Texas GOP has 'ominous' plan to maintain power — under any circumstances

05 June 2024

At their annual convention in late May, the Texas Republican Party approved their new 50-page 2024 platform — which calls for the Bible to be taught in public schools, doctors who perform abortions to be charged with homicide, and the United States to permanently withdraw from the United Nations.

The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty, in a June 3 column, attacks the "hair-raising" proposals as proof that "the id of a political party" has "gone off the deep end." Similarly, The New Republic's Matt Ford describes the Texas GOP's platform as "outlandish" in an article published on June 4.

But Ford emphasizes that one part of the platform goes way beyond "outlandish" and is downright "ominous" — a proposal that, Ford warns, "would effectively end representative democracy in Texas" and "keep the state firmly in GOP hands even as it becomes increasingly diverse and urban."

Ford describes the proposal as an "electoral college of sorts for Texas statewide races."

The platform reads, "The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county."

This proposal, according to Ford, is "born from the party's fear that it will not rule Texas forever."

Texas is still a red state, but some Democratic strategists believe it is light red rather than deep red at this point. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was narrowly reelected in 2018, defeating former Rep. Beto O'Rourke by only 2 percent. And President Joe Biden lost Texas by roughly 6 percent in 2020 — compared to the double-digit wins GOP presidential nominees typically enjoyed in Texas during the 1990s and 2000s.

But those statewide election results would have been much different under the proposal in the Texas GOP's new platform.

"It is hard to imagine that such a system as the Texas GOP has proposed would comply with the one-person, one-vote principle, to put it lightly," Ford explains. "Texas has 254 counties, some of which are extremely sparsely populated. Loving County, which is on the state's western border with New Mexico, counted only 64 residents during the 2020 census, making it the least populous county in the United States. Eight Texas counties are home to fewer than 1000 people, and an additional 86 counties each have fewer than 10,000 inhabitants."

Ford continues, "Adopting a county-majority requirement for statewide elections would obviously cement Republicans into perpetual power in statewide races. In modern American politics, Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in urban areas, while Republican voters are overwhelmingly popular in rural counties. President Joe Biden received 1.9 million votes just from the three Texas counties in 2020 that cover Houston, Dallas, and Austin."

The New Republic journalist points out that a "county-majority requirement" in Texas "would dramatically shift the state's electoral power toward its rural residents in general."

"Roughly 3.9 million people live in the least-populated half of Texas counties," Ford observes. "They would enjoy an effective veto in statewide elections over the other 26 million or so Texans who live in denser areas."

Read Matt Ford's full report for The New Republic at this link.

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