Red State Blues

Conservative candidates just got wiped out in Texas. Here's why it matters

Reader: we’re heading to Texas, where this weekend something astonishing happened. At the very moment that Governor Greg Abbott was signing his deeply controversial voucher legislation, voters were rejecting the same education culture wars that Abbott et al have stoked relentlessly in order to justify said school vouchers. Indeed, at a time when the GOP is essentially telling its own voters to abandon their schools, those voters said ‘no thanks.’ And while party officials and pundits were quick to tell us that we shouldn’t read too much into the results of low-turnout municipal elections, I’m going to take the opposite tack. Examine these Texas tea leaves closely and you can see, not just a rejection of the GOP’s education vision, but the weakness of the MAGA movement.

Loud and clear

First, a quick recap. In communities across the state, voters headed to the polls to weigh in on an array of local offices, including school board. And the message they sent was loud and clear. Michelle Davis, author of the must-read Lone Star Left newsletter, sums it up this way: “[W]e’re done with your culture wars, your book bans, and your crusade against public schools. Voters chose community over chaos, educators over agitators, and progress over extremism.” Conservative school board candidates suffered sweeping defeats across the state. The same communities that have been consumed by school culture wars in recent years— Keller, Grapevine-Colleyville, Mansfield—gave GOP-backed candidates the boot. And in one particularly satisfying development, every single candidate supported by Patriot Mobile, the far-right Christian nationalist group that has been trying to take over local school boards, was rejected.

For a full rundown of the results, check out Frank Strong’s exhaustive district-by-district review. I’ll skip straight to Strong’s conclusion: “This was a statement election.”

Bad news for MAGA

The sweeping rebuke of education extremism isn’t just about school board politics though. Voters were also sending a loud signal regarding their exhaustion with MAGA. And I’m not just speculating here. In Tarrant County, described as the single largest ‘red’ county in all the land, GOP officials have been relentless in their efforts to MAGA-fy local elections. In the lead-up to the vote, they parachuted in far-right luminaries, including Steve Bannon and Pizza Gate conspiracist Jack Posobiec, for a Make America Great Again Gala intended to whip up grassroots enthusiasm. In an unhinged speech to MAGA faithful back in March, Bannon reminded the crowd that nothing less than the fate of the world rested on the results of the Tarrant County vote.

As Tarrant County goes, so goes Texas, right? As Texas goes, so goes MAGA, and as MAGA goes, so goes the United States of America, and as the United States of America goes, so goes the world.

So how did things shake out? As veteran news columnist Bud Kennedy pointed out, every single one of the candidates endorsed by the Tarrant County GOP lost, a stunning 0-11 rejection by voters. That included, by the way, all seven school board candidates running with the backing of the party. “We want all gas and no brake,” Bannon told the crowd. To which voters seem to have responded, “No thanks - we’d rather walk.”

Timing is everything

That the GOP’s shellacking was transpiring at the very moment that Greg Abbott was celebrating the passage of his voucher legislation, an effort years and countless millions of dollars in the making, is a special kind of irony. Instead of rewarding the GOP for delivering on Abbott’s top policy priority, voters delivered a rebuke. If you’re wondering what vouchers have to do with an electoral wipeout at the local level, allow me to explain. You see, Abbott’s entire case for why vouchers are desperately needed in Texas rested on the school culture wars. Parents needed vouchers, he argued, because of “the pervasive woke leftist agenda that's being forced on our kids in our public schools.” They needed vouchers because the schools were turning kids trans. And they desperately needed vouchers because “Kids go to school dressed up as cats with litter boxes in their classrooms.”

But while the Governor may have succeeded in dragging vouchers across the finish line (more on that momentarily), the candidates running on the culture wars themes Abbott has hammered fared remarkably poorly. And in another sign that Abbott’s brand of education extremism has run out of gas, voters approved huge bond measures to support their local schools, including in communities where such measures have previously been rejected.

As I’ve been chronicling in these pages and elsewhere, there is tremendous anger with Abbott and the GOP over vouchers on the right—anger, by the way, that shows no signs of abating. Grassroots activists have a laundry list of reasons for opposing vouchers, but what connects them—and unites them with many Democrats—is a deep sense that their elected officials no longer represent them and are accountable instead only to party donors, including Jeff Yass, the hedge fund billionaire who flooded Texas with cash. Yass, by the way, was a featured guest at Abbott’s voucher celebration. The message being sent to the GOP’s own voters might as well have been: You’re right - we are wholly owned by our donors. Now get out there and vote for us.

What about Trump?

“You guys turned around the Texas GOP to a MAGA party,” Steve Bannon told the crowd at this spring’s Make America Great Again Gala. But the election tea leaves also contain some clear warnings for Trump and his movement. The sweeping losses for candidates who allied with him are an ominous portent for the midterms. Then there’s the outsized role that Trump himself played in helping Abbott get his deeply unpopular voucher bill passed. The fate of the bill hung in the balance thanks to a bipartisan push to put vouchers up to a statewide vote to be held in November. According to the must-read Quorum Report, the plan had enough support among lawmakers from both parties to pass easily. At which point Abbott brought out the big guns, first threatening GOP lawmakers who didn’t fall in line, and then having Trump himself weigh in.

Trump’s “rambling” phone call, in which he assured legislators that they wouldn’t be hurt by their support for vouchers and pledged endorsements for those who voted yes, sealed the deal. “[A]ll the starch came out of any remaining GOP dissent,” as the Quorum Report’s Scott Braddock put it. And there in lies the rub. You see, all of the starch has not gone out of the opposition to vouchers within the Texas GOP. Indeed, on the issue that has arguably animated grassroots conservatives like no other, they’ve just been told to fall in line, and by none other than Donald J. Trump himself.

“Vouchers played a key role”

In recent months I’ve talked to countless conservative Texans who are furious about school vouchers. Their anger is real, but what’s less clear is what happens next. The GOP’s shellacking in these local elections could be a sign of more trouble ahead. Hollie Plemons, a Republican Party activist and precinct chair in Tarrant County who made a starring appearance in my story about the strange bedfellows opposing vouchers, told me that there were lots of reasons that the GOP fared so poorly at the polls, including subpar candidates. “This election was void of any excitement for a better change,” she says. But she’s convinced that anger over vouchers was a key factor.

For months, Hollie has been warning GOP lawmakers that they would pay a price for ignoring their constituents’ furious opposition to vouchers, what she characterizes as the governor’s “transfer of taxpayer money to his donors.” That price? “[R]ed seats all across the state,” she predicted. “It only took two weeks to prove me right.”