The Texas GOP Has a Bold Agenda — If It Can Stick Together

Conservative Republicans have an iron grip on Texas state government, but their own caucus is proving to be a bit more slippery.

The rapid growth of Texas’ population in recent years has also coincided with a political shift to the right. The last time Democrats held a branch of government in Texas was 2002, when they had a majority in the state House. Gov. Greg Abbott, one of the most conservative governors in the country, was elected for a third term in 2022. In the spring primary, Abbott successfully backed a slate of conservative candidates in challenges to House Republicans who’d been resistant to parts of his agenda. In the November election, when President-elect Donald Trump won more than 56 percent of the Texas vote, Republicans won an additional seat in the state Senate, bringing their majority there to 20-11.

All signs point to a clear runway for the Texas GOP to enact its agenda in the 2025 session — or most signs, anyway. Before the party can enact any of its priorities, state representatives will need to select a speaker of the House. Speakers control which bills get committee hearings and can slow or stop the progress of legislation in the House, giving them lots of leverage to extract concessions in negotiations with other lawmakers.

The current speaker, Republican Dade Phelan, narrowly survived an Abbott-backed primary challenge in the spring and recently announced he won’t be seeking another term as speaker. Most of the GOP caucus rallied around Rep. David Cook, a conservative ally of Abbott, in party meetings earlier this month. But another Republican, Dustin Burrows, is also claiming to have enough support from a mix of Republicans and Democrats to win the speakership. The House will vote for speaker in mid-January.

The fight for the speakership has surprised some observers, who saw Abbott’s success in the primaries as momentum for new conservative leadership in the House. While the factions aren’t neatly ideological — almost all of Texas’ Republicans are deeply conservative — the leadership contest clouds the prospects for certain aspects of the GOP agenda. It could also complicate the dynamics between the two legislative chambers; the Senate Republicans have been much more aligned under the leadership of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick than the House has been.

“The likely future of a lot of conservative legislation coming out of the Senate, if Burrows is speaker, is it either gets blocked and never reaches the floor or it gets watered down substantially,” says Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.

Texas’ legislative sessions only come about every other year and are typically short. Next year’s session is likely to revolve around a lot of hot-button issues, including school vouchers and transgender rights. Meanwhile, the Legislature will face pressure to deal with the consequences of the state’s rapid demographic and economic growth. Texas’ population has grown substantially during every decade of its history. Recent growth has put pressure on the state’s transportation network and especially on its water resources. The Legislature recently approved $1 billion for a new water fund, even as experts estimate it will need many times that amount to fix aging water infrastructure. Party leaders will have to determine how to balance the “red meat” culture-war battles that energize the Republican base with the less headline-grabbing needs of the nation’s second-biggest state.

According to state Rep. Tom Oliverson, chair of the House Republican caucus, security enforcement on the Mexican border is still the party’s top priority. State spending on border enforcement has exploded in the last decade, and state lawmakers are hoping that the federal government will pick up some of the slack under a second Trump administration. “That’s the federal government’s job to do,” Oliverson says.

Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick have signaled that school vouchers are their top priority, hoping to create programs that help students move between public schools or use taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition or other education expenses. And state lawmakers also want to tighten restrictions around voting, clamp down on “inappropriate content being shown to minors and grooming behavior in books,” improve the reliability of the electricity grid, and end taxpayer-funded lobbying, Oliverson says. In the House, the GOP also wants to end the practice of appointing Democrats to chair some committees, a holdover from a time of more bipartisan cooperation. All of these priorities are a reflection of the electorate’s demands, Oliverson says.

“There’s an expectation that they want to see us pass all of them and not some of them,” he says. “Historically we’ve gotten most of them. I don’t know that we’ve ever gotten all of them.”

For Oliverson, the contested speaker race is a reflection of the changing politics of the House. Abbott targeted rural Republicans who had bucked his school voucher plan because they believed it would be bad for their districts. The result is that a new crop of even-more-conservative Republicans, solidly in favor of vouchers, has entered the House of Representatives. Most members now oppose Phelan, a leader they see as having failed to champion previous voucher efforts.

“[Phelan’s] allies are very, very bitter still about the fact that they got absolutely taken to the woodshed in the primaries,” Oliverson says. “The House is a different place. … We haven’t gotten to that kumbaya moment.”

Burrows would need support from Democrats to win the speakership. That would make it harder to push certain priorities, like ending Democratic committee chairs, and it would give Democrats more leverage in negotiations over school vouchers and other issues. If Cook wins the speaker contest, the path forward for Abbott’s agenda and other conservative legislation is much clearer.

“He’ll get school choice legislation. It’s just a question of how expansive it is,” Jones says. “That’ll depend a lot on what happens in the House.”

Democratic leaders are keenly aware of their limitations as a minority party. But they still see ways to influence various issues. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, says school vouchers are much less popular among the electorate than they are with Republican elected officials. And he believes Patrick’s recent push to ban all forms of THC in the state could create a popular backlash that might complicate the rest of the party’s agenda. “I think there’s a real chance we’re gonna kill this [voucher] thing unless it’s extremely limited,” Wu says.

Senate Democrats, who are much more outnumbered than House Democrats, are less sanguine about the prospects of stopping the voucher plan altogether. But they’re hoping to push for greater accountability for private schools that receive vouchers and for more funding for public schools. They say they want to avoid what’s happened in places like Arizona, where voucher policies have caused major budget problems. But they know their leverage is small, and it’s been a long time since the political winds shifted in their favor.

“In a lot of ways,” says James Henson, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, “Republicans [in Texas] have no one left to fight with but themselves.”