For our look at the transition from the Democratic to Republican Party in Texas.
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Hall was one of the last conservative Texas Democrats to switch over to the GOP and made history as the oldest member of the U.S. House.
He was a veteran of the Texas Senate, and East Texans elected him to the U.S. House in 1980 as a Democrat. He switched to the Republican party in 2004.
Hall served 17 terms in the U.S. House.
. . . Like most people in Texas politics, he was a Democrat early on. He served as a county judge from 1950-62, went to the Texas Senate in 1962 and served there for 10 years.
In 1980, East Texans elected him to Congress. Hall's district stretched from the Dallas suburbs deep into Northeast Texas — all the way to Texarkana — and was the seat once occupied by U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Rayburn was a close friend of Hall's mother. In the 1950s, a group of Republicans tried to recruit Hall to challenge Rayburn.
"If you do that, where are you going to get breakfast?" Hall's mother told him, according to a 2014 C-SPAN interview with the congressman. "You're not going run against Sam Rayburn."
While a member of the Democratic caucus, he voted often with Republicans. He stayed with the party long after many other high-profile Texans moved to the GOP, including John Connally and Rick Perry. In 2003, Hall voted "present" rather than support the Democrats' new leader, future Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Hall finally made the jump in 2004 amid a GOP redraw of the state congressional map, and Republicans quickly named named him to a senior position on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee. He would easily coast to re-election — until 2014.
Ratcliffe defeated Hall in a 2014 Republican primary. Most of the Texas Republican delegation realized the seriousness of the Ratcliffe threat at the time and rallied behind Hall. Even so, the longtime congressman lost that race.
"When I got up here, I was a Democrat. But I was a conservative Democrat," he said during the C-SPAN interview. "And I didn't really fit. Republicans didn't really want me, and the Democrats didn't like me."
