At back-to-back campaign events Wednesday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott made his closing pitch for the Republican candidate in House District 121, Marc LaHood, while two members of his own party were lining up behind the Democrat in the race, Laurel Jordan Swift.
The strange political dynamics come as Abbott spent big money ousting incumbent state House Rep. Steve Allison (R-Alamo Heights) in the Republican primary — part of a larger effort to rid the GOP of members who oppose his school voucher plan.
But now days out from an election that Republicans wouldn’t otherwise be worried about, GOP groups are spending big to shore up their new candidate, while some local Republicans are still stewing about a primary that featured millions of dollars of attack ads run against the personally popular incumbent.
Outside the Brook Hollow Library on Wednesday, Swift was joined by Allison and former GOP state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, who said they each split from their party to vote for her, in hopes of stopping Abbott’s school voucher program from being approved next session.
But Wentworth, whose own political career ended in a 2012 primary loss, also gave voice to a sentiment percolating among some local party faithful.
“Another thing that really disturbed me was the way that Steve Allison was treated in the primary. Our mailboxes and airwaves were flooded with money that came from outside of Texas,” Wentworth said, referencing a Pennsylvania billionaire who gave Abbott $4 million to fund the pro-voucher campaign.
“Can you imagine?” he added. “[Abbott] spent like $1.2 million just to defeat Steve Allison in the primary. It’s not right.”
While Allison’s primary was particularly ugly, his loss is just the latest in a string of Bexar County-area seats that have traded moderate incumbents for more conservative successors in recent years.
Wentworth lost his seat to conservative firebrand Donna Campbell, a close ally of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick during the Tea Party movement. And when state Rep. Lyle Larson retired in Texas’ 122nd House District in 2022, primary voters chose former Republican Party of Bexar County Chair Mark Dorazio as his replacement
Across town at the Angry Elephant, where Abbott was holding his second rally for LaHood in a week’s span, Dorazio opened for the governor, cheering LaHood as a potential partner for the House’s conservative squad.
Both San Antonio-area Republicans have signed onto an effort to install a more conservative House speaker, and to cut Democrats out of the legislative process altogether. The ideas are top priorities of a different set of billionaire political donors, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have put big money into LaHood’s race.
“We need Marc in the House,” said Dorazio, who has personally led the charge to push Republicans to the right in blue Bexar County. “He’s a strong conservative, and the more I get to know about Marc, the more I like him and really want to serve with him.”
School vouchers
Abbott’s attempt at unifying Republicans days out from the election made little mention of Allison or LaHood, instead rehashing highlights of the governor’s fights with the Biden Administration over border security — something Abbott and Allison had worked together on.
Abbott also touched briefly on the school voucher issue that got him involved in the race in the first place, suggesting vouchers would allow parents the ability to escape public schools that are driving a radically progressive social agenda.
“Why are public schools trying to educate families about how to change biological sex?” Abbott said. “If your child were in a school like that … you should have the right to be able to move your child to another school.”
While some school voucher proponents have vowed to pair such a program with a major increase in funding for public schools, Abbott, who held public school funding hostage as leverage last session, suggested the state’s budget surplus should instead go toward tax cuts.
“School districts, that’s where your property tax bill largely comes from,” Abbott said. “… Walking into this next session we’re going to have at least a $20 billion budget surplus. I want to work with these legislators … and make sure we pass another huge property tax cut.”
Against that backdrop, Allison and Wentworth each said Wednesday that they still consider themselves Republicans, but protecting the state’s public education system has become mission critical.
“The two most important things we do in the legislature is fund schools and roads, and
yet we’re failing in our most important responsibility, and that is public education,” said Wentworth, who endorsed Swift last week.
In a nod to the enduring divisiveness the race has caused among local Republicans, Allison and Wentworth both faced some heckling from GOP activists campaigning outside the library for other Republican candidates.
Asked about Abbott’s school voucher comments, Allison said it’s no secret some school voucher supporters view that as the end goal.
“You can’t escape the fact that some of the extreme interests in the voucher program, their ultimate goal is to get rid of the public education system,” he said.