These Republicans are damaging the party in Texas. Division won’t help the GOP win.
If the Republican Party loses local elections Tuesday in Tarrant County or Texas, I can give you one reason why.
For the first time in my memory, Texas Democrats have been better organized.
For the most part, they focused on one goal: winning control of the Texas House for the first time in 18 years, in part by flipping from one to five seats in Tarrant County.
Meanwhile, Republicans were already trying to run the March 2022 party primary.
On the Saturday before early voting began in a presidential election, where would you have expected to find the state Republican Party chairman, a state senator and one of the top statewide elected officials?
They were outside the Governor’s Mansion leading a protest against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
For some reason, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller of Stephenville; state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood; and party Chairman Allen West of Garland thought it was the perfect time to tear down a Republican leader elected by 13 points in 2018, the party’s widest margin of victory in a statewide race.
Right now, Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn are the only leaders holding onto the remnants of the old Republican Party majority, with the old Tea Party crowd determined to tear it apart.
Years ago, then-Tarrant County party chairman Steve Hollern was the one leading the insurgents. He rallied faith-and-values Republicans against the establishment in the era when the party looked up to President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush.
But back then, Republicans mostly buried their differences after the convention.
“In my opinion, it is ill-advised for our party officials to have a major public confrontation with our elected Republicans, particularly this close to an election,” Hollern said.
“It is not good.”
West, a one-term Florida congressman and former leader of a failed Dallas think tank, was elected by Republican convention delegates who mostly never face voters outside their own precincts. His work is oveseen by the State Republican Executive Committee, made up of one man and one woman from each state Senate district.
When frustrated SREC members tried to meet clumsily over Zoom in July as the pandemic was getting worse, a committeeman from Montgomery County waved a bottle of Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey and shouted “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!”
Committeeman Walter West (no relation to the party chairman) said meeting over Zoom was “exactly what the Democrats would use against us when the time comes in November, or whenever they want another COVID-19 fix.” He called then-party Chairman James Dickey of Austin, a bookish insurance executive, a “fraud.”
Walter West is now the party sergeant-at-arms. Former Tarrant County party chairman Tim O’Hare of Southlake is the state party treasurer.
In September, Allen West was among those who sued Abbott to prevent the state from adding six days to early voting as a convenience during the pandemic.
Then, on Oct. 10, instead of working to get out the vote or win over the millions of new Texas voters, the new Republican Party of Texas was on parade at a “Free Texas” rally outside the Governor’s Mansion.
West read a resolution from the SREC demanding his own party’s governor rescind state health orders involving COVID-19 and instead just tell Texans to “act responsibly.”
According to the Texas Tribune, Miller told the rally, “Quite frankly, Governor, your cure is worse than the disease.”
(Yeah. Tell that to the people in West Texas right now driving to Kansas and further to find a hospital with an open COVID-19 bed.)
According to the Tribune, Abbott was away, working to actually help elect Republicans. He was making get-out-the-vote calls for Cornyn and attending the Texas-Oklahoma football game.
Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley of Hurst, a 23-year veteran of commissioners’ court, has taken the same kind of heat over COVID-19 decisions. (Like Abbott, he is not on the ballot Tuesday.)
“You’ve got people out here getting all over the governor, and the governor trying to get to the right of the lieutenant governor [Dan Patrick], and the new party chair suing the governor,” he said. “It’s ridiculous that we have all this infighting.”
This is not how Republicans win.
This story was originally published October 30, 2020 at 11:26 AM.
