I covered my first Texas Republican Party Convention in 2010, during the Tea Party movement’s ascendance at the state and the national levels. My editors warned me ahead of time that I would see and hear some wild stuff, but cautioned me against taking any of it too seriously in my reporting. This was “red meat” for the base, not serious policy. I got the memo: my coverage, for the Dallas Observer alt-weekly, was full of snark and derision.
But 14 years later, many of the priorities for which I mocked the Texas GOP’s faithfulest-of-the-faithful have indeed been realized, both here in Texas and nationally. Now, their latest platform, which delegates voted on last weekend, endorses the conspiracist “great reset” theory, declares that “abortion is not health care, it is homicide,” and calls for a new election law requiring candidates running for statewide offices to win a majority of Texas’ 254 counties, effectively barring any Democrat from the position. And that’s just the start.
The Texas GOP platform has been driving policy in Texas and beyond not just recently, but for several years.
Yet the chief politics reporter for the Austin American Statesman just called the platform “more of a wish list for the most activist members of the GOP than a road map that will be followed to the letter by lawmakers in Austin or Washington.” Even the Texas Tribune’s otherwise thoughtful, comprehensive reporting on the convention describes the party platform as “traditionally … seen not as a definitive list of Republican stances, but a compromise document that represents the interests of the party’s various business, activist and social conservative factions.”
These views — which echo the cautions my editors issued to me as a new politics reporter 14 impossibly long years ago — aren’t merely outdated. They’re patently incorrect, contradicted by demonstrable evidence that the Texas GOP platform has been driving policy in Texas and beyond not just recently, but for several years.
Back in 2010 I took note, for example, of a convention vendor selling T-shirts reading “AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES: THE LAST BASTION OF COMMUNISM.” Today, of course, attacking higher education — especially the censorship of critical race theory, queer history, and most recently, pro-Palestine advocacy — is a basic plank of Republican politics.
In 2016, the Texas GOP platform backed anti-transgender legislation targeting trans people using gendered facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms. Today, “bathroom bills” and bans on trans student athletes and on gender-affirming care are taking hold in Texas and across the country — Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law attacking trans athletes in 2021. In 2018, the Texas GOP platform called for the “constitutional carry” of firearms, which became reality in 2021. And the Texas GOP has fantasized about outlawing and criminalizing abortion for over a decade; it became the first state to totally ban abortion through the SB8 “bounty hunter” law, even before the Dobbs decision struck down Roe v. Wade.
During the 2016 state GOP convention, as the party was grappling with an even further-rightward pull from a growing contingent invigorated by Donald Trump’s bare bigotry, I wondered: “How do you steer a ship that’s veering wildly out of control … on purpose?”
The farthest-right factions of the Texas GOP have amassed a tremendous amount of power and influence.
The answer to my question was, apparently, to let go of the wheel entirely. The pro-Trump wing of the Texas GOP is no longer a faction of the party, but its core. And the same is now true of the Republican National Committee, complete with (as NBC News put it) “a new leadership team hand-picked by the former president, a formal signal of his takeover of the national Republican Party.”
So I would hope that, by now, we political writers have realized that the “fringes” of the Republican Party — in Texas or anywhere else — are the primary drivers of politics, policy and personnel. I would hope that we finally take seriously the idea that the Texas GOP platform is a statement of intent. As the Dallas Morning News’s Gromer Jeffers wrote after the party’s 2022 convention, “many proposals once thought too extreme are becoming public policy.” Of course they are; between the Tea Party and Trump, the farthest-right factions of the Texas GOP have amassed a tremendous amount of power and influence. From Gov. Abbott to Lt. Gov Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton on down, Texas Republicans now take their orders from the blathering, criminal bigot from New York City. American conservatism, bent as it always has been toward authoritarian rule, white supremacy and xenophobia, has long been ripe for this kind of takeover. For decades, even supposedly more moderate and mainstream Republican politics have been dominated by public pledges to do, well, exactly what Republicans are now doing: outlawing abortion, censoring free speech and terrorizing immigrants, queer people and religious believers (even Christians!) who fail to comply with the GOP’s vision for America as an evangelical Christian theocracy. There are many, many horrors to behold in the latest platform, and they must be taken seriously not in spite of how terrifying the document is, but because of how terrifying the document is. It is because the latest Texas GOP platform endorses “prohibiting the teaching of sex education, sexual health, or sexual choice or identity” that we should take it seriously. It is because the platform equates abortion and murder that we should take it seriously. It is because the platform aims to ban any Democrat — and indeed, any noncompliant Republican — from ever holding statewide office, that we should take it seriously. This stuff cannot and should not be written off as outsider, fringe crankery. Because it isn’t. And the rightward, increasingly fascist swing in the GOP in Texas and nationally is far from complete. We have seen it amplified year over year in Texas, and with Trump’s takeover of the RNC, we are going to see much more of this across the country. We dismiss that fundamental truth at our peril.
Andrea Grimes
Andrea Grimes is a journalist and activist living in Austin, Texas. 
