue state,” Cochrane asserts. “It’s just that for whatever reason Democrats have felt like their vote doesn’t matter, their vote doesn’t count. I think that we’ve all believed the rhetoric that Texas is a red state, we’re a red state, we’re a red state. We’ve all believed that all along but when you really look at it when Democrats vote, Republicans lose.”
But how does one increase Democratic voter turnout in an area where Democrats have been told again and again that their efforts are useless? To tackle this problem, the FEDDs turned to grassroots action: they block walked; they held phone banks; they hosted candidate meet-and-greets, and they laced up their boots or their high heels and got to work. One of their most far-reaching efforts, the Precincts United Mobilization Plan (also known as PUMP), created contacts in each of the precincts or voting districts that the FEDDs serve to connect the people of these neighborhoods to progressive voting resources, events, and opportunities to volunteer. It has really transformed East Dallas from a place where politics weren’t talked about to a united Democratic stronghold, something clearly seen in more recent voting data.
Although Dallas did vote for Hillary Clinton with a 60.22% majority in the 2016 election according to numbers from the Dallas County Elections Department, the Democratic energy in the area was stunningly low, with Texas House District 32 Democrats not even fielding a candidate to oppose controversial Republican politician Pete Sessions. When a challenger rose up in the 2018 cycle, football player-turned civil rights lawyer Colin Allred, the FEDDs knew they had to do what they could to help him and other progressive candidates make it to the White House. Dallas county is notorious for having low voter turnout in midterm elections, and in general, hence Cochrane’s assertion that Texas is more of a non-voting state than a red Republican state.
So, the FEDDs focused intensely on “get out the vote” efforts to mobilize people to vote, and on giving voters a chance to meet and connect with the politicians running to represent them. At a FEDDs meeting in August, Allred came to speak, and the room at the back of the Mexican restaurant that Cochrane had reserved for the talk was filled to the brim, and many people stood in the back of the room so more could fit. The majority of these people were fellow East Dallas Democrats who wanted to hear Allred speak and to connect with their fellow Democrats. The FEDDs provided them space and a place to make these connections, and with the information to make an informed and empowered decision in the voting booth as a Dallas progressive.
When the 2018 midterm elections finally rolled around, Cochrane and the FEDDs couldn’t help but wonder if they had done enough, if they would be able to tip the scales in Dallas county, especially in tenuous races like that between Colin Allred and incumbent Pete Sessions. They spent their days on election day at polling booths greeting voters, preparing for election watch parties, and trying their best not to dwell on their insidious anxiety.
Election results finally started to trickle in late that Tuesday evening. While my mother and I mourned the loss of a close race in Collin county’s 3rd congressional district by Democratic challenger Lorie Burch, a candidate who we had helped to support, Cochrane spent her evening rifling through election statistics at Colin Allred’s watch party. Finally, as the results showed the outcome, Cochrane began to celebrate. Allred had won his election. And so, did Nathan Johnson. And Victoria Neave. And John Turner. And a laundry list of other progressive candidates in the East Dallas area. It was a major victory for the FEDDs, who are regarded as a large part of why this large-scale Democratic victory was able to take place. Cochrane texted us that night from Allred’s watch party, “Colin won! We did it!” Her pride radiated into the room even through the phone.
Another major victory for the FEDDs was less evident until a few days later when the full voting results were released. Dallas county’s incredibly low voter turnout in the 2014 midterm was significantly improved in the 2018 cycle. From a turnout of 34.02% of registered Dallas county voters in 2014 to 54.64% in 2018, the rise in turnout was meteoric and is an incredible testament to the impact that the FEDDs have had on their community. These numbers came close to even beating voter turnout for the 2016 presidential election (59.42%), which typically gets around 20% more turnout than midterms.
In my mind, Cochrane was always a philanthropist, and I can’t imagine that she’s voted for a Republican once in her life. But I never imagined her becoming a champion for voter rights and engagement, civil rights, and an end to the climate crisis (all things covered in the FEDDs’ Representative Accountability Teams, tasked with tracking bills on certain issues and advising our representatives accordingly). As a white, wealthy stay-at-home mother for several years, Cochrane was easy to stereotype as someone who would turn her nose up at grassroots activism, at knocking on doors or calling her neighbors to support candidates and values she believed in. I even stereotyped her in this way myself, and still cannot believe how wrong I was.
Although 44% of white, college-educated women may have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election and although white women are often looked at as a scourge to political activism, Cochrane has shown me a version of events in which white women are ready and willing to stand with those who stand against oppression and to take charge when needed. Although the face of progressive grassroots activism across America may look pretty different, one of Dallas’s strongest progressive activists comes in the form of a wealthy white woman from the White Rock Lake neighborhood, and I think that says more than I ever could about Cochrane and her evolution.
Bibliography
Clement, Scott, and Emily Guskin. “2016 Election Exit Polls: How the Vote Has Shifted.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 Nov. 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/exit-polls/.
Holter, Rick, and Gus Contreras. “Dallas’ Victoria Neave On Winning An Election On A Challenging Night For Democrats.” KERA News, 11 Nov. 2016, www.keranews.org/post/dallas-victoria-neave-winning-election-challenging-night- democrats.
“Historical Election Results (Resultados Históricos Anteriores).” Dallas County, TX Elections, www.dallascountyvotes.org/election-results-and-maps/election- results/historical-election-results/#Election.
Pickett, Steve. “Grassroots Efforts Helped Dallas-Area Democrats On Election Night.” CBS Dallas / Fort Worth, CBS Dallas / Fort Worth, 7 Nov. 2018, dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/11/07/grass-roots-dallas-democrats-election-night/.
Shams-Rainey, Miriam N. “Jill Cochran Interview.” 19 Mar. 2019.
The Funky East Dallas Democrats. The Funky East Dallas Democrats, 2019, funkyeastdallasdemocrats.com/.
