Each of the four candidates in this year’s Republican primary campaign for Texas attorney general promised to finish former President Donald Trump’s border wall — never mind that border security is the federal government’s responsibility.
Seeking reelection, the Republican Texas comptroller, whose job is to balance the state’s checkbook, pledged to “fight every day” to restrict abortion access and “expand the rights of gun owners.” He can’t; it’s not his job.
Surely our state’s agriculture commissioner would mention farmers or ranchers, or agriculture, in the issues section of his campaign website. Not a peep. Guns, abortion, taxes and “protecting houses of worship from politicians” were his top priorities.
Seriously?
It’s nothing new for politicians to play to the polls and make promises they can’t deliver, but this kind of grandstanding corrodes our democracy and our politics, undermining honest and legitimate debate on the issues. Disingenuous posturing up and down the Republican primary ballot deprived voters of the chance to learn how the candidates would actually do their jobs if elected. All candidates owe us that.
To be clear, Democratic politicians can be guilty of inane hyperbole and finger-in-the-wind politics, too. But based on our analysis of dozens of Texas primary campaigns, Republican candidates were, by far, more guilty of this than Democrats in the latest election cycle. Many promised more than they can deliver on issues outside the purview of the offices they were seeking, and frequently invoked Trump’s ideologies, while crowing about his endorsement of their candidacies.
Why do so many Republican candidates display such zealous fealty to the twice-impeached former president who lost in 2020? Perhaps they think it’s their key to victory. But they might keep in mind that a Trump endorsement also can backfire spectacularly, as Georgia voters learned when both candidates he backed in the 2020 U.S. Senate races lost.
Meanwhile, a University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll released last month found that only 22% of state Republicans believe President Biden’s election was legitimate. Put another way, more than three-fourths of Texas Republicans actually believe Trump’s Big Lie. That is astounding and dangerous. GOP contenders in the primaries frequently cited “election integrity” as a major concern, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Texas 2036, a think tank dedicated to finding bipartisan solutions to the biggest challenges facing Texas, advocates more meaningful connections with voters on issues that matter most to them. A statewide poll the group released last month found Texans may not be as divided as we think.
The poll found that 79% of all Texans are extremely or very concerned about low reading scores among elementary school students. More than half (53%) are extremely or very concerned about increasingly extreme weather. Just 10% of Texans polled were “very confident” in the Texas electricity grid. You had to look hard, and often times in vain, to find our Republican candidates talking about those issues.
Margaret Spellings, who was education secretary in Republican President George W. Bush’s administration and is president and CEO of Texas 2036, told us Texans desperately want their leaders to focus on problems affecting their lives, such as a low student achievement or a lack of health care, instead of the newest staple of the Texas GOP agenda: the perceived threat of a transgender kid playing school sports.
“Wherever I go around the state people are starving for this,” Spellings told our board. “I say this with admiration and no judgment, but people who have gone to Austin and helped enact legislation around abortion or vaccines or masks or whatever else have built civic demand. If we want this kind of thinking, we’ve got to build civic demand.”
That’s where you come in. Voter turnout in Texas primaries is traditionally and dismally low, and while the recent contests generated the highest voter participation in the past six mid-term primaries, still only 17% of registered Texans cast a ballot. Way too many Texans aren’t making their voices heard at the polls.
Austin-based Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in 2020, now runs NextGen America, a left-leaning advocacy group that registers young voters in battleground states. She says narrowly-targeted primary campaigns and low voter turnout yield elected officials who focus only on a small set of interests.
“It’s so important that we run campaigns on real ideas that matter to people’s lives, versus, you know, trying to sway a minority of voters on issues that just divide us and don’t actually address the common pain that most Texans feel,” Tzintzún Ramirez said.
Texans deserve elected officials who understand their needs and their pain.
That’s why we implore candidates from both parties on the general election ballot in November to reject easy slogans and do the hard work of crafting meaningful policy platforms that can help the most Texans. The future of our state depends on it.
Austin American-Statesman
