Rural Republicans are Under Attack

An interesting story is developing in Austin this week, as Republicans Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz, as well as some “conservative” education PACs, have announced endorsements of primary challengers to several rural Republicans.

You read that right: The Rural Republicans are under attack by the leaders of their own Party. And the guys I am talking about are your strong, conservative, pro-life, small-business Republicans who represent very Republican Texas House districts.

So far, the Governor has announced two such endorsements, with several more expected in the coming days.

• Republican Hugh Shine was the very first Republican in Bell County to be elected to the Texas House. Shine served in the Reagan and Bush Administrations as a member of the President’s Council on Education. He had a 30-year military career as a Master Army Aviator, flying tours in South Korea and Bosnia; he has an MBA from Baylor and for 40 years has worked as a financial advisor; and he is a member of Temple Bible Church.

• Republican Glenn Rogers is a sixth-generation Texas rancher and a veterinarian who lives in Grayford, TX (population 685). He attended Texas A&M and was a tenured professor at North Carolina State, where he taught disease prevention in livestock. Rogers is a former Graford ISD school board member, an active member of the Methodist church, president of the Palo Pinto Farm Bureau, and has served on the Board of the Veterinary Medicine Association.

Ya’ll, these two men are straight out of central casting for the part of a rural Republican. They are not liberals or RINOs either in their beliefs or their actions. They represent conservative values from top to bottom of their lives, faithful public servants, Christians, family men, community leaders, and examples of who should be down in Austin representing rural Texans.

And their voting records prove it. They vote for strong borders, they vote strongly pro-life, they voted to lower property taxes, and they are pro-business. They represent their constituents and their districts well.

So, why would the Governor and his associates do such a thing? It comes down to one issue and one vote where they have disagreed with the governor: School Vouchers.

Since the beginning of the legislative session last January, the Governor has warned that he would get his way on “school choice,” and if he didn’t, anyone who was against him would be in trouble. Recently, a coalition of 21 rural Republicans, led by Representative John Raney (R-College Station), defeated the governor's issue with an amendment to remove vouchers.

Since Abbott could not control the votes of these independent rural Republicans, he has now shifted to a strategy where he will use his network of big-money players and his political power to take them out, replacing them with a vote he can control on this issue and, likely other issues as well.

These unfortunate endorsements say more about the Governor than they do about the conservative credentials of these 21 Rural Republicans.

And it’s important to understand that the Rural Republicans who are being targeted have not switched sides or switched their positions on the voucher issue. Quite the opposite. Rural Republicans have consistently opposed vouchers, and they have campaigned inside their districts as anti-voucher / pro-public education voters. Their constituents know this about them, vote for them with the knowledge of where they stand, and send them to Austin with a mandate to protect public schools.

Which is precisely what The 21 did. They voted FOR their constituents. Rural parents and communities have legitimate concerns that passing vouchers will take the focus on accountability measures and the funding of our local schools away from the public school system, and throughout history, they have kept vouchers from becoming state policy.

In the case of Rogers, the Governor’s endorsement is particularly peculiar. Abbott endorsed Rogers in 2020 and again in 2022 plus Abbott donated $26,500 to the Rogers campaign. In his endorsement of Rogers, Abbott notes that Rogers “understands the importance of strengthening public education,” indicating his voucher position was okay.

The Rogers race is a repeat of 2022, as he faces the same opponent, Mike Olcott, a vocal nemesis of Governor Abbott who donated $25,000 to Donald Huffines. Even more surprising is that this indicates Abbott’s tolerance of candidates like Olcott who associate with Defend Liberty Texas (DLT PAC). Olcott is supported by DLT PAC mega-donors, such as the Wilkes Family, and Johnathan Stickland mega-donors the Pendery’s. Stickland as the leader of the DLT PAC, held a 7-hour meeting with the anti-sematic, anti-Republican-social media influencer Nick Fuentes and has been the subject of public scrutiny over that meeting.

This voucher issue is driving Abbott and Cruz and the likes toward the things we all hate most about politics — big money influence, which drives bad decision-making — and it become a concern that it could seriously impact the future of the state.

In 2018, the anti-Cruz Vote gap was only 149,000 votes statewide, and he won largely due to rural Republican counties he visited that turned to vote for him. The GOP took a beating in 2018, and we lost all of our down-ballot Republican judges during that same election. In 2020, Abbott-endorsed Trump only got 52% of the vote. Abbott only received 54% of the vote in 2022 vs Beto O’Rourke, the lowest percentage of any statewide elected official.

For comparison, when George Bush was elected governor in 1998, and we swept the statewide ballot for the GOP for the first time in Texas history, Bush received 68% of the vote. Notably, Abbott received 60% of the vote that same year as a member of the Texas Supreme Court.

As they say, “We’ve come a long way, baby,” but we’re moving solidly in the wrong direction. Disenfranchising Rural Republicans in counties and districts that vote 80% plus does not seem like a very solid strategy for Abbot or Cruz or the Texas Republican Party. If and when the rural Republicans, who are upset over vouchers or the targeting of their local state representative, choose to stay home or skip the vote Cruz or Abbot on their ballot — another bad GOP decision to eliminate straight-party voting, by the way — in this case soon the reign of the GOP over Texas will be a thing of the past.

Trump gave us Biden; the question is, who will Abbot and Cruz give us?