At the statewide level, unless your name is Tim Dunn or that of a handful of other billionaire donors, your vote is becoming increasingly irrelevant. This, of course, is not to say you should not vote — on the local and national levels, voting is plenty important. Increasingly, though, state political leaders are doing their best to dismantle democracy.
Take March as an example. Compared to 2020’s, the 2024 Texas primary elections (in which both major parties choose their candidates for the November general) came and went quietly this March. Facing a long electronic piece of paper with no big names, no real competitive races and dozens of judicial candidates whom the state of Texas asks its citizens to elect for some reason, the vast majority of registered Texas voters, perfectly reasonably, saw no compelling reason to vote — assuming they even knew an election was going on.
The numbers are staggering — only 18% of Texas’ registered voters turned out, fewer than one out of every five. If this were any other comparable election, this would sound preposterous — imagine, for example, if only 40 million registered Americans voted for president, or if only Trinity students who went to private high schools voted for SGA president — but, because it’s the primaries, this is a thing that everyone accepts.
This is by design. Over the past year, Texas’ most influential people — especially Governor Greg Abbott and disgraced, impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton — have done their best to mold themselves in Trump’s authoritarian image. As part of their quest to Trumpify themselves as much as possible, they have unmoored themselves from any commitment to “small government” or the “will of the people,” whatever those mean. Increasingly, it seems like state-level elections are foregone conclusions in which, instead of making an informed decision between two candidates on a relatively equal playing field, voters serve as rubber stamps of whatever Abbott, Paxton and Tim Dunn, their billionaire-pastor puppeteer, want. These are elections in name only.
The March Republican primary — the only state-level election that truly matters in a gerrymandered state with successful voter suppression efforts and a dysfunctional, feckless state Democratic party — shows this. Two issues dominated the March election. First, Paxton’s effort to purge from the party officials who expressed the slightest disagreement with him and Texas House reps who voted to impeach him for his well-documented abuses of power. Second, Abbott’s effort to purge from the party rural Texas House reps who repeatedly voted against his attempted defunding of public schools (by allowing any student, regardless of income level, to use public school funding for their own personal private or religious school tuition).
In the end, they both got what they wanted. Paxton replaced three Republican Criminal Court of Appeals judges who disagreed with his extreme stance on election fraud with three of his preferred stooges. Meanwhile, Abbott ousted nine of the 21 rural representatives who understood the importance of public schools to their rural constituents and forced five more into runoffs. If two more pro-public school representatives, including House Speaker Rep. Dade Phelan, lose their May 28 runoffs, then Abbott will likely have enough votes to ram his anti-public school bill, which the House already voted down three times, through the legislature and into law.
You might argue that this is just politics as usual, that it would be naïve of me to suggest that these supposedly anti-democratic tactics aren’t normal practice in statehouses all over the country. Certainly, it isn’t just Texas whose state Republicans have swung toward purging members of their own party for supporting values that were once called conservative — Iowa, Oklahoma, Georgia and, of course, Florida have all experienced similar such fights over universal school vouchers in the past few years. Nor could it entirely be said that Abbott and Paxton are going against the will of the people when 60% of Republican primary voters said they’d be less likely to support school voucher opponents in one poll.
What is new, though, is Abbott and Impeachment Paxton’s lack of shame in openly disdaining election results and aligning themselves with billionaires who use dark-money donations to tip the scales for their preferred candidate — in effect, making elections meaningless. To fund their purge efforts, Abbott and Paxton primarily relied on dark-money PACs known to be associated with three billionaire West Texas oil tycoons — Dan and Farris Wilks, who saved Paxton’s career after numerous fraud charges, and, of course, Tim Dunn, Texas’ biggest individual source of campaign money, who Texas Monthly proclaimed “the state’s most powerful figure” in March.
Dunn isn’t even shy about his belief that Texas should be a “Handmaid’s Tale”-style theocracy and not a democracy. For years, he has ran his own Christian school and Bible church, at which he has preached messages like “women were designed as helpers.” In 2018, he told the then-Texas House speaker (who was Jewish) that “only Christians should hold leadership posts” in Texas politics. And, of course, his money played a pivotal role in purging pro-public school Texas House Reps from the party this March, paving the way for state-subsidized, non-secular Christian schooling. This is who really runs the state. It’s Tim Dunn’s world, and we’re all living in it.
I would end with some sort of stirring call to action, some sort of urge to call or email your local representative and ask them to vote against vouchers, to vote for secularism and democracy, but, at least on this front, I’m afraid it’s already too late. They are not listening to you. Unless you happen to be a pastor with billions of dollars lying around.