“The way I see it, we’re not always gonna be able to control everything that happens inside that capitol. But I can control what happens outside the capitol and in our district.”
Houstonia: New Texas Senator Molly Cook Is All about ‘Treating’ Voters
Molly Cook walked into Empire Café on a Friday afternoon, her favorite local spot in Houston, her demeanor still upbeat even after the day she’d had. Fresh off a shift in the ER, she arrived in her scrubs, a backpack slung over one shoulder, her bright, colorful tattoos peeking out from her upper left arm.
Cook’s journey from the emergency room to the Texas Senate is as dynamic as her ink. The 33-year-old’s path to becoming a health care professional began when she was just 12, in a place most children dread: the school nurse’s office, somewhere she frequented to escape the monotony of class.
“I hated seventh grade,” Cook says. “The nurse was my pastor’s wife. So, I would go down there with a heating pad, instead of being in class.”
A chance encounter with the goriness of the job ignited a flame in her that would go unquenched for years. “One time I saw [the nurse] have to respond because a kid cracked his head open on the playground, and she came back in carrying this trash bag with blood and clothes in it,” Cook says with a gleam in her eyes. “I just thought it was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life and I thought I want to be the person who knows what to do when there’s an emergency.”
This early fascination with emergency response followed her through her formative years. Cook followed her passion, but it wasn’t a straightforward path. She initially pursued music performance at the University of Texas at Austin, playing the harp as she had done since she was 7. Despite her love for the instrument, something felt off.
“I loved the work of performing but you just ended up spending like six hours a day alone in a practice room and that was just not right for me,” Cook says. After some soul-searching, she switched to nursing, a decision she describes as one of the best she ever made.
Nursing, for Cook, was not just a career but a calling. It allowed her to fulfill her desire to help people in their most vulnerable moments. But as she worked in the ER, she saw firsthand the social determinants of health affecting her patients’ lives. This realization sparked another passion: public health policy.
“The first person who inspired me to think about politics was a preceptor in my last semester of nursing school,” Cook says. “She had gone to the state legislature and got the laws changed. It was the first clue that nursing could be politics.”
This law, which counted a sick child’s illness as an excused absence for their high-schooler parent, showed Cook the power of policy to make tangible differences in people’s lives. She says this policy change allowed many young parents to graduate on time.
The realization planted the seed that nursing could intersect with politics and offer a broader platform to enact change, leading her to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where she earned a Master’s in Public Health and Nursing in 2018, focusing on policy. She volunteered on political campaigns, interned in policy roles, and advocated at the Maryland General Assembly.
Cook’s transition from health care to politics wasn’t immediate, nor was it without challenges. She didn’t grow up in a politically active household, but each step in her journey led her closer to her new path.
“My parents vote in every presidential election but beyond that, it just wasn’t top of mind,” Cook says. “In 2014, I had moved from Austin to Houston and gotten my job here in town and I remember writing postcards to my senators about health-related issues I cared about. Each time you start to take that peek behind the curtain it grows a little bit inside your heart.”
After moving back to Houston in 2018, Cook’s passion for policy and community organizing only intensified. That same year, she volunteered 40 hours a week for Beto O’Rourke’s senate campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz while working full-time as a nurse. “Knocked on doors in Montgomery County for Beto,” she says, joking that she felt like she could do anything after that. “Organizing, owning the space, recruiting and maintaining volunteers running door knocks, door knocking myself, running the phone bank—all that was great experience.”
Cook’s hands-on approach and her willingness to dive into the grassroots level of campaigning paid off. She built a solid foundation of experience and a network of supporters that would later become instrumental in her political journey. The transition from the ER to the political arena felt innate to her. “To me, it seemed very natural. Instead of having one patient at a time, you just have 950,000 or 20 million patients,” she says.
Her passion for community organizing came to the forefront when she spearheaded efforts against the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) I-45 expansion. The project, which threatens to displace communities and cause environmental harm, became a rallying point for Cook. She mobilized residents, organized protests, and tirelessly advocated against the expansion, highlighting the detrimental impact it would have on neighborhoods.
“It’s very frustrating that despite the fact freeways kill people, cost a ton of money, and make traffic worse, we are still expanding freeways. Even though we’ve been organizing for years and spreading the word and knocking on doors, it feels like the needle hasn’t moved even though I think it actually has,” Cook says.
Cook’s campaign against the I-45 expansion is one she wants to carry into office. She says she has hope, even for a state with little-to-no public transit planning.
“Currently TxDOT is constitutionally mandated to spend about 92 to 98 percent of pertinent revenue on freeways, roadways, or roadway-adjacent projects and we need to untie TxDOT engineers’ hands,” she says. “They need to be able to spend state dollars on public transportation, biking, walking, and ADA-accessible infrastructure.”
It wasn’t until 2022, four years after she began organizing, that she entered the political fray herself. Cook ran against then–Texas senator John Whitmire, who had held the seat since 1983, in the Democratic primary. Challenging a seasoned incumbent was no small feat. Though she lost by 17 percentage points, she came the closest any of Whitmire’s opponents ever had, and the campaign was crucial in building her political profile and gaining valuable experience.
When Whitmire became the mayor of Houston this year, Cook ran again for the seat he vacated. In a highly competitive and talked-about special election, she faced off against state representative Jarvis Johnson and other challengers, getting 20.6 percent of the vote to his 36.2. The intense race culminated in a narrow runoff where she won by only 62 votes. Cook believes her grassroots campaign, bolstered by her community organizing credentials and health care background, resonated with voters. She is serving the remainder of Whitmire’s term, which ends in January 2025, and will be on the ballot again this November.
As the state senator for Senate District 15, Cook carries her activism and ER experience into her legislative work. She is driven by the same urgency and empathy that guided her nursing career. Her top priorities include expanding Medicaid, protecting public education, ensuring environmental justice, and advocating for gun safety and abortion rights. Her personal experiences, such as her procedural abortion in 2014, deeply inform her commitment to reproductive rights and health care access. She emphasizes the importance of staying rooted in data, lived experiences, and community needs to guide her policy decisions.
“The way I see it, we’re not always gonna be able to control everything that happens inside that capitol. But I can control what happens outside the capitol and in our district,” Cook says. “Inside the capitol, I’m going to be a nurse first. Every single move that I have made, all of the work that I have done, and every decision that I’ll make inside that capitol is based on what I see on a daily basis and the way that I want to care of my patients that I’m not able to.”
Despite the challenges of working in a predominantly conservative legislature, Cook remains optimistic about finding common ground. Her experience collaborating with Republicans on a housing reform bill as an activist last session demonstrates her willingness to work across the aisle for the betterment of her constituents.
And as the first openly bisexual member of the Texas Senate, Cook aims to be a symbol of pride for the LGBTQ+ community, advocating for their rights and serving as a safe space within the legislature.
“It’s exciting to be able to be a vessel of that power, determination, and resilience. It’s exciting to get to symbolize the hope that we all have together and I can’t wait to go and be a safe space for our community and do my absolute best for us,” Cook says.
Cook’s vision extends beyond the immediate legislative goals. She emphasizes the importance of organizing and voter turnout in Senate District 15, believing that community engagement is key to enacting meaningful change. While she’s not sure politics will remain in her future, she says her ultimate goal before she dies is to become a hospice nurse, a specialty she finds profoundly meaningful. For now, though, her focus remains on serving her constituents and making a lasting impact in the Texas Senate.