Lloyd Alton Doggett II (born October 6, 1946) is an American lawyer and politician serving in the United States House of Representatives from Texas since 1995. A member of the Democratic Party, Doggett was a member of the Texas Senate from 1973 to 1985 and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1989 to 1994. Doggett represents the same district President Lyndon B. Johnson once represented from 1937 until 1949.
He is the dean of Texas's congressional delegation; he previously shared the deanship with Sheila Jackson Lee until her death in 2024. Doggett was the first sitting Democratic congressperson after the CNN presidential debate to call on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. On August 21, 2025, he announced that he would not run for re-election in 2026 if Texas's then-planned new congressional map was in effect for the 2026 elections.
Early life and education Doggett was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Alyce Paulin (Freydenfeldt) and Lloyd Alton Doggett. His maternal grandparents were Swedish. Doggett graduated Omicron Delta Kappa and received both a bachelor's degree in business administration and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as student body president his senior year. While attending the University of Texas at Austin, he also joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.
Early career Doggett served as a member of the Texas Senate from 1973 to 1985. He gained attention in 1979 as a member of the "Killer Bees", a group of 12 Democratic state senators who opposed a plan to move the state's presidential primary to March 11. The intent was to give former Texas Governor John Connally a leg up on the 1980 Republican nomination. The Killer Bees wanted a closed primary. When this proposal was rejected, they walked out of the chamber and left the Senate two members short of a quorum. The bill was withdrawn five days later.
He was the Democratic nominee for the 1984 United States Senate election in Texas, losing to the Republican candidate, then-U.S. Representative Phil Gramm, by a wide margin. Doggett authored the bill creating the Texas Commission on Human Rights, as well as a law outlawing cop killer bullets and a sunset law requiring periodic review of government agencies.
In 1989, Doggett became both an Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections Before 2012 Doggett was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994 in what was then the 10th district after 32-year incumbent Jake Pickle retired. He was one of the few Democrats to win an open seat in that year's massive Republican landslide. Running for reelection in 1996, Doggett defeated Republican nominee Teresa Doggett, to whom he is no relation. It marked the second election in a row in which he defeated a black female Republican. In the years following his first reelection, Doggett consistently won around 85% of the vote, facing only Libertarian opponents. The 10th, which had once been represented by Lyndon Johnson, had long been a liberal Democratic bastion in increasingly Republican Texas.
Redistricting by the Texas Legislature in 2003 split Austin, which had been entirely or almost entirely in the 10th district for more than a century, into three districts. Through Republican gerrymandering, Doggett's home wound up in a new, heavily Republican 10th district stretching from north central Austin to the Houston suburbs. Most of his former territory wound up on the 25th district, which consisted of a long tendril stretching from Austin to McAllen on the Mexican border. It was called "the fajita strip" or "the bacon strip" because of its shape. Doggett moved to the newly configured 25th and entered the Democratic primary—the real contest in the heavily Democratic, majority-Hispanic district. He won the primary and the general election.
On June 28, 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the nearby 23rd district's lines violated the rights of Latino voters. As part of the 2003 redistricting, heavily Democratic and majority-Latino Laredo had largely been cut out of the 23rd and replaced by several heavily Republican areas near San Antonio. The decision turned on the fact that the 23rd was a protected majority-Latino district—in other words, if the 23rd was ever redrawn to put Latinos in a minority, an acceptable majority-Latino district had to be created in its place. While the new 23rd was 55% Latino, only 46% of its voting population was Latino. The Court therefore found that the 23rd was not an acceptable Latino-majority district. It also found that the 25th was not compact enough to be an acceptable replacement because the two Latino communities in the district were more than 300 miles apart, creating the impression that it had been deliberately drawn to pick up as many Latinos as possible without regard to compactness., which forced the redrawing of the 25th
Due to the 23rd's size, the ruling forced the redrawing of five districts between El Paso and San Antonio, including the 25th. For the 2006 election, Doggett regained most of his old base in Austin (though not the area around the University of Texas at Austin, which stayed in the 21st), and also picked up several suburbs southeast of the city. After skating to reelection in 2006 and 2008, he was held to only 52 percent of the vote in 2010—his closest race since 1996.
2012
It was reported that the new Congressional maps in Texas turned Doggett's district from a strongly Democratic district into a strongly Republican one. The new map split Doggett's old territory among five districts. His home was placed in a new, heavily Republican 25th district stretching from east Austin all the way to the fringes of Fort Worth. Much of his old base was placed in the newly created 35th district, a majority-Hispanic district stretching from San Antonio to eastern Austin.Map of Texas Congressional districts 25-36 Doggett's home was approximately five blocks east of the 35th. It appeared that the Republican-controlled state legislature had gerrymandered the district by packing as many Democrats in the San Antonio-Austin corridor into it as possible.
Doggett accused the Republicans of wanting to make it difficult, if not impossible, for an Anglo Democrat to be elected to Congress from Texas, saying, "The Republican Party is determined to make the Democratic Party a party of minorities—that is what this is about, as well." He added that the Republicans were deliberately trying to reduce Austin's clout in Congress by "deny[ing] the capital city an opportunity to have a district that reflects the capital city." He was faced with the choice between running in the reconfigured 25th or moving, joking that he would live in a Winnebago to be able to run in the newly created 35th.
Doggett was set to face State Representative Joaquin Castro in the 35th district primary election. The race was described as the biggest threat to Doggett's survival yet, with Castro seen as a "rising star" in the Democratic party. Doggett accused Castro of working alongside Republicans throughout the redistricting process. The Republican House Redistricting Committee later said that any discussions with Castro took place after the area for the district was decided. Castro opted to run in the neighboring 20th district after its incumbent, Charlie Gonzalez, announced his retirement.
Doggett eventually decided to run in the 35th district, facing Bexar County assessor Sylvia Romo. Before the primary, he said that he would move into the district if he won. Political commentators suggested that Romo had the district numbers in her favor, but was attempting the difficult leap from local office to Congress, while Doggett had a huge amount of funding. Doggett stressed his long tenure as a progressive Democrat, saying he wanted to "stoutly defend Social Security, Medicare, and national health care", and also touted his strong support for higher education programs and public education. By contrast, Romo's campaign stressed her tax knowledge and CPA license, focusing on her potential to help with Congressional tax reform and economic growth.
Doggett won the primary with 73.2% of the vote. He performed strongly in San Antonio, an area he had never before represented. The district is so heavily Democratic that he was heavily favored to win the general election in November. He easily defeated Republican nominee, former San Marcos Mayor Susan Narvaiz, in the general election to become the first Anglo Democrat to represent a significant portion of San Antonio since Chick Kazen left office in 1985.
2016 Doggett won his 12th House term in 2016. With 124,612 votes (63.1%), he again defeated Narvaiz, who polled 62,384 (31.6%). Two other contenders held the remaining 5.4% of the vote.
2022
Texas's population growth resulted in its gaining two congressional seats after the 2020 census. In October 2021, Doggett announced he would run for reelection in the state's new 37th district rather than the 35th. Austin had been split between five districts on the previous congressional map, and Republican members of Congress who represented the area began facing closer reelection margins later in the decade due to the city's continued population growth and overwhelmingly Democratic voting patterns. Republican state legislators drew one of the new districts, the 37th, almost entirely within Travis County. They hoped to bolster Republican margins in surrounding districts by packing as many of Austin's Democrats into the 35th and 37th districts as possible. It closely resembles the area Doggett represented for his first five terms. Doggett's decision to run in the 37th district created a vacancy in the 35th, which runs along Interstate 35 from Austin to San Antonio. Both seats are overwhelmingly Democratic, and the winner of the Democratic primary in the 35th district, Greg Casar, was easily elected in the general election. Doggett won the 37th.
Tenure Described as an "endangered species", Doggett was one of only three white male Democratic House members from Texas in the 113th Congress (the others being Gene Green and Beto O'Rourke) in a state with mostly Republicans and minority members of the Democratic Party. Since Green's and O'Rourke's retirements after the 2018 election, Doggett is the only white male Democrat representing Texas in Congress. He is one of the most liberal white Democrats from a Southern district, and one of the most liberal people ever to represent Texas in Congress. David Hawkings of Roll Call described his tax and environmental policies as "muscular progressivism".
Doggett was a frequent critic of former Speaker Newt Gingrich while allying with David Bonior, the Democratic whip, when Bonior was leading "an effort to diminish Gingrich's power by raising continual questions about his ethics." He has been a close ally of Nancy Pelosi. In 2002, he supported her successful bid for Democratic leader over fellow Texan Martin Frost, a more moderate candidate.
On the local level, Doggett helped ensure the development of the Austin Outpatient Clinic, which opened in 2011 as the largest veterans' clinic of its kind in the country. In 2014, he secured passage of legislation to expand the Missions National Park and supported it being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.