TEXAS POLITICS

Texas’s Republicans eat their own

Run-off primary elections are an exercise in retaliation

 

The Economist

May 27, 2024 

 

 

Speaker Dade Phelan and challenger David Covey

 

BEAUMONT, Texas -- At the time it seemed they had outdone themselves. In the past two legislative sessions Texas Republicans outlawed abortion, allowed gun-owners to carry their weapons without permits, gave state judges the power to deport immigrants, banned diversity offices in public universities and nixed all sorts of progressive city laws. In a note to funders last summer, the Republican state party chair declared that the flurry of policies amounted to “probably the most sweeping conservative change ever passed in our Texas state legislature”.

 

It may come as a surprise, then, that the speaker of the Texas House, the man responsible for getting those bills through the  lower chamber, is at risk of losing his job for not being conservative enough. On May 28th Dade Phelan (pictured) will face his first challenger in a decade in a run-off primary election that threatens to end his political career. If he loses it will be the first time that Texas’s speaker has been dethroned since a scandal took down the governor, lieutenant-governor and speaker in 1972. His challenger, David Covey, an oil-and-gas consultant and political newbie, has been endorsed not only by many of Texas’s top dogs but by America’s most famous Republican, Donald Trump. The primary has become the most expensive state-representative race (with spending of some $7.5m) in American history, according to AdImpact, a data firm.

 

The speaker is the most notable of several incumbents that either Greg Abbott, the Lone Star State’s governor, or Ken Paxton, its attorney-general, is bent on unseating on Tuesday. In December the two set out on parallel warpaths. Mr Abbott vowed to unleash his wrath on Republicans who tanked last session’s school-voucher bill, his biggest policy priority, and Mr Paxton decided to go after those who voted, unsuccessfully, to impeach him for bribery last spring. To bolster their efforts Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, gave Mr Abbott $6m, the biggest campaign donation in Texan history, and a trio of West Texas oil tycoons donated at least $2.5m to candidates challenging the impeachers.

 

In the primary in March, eight of the targeted incumbents lost re-election—one was replaced by a lawyer on Mr Paxton’s defence team—and eight, including Mr Phelan, who came in second of three, were forced into run-offs. That was exceptional: in the last cycle just one of the 84 Republican representatives who were challenged lost. The thrashing was a huge win for Texas’s top brass, who had never waded into state races like this before. “March 5th was the best political day of Abbott’s governorship, including the days he was elected,” says a veteran Republican operative.

 

In practice, the effect of this revenge tour is to purge the statehouse of its more moderate, old-guard Republicans—“rinos”, or “Republicans in name only”, as their foes call them. 

 

Although Mr Phelan abstained (as speakers often do) from voting on vouchers, he did bless the impeachment inquiry. More controversially, he promises to continue to work with House Democrats and appoint them to chair committees. “I run the House based on the very simple philosophy that the majority will prevail and the minority will be heard,” he says, standing outside a rural polling place dressed in a camouflage t-shirt. “These folks want a dictatorship in the Texas House, but as long as I’m speaker there will not be a dictatorship in the Texas House.” Mr Phelan reckons his philosophy is also good strategy: despite being in the majority, Republicans need Democratic votes to pass big bills.

 

This extraordinary primary season shows that, for Republicans in Texas, proving conservative credentials is getting harder every day. Researchers at the Texas Politics Project of the University of Texas at Austin note that incumbents in the Republican-dominated state face an increasingly tricky trade-off between representing their constituents and responding to the demands of primary voters, a more hardline subset who decide their fate.

 

At a bustling fish fry in his hometown of Beaumont a week before the election Mr Phelan vociferously denied that he was a moderate. “Just look at my record,” he told locals wearing bejewelled “Trump 2024” pins. In the final days of his campaign his defenders are avoiding ideological debates and are instead going back to basics. When asked why he came to stump for the speaker, Rick Perry, Texas’s former governor and energy secretary under Mr Trump, said he was there to pose one simple question to voters: “Do you want to trade your speaker, who is arguably one of the most influential people in Austin, for a first-termer who doesn’t know where the bathrooms are in the capitol?”

 

Across town at a duelling campaign event Mr Covey, the prospective first-termer, had a very different question for voters. Looking out onto a dozen rows of people sitting in neatly arranged hotel chairs he asked, referring to his best-known backer: “Can you trust President Donald Trump?”