To review the current landscape:

Data centers are at the front and center of the public’s political discourse, here in Texas and across the country. Here, the legislature and the Governor have all made the issue a top priority. San Marcos became the first Texas city to ban them outright. Hill County passed a moratorium, got hit with a $100 million lawsuit from a developer, and reversed course. In urban areas across North Texas and beyond, neighbors are showing up at council meetings in force, demanding that projects get halted - sometimes after those same projects were already approved through the proper process. And a Texas Tribune analysis found that nearly half of all planned data centers in the state are now being sited in unincorporated areas where counties have no legal zoning authority to manage them.

Elsewhere, Governor Hochul of New York signed an executive order yesterday making New York the first state in the nation to impose a full moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. Other states may follow suit.

All of this lands in Austin in 2027. The legislature will walk into a room where every one of these pressure points has been building for years, and they will have to decide what Texas’s answer is.

I have a perspective on this that is a little different from most of what you are reading. I have been hearing about data center opposition starting on the campaign trail and afterwards, for the better part of a year. And for the last year, I have been telling people in the industry - some of whom have asked for my political read on the situation - the same thing: however difficult data center development is right now, it will get more difficult. Because everyone running for office is getting an earful everywhere they go. The politics of this were going to get harder before they got easier. That is now happening.

So let me offer a framework, starting with something that might surprise you coming from someone who spent over a decade governing a growing city.

The people pushing back the hardest on data centers are not wrong. Not entirely.

Subscribe now

What’s valid and what’s being exaggerated

There are real concerns here, and a governing conservative has to acknowledge them honestly. Data centers are not all quiet neighbors. A large hyperscale facility draws industrial-scale electricity, generates significant heat, consumes enormous amounts of water for cooling (at least initially), and runs twenty-four hours a day. A University of Texas study recently found data centers could account for 3 to 9 percent of the state’s total water use by 2040. For a state with serious aquifer pressure and a growing agricultural sector, that is not a number you wave away.

The grid pressure is real too. Hundreds of large data centers representing roughly 410 gigawatts of potential electricity demand have asked to connect to ERCOT through 2032. ERCOT’s projected peak demand this summer is around 92 gigawatts. The data center pipeline alone represents more than four times our current grid’s total capacity. If that demand lands on the grid without adequate infrastructure behind it, the cost lands on residential bills. That is unacceptable, as Governor Abbott has acknowledged.

But here is what is also true: not every data center is a hyperscale behemoth. The public debate has collapsed a very wide spectrum of facilities into a single monolith, and that collapse is producing bad policy instincts.

A hyperscale campus operated by a tech giant, drawing 100 megawatts or more, with its own water and power demands, is a categorically different thing from a regional colocation facility that uses no more infrastructure than a mid-size distribution warehouse and serves local businesses that need secure, reliable compute nearby. A policy environment that treats every data center as an existential threat to the grid ends up blocking the small, nimble facilities that Texas should actually be trying to attract, while the hyperscale players with deeper pockets find workarounds or move to another state.

Some of the claims being made about environmental impact are also being exaggerated, in part because a great deal of the opposition is not entirely organic. More on that in a moment.

The zoning process is broken. The rural workaround is not a fix.

I spent three years as Mayor of Southlake and another six on the Southlake City Council. I have sat through hundreds of hours of zoning hearings. I know exactly how this dynamic plays out, because I have watched it in different forms more times than I can count.

A developer comes in with a project. It goes through staff review, the planning and zoning commission, public hearings, and a council vote. At every step, the process is supposed to weigh the relevant facts: land use compatibility, infrastructure capacity, environmental impact, economic benefit. That is what the process is for. But before the vote ever happens, the community groups mobilize, the Facebook groups organize, the yard signs go up, and the council chamber fills with residents who are angry and organized and showing up on a Tuesday night. Decision makers face enormous pressure to listen to the torches and pitchforks rather than to the policy. Good planning gets drowned out. We are watching this play out right now in more than one Texas city where data centers have not gotten anything close to a fair hearing.

The problem is not that community members have opinions about what gets built near their homes. They should, and the process should hear them. The problem is that the process gets co-opted. Organized, motivated opposition floods the zone and makes it nearly impossible for decision makers to do the hard work of weighing costs and benefits honestly. The loudest and most coordinated voices - rarely the most reasonable ones - end up setting the outcome.

Developers, who are rational actors, draw the rational conclusion. If the municipal process is too easily captured, go somewhere the process can’t reach.

Texas counties, unlike cities, do not have general zoning authority. A developer who knows the city zoning fight is going to produce years of delay and a real possibility of reversal by a mobilized opposition has a legal alternative: find land in an unincorporated county, acquire it, and build. No zoning commission. No public hearing. No council vote. The Texas Tribune recently found that nearly half of all planned data centers in the state are now headed to unincorporated areas for exactly this reason.

I understand why developers make that choice. But the solution to a broken city zoning process is not to push industrial-scale development into rural communities that have no legal tools to manage it. Those communities didn’t choose to forgo zoning authority. Texas law made that choice for them. That is not consent. When a massive industrial facility appears in what was previously agricultural land, next to farms and homes that had no warning and no meaningful recourse, that community’s anger is just as legitimate as any urban neighborhood’s.

Hill County tried to act. The commissioners voted for a moratorium. A developer filed a $100 million lawsuit and the county reversed course. Counties are fighting with no weapons. They cannot zone. They cannot moratorium without legal exposure. Into that void, the industry is building.

Both failure modes are real. The urban process gets captured by organized opposition. The rural workaround sidesteps the legitimate planning questions entirely. Neither is a policy. Both are symptoms of the fact that Texas does not yet have a coherent answer to where this infrastructure belongs and what obligations it carries to the communities around it.

One more complicating layer

The organic community opposition is real. I want to be clear about that, because what I am about to say should not be used to dismiss legitimate neighbors with legitimate concerns.

But some of what is driving this debate is not organic at all. Some reporting has pointed to more than $39 million in documented foreign funding flowing through activist organizations that have signed onto the congressional moratorium push. I am not in a position to verify every thread of that, and I want to be careful not to overstate it. What I can say is this: China’s interest in this debate is not hard to understand. Its interest is not simply to slow American AI infrastructure. It is to own AI compute 100%. If American development stalls long enough, the global capacity to run and train frontier AI models tilts toward an adversary that is not holding public hearings about whether to build, and does not have our best interests in mind.

Real community anger and foreign-funded amplification are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true at once. Texas lawmakers sitting across from a packed council chamber should at least be aware that not everything in that room grew there on its own.

Do we really want to follow New York’s lead?

Which brings me to the most important political data point of this whole debate.

This week, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York signed an executive order imposing the first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in the country. The New York legislature had passed the underlying bill 44 to 16 in the Senate and 102 to 39 in the Assembly.

New York is now officially closed for this business.

And here in Texas - Texas, which has built its entire economic identity on being the alternative to New York’s regulatory instincts - some of the voices calling for the same thing are Republicans.

I want to sit with that for a moment. When the policy reflex of Texas Republicans on economic development starts to rhyme with Kathy Hochul’s, something has gone sideways. I am not saying the underlying concerns are wrong. I have already said they are not. But the answer to those concerns should not be the same answer that a Democratic governor in the most regulated large state in the country just reached. Texas has competed with New York for decades by being a place where businesses can operate without endless regulatory barriers. A Texas moratorium, or the functional equivalent of one produced by a hostile 2027 session, hands New York its best economic development pitch in a generation.

The compute that gets blocked in Texas does not disappear. It goes to Virginia, to Georgia, to Arizona. Or it goes to a country that is not holding public hearings about whether to build it. DeepSeek has been pricing its AI models more than thirty times cheaper than American competitors on a per-token basis. That is a deliberate strategic bet that cheap, abundant compute is a geopolitical advantage. Slowing our own build-out is not a neutral act. It is a concession to the adversary running the influence campaign.

Governor Abbott has the right instinct. The market can do the rest.

To his credit, the governor has found the correct framing on the how question. His directive to the PUC and ERCOT in June was clear: data centers pay for their own electric infrastructure and interconnection costs. They do not pass those costs to residential ratepayers. They bring water-efficient technology. They report their usage.

That is exactly right. Texas has spent the last five years hardening and strengthening the ERCOT grid after the failures of Winter Storm Uri. That work cannot be undone by an unconstrained industrial build-out that treats the grid as a free resource. Our infrastructure has to support our population first. The “bring your own power and water” standard protects that priority without slamming the door on development.

SB 6 from last session moved in the same direction: interconnection cost-sharing for large loads, disclosure requirements, and the obligation to disconnect from the grid during emergencies rather than drawing capacity away from homes and hospitals. That is good governing. It does not ask whether. It asks how.

And now the market can do what markets do. With those guardrails in place, developers will look for stranded power - generation capacity that exists but is not fully utilized. West Texas has it in the oilfield, where associated gas is flared and power generation goes underused. Rural areas with excess transmission capacity become attractive for the right-sized project, not the hyperscale campus that overwhelms local water and roads, but the colocation facility that fits what the community’s infrastructure can actually support. Small, nimble data centers that bring their own power and manage their own water have a cleaner path. That is not a coincidence. That is the “bring your own” standard working as intended.

Texas should be actively trying to attract those facilities. They are the development that fits. The ones that don’t fit should be required to make the infrastructure whole before they build - not blocked, but not subsidized either.

The 2027 risk

The legislature’s interim charges already signal where the session is headed: reviewing the data center sales tax exemption that grew from $14 million in 2013 to a projected $3 billion in foregone revenue, scrutinizing water usage, monitoring SB 6 implementation. Some of that review is overdue. Texans deserve a clear return on billions in tax expenditures.

What is not overdue is a moratorium. What is not overdue is treating this as a culture war rather than a planning problem. What is not overdue is giving China and Russia the outcome they have been paying to manufacture.

The goal for 2027 is a framework - on how and where - that gives communities a legitimate voice without handing veto power to the loudest Facebook group, gives rural counties something other than a choice between helplessness and a lawsuit, gives developers a predictable process so the rural workaround loses its appeal, and gives Texas the infrastructure it needs to compete in the AI economy for the next twenty years.

That is a governing problem. It is exactly the kind of problem the current Republican Party has been struggling to prioritize over the performance of outrage.

I have been saying for a year that this gets harder before it gets easier. It is now harder. The question is whether Austin can get it right before the storm passes and we find out the hard way what we lost.

The compute is coming. The only question is whether it lands here, on terms that work for Texans, or somewhere else, on terms that work for everyone else.

The question is: why are so many Republicans who were instrumental in flipping Texas red in the 80s and 90s now considered by much of the GOP grassroots to be RINOs?

Today, there are many Republicans in Texas for whom total statewide political dominance is simply the natural order of things. They have never known anything else. But there is another group who very clearly remembers the time before, where Democrats dominated, and Republicans were the minority. For this group, flipping Texas Red is not just a history lesson, it’s part of their biography, because they are the ones who did it. They recruited candidates, they fundraised, they organized, they lost races, and eventually, they started winning. Ironically, it’s now this very group of people that finds themselves condemned, belittled, and ignored by the newcomer Republicans who now live under the political shade they provided.

So how did we get here?

First, some history. In 1978, Bill Clements became the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction. He won by 17,000 votes out of 2.3 million cast. The state legislature was still Democratic. So were most of the courts, most of the county offices, and most of the congressional delegation. Texas had been a one-party state for more than a century, and the party it belonged to was not ours.

What happened between then and now did not happen by accident. It took thirty years of patient work by a recognizable cast of people: George H.W. Bush, who had been building the party from his Houston congressional seat since the 1960s. George W. Bush, who unseated Ann Richards in 1994 and held the governorship until he was elected president. Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in state history, who consolidated the realignment Bush began. James Baker, the institutional architect for two generations of Republican administrations. Karl Rove, whose direct-mail operation methodically flipped down-ballot seats one county at a time. Phil Gramm, who delivered his Senate seat. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who held it. John Cornyn, who built it out. The list goes on.

Subscribe now

These public officials, and their colleagues, are the people who built the Republican Party in Texas. Their work was not glamorous, and it was not fast. Republicans won the state Senate majority in 1996. They didn’t win the House majority until 2002 - the first time Republicans had controlled the Texas House since Reconstruction. The people who did that work took thirty years to do it.

Here is something worth knowing about several of them: they were not always Republicans.

Phil Gramm was elected to Congress as a Democrat. He served as a Democrat, voted with Democrats, and ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat in a 1976 Senate primary. He switched to the Republican Party in 1983, resigned his congressional seat, and ran again immediately in a special election so his constituents could ratify the change rather than be surprised by it. That is still considered the gold standard for how a party switch should be handled. He won the Senate seat in 1984 as a Republican and became one of the most consequential conservative legislators in modern history.

Rick Perry was elected to the Texas House as a Democrat in 1984. He switched to the Republican Party in 1989 - Phil Gramm reportedly told him it was “the last copter out of Nam” - and ran statewide as a Republican in 1990. He went on to serve successfully as governor for fourteen years, longer than anyone in Texas history, and helped cement the Texas GOP as the dominant political force in the state. Democrats have not been competitive since.

These folks, and many others, helped build the majority. Under the purity standards currently enforced in Republican primaries - standards that disqualify people for insufficient loyalty, insufficient willingness to perform outrage on cue - they may not survive a primary today.

Now ask a different question. Where were the current enforcers of Texas “conservatism” while all of this was happening?

Dan Patrick, for example, was born in Baltimore. He went to the University of Maryland and built a broadcasting career out east before arriving in Houston in the late 1970s as a sportscaster. He went bankrupt in the 1980s running a sports bar chain. He reinvented himself as a conservative talk radio host starting in 1988. He ran for the Texas Senate for the first time in 2006 - three years after Republicans finally won the House majority, and more than a decade after George W. Bush had won the governorship and begun remaking the state. He was first sworn in as a state senator in January 2007. He is now the second-most powerful official in Texas government, and the man arguably most responsible for deciding who is and is not a real conservative. He arrived after the work was done.

Tim Dunn, author and funder of the most powerful political machine in Texas, grew up in Big Spring and built his career in Midland. So he was here in the state. But he was building a business, not a party. He co-founded his oil company in 1996. He served as a Republican convention delegate for the first time that same year. He didn’t start his own political PAC until 2006. His serious political money began flowing around 2008. The machine he built - the one that now enforces ideological purity in Republican primaries and has been described by one consultant as making Karl Rove unelectable in a local race - didn’t exist while Gramm was flipping the Senate seat, while Rove was running direct mail operations county by county, while Perry was canvassing the state in a single-engine plane trying to beat Jim Hightower.

Ken Paxton, our new conservative standard bearer, was born on an Air Force base in North Dakota and settled in Collin County after law school. He was first elected to the Texas House in 2002 and sworn in at the start of 2003 - the same year Republicans finally won the chamber majority for the first time since Reconstruction. He has never served a single day in Texas politics as a member of a minority party. He has never had to recruit a candidate, flip a seat, or hold a coalition together in a competitive environment. He arrived when the building was finished and has spent his career telling everyone else their blueprint was wrong.

And then there is President Donald Trump. The man whose endorsement now functions as the single most powerful variable in a Texas Republican primary - the credential that outweighs record, service, character, and competence combined - was a registered Democrat for eight years while the Texas Republican majority was being built. He switched to the Democratic Party in 2001 and stayed there through 2009. In 2004, he told CNN that “in many cases I probably identify more as a Democrat.” While Phil Gramm was building the Senate majority and Karl Rove was flipping counties and Rick Perry was governing the state, Donald Trump was a registered Democrat living in New York, donating to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.

At some point, he decided he was again a Republican. And now, despite a deeply questionable past, both politically and personally, he is the undisputed arbiter of Texas Republican authenticity.

The Texas founders built the majority. These enforcers arrived when the majority was already built - and then told the founders they weren’t conservative enough to belong to it.

The Texas GOP of 1978 was a minority party. By 2003, Republicans held every statewide office and both chambers of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The people who did that work built their majority through patience, coalition-building, and a tolerance for impurity that is simply required to turn a minority party into a governing one. They made room for people who had been Democrats. They understood that addition, not subtraction, was the mechanism of majority.

That is not what the current Texas GOP prizes. The current party prizes ideological enforcement. It prizes the primary challenge, the purity test, the willingness to name enemies and cast them out. It has made a virtue of the qualities that, in the long work of building a majority, are exactly the wrong ones.

And the people being purged are the people who know how to win general elections.

John Cornyn spent decades building the Texas Republican majority - as attorney general and as senator. He is a lifetime conservative, and no serious person would argue otherwise. But he lost a Senate primary runoff to Ken Paxton primarily because – let’s be honest here - he was deemed insufficiently loyal to a man who was a registered Democrat for eight of the years Cornyn was building the majority Paxton now claims to defend.

Karl Rove - the architect of two Bush presidential victories and arguably the most effective Republican political operative of his generation - is now routinely dismissed in conservative circles as a symbol of the failed establishment. Consultants joke, not without some bitterness, that Rove couldn’t win a local race in a Dunn-funded primary today. Rove is the man who built the majority Dunn is now purifying.

George W. Bush has not endorsed a Republican primary candidate in years because doing so would likely hurt the candidate he was trying to help. Read that sentence again. The forty-third President of the United States, who carried Texas by 22 points in 2004, cannot endorse a Republican primary candidate in his own state without being a liability.

A movement that cannot recognize its own founders has not become a purer version of itself. It has become a different party. The honest move is to admit it.

Because the question that follows is the one the current leadership does not want to answer: what is your plan to keep winning, now that you have purged the people who knew how?

They were candid. That is what made it useful.

The picture they painted was not doom and gloom. Texas is still an attractive state. The fundamentals are real. But there are challenges on the horizon, and the people whose job it is to know them were not looking away. Here, roughly, is what they said keeps them up at night.

Infrastructure - water and power above everything else. Not just for the people already here, but for the businesses that are thinking about coming. When a site selector is evaluating Texas against competing states, the grid and the water supply are at the top of the checklist. We have a credibility problem on both.

The food supply chain, and the cost of food. Housing affordability. The cost of health insurance and childcare - not just as a quality-of-life issue, but as a workforce issue, because employers cannot recruit and retain workers in a state where the cost of having a family has become genuinely prohibitive. Workforce readiness, and whether our public education system is producing the people the next Texas economy is going to need.

That is the list. Real problems. Hard problems. The kind of problems that take sustained attention, real policy tradeoffs, and legislators who are focused on governing rather than performing.

Now consider the other list.

The Republican Party of Texas, at its 2026 convention, adopted eight official legislative priorities. Here they are, in order:

1. Secure Texas Elections

2. Don’t Sharia Our Texas

3. Completely Eliminate All Property Taxes

4. Ban Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying

5. Secure Texas Grid, Water, Energy, Agriculture, and Property Sovereignty

6. Border Enforcement

7. Protect Texas Kids

8. Protect Life

Read those two lists back to back and sit with what you notice.

The economic development panel mentioned infrastructure - water and power - as their top concern. The RPT list has something adjacent to that at number five, tucked under a heading broad enough to mean almost anything or nothing. Everything else the panel named - food supply chain, housing, health insurance, childcare, workforce, public education - is simply absent. Not deprioritized. Absent.

The panel’s top concerns did not crack the list. The list’s top two items - election security and a warning about Islamic law - did not come up in the panel. Not once.

I want to be fair to the people who produced this list. Election integrity is a real concern to a lot of Republicans, and I am not going to pretend it isn’t. Some of the other items represent genuine values, not just performance. I understand why they are on the list, and I’m not necessarily discounting them as important issues.

But here is what I cannot get past. The people whose job it is to sell Texas to the world - to look a company CEO in the eye and say “move your headquarters here, bring your people here, plant your future here” - are talking about water, power, housing, education, and workforce. And the official statement of what the Republican Party of Texas wants its legislators to focus on leads with election security and Sharia law.

That is a gap. A serious one.

And then there is the second problem, which is actually worse than the first.

These priorities are not just a general statement of party values. In recent years, they have become a weapon. Certain factions of the RPT uses them to evaluate legislators - and to punish the ones the activist base decides haven’t pursued them with sufficient vigor. Censure resolutions. Primary challengers. Negative mailers branding conservative legislators as insufficiently conservative, based on standards the activists themselves invented.

Notice something about the language on that list. “Secure Texas Elections.” “Protect Texas Kids.” “Protect Life.” These are not objective measures. There are no finish lines, no metrics, no definitions of done. That is not an accident.

When you define the goal in terms specific enough to be measured, you create the possibility of actually achieving it - and of legislators demonstrating they have. Vague goals do the opposite. They stay permanently open. They can always be redefined. And that makes them perfect instruments for the people who want to keep score without ever agreeing on what the score means.

The nebulousness is the point.

A legislator who worked hard on the actual water crisis in Texas - who spent months in committee, made hard votes, negotiated with competing interests, and delivered something real - can still be censured for insufficient attention to “Secure Texas Grid, Water, Energy, Agriculture, and Property Sovereignty” if the activists decide he didn’t do it the right way, or came to the wrong conclusion, or crossed the wrong donor.

The list isn’t a governing document. It can’t be.

I have said before that the current Republican Party has stopped producing people who know how to govern, because governing requires you to sit at a different table than the one that got you elected. The panel I was in a few weeks ago is the governing table. Real problems, real tradeoffs, real consequences for getting it wrong. The RPT priorities list is the campaign table. Fear, identity, grievance, and goals designed never to be met so they can always be weaponized.

Texas has been governed well enough, for long enough, that people forget it can go the other way. The fundamentals that made this state attractive - low taxes, light regulation, a serious approach to infrastructure, a business climate that said “we want you here” - those were built by governing conservatives who were focused on the governing table. The people running the party right now did not build that. They inherited it. And they are spending it.

The economic development professionals in that room are trying to sell a Texas that, in some ways, is getting harder to sell. That is the tension nobody pulling the strings wants to say out loud.

The panel’s list and the party’s list are not two versions of the same project. They are two different projects. One is about making Texas work. The other is about making Texas activists feel heard.

Those are not the same thing. And until the people running this party can tell the difference, the gap between those two lists is going to keep growing.

(By the way, this is by no means meant to suggest the Democrats have a better set of priorities. I’m sure whatever their convention produces will be equally out of touch. My point is simply, if the Republicans are going to appeal to everyday Texans, then our priorities should address everyday Texans’ problems.)

Subscribe now

Unity, unity, unity.

It’s become clear that the top echelon of Texas Republicans know they have a problem in November. We know this because the rallying cry, starting last week at the state Republican Convention and echoing in speeches and social media across the state, has become UNITY. The word was even draped over an elephant in Houston.

Dan Patrick has been very vocal on this point, spending some of his time on stage and in interviews to lecture John Cornyn’s voters about unity. The words he kept finding were “sore losers.” The message from the Lt. Governor, stripped of the polish, is: the primary is over, get over it, fall in line.

I can say with some confidence that it isn’t going to work. I know this not because I’ve modeled the November electorate or run a focus group. I know it because he and his endorsed senate candidate in the SD-9 runoff in January had the exact same attitude towards me and thousands of people in Tarrant County who supported me in the initial ballot. It didn’t work then. I seriously doubt it will work statewide.

But before I explain why, I want to address the premise directly - because it is wrong, and it is the thing that I fear Paxton’s people are most likely to get wrong in the months ahead.

The primary is not the past.

The people who run smear campaigns love to say that what happened in the primary needs to stay in the primary. Move on. Unite. Don’t be a sore loser. The general election is what matters.

Here is what that framing misses: the primary does not end when the votes are counted. It sets the tone for everything that comes after. Every smear that landed, every mail piece that called a good conservative a RINO or a fraud or worse, every moment where the winning campaign looked at the losing candidate’s voters and made clear what it thought of them - all of that is still present on election day. It lives in the gut of every voter who received it. It informs how much enthusiasm they have for getting in their car and driving to the polls for someone who spent six months making them feel unwelcome in their own party.

I know this because I lived it in SD9. I was the third-place finisher in the November special election. In the runoff that followed, Leigh Wambsganss had the Trump endorsement, the full backing of the West Texas machine, and every institutional resource available. She still lost a Trump +17 district to a Democrat by 14 points. Thirty-one point swing.

And in the months after that loss, Dan Patrick and Leigh’s other surrogates had a ready explanation: it was my fault. If I had endorsed her, my 20,000 voters would have followed, and she would have won.

I want to be direct about how wrong that is - not to settle a score, but because Ken Paxton is about to make the same mistake if he accepts the same logic.

I am not the Pied Piper of my Republican supporters in Tarrant County. And John Cornyn is not the Pied Piper of his Republican supporters statewide.

Those 900,000 voters who voted for Cornyn in the primary will make their own decisions in November. They are not a block that Cornyn can hand to Paxton with a phone call and a press release. They are individual voters with individual concerns, and the primary campaign just gave many of them significant reasons to stay home.

That is on Ken Paxton to fix. Not on John Cornyn to manage.

This is the thing Leigh never understood, and the thing Dan Patrick’s unity lectures will never acknowledge: it is not the loser’s job to go collect votes for the winner. It is the winner’s job to go earn them. Leigh didn’t reach out to me until the week before early voting. (In fact, no one from her side did. Not even Dan Patrick, who apparently thinks that my endorsement would’ve made a world of difference in the runoff. They didn’t even bother to call. Probably because, at the time, they didn’t think they needed me.)

When a mutual friend finally did call, I quickly agreed to meet out of respect. Leigh and I sat down the day before early voting started. Although I will not share all the details of the meeting, suffice it to say that she acted entitled to my support and the support of my voters, without doing the very minimum it would require to earn it. Which is to say, she wanted capitulation, not unity. That is not coalition-building. That is a transaction, and the people she needed could smell it.

So Ken, here is what I think you have to do, and why the window for doing it is shorter than you think.

Stop running against the people you need.

You said things about John Cornyn in this primary that his voters are not going to forget. You treated a man who has represented Texas in the United States Senate honorably for more than two decades as the enemy. Those 900,000 people who voted for him heard every word of it, and they took it personally - not because they’re sore losers, but because you were talking about someone they respect, and by extension you were talking about them.

The primary is still present. That means the negative campaigning is still present. You do not get to declare it over and ask for their votes in the same breath. Earning their support in November requires acknowledging what the campaign felt like from the other side - not relitigating it, not apologizing in some hollow public way, but demonstrating through your conduct between now and November that you understand what those voters were telling you when they showed up to vote against you.

Go get the vote yourself - and start now.

You do not earn 900,000 skeptical voters by waiting until October. Leigh waited until January. You saw how that worked out.

So go to the voters. Not through surrogates. Not through a party apparatus that many of them no longer trust. You - the candidate - reach out, listen, and make the case. You make clear that the voters who chose John Cornyn are not the enemy, not the establishment crowd, not RINOs who need to be managed. They are Republicans who applied a standard to this race that you would do well to understand.

Give the Remnant a real seat at the table.

Not a gesture. Not an invitation to show up and applaud. A real voice in the process.

The voters who supported Cornyn are not looking for someone to tell them the primary is over and they should be team players now. They have been told to be team players through every cycle of this, and what they have gotten in return is a party that selects its nominees without them, smears them when they object, and then acts surprised when they don’t show up in November. That trade has failed. SD9 was the proof of concept. November is the statewide test.

If the answer from Paxton’s camp is the same one Leigh’s camp gave - fall in line, the alternative is worse, be grateful we still acknowledge you at all - then the math from SD9 is going to repeat itself at a scale that is very hard to come back from.

Dan Patrick can keep calling it a unity problem. It is not a unity problem. It is an arithmetic problem. The primary set a tone, and the tone is still present, and the votes that tone cost you do not come back automatically just because the calendar turned.

The window is open. It will not be open forever.

What’s your plan, Ken?

The author is Tim Dunn.

For more than a decade, Dunn and the West Texas oil money around him have poured tens of millions of dollars into Texas Republican primaries - not to build a party, but to train one. To mold one into something it was not. The method has been consistent and, I will grant him this, brutally effective: find the incumbent who governed like an adult, fund a challenger who promises never to, and saturate the primary with the manufactured outrage that the challenger exists to perform. The 2024 House primaries were the purest expression of it - a bloodbath in which many serious, conservative legislators were beaten by people whose entire qualification was a willingness to be furious on cue. Dunn has weaponized fear and grievance in the primary process more efficiently than anyone in the modern history of this state.

I want to say something here that my wife pointed out, and she is usually right about these things.

On paper, Tim Dunn and I are not so different. We are both conservative Christians. Both classical home educators. Both pro-life, pro-free market, small government in our bones. I do not write this as an ideological adversary. I write it as someone who shares, genuinely, almost every conviction he would say he is fighting for.

Which is what makes the method (and his chosen emissaries) so genuinely confusing to me. Because the politics of manufactured grievance - the deliberate stoking of anger as a permanent operating posture - is not just bad strategy. It is, I would argue, a deeply unbiblical one. Proverbs 16 has something to say about the man who sows strife and leads his neighbors down a path that is not good. The Machine’s entire architecture runs counter to it. You do not build the kingdom, or a governing majority, by keeping people furious. By using the politics of personal destruction against anyone who stands in your way. You build it by being faithful - to your constituents. To the truth. To the work.

Tim Dunn is a serious man with serious resources who may actually believe he is doing serious good. I have no reason to doubt his stated values. What I doubt is his method. And I think the distance between his stated values and his operational ones is the most important, and least examined, story in Texas Republican politics.

And here is the part that should frighten anyone who actually wants Texas governed well: he has won a great deal, but he has never quite won a governing majority of the old kind – the legislators on his dole are still in the minority. And that is not a failure of his project. It is the whole project.

Fomenting grievance is an effective political tool only so long as you are not responsible for outcomes. The persecuted faithful, abused and ignored by a corrupt establishment, is a powerful thing to be - right up until the moment you are the establishment, at which point the abuse and the corruption become your record, and records can be judged. So the Dunn Machine, as we will call it, has always been most comfortable just a few seats short of having to answer for anything. It does not want the responsibility that comes with a true majority, because responsibility is fatal to a politics that runs on complaint. This is precisely the failure I described at the second station, the governing station: a politics built to win a noisy minority — not to make policy, but to keep complaining about it — cannot build anything, and does not want to, because building means owning.

There is a second design feature that people miss, and it is the one I find most quietly corrosive. Look closely at who the Machine actually elects. In almost every case, they are not figures with independent standing - not people who arrived with their own constituency, their own record, their own reasons that voters trusted them. It primarily seeks to elevate activists, whose entire political existence is downstream of the money. That is not a flaw in the recruiting. It is the whole point. (There are some Machine candidates who are exceptions to this. They know who they are.)

Serious conservatives in the political word have for years bemoaned the lack of qualifications of many of the stooges that the Machine manages to elect. But non-qualification is a feature of the system, not a bug. A coalition of people with no gravitas of their own is a coalition that cannot defect. They cannot cross the patron, because the day the donation checks stop, they are nothing - they have no independent platform to stand on. Independent stature is dangerous to a patron. Dependence is the foundational architecture.

When you are dependent, you can’t speak with your own voice. You can’t pursue your own aims. You can’t wander too far afield from the approved messaging or endorsees, because that would put your political lifeline at risk. Have you ever been curious about how a political unknown can jump onto the stage in a Texas House or Senate race and immediately have the same set of endorsements from the same people and organizations across the state, mobilized with seemingly little effort? It’s not accidental. It’s directed. And it is very, very effective.

Now comes the real game.

For ten years the Machine has been proving it can win primaries for the Legislature. Having proven it, the frontier moves to the offices it has so far mostly left to others - the executive offices, the ones that cannot hide inside a caucus, the ones that actually have to govern the state. And these marquee offices have been occupied by the same folks for longer than the Machine in its finely-tuned form has been winning seats in the legislature, so there hasn’t been much of an opportunity to unleash the Machine on these statewide offices.

That changed this cycle with the nomination of Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French, a twice-failed House candidate who was so controversial and, frankly, weird in his role as Tarrant County GOP Chair that even Dan Patrick called on him to resign. When he snuck into the runoff this cycle for Railroad Commissioner against the incumbent Chairman Jim Wright, the major statewide players said no – Governor Abbott, Lt Governor Patrick, and many others endorsed Chairman Wright in a last ditch attempt to keep Bo away from the statewide ticket.

But with heavy backing from the Dunn Machine, Bo won anyway. It didn’t matter that the Governor and Lt. Governor and so many other political figures backed Wright and in fact campaigned for him. It didn’t matter that Bo spent more time in the runoff talking about issues like Sharia Law than the actual work of regulating the Texas Oil and Gas Industry. Bo’s past wild public statements were irrelevant. In the runoff, the only thing that mattered was the Machine – and the Machine worked.

This race should scare every Texan as we look ahead to 2030.

Because 2030 is shaping up to be the most open statewide map Texas has seen in a generation: plausibly open at the very top and straight down the ballot – Governor (not sure if Abbott plans to leave office in 2030 but for the sake of this article, let’s assume he will), Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General if the new AG runs up the ladder, possibly a US Senate seat if Cruz hangs it up, at least one Railroad Commission seat, and more besides. Open seats are where a Machine like this does its finest work, because there is no incumbent record to defend and no incumbent stature to dislodge.

And every ambitious officeholder in the state is asking the same private question: which lane of the party do I want to be in, and how far will I have to go to be one of the chosen ones when the primary comes? That is the lane they will be competing for - the one in which the Machine dominates.

Here is the part I will say plainly, even though I vehemently disagree with the move: triangulating yourself into the Dunn Machine lane is probably the correct political move. In a Texas Republican primary, it does not pay to plant your flag in the pro-governance, pro-public-education, pro-business lane. I know, because that has been my lane, and I have the losses to show for it. The outrage-and-fear lane is simply more fruitful. The math is the math, and an ambitious person who wants to be Governor in 2030 and looks honestly at the electorate that will pick the nominee will conclude - correctly - that the road runs through the fringe and not through the center.

So what does that mean for the next four years? It means that every politician in Texas with aspirations to statewide office is having to make a choice about which issues to lead on. And even the ones otherwise inclined toward the Greg Abbott model - pro-business, pro-growth, good-governance conservatism - are going to point their ships in a different direction: toward outrage, toward fear. Not merely being vocal on those hard-right red-meat issues, but trying to lead on them, to plant the flag there early and loudly, so that they can box out other possible candidates from that lane in their future primaries. Because that is the lane that is well funded, well organized, and, right now, dominating the primaries.

What they say in public between now and the filing deadline, and what they promise behind closed doors to the handful of people who can anoint or destroy them, will both bend in the same direction. Politicians are no different from anyone else; they follow their incentives. And right now in Texas, the incentive is for more outrage, more fear, more crazy.

We, the voters, gave them that incentive.

Which brings me back to the question that keeps me engaged in politics instead of quietly retiring from it. If the next four years are a race to the fringe - if every figure with statewide ambition spends them proving devotion to the outrage lane - then who is going to speak for the remnant? Who is going to talk about the things real Texans actually live with: the price of a house, the quality of the school down the street, the water and the grid and the roads, the small business trying to make payroll? Those are governing problems. They do not trend, they do not fundraise, and they do not move a primary. So in the lane that wins, they simply go unaddressed.

The officeholders who fall in line don’t speak to these issues; they made their trade and they will not unmake it. Nor will the consultants; they work for whoever pays, and the Machine pays. Not the party apparatus; the Machine owns it now, floor to rafters.

That leaves the rest of us. The politically homeless. The ones who have won, and governed, and lost, and somehow still believe the system is worth defending - not because we expect to win the next race, but because someone has to be standing where the Machine is not, still standing there and still credible, on the day enough Texans tire of being governed by people who only ever learned how to be aggrieved.

I have had this conversation with many current and former elected officials. Most currents can’t say this stuff out loud for fear of engendering even more attention from the Machine. But they know it’s coming. They’ll tell you over drinks. And there’s not much any of them can do to stop it.

I’m not sure I know the answer. But what I do know is that the Texas GOP is playing a dangerous game. Their gambit is that they can nominate whomever they want from the hard-right lane with the Machine and that Texans will always fall in line in November. We saw in January that that gambit failed in SD-9 runoff. If polling is to be believed, it may fail again in November. If it does, will the GOP primary voters get the hint? Or will we see the Machine dominate in 2030 and potentially risk handing the Democrats more seats – even the very highest levers of power in Texas?

Only time will tell.

As for me, I know where we are. It is the long watch before the break. The whole of the work for the Remnant, right now, is to still be here - and to keep naming the things the winning lane has decided not to name - until the break comes.

I want to write about all three of those stations, because most political writing comes from people who have only stood at one of them. Pundits have never won or lost anything -they have only watched. Activists know how to win primaries but rarely have to govern after. Career officeholders know how to win general elections but rarely have to lose one and accept it. Each of these vantage points is partial. Our electoral system requires all three at once: candidates who know how to win, leaders who know how to govern, and losers who know how to accept the result. A system populated by people who only know how to do one of those things is a system in trouble. Our system, at the moment, is in some trouble.

So let me walk through what each station actually teaches you, and what I think the current Republican Party has forgotten about each one.

Winning

A 70-30 mandate is a beautiful thing to receive and a dangerous thing to misunderstand.

The night I won the mayor’s race I went home with my family from the election night party and tucked our kids into bed, because that is what you do when you have children and the world keeps moving regardless of what just happened. But the next morning I was the mayor-elect, and the math of that race was the first thing I had to start unlearning.

Seventy-thirty sounds like a mandate. In a sense it is. But the seventy is not one thing. It is a coalition. Some of those voters chose me because they liked my record on council. Some chose me because they did not like the alternative. Some chose me because they trusted my family or my church or my professional background. Some chose me because of one specific issue and were prepared to disagree with me on a dozen others. The coalition that elects you is not a single entity with a single set of expectations. It is a temporary alliance of people who each said yes for their own reasons, and the morning after the election you do not yet know what most of those reasons were.

The mistake almost every newly elected official makes - and I made my share of versions of it - is to treat the mandate as ideological. To assume the voters who chose you also chose your full platform, your full worldview, and your judgment on every question that will come before you. They did not. They chose you on the information they had, weighted by the concerns that were salient to them in that specific election. The mandate is a loan of trust. It is not a delegation of authority. And the test of whether you deserved the loan is what you do next.

I think the modern Republican Party, at the national level and increasingly at the state level, has forgotten that winning is the easy part. The candidate who wins a primary by activating the most intense fifteen percent of the electorate has not received a mandate to govern as that fifteen percent would prefer. He has received an opportunity to demonstrate whether he can earn the trust of the other eighty-five. The candidates who confuse the first thing for the second are the candidates who go on to lose generals.

Governing

This is the part that almost no political writing captures, because almost nobody who writes about politics has done it.

Governing is the daily exercise of leading a coalition towards broader goals that serve not only the folks who voted for you, but the folks who didn’t. It involves turning political supporters into permanent allies and, if possible, finding common ground with former political opponents. Some may be members of other branches and levels of government. Some are city staff who have served three mayors before you and will serve three after. Some are residents you have never met who care intensely about one street, one tree, one zoning question, one school. They all have to be part of the governing coalition. Without them you cannot build anything that lasts past your term.

The shift from campaigning to governing is the hardest transition in politics, and almost nobody writes about it well because almost nobody who writes about politics has actually felt the difference in their bones. The campaign rewards clarity, certainty, combativeness, the ability to make complicated things sound simple. Governing rewards the opposite - patience, the tolerance of ambiguity, the willingness to admit you do not yet know the answer, the capacity and desire to listen, the discipline of refusing to perform certainty you do not actually have. The campaign rewards the parts of you that are most public. Governing rewards the parts of you that are most private.

The hardest thing about governing - the thing I do not think you can know until you have done it - is the fact that you have to risk disappointing supporters, even close supporters, if your larger aims conflict with their desires of you in office. And despite your best efforts, governing well – and governing to the benefit of the maximum number of people possible –can and does cost you relationships. In modern politics, your relationship with some of your supporters is unfortunately conditioned on your purity in their minds. A leader who governs well has to be comfortable that those relationships may not last.

Some of the people who put a yard sign in their yard for you will be furious with you within ninety days, because you took a position they did not expect, or refused to take a position they wanted you to take, or compromised on a fight they thought you were elected to win without compromising. You will lose some of those people permanently. You will gain other people who never expected to support you. (To wit: my opponent in the 2021 mayor’s race openly endorsed me for my 2025 senate race. I was deeply honored by that.) The coalition that governs never fully overlaps the coalition that elected. The party that has forgotten it is producing nominees who govern like permanent candidates - which is to say, who cannot govern.

If I have one criticism of the current Republican Party that I would stand behind without qualification, it is that we have stopped producing leaders who understand the difference between campaigning and governing. We have made a virtue of permanent campaigning. We have rewarded the politicians who treat every governing decision as a campaign event, every press conference as a rally, every vote as a litmus test. And we have, accordingly, stopped producing people who can build anything that outlasts them. A party that has forgotten how to govern is a party that has forgotten what the winning was for.

Losing

I lost two races, one in 2024 and one in 2025. I have written elsewhere about what I think those losses meant. I do not want to relitigate them here. What I want to write about is what losing taught me about the electoral system that produced the losses, because that is the part of the experience that turns out to matter most.

The first thing losing teaches you is that the system has the right to reject you. That sentence is easy to type and almost impossible to live with. Every losing candidate, in the days and weeks after the count comes in, develops a private theory of why the rejection was wrong. Sometimes the theory has merit. Sometimes it does not. None of it changes the basic fact: the system, working as designed, produced an outcome in which you were the input it rejected.

The discipline of accepting that -not publicly, where everybody accepts it because they have to, but internally, where the temptation to nurse a private grievance is enormous -is one of the things our electoral system depends on. The acceptance has to be real. It has to outlast the bad days. It has to survive the moments when the case for the loss being illegitimate is more emotionally satisfying than the case for taking the loss on the chin.

I have done that work. I have done it the slow way, by sitting with each loss long enough to ask what the voters were telling me that I had not yet heard. I have come out the other side still believing in the system that beat me, twice. That belief is mine to give. The voters cannot give it to me. The party cannot give it to me. It is the part of the transaction that belongs to the loser alone.

But here is the thing that I think the people running the current Republican Party do not understand: acceptance is a two-way street.

The loser owes the system the discipline of taking the loss honestly. The system, and the winners who run it, owe the loser something in return. They owe recognition. They owe a seat at the table. They owe the work of keeping the loser inside the coalition rather than driving him out of it. When the winners do that work, the system stays whole. The losers stay engaged, the party stays broad, and the next election is fought between people who still believe they are on the same team.

When the winners do not do that work -when they treat the loser as a problem to be managed, a “team player” who is now expected to fall in line and be grateful for the chance -they have broken the trade. The acceptance the loser offered loses its meaning, because there is nothing on the other side of the table to be accepted into. The losers, increasingly, find themselves in a party that wanted their vote but not their voice. And eventually, predictably, they stop showing up. Not all at once. One election at a time. Until the math does not work anymore.

I want to be honest about something. Not every election loser holds up his end of the deal either. We have produced, in the last decade, a class of losing politicians and their supporters who refuse the discipline entirely. Who decide that since the system rejected them, the system itself must be illegitimate. Who teach their voters that the only valid election is the one their side wins. I do not know where that road ends, but I know it does not end well. A system that can no longer produce losers who consent to their losses is a system that has stopped being a system at all. It has become a contest about whether to keep having contests.

That failure mode is real and it is dangerous. But it is not the failure mode I am writing about here, because it is downstream of a larger one. The losers who refuse to consent to their losses are, often, the losers who were never offered anything to consent to. The system asks them to accept the result, and offers them nothing on the other side of the result. After enough rounds of that, some of them break. The system that produced them then turns around and complains about how broken they are.

The current Republican Party is failing on the winners’ side of the two-way street. It is producing nominees who win primaries and then immediately demand the acceptance of everyone they just defeated, without offering anything back. It is producing a faction of officeholders who treat half of their own party as the enemy, and then act surprised when that half does not show up in November. The million Texans who voted for John Cornyn last week will be expected, over the next five months, to come home for Ken Paxton. Some of them will. Many of them will not. And the people running this party will, predictably, blame the losers for not falling in line rather than asking why the winners failed to extend a hand. (Guess how I know? Hint hint, SD9 runoff.)

The two-way street is the thing. Losers accepting their losses. Winners honoring the losers. Both sides doing the work. When either side stops, the system frays. When both sides stop -which is what is happening now -the system unravels in the kind of slow motion that nobody sees clearly until it is too late.

The Three Stations Together

Here is what I think holds the three together, and what I think the current Republican Party is failing at all at once.

A healthy political system requires people who can win without confusing the win for a coronation. It requires people who can govern without confusing governing for a permanent campaign. And it requires winners and losers who hold up their respective ends of the two-way street that makes losses survivable and parties durable. Each station has its own discipline, and each discipline is hard to learn unless you have stood at that station yourself.

The current Republican Party -and I say this as someone who is still part of it, who is not leaving, who watched Ken Paxton be nominated this week with the same complicated grief most of you reading this watched it with -is failing at all three stations simultaneously. We are nominating candidates who treat primary wins as full ideological mandates. We are electing officials who govern as if they are still on the campaign trail. And we are running a party whose winners no longer believe they owe anything to the people who lost -which is, eventually, going to produce more of the bitter, system-doubting losers that the same party turns around and complains about.

This is not a party. It is a faction with a logo.

The work of becoming a party again is the work of relearning the three stations, in order, the hard way. Which is the only way they can be learned. You learn winning by winning, and then by being forced to figure out what to do with the win. You learn governing by sitting in the chair and discovering that almost nothing you said in the campaign survives contact with the day-to-day reality of the job. And you learn losing -the right kind of losing -by holding up your end of the two-way street, and by being part of a party that holds up its end too.

I have stood at all three stations. I am writing this for the people who have stood at one or two of them and who are wondering whether the third is worth attempting. It is. Our larger electoral system needs people who have done all three. It needs them now more than it has in a very long time.

The party will eventually need them too. It does not know that yet. But it will.

Just over 500,000 Texans voted for John Cornyn yesterday. Not because they were confused. Not because they were uninformed. They knew exactly who Cornyn was. And more specifically, they knew exactly who Ken Paxton was. They knew Paxton had the Trump endorsement, knew his record, and knew his personal scandals down to the burner phones and the FBI referrals and the divorce filing.

A lot of those people did not vote for John Cornyn so much as they voted against Ken Paxton.

That group of people – good conservatives, lifelong Republicans - is what I will call the Remnant. We are the Republicans who looked at the choice in front of us in this runoff election and decided that – despite 10 years of Trump breaking every moral norm our politics ever held - character is still a serious criterion to us. We do not all agree on everything. But we agree on enough that we just delivered the most consequential anti-Paxton vote in the state, and we are still here this morning, watching to see what the party does next.

And that’s just the voters who showed up yesterday. There are roughly 400,000 more Texans who voted for Cornyn in the March primary and did not return for the runoff. Maybe they assumed Cornyn had it. Maybe they have already given up on the primary process. Whatever the reason, they are real, they vote in November, and they will be making a decision about Paxton in five months. So the question for leadership is bigger than I have made it sound. It is not just how to win back the 500,000 who voted against Paxton yesterday. It is how to win the 900,000 who, between turnout and the ballot, have already told you something you should be hearing: that Ken Paxton is an unacceptable standard-bearer for our conservative values.

So I have a question for Texas GOP leadership, and I am going to ask it plainly: what is your plan to win us back?

I know how some of you are going to answer, because I know many of you. The answer in certain quarters is that you don’t need us. The plan is to double down. Sharia law. Banning Chinese ownership of Texas land. H1Bs. Transgender kids in school bathrooms. Deportations. The full red-meat menu, run on repeat from now until November, because the theory of the case is that turnout among the hard right is all that matters and the rest will come home when the alternative is a Democrat.

I want to be careful here, because I do not think these are invalid issues. Some of them matter quite a lot. But they are not what the average Texan is talking about. The average Texan is talking about gas prices. About grocery prices. About the price of daycare and the price of health insurance and the cost of buying a starter home in a market that has priced their kids out of the neighborhood they grew up in. The average Texan is wondering why we are mired in another Middle East war when Trump Version 2 was supposed to be all about peace. The average Texan is wondering when, exactly, the Texas GOP is going to start talking to them instead of to the loudest 15 percent of the primary electorate.

That is who the Remnant speaks for. Not the activist base. Not the donor class. The ordinary Republican voter who still thinks character matters, who still has a kitchen-table list of concerns, and who is increasingly unsure what this party is offering them.

If you in leadership think you do not need us, let me point you to one piece of evidence that should be sitting on every desk at the state party headquarters this morning. Texas Senate District 9.

I have particular and specific knowledge of the SD9 race. I was the third-place candidate in the November special election.

As you may know, SD9 is a Trump +17 district. The Republican is supposed to win it going away. And in the special election runoff in January, the Republican candidate had the Trump endorsement and every other endorsement down the line, as well as the full funding of the West Texas machine.

She lost the race to a hard-working but unknown Democrat, by fourteen points. For those keeping score, that’s a 31 point swing.

Her campaign’s explanation, predictably, was that it was the fault of Republicans who stayed home, or the fault of figures like me who declined to endorse her. Fine. Do the math. Twenty percent of Republican voters in that district who showed up to vote in the runoff refused to mark her name on the ballot — and that’s in a district where Republicans made up 52% of the total turnout. Yes, she was (and remains) an awful candidate. And maybe some of the Republicans who voted for the Democrat were voting against Trump. Maybe some of them were voting against her specifically. But every one of those votes was a signal that the leadership of the Texas GOP has not yet acknowledged.

Now take a look at the November statewide ticket. Paxton at the top. Don Huffines, proud owner of Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico Ranch. Bo French, who is so off his rocker that even Dan Patrick called on him to resign as Tarrant County GOP chairman. Stack the names in a column and read them out loud and ask yourself, honestly, whether that ticket is going to make the Remnant feel more welcome than SD9 did.

It isn’t. It’s going to make us feel less welcome. The math from SD9 is not going to get better come November. It is going to get worse.

This is not a threat. This is arithmetic.

So I will ask the question again. Assuming you don’t want November to look like SD9 statewide, what is your plan to win us back?

Because here is what I know, and what I fear some of you are going to be tempted to dismiss as the complaint of a man who lost twice. The hard right can win primaries. They have proven it over and over. They have proven it against me , and they have proven it against serious Republicans by the dozens, some of whom you have heard of and some of whom you never will, because they got cleared out of primaries before anyone had the chance to learn their names.

Bad candidates with no experience and the right endorsement can and do win Republican primaries in Texas. I am living proof, twice over.

But the question the party has been quietly asking itself for a decade is the one SD9 just answered out loud: can the hard right win a competitive general in a bad year for Republicans?

The honest answer is that we don’t know yet. SD9 said no in the special election. November is going to be a much bigger test, with much more at stake, with Paxton’s record and personal life as the centerpiece of every Democratic ad from now until election day, and with a Remnant that has just been told, again, that its concerns about character do not matter to the people running the show.

If you have a plan to bring us back, now would be the time. It is going to take more than lip service. It is going to take more than election-night platitudes or a few op-eds about big-tents and being “team players” written by people who do not actually believe it. It is going to take making us feel like we have an actual seat at the table, because right now we do not. It is going to take treating Cornyn’s voters not as a problem to be managed but as a coalition to be honored. It is going to take some humility from a faction of the party that has not shown much of it.

And if you do not have a plan, the polite version of what I want to say is this: SD9 is the bellwether. If you read it honestly, you have time to fix this. If you do not, you are going to find out in November what we already know.

We are still here. We still want to be part of this. We have not left, and most of us have no intention of leaving. But the door does not stay open forever, and the assumption that we will always come home in the end failed in SD9. It could very likely fail statewide in November. And if it does, we may lose Texas for good. Count the cost before you dismiss us.

You can have us, or you can have your purity. You cannot have both.

What’s your plan?