The Texas Republican Party is Destroying Itself from Within

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Abstract

arly, doing the job we elect these idiots to do). Within the Texas Republican party today, if you do not parrot everything the ultra-far right embraces 100%, you are their enemy. And if you’re a candidate for office who believes even 90% of the MAGA creed but opposes 10% of it, you are branded a liberal and will absolutely face a primary challenge.Under normal, more reasonable circumstances, every race having multiple challengers would be a good thing for the party; having choices used to mean the more qualified candidates rose to the top (ok, maybe not usually, but at least sometimes). But we do not live in reasonable times and the result is instead a blood feud that will, I believe, ultimately splinter the Republican party in Texas for generations to come. Most reading this would say that’s a good thing; I think it both is and is not.A perfect example of this is a race for state legislature that I mentioned in <a href="https://readmedium.com/some-ways-medium-and-an-east-texas-gas-station-are-eerily-similar-3d131445d150">an earlier piece</a>. In a just-concluded special election to fill the unexpired term of a legislator who resigned from the Texas House, the losing ultra far-right candidate has accused the winning just-a-bit-less far-right candidate of “stealing” the election with Democratic votes (even though there are perhaps seven Democrats in the three rural counties they are battling to represent in the dysfunctional Texas legislature).The two are now battling in the upcoming Republican primary, and the rhetoric has only gotten worse. The winning candidate from that special election (and I am not naming either of them because neither deserves more publicity) is accusing her opponent of helping to sell Texas farmland to Communist China while he is accusing her of being the best friend of Beto O’Rourke. Poor Beto; first he couldn’t beat Ted Cruz, then he couldn’t beat Greg Abbott, and now they’re using his name in vain when he’s not even running for office.This “you’re not as conservative as me, so you’re obviously a closet liberal” trope has spilled over into everyday life in my stepdad’s little East Texas town, with the town veterinarian (which is a more powerful position than you might expect in a place where everyone owns cattle) openly feuding with men who have been his friends since Ronald Reagan was a Democrat. Many have already vowed that if their candidate loses in the p

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rimary they will simply not vote in that race during the general election, and they are dead serious.In that part of the state, half of the Republican voters abandoning a candidate simply means the Democrat will lose by a smaller number. However, in the suburban and urban areas (where races are more hotly contested), it could be very good news for Democrats. And there is already talk from the more “moderate” Republicans of splitting off and forming a new party. With Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton actively opposing candidates Republican Governor Greg Abbott supports (after Abbott supported <a href="https://readmedium.com/the-vicious-infighting-between-texas-republicans-may-be-the-states-only-hope-a720cff4ff5">Paxton’s impeachment</a>), this seems more likely than ever.This isn’t just happening here in the Great State of Confusion, either. In Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, Donald Trump defeated Nikki Hailey 59.8% to 39.5%, which on the surface seems like an overwhelming victory for Trump and the MAGA movement, especially since South Carolina is Hailey’s home state. What many pundits have missed is the fact that in a state where Trump defeated Joe Biden 55% to 43% in 2020, four years later 40% of Republicans voted against him.The cracks are showing, no matter how hard the party establishment tries to paper over them. I said earlier that an eventual split could have both an upside and a downside. The upside is that it would at the very least significantly weaken the stranglehold the MAGA movement has on Texas politics. The downside is that no party would ever be able to gain a majority in the legislature and given that they already refuse to work together nothing will ever get done. We see what that looks like in Washington, D.C. every day.In the end, it looks like the dumpster fire that is Texas politics will continue well into the future, even if a split in the Republican Party actually does happen. As for me, I’m about to head to the polls for early voting, knowing that no matter who wins, I lose. I’ll do it anyway; the ghost of John Wayne has grown accustomed to the one write-in vote he gets from me every election cycle.If you enjoyed this story, you can support my writing directly by leaving a tip below using the small (and kind of weird) hand icon (you tip waiters and bartenders, so why not writers?).</article></body>

It’s like a car crash I can’t stop watching

Donald Trump has pulled off some impressively dubious feats, including somehow driving a casino into bankruptcy, causing his evangelical Christian supporters to ignore a large portion of the Bible, and shaking the foundations of a democracy that has survived a Civil War, two World Wars, and reality television. Yet none of these are as surprising, to me at least, as what he has managed to do in Texas over the past few years: dividing a once-monolithic political party to the point of irreconcilable fracture.

When I was a child, Texas was still a solidly Democratic state; this changed when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, and for more than 40 years seemed unlikely to ever change again. In what was an undeniably brilliant strategy, Republicans took a long-game approach to statewide dominance, focusing on the elections and offices that aren’t sexy enough to make the evening news: school board, county commissioner, local judges, and the state legislature. Control the down-ballot races and you control the state.

This strategy (which was copied by red states across the nation) has been so successful that even with the major urban areas of the state being solidly Democratic, no Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. This has been accomplished not just by a horrendous amount of gerrymandering of congressional districts but also by Texas Republicans marching in lockstep, to the point that primary challenges that could weaken their candidates rarely occurred. There were times in the 2010s where there was literally no reason to vote in a Republican primary because everyone was running unopposed.

That was true in the days when our political process had some semblance of sanity, but no longer. Much like the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao, in the MAGA era, ideological purity matters more than anything else (including, clearly, doing the job we elect these idiots to do). Within the Texas Republican party today, if you do not parrot everything the ultra-far right embraces 100%, you are their enemy. And if you’re a candidate for office who believes even 90% of the MAGA creed but opposes 10% of it, you are branded a liberal and will absolutely face a primary challenge.

Under normal, more reasonable circumstances, every race having multiple challengers would be a good thing for the party; having choices used to mean the more qualified candidates rose to the top (ok, maybe not usually, but at least sometimes). But we do not live in reasonable times and the result is instead a blood feud that will, I believe, ultimately splinter the Republican party in Texas for generations to come. Most reading this would say that’s a good thing; I think it both is and is not.

A perfect example of this is a race for state legislature that I mentioned in an earlier piece. In a just-concluded special election to fill the unexpired term of a legislator who resigned from the Texas House, the losing ultra far-right candidate has accused the winning just-a-bit-less far-right candidate of “stealing” the election with Democratic votes (even though there are perhaps seven Democrats in the three rural counties they are battling to represent in the dysfunctional Texas legislature).

The two are now battling in the upcoming Republican primary, and the rhetoric has only gotten worse. The winning candidate from that special election (and I am not naming either of them because neither deserves more publicity) is accusing her opponent of helping to sell Texas farmland to Communist China while he is accusing her of being the best friend of Beto O’Rourke. Poor Beto; first he couldn’t beat Ted Cruz, then he couldn’t beat Greg Abbott, and now they’re using his name in vain when he’s not even running for office.

This “you’re not as conservative as me, so you’re obviously a closet liberal” trope has spilled over into everyday life in my stepdad’s little East Texas town, with the town veterinarian (which is a more powerful position than you might expect in a place where everyone owns cattle) openly feuding with men who have been his friends since Ronald Reagan was a Democrat. Many have already vowed that if their candidate loses in the primary they will simply not vote in that race during the general election, and they are dead serious.

In that part of the state, half of the Republican voters abandoning a candidate simply means the Democrat will lose by a smaller number. However, in the suburban and urban areas (where races are more hotly contested), it could be very good news for Democrats. And there is already talk from the more “moderate” Republicans of splitting off and forming a new party. With Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton actively opposing candidates Republican Governor Greg Abbott supports (after Abbott supported Paxton’s impeachment), this seems more likely than ever.

This isn’t just happening here in the Great State of Confusion, either. In Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, Donald Trump defeated Nikki Hailey 59.8% to 39.5%, which on the surface seems like an overwhelming victory for Trump and the MAGA movement, especially since South Carolina is Hailey’s home state. What many pundits have missed is the fact that in a state where Trump defeated Joe Biden 55% to 43% in 2020, four years later 40% of Republicans voted against him.

The cracks are showing, no matter how hard the party establishment tries to paper over them. I said earlier that an eventual split could have both an upside and a downside. The upside is that it would at the very least significantly weaken the stranglehold the MAGA movement has on Texas politics. The downside is that no party would ever be able to gain a majority in the legislature and given that they already refuse to work together nothing will ever get done. We see what that looks like in Washington, D.C. every day.

In the end, it looks like the dumpster fire that is Texas politics will continue well into the future, even if a split in the Republican Party actually does happen. As for me, I’m about to head to the polls for early voting, knowing that no matter who wins, I lose. I’ll do it anyway; the ghost of John Wayne has grown accustomed to the one write-in vote he gets from me every election cycle.

If you enjoyed this story, you can support my writing directly by leaving a tip below using the small (and kind of weird) hand icon (you tip waiters and bartenders, so why not writers?).