Tuesday’s primary with the biggest statewide implications will be decided by a few thousand Republican voters living in and around the Southeast Texas oil refinery town of Beaumont.
That’s home to embattled House Speaker Dade Phelan, who is being targeted for defeat by some of the most powerful Republican officeholders and donors in Texas, and even by former President Donald Trump. And if the two-term speaker and four-term House of Representatives are ousted by political newcomer David Covey, it would set off a fierce battle for the top leadership post in the lower legislative chamber that could reshape the Texas political landscape for years to come.
“This is a pretty heavy burden on the voters of that district,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “We rarely see a Speaker of the Texas House in political danger (at home). They usually have the political ear of their districts and have enough power and money to hold those seats. We see this turning into a race. That could dramatically change the fate of the next legislative sessions.”
The race for Texas House District 21 stretches south from the East Texas city of Jasper, taking bites from Beaumont and Port Arthur as it stretches to the Gulf Coast. The high-profile election cycle, fueled in no small part by the support of the former president as well as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton, has drawn millions in political contributions from inside and outside Texas.
With neither party competing in the statewide runoff, the Republican Party’s primary battle for District 21 has had major ramifications because of Phelan’s position as leader of the 150-member, Republican-dominated House of Representatives. There is no Democrat on the ballot in District 21, so the winner of the Republican Party’s runoff will take the seat when the Legislature convenes in January.
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And that fact was underscored during the Republican Party’s three-day state convention in San Antonio, which began Thursday, when many party activists, especially those on the arch-conservative wing, barely missed an opportunity to express their displeasure with Phelan.
Republican State Chairman Matt Rinaldi set the tone in his remarks opening the convention by faulting the speaker for not ending the House’s decades-long practice of awarding certain committee chairmanships to the minority party.
“Last year, House Speaker Dade Phelan handed political power in the Texas House to Democrats,” Rinaldi said. “He went to war with the Republican party’s lieutenant governor in the Texas Senate.”
Phelan, meanwhile, is not without allies in his own party. During the run-up to the March 5 primary, former Gov. Rick Perry campaigned for speaker in his home district. Phelan’s endorsement page on his campaign website lists Sen. Robert Nichols, an East Texas Republican, along with several dozen local elected officials from the district.
The speaker also touted support from the National Rifle Association, the anti-abortion Texas Alliance for Life and pro-business organizations such as Texas Realtors, the Texas Oil and Gas Association and the Texas Association of Business.
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On social media, Phelan pushed back against intraparty claims that he is in the pocket of Democrats in the House of Representatives.
“I’ve led the two most conservative sessions in Texas history, and I’m ready for a third,” he said in an Instagram post Thursday. “We passed a constitutional law, banned cities from funding police, banned gender reassignment in children, cut property taxes by billions, and took action to finish the border wall. It’s time to go to the polls and continue our conservative victories in Texas.”
Covey, a former Orange County GOP chairman and oil and gas consultant, is playing up Trump’s support, with the former president prominently featured at the top of his campaign website.
“President Trump reiterated his support for my candidacy at the NRA convention this weekend because he knows I will relentlessly fight the Austin establishment every day. I have the will to stand up for this community and our values, and that is exactly what I plan to do,” he said in a recent press release.
Covey won the first round in what started as a three-candidate race, defeating Phelan by 3 percentage points but failing to win an outright majority to win the GOP nomination in the March 5 primary, which attracted about 34,000 voters from Republican District 21 went to the primary. polls. In the weeks since, Covey has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Texans United for a Conservative Majority PAC, founded by oilman and Republican megadonor Tim Dunn. He also received $100,000 from Patrick.
Phelan, meanwhile, has outraised his opponent and recently received approximately $660,000 from Las Vegas casino owner Miriam Adelson.
Rottinghaus pointed out the historic implications of Tuesday’s vote in District 21. Sometimes, Texas House speakers are impeached because they lose the support of members or simply choose to retire. But not since 1972 has it faced the prospect of rejection from its own local voters, when Rayford Price was defeated in the Democratic primary amid what became known as the Sharpstown stock fraud scandal, involving financial crimes that ended embarked on various political careers.
“The last time we had a speaker of the House of Representatives in serious political danger, there was a major scandal that rocked the leadership of that party,” Rottinghaus said. “So that’s the most interesting thing.”
This article originally appeared in Austin American-Statesman: Texas Primary: Will Dade Phelan Survive the David Covey Challenge?
