Will Texas GOP continue its descent without Matt Rinaldi as chair?

When we read the news that Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi would step down, we were hit with a little spark of hope. This is, after all, one of the men who presided over the transformation of the state GOP from a normal, if deeply conservative, political party into a conspiracy-embracing, corruption-supporting mess that has mutated the meaning of conservatism in Texas.

Our hope lasted about a millisecond when we remembered that this is the Republican Party of Texas. Whenever we think it can’t get worse, it usually does.

Look at the track record. Rinaldi, a flamethrower in the Texas House who lost his Dallas County seat in 2019, succeeded former Florida Congressman Allen West as state GOP chair. Once a tea party agitator, West regularly made headlines for incendiary comments that flirted with the far-right QAnon cult and the Texas secessionist movement.

(By the way, if you’re a Dallas County Republican who didn’t vote in the primary, we regret to inform you that West is your new county party chair.)

While West tried to use the state GOP to vault himself to the governor’s mansion, Rinaldi has brandished the party as a weapon on behalf of the billionaires bankrolling the far-right movement in Texas. Instead of buoying its members, the party apparatus attacks conservative lawmakers who ran afoul of Attorney General Ken Paxton or otherwise failed to fall in lockstep with every hard-line position of West Texas oilmen Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks.

Rinaldi should go down in infamy for his ties to Texas GOP activists who met with Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes in the fall. The Texas Tribune observed Rinaldi leaving the building where the meeting took place. Rinaldi denied participating in that meeting and condemned Fuentes, but we can’t take him seriously when he dismissed as unnecessary an attempt by his party to pass a ban on associating with antisemites. The ban eventually passed in spite of Rinaldi.

Running to replace him is former Collin County GOP party chair Abraham George, a Paxton defender. The Texas Tribune reported Monday that police responded to his home last year based on a call that an armed George was going to confront a man he thought was having an affair with his wife. Also running is state GOP Vice Chair Dana Myers, who voted in favor of the ban on associating with known neo-Nazis. She’s got at least that going for her, though the party has set the bar so low you have to dig to find it.

As Paxton hints that he may take on U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in 2026, we can’t reconcile how it is that we’re talking about the same party. How can a Texas GOP that gave us a principled and competent leader like Cornyn elevate an unscrupulous and inept attorney general like Paxton to be its standard bearer?

We think this helps explain why Republican turnout in the Texas primary was only 12.6%, as our colleague Gromer Jeffers Jr. reported. Traditional conservatives in Texas are losing heart. The party that once courted them and lifted them up has kicked them out of the house.

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