Texas Republican Party’s divisions grow after fraught primaries

Tuesday’s hotly contested runoffs revealed the turmoil in the Texas Republican Party.

In elections that saw unprecedented levels of external spending, the party’s so-called business faction was shaken but still standing, while some incumbents resisted, the majority notably the speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan (R) and Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).

Their positions, however, are precarious. In Tuesday’s vote, hard-line conservatives in the state executive largely cleared the board of resistant limbs – largely those who had fought against the rise of privatization in the state’s massive public school system, as well as in a group smaller than supported impeachment from Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).

Tuesday’s results “were really the most chaotic result,” said Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “Most of the targeted Republicans lost, but the Speaker of the House managed to pull off a victory.”

As a result, the primaries widened divisions within the state Republican Party as a whole — a body that has been widely criticized, Blank noted, for “prioritizing the persecution of Republicans over building the state party.”

Now, he said, “it appears the party is continuing in that direction.”

Tuesday’s election came on the heels of a state party convention, where Republicans passed through a hard-line platform calling abortion “homicide, not health care”; advocating an end to no-fault divorce; labeling homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice” that does not deserve any legal protection or parental rights; and classify carbon dioxide, which causes climate warming, as “non-polluting”.

These measures ran counter to the once-dominant “business” faction of state Republicans, who tended to put the culture war second to the day-to-day functioning of the state.

These intra-party tensions became fully visible after Tuesday’s second round. School voucher activist Corey DeAngelis called result “a political earthquake”.

Abbott said he now had “the votes to approve school choice,” which proponents call vouchers, and conservative activists were already sharpening their knives on Phelan, who they see as insufficiently committed to that cause.

“We’ll see if the speaker of the House can handle it,” said Sherry Sylvester of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “He has a whole new House, many of whom were elected based on their commitment to school choice, and he didn’t let school choice pass, he didn’t make it a priority and he said he would have preferred a weaker version of choice from school to pass.

Now, she said, the voucher side has the ability to approve “a stronger version. Because every time before it included carrots for school districts. We don’t need those carrots right now. We have the votes.”

But that kind of analysis sees things too “simplistically,” argued Republican lobbyist Thomas Ratliff. Whatever members’ commitment to vouchers, he said, “there are 37 different flavors of what that means. There will be a division within the House, and an equal or greater division between the House and the Senate.”

Ratliff pointed to the number of Texas House members who have rallied around Phelan since the runoff as a sign that voting him out won’t be easy.

“What is still true in Texas politics is that House members and senators don’t like it when the other side meddles in what they consider to be their internal affairs,” he said. “I think outside interference influences the House to come together and get around the wagons.”

Bitterness among Republicans was also apparent in congressional races.

Gonzales narrowly survived a challenge from his right against Brandon Herrera, a YouTuber and gun enthusiast, in Tuesday’s runoff. The congressman drew the ire of the Texas Republican Party last year because of his stance on several pieces of legislation, most notably supporting a bipartisan gun safety law following a devastating school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which Gonzales represents. and for supporting the Respect for Marriage Act.

In response, the Texas Republican Party censored Gonzales – a measure that, according to the measures proposed in the party’s new platform, would allow him to be removed from the polls.

Gonzales’ primary turned personal when several of his House colleagues supported Herrera in the primary. Among those who supported the YouTuber were House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good (R-Va.) and Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.).

Although Gonzales had the support of colleagues in his home state as well as Abbott and others, the mainline conservative barely managed a victory.

As is typically the case in Texas primaries, both Gonzales and state Rep. Craig Goldman (R-Texas), who is running in the 12th Congressional District, were “being challenged from the right,” said Travis County Republican Party chairman and strategist Republican Matt Mackowiak told The Hill.

“I wouldn’t say any of his opponents were serious,” Mackowiak added.
“But the political environment made them serious.”

Many in the party argued that non-Republicans helped Gonzales to victory. This belief — and the steps the party is taking to respond to it — underscore a second divide, between Republicans who believe in embracing a big tent that includes as many new voters as possible and those who want a smaller, more robust party. ideologically more committed. for the cultural war.

The new Republican platform, for example, restricts voting in the primaries to registered party members and establishes the party’s intention to end the state’s long period of early voting.

These measures worried even some members of the state’s rising far right.

“As a conservative, my side comes up with good ideas all the time that we believe we can win over people,” Sylvester of the Texas Public Policy Foundation told The Hill. “Elections are a matter of ideas and need to be as easy as possible for [people to vote] as possible.”

Sylvester also criticized a party platform that seeks to require statewide elected officials to carry more than half of Texas’ counties — blocking the power of the largely urban Democratic Party.

Still, Sylvester and other Republicans agree the party will be successful in the fall.

“Texas Republicans are more united than ever before,” state GOP Chairman Abraham George said in a statement to The Hill. “We just approved our platform, legislative priorities, rules and elected new party leadership at our convention with an overwhelming majority.”

Others see a longer road ahead.

Infighting at the state House level is unlikely to give Democrats an electoral opening outside of a few purple districts, experts told The Hill, noting that many of these consequential contests have occurred in rural districts that are reliably conservative.

But they recognize that tensions and internal struggles will still persist in the autumn and the new legislature.

“I think this is going to continue all summer, all fall and all winter because everyone is watching Dade Phelan and whether or not he can remain president,” said Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser.

“There are a lot of vested interests that want to replace him, not just on the issue of school choice, but on other issues like the border or other cultural issues.”

Phelan is still a clear favorite to maintain control of the House, Blank of the Texas Politics Project told The Hill, in part because many members may be angry about the role Abbott, Patrick and Paxton played in choosing their fellow incumbents.

“They may have created an environment in which these Republican members — or at least a significant number of them — are even less likely to commit to the objective,” Blank said.

This division could give state Democrats a level of strategic power they haven’t known in a long time.

“From Washington to Austin, Republicans are more divided than ever,” state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told The Hill.

But just like in Congress, “when Democrats come together – our unity is our greatest asset,” he said.

A looming question is whether Texas Republicans will start rejecting bills just because Democrats have proposed them, Ratliff told The Hill.

“If Democrats return to the next legislative session with less power and less voice in the process, they could become more of a force for chaos, which is not really the role they tend to play,” Blank said. “And so you can have GOP primary factions within the legislature at odds with each other, and Democrats, more inclined to pour gasoline on the fire.”

Abbott’s attempt to take control of the House could founder on something much more prosaic than intra-party politics.

“They run on a single issue, they have 7,000 notes coming their way. So there are still a lot of unanswered questions about what these members want to do,” Blank said.

But he said those hoping the insurgents will remake the House’s culture may be disappointed.

“Having a significant impact on the rules or the process,” he said, “is not the norm for a freshman member.”