The biggest headline out of the most recent special legislative session was the passage of a new congressional reapportionment map. The new map is expected to add five seats for the GOP in Texas in advance of next year’s midterms.
Robert Downen, who reports on Texas politics for Texas Monthly, says this is not the only step the Texas GOP leaders have taken to consolidate power within the party. And much of it, he said, goes back to the struggle within the party between the far-right faction and the more moderate lawmakers.
“(There are) many ways that the Texas GOP… Has allowed a group of people that are pretty to the far right to really consolidate power and pass through a bunch of different measures that would therefore make it easier for them to purge dissent from the party,” Downen said.
“At the same time, they are also – at multiple levels of government throughout the states – really pushing through changes to elections, whether it is cutting polling places in Tarrant County, pushing for, as Abraham George, the party’s chair, calls the ‘end of DEI districts’ – all these types of things.”
Downen highlighted the story of Frisco Republican Jared Patterson, who received a formal party censure for several votes he took during the last session.
“In 2024, the Texas GOP passed new changes to what’s called Rule 44. What this did was it made it so that if you are censured by the party, you are no longer eligible to run in a primary,” he said. “A censure used to be used as ways to measure a form of displeasure with a lawmaker. They were rarely used. But what this did was it made it so that if you break with the party on its priority legislation or its preamble or principles, which are kind of a vague outline of principles, you can be removed from the primary.”
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Downen said this change is something that has concerned even a lot of conservative Republicans, who say that this policy gives party leaders too much control over the primary election process.
“We are talking about a potential attempt by party leaders to decide that voters don’t even have a choice to vote for somebody,” he said. “This is also happening at the same time that the Texas GOP is pushing to close its primaries to only Republican voters.”
Historically, Texas has had “open primaries,” meaning voters don’t have to be registered with a party to vote in its primary. The Texas Republican Party is considering changing that rule.
“I’ll defer to what some Republicans said about this,” Downen said. “Which is that when you put this in tandem with the censure changes, it seems like an attempt by party leaders in their mind to really have unprecedented control over who gets to vote and run in elections.”
Downen said that although redistricting made national news, the rest of these political changes often fly under the radar.
“I think that there have been a lot of people who are really not paying attention to this Texas GOP civil war and the way that it has really normalized bare-knuckle politics to a degree that I think would surprise a lot of people,” he said.
“This is a story that I really think is emblematic of where our politics is heading in this era where we really are normalized to purging of dissent and power grabs.”
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