Trump Has Pushed Some Texas Republicans Too Far
Four Lone Star State conservatives wrestle with their party’s MAGA turn.
The tiny Yorkshire terrier in a diaper was not central to my experience in Tarrant County, but she did set the tone.
Tia was the first creature to greet me when I arrived at Hillary Shepheard’s townhouse in Texas last week. She yapped until I settled into a chair at the kitchen island, when she switched to a minuscule growl. “Sorry,” Shepheard told me. “She always does this.” Shepheard, the blond-haired, 34-year-old leader of the Tarrant County Young Republicans, would apologize a dozen more times during the next half hour: for the clutter, for having forgotten to put on her “face” before I arrived, for leaving the charcuterie board to the very last minute. “My mom would kill me if she knew,” Shepheard said, plopping grapes into a colander. Her voice sounded raspy. She’d just gotten over the flu.
Life is chaotic for any political operative two weeks ahead of an important election. But the midterms have taxed Shepheard emotionally, too. In fact, this was the reason for our charcuterie gathering, which involved three other Tarrant County Republicans: a former politician, a party activist, and a professor. The five of us spent the evening discussing the midterms, which for some Texas conservatives pose a moral test that is bigger even than Donald Trump: whether or not to vote for Ken Paxton.
I have had several memorable experiences in Texas over the past year. In Lubbock, I was escorted from a Jasmine Crockett rally by armed guards. In Allen, I watched Paxton fans consume countless margaritas in celebration of President Trump’s long-awaited endorsement. And in Tyler, I watched Democrats gaze at James Talarico like an oasis in the desert.
But nothing has been quite as instructive as listening to a group of Texas conservatives decide, in real time, how best to meet this current political moment. The choice seems anything but straightforward; they’ve been asked to fall in line behind a Senate nominee with enough baggage to fill a container ship. What happens on Tuesday will hinge on the decisions of people like the ones in Shepheard’s living room. After much internal debate, Tia’s owner had made her own choice clear. For the long-term survival of her party, she told us, “Ken Paxton has to lose.”
The five of us sat in white chairs around a glass table in Shepheard’s living room, stacking cheddar cubes on crackers from her hastily made spread. But our conversation didn’t begin with Paxton. It began, as so much seems to, with Trump.
All but one of the conservatives in the room said they’d voted for him all three times, although none seemed the type to put on a red baseball cap and do the YMCA. Shepheard had assembled a group of highly engaged, deeply partisan Texans, diverse in style if not ideology. “When you describe me, Brad Pitt–esque is totally fine,” John Huffman, a 43-year-old entrepreneur and the former mayor of Southlake, told me (although his beard actually makes him look more like Oscar Isaac in Dune).
Huffman’s attitude toward Trump has always been conflicted—but it seemed representative in the group. A self-described “Christian conservative,” he has never supported Trump in a primary election, but ultimately voted for him every time in November. He was disturbed by the events of January 6, but believed that Trump’s second administration “had an incredible amount of promise.” He’d hoped that the president would improve the economy, deport only violent “illegals,” and implement a more coherent tariff strategy. But now? Huffman feels that Trump has done the opposite on virtually all counts and started a brand-new war. It “makes no sense,” he said, as Shepheard nodded along. The president built a powerful coalition, “and less than two years later, he squandered it.”
Jill Tate, a 53-year-old Republican activist and the president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, hadn’t been a Trump primary voter either. But she offered a softer assessment of his second term. “Most things I’ve been happy with,” she told the group. “There are certain things that I think make him …” Tate trailed off, sighed, and looked into the distance. She was trying to choose her words carefully. “He’s brought a different element to the party,” she went on after a moment. “He’s not a Reagan Republican; he’s his own brand of Republican, and that is one of the reasons the party’s looking differently.”
With what was perhaps the understatement of the century, we had reached the crux of our conversation. Trump has remade the Texas Republican Party in his image, transforming it into a machine built not for winning general elections, but for allowing him to dominate poisonous primaries. “What we have,” Huffman said, “is a fractured set of relationships that we are finding harder and harder to mend.” This reconfiguration has facilitated the rise of questionable characters and reactionaries. Bo French, the former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party, once shared a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America. Now French is the billionaire-backed Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, a job overseeing gas and oil in Texas. He continues to post bigoted messages.
Then there is Paxton. The three-term Texas attorney general is well known by now for facing accusations of securities fraud and bribery, for his alleged extramarital affairs, and for his less important but notable decision to pocket a $1,000 pen that did not belong to him. Still, many Texas Republicans adore Paxton for his commitment to MAGA. Others support Paxton in spite of the fact that his name appears to evoke instant and obvious disgust. At a “Come and Take It” rally for Paxton last week, one man told me he’d vote for the attorney general, even as he made a face. In another ringing endorsement, an elderly woman said she’d “vote for the devil himself” before siding with Paxton’s opponent.
Two Republicans in our group seemed to share this sentiment, even if they wouldn’t put it quite that way. Brandon Chicotsky, a 41-year-old marketing professor at Texas Christian University and the faculty adviser for its Turning Point chapter, was the only one who did not vote for Trump in 2016; he’d supported the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. Sitting across from me at Shepheard’s house, he explained that the charges against Paxton and French were not enough to dissuade him. “I don’t like these people,” he said, “but I find it imperative for the function of government that they win.” Straightforward. So was Tate: “While you may have issues with Paxton, he’s gonna vote Republican,” she said, looking around at the others.
Even after ugly primaries, Texas Republicans can usually be relied upon to fall in line come November. (See: Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024.) But Huffman and Shepheard said they just weren’t willing to do it this time. Neither plans to vote for Paxton or French. “Our party needs a slap in the face,” Shepheard said. The pair, she added later in a follow-up call, can’t “define the Republican Party to the outside world.”
Huffman agreed. “I held my nose and voted for Trump three times, knowing that he didn’t share a lot of my moral compass,” but voting for Paxton “would be admitting to myself and my family and my friends that character truly doesn’t matter as long as your jersey is Republican.”
I admitted to being a little confused. Paxton and Trump have a remarkably similar set of ethical problems. Why support one but draw a line at the other? It was a question Huffman said he’d thought a lot about. The presidency matters more than a single Senate seat, he answered. “There’s also part of me that understands the compromise I had to make to vote for Trump, and maybe this is my way of reclaiming a little bit of that.”
Tate, a Republican activist for more than three decades, seemed to be struggling. She nodded occasionally as Huffman talked, but she was frustrated to hear him say this. The Texas legislature is red. The governor is a Republican. “We are exactly where we wanted to be 30 years ago,” she said. The Democrats stopped winning in Texas because the party couldn’t stay united, she added. “If we lose one statewide, the door is open. We cannot let it be open.”
But Huffman and Shepheard believe it’s too late—that Trump and his allies ripped the door off its hinges years ago. Last year, in a special election to fill a vacancy in the state Senate, Huffman lost a bitter three-way fight to a self-described “ultra-MAGA” candidate and a Democrat. The district, which Trump had won by 17 points in 2024, elected the Democrat by 14. (The “ultra-MAGA” candidate is running again this year but has since shed the label.)
If Paxton loses, perhaps Texas Republicans will feel compelled to reform the way the party runs primaries—which might, in turn, allow more reasonable, less morally compromised candidates to be successful. “Ken Paxton losing,” Huffman said, “may be the thing that could save the Republican Party in Texas.”
So, will the Paxton naysayers be voting for James Talarico? As if.
“I’m perfectly comfortable leaving that particular race blank,” Shepheard told me, although she would vote for Jon Rosenthal, the Democrat and former oil-field engineer running against French. “Talarico is a heretic, and a hard-left progressive,” Huffman said, not an unusual take among conservative Christians, who have been startled to hear Talarico defend abortion on biblical grounds and argue that God is nonbinary.
Talarico has made overtures to Republicans by appealing to faith and talking a lot about economic populism. In some cases, it’s worked: A parade of local and state GOP officials has publicly switched sides to support him. But most hard-core partisans, including the ones at Shepheard’s house, aren’t going to skip to the polls to cast a ballot for a Democrat. The ones who can stomach it will support Paxton. The ones who can’t will sit out the race altogether. Right now, polls show a tight Senate race, although Talarico has a slight, consistent edge. If the Democrat does defy the odds to win in November, his bipartisan appeal will be only a sliver of the story.
A better explanation will be that Trump and his Republican allies in Texas have finally pushed their own voters too far.
