Republicans vs. Republicans: Dan Patrick’s record is ‘abysmal,’ says a Texas opponent
Everything is going Texas Republicans’ way in 2022.
Isn’t it?
“Everybody recognizes this is going to be a big year,” Tarrant County party chairman Rick Barnes of Keller said the other night, looking around at a packed crowd for a candidate forum. “They want to be part of it.”
With Democrat Joe Biden in the White House, Republicans are counting on a year like 2010, when Gov. Rick Perry and the GOP won Tarrant County by 15 points two years after the election of President Barack Obama.
But only a few steps away from Barnes, trouble was lurking.
“The incumbent’s record is abysmal across the board,” said Nederland Republican Daniel Miller, a campaigner for Texas secession running against Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Montgomery County Republican known for leading former President Donald Trump’s statewide campaign. “Whether it’s mismanagement of the COVID lockdown, or that we haven’t secured the border, there’s been no concrete action since he was elected.”
Maybe nobody can stop Texas Republicans in 2022 except other Republicans.
Taking the margin of error into account, Garland Republican Allen West and Highland Park Republican Don Huffines may not have even 10% support against incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott.
Yet both are pulling Abbott to the political right, with Huffines outright calling for shutting down the $180 billion in inbound commercial trade from Mexico to Texas.
West, endorsed last week by former Trump campaigner Michael Flynn, was leading protests a year ago outside the Governor’s Mansion.
Even the current agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller of Stephenville said, “I’m convinced that our current governor cannot get re-elected in the general election.”
If either Huffines or West were to wrest the nomination away from Abbott, or if a secession salesman knocked Patrick off the ticket, that would bolster Democratic gubernational candidate Beto O’Rourke or one of the three lackluster Democrats running for lieutenant governor.
(Noting: O’Rourke brings his campaign to Dallas for a 2 p.m. rally Sunday at Fair Park.)
Locally, the Republican primary races for state legislature and courthouse seats are drawing a list of the party’s experienced winners.
But the filings so far are also laced with obscure newcomers hoping to ride the Republican wave into office for a paycheck and a future pension.
Last fall, Republicans won most countywide elections by a 5-point margin.
But back in that 2010 election, during Obama’s first term, local Republicans won elections by 25 points. And that was with Houston Democrat Bill White spending $25 million to campaign against Perry.
Republicans even flipped two local Texas House seats.
Mathematically, this isn’t Democrats’ year. Maybe that’s in part why Democrats have been slower to file for the March 1 party primary, with the deadline coming up Dec. 13.
(Tarrant County is electing both a new county judge and a new district attorney for the first time since 1966, when the winners were Democrats Howard Green and Frank Coffey.)
On the Republican side, “our ballot is shaping up to be pretty solid,” said Barnes, the county chairman.
But to Daniel Miller, the secessionist candidate challenging Patrick, “The fact is that you’re going to see a lot more conservatives voting.
“That’s going to push the candidates farther to the right.”
But maybe farther from winning.
