In Texas Republican Primaries, The RINO Attack Fell Short

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s Texas primaries, Republican candidates looking to unseat GOP incumbents from the governor’s mansion to the Texas Capitol rallied around a theme: attacking their opponents for not being conservative enough.

Take East Texas U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, who was vying for the GOP nomination for attorney general. At a campaign event near Gainesville last month, Gohmert attacked current Texas AG Ken Paxton for failing to label gender affirming medical treatments for minors as child abuse.

Then there’s Don Huffines, who challenged Gov. Greg Abbott with accusations that Abbott wasn’t tough enough on border security. Huffines said he, as a true conservative, would take more drastic measures to secure the border.

"If there is a Republican incumbent in Texas, particularly over the last decade, the way to challenge that Republican is to get to their right,” said Cal Jillson, professor of political science at Southern Methodist University.

The strategy has its uses when it comes to driving GOP officeholders to shift their stances to the right to protect their flanks. Abbotts' campaign in recent months pretty much ended any small reputation he might have still retained as a sort-of centrist. Still, Tuesday’s primary showed that calling a GOP officeholder a RINO (Republican in name only) or suggesting that long-time party stalwarts are really closet leftists has  limits when it comes to winning races.

A slew of candidates deploying the strategy lost their bids for the GOP’s nomination, many by huge margins. Huffines carried a paltry 11.9% of total primary votes, compared with Abbott’s 66.5%.

Gohmert finished dead last in the AG’s race with only 17% of votes compared with incumbent Ken Paxton’s 42.7%. Paxton faces a runoff against GOP challenger George P. Bush, 45, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and currently the Texas land commissioner.

Republicans aiming to out-conservative incumbents didn’t fare well in races for Congress or the Texas Legislature. U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, an incumbent from the Houston area, crushed challenger Jameson Ellis, who spent the lead-up to the race trying to paint Crenshaw as not conservative enough to represent the district’s interests.

Andy Hopper, whose campaign literature includes the phrase “Not A RINO,” appeared to have narrowly lost to incumbent state Rep. Lynn Stucky in District 64 in the Denton area. Texas House candidate Mark Middleton, who's facing trial on charges related to his participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol assault, received 13.5% of the vote in District 68, where incumbent GOP Rep. David Spiller walked to an easy victory with 70% of the vote. In House District 62, salon owner/cover band singer/Abbott critic Shelley Luther, who rose to fame by defying orders to close her salon at the height of the COVID pandemic, lost in her second attempt to parlay her notoriety into elective office. Incumbent state Rep. Reggie Smith won 58.7% percent of the GOP primary votes in District 62.

The strategy was not a complete failure in North Texas, however.

Rebecca Deen, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, told The Dallas Morning News that the race for Tarrant County judge between Southlake attorney Tim O’Hare and former Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price was “a fight for the direction of the Republican Party in Tarrant County.”

Price was considered a heavy favorite to win the GOP’s nomination for county judge but was thumped by O’Hare on Tuesday.

O’Hare painted Price, a longtime public official in Tarrant County, as an entrenched liberal whose conservative values could not be trusted. He won ringing endorsements from President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in the run-up to Tuesday’s primary.

Jillson said O’Hare’s decisive victory indicates that the outflanking strategy can still work, and demonstrates the power of Trump’s and Trump-affiliated politicians’ endorsements.

“O’Hare got to her right effectively, his ads were effective, and the Trump endorsement allowed him to beat her easily,” Jillson said.

In the AG’s race, however, Trump’s endorsement did not deliver an easy victory for the incumbent.  Paxton is facing a runoff even though Trump endorsed Paxton months back. Paxton launched the first legal challenge in late 2020 aiming to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election based on Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.

Since the 2020 presidential election, loyalty to Trump has emerged as a litmus test for the authenticity of Republican candidates’ conservative values, Jillson explained. “Any vote in favor of an inquiry of any kind into Trump is enough to brand a person a traitor, no matter how conservative they have been over the course of their career, said Jillson.

However, he added, GOP voters showed Tuesday that alignment with Trump and the most-conservative wing of the GOP is not a guaranteed path to victory.