On the Friday before the Texas primary election day (with early voting all but over), Donald Trump visited Corpus Christi and—among other things—dished out a long list of last-minute endorsements for his preferred GOP candidates mired in competitive races. 

One surprising name on that list was Sid Miller. Surprising because one would have expected Trump to throw his weight behind Miller, the bombastic Texas Agriculture Commissioner and one of the president’s most steadfast champions in the state (Trump once called him his “man in Texas”), much sooner. For months, Miller had found himself as something of an underdog in the toughest primary fight of his career, up against a strong challenger fully backed by his powerful political nemesis, Governor Greg Abbott. 

Nevertheless, Miller tried to squeeze all the juice from that endorsement that he could in the final stretch before Tuesday, saying it was proof that Republicans simply need to “Stick with Sid.” 

But early Tuesday night, it was clear that this was all too little, too late. Miller was getting his cattle rousted by his challenger, Nate Sheets, a businessman who purveys a successful line of honey products. 

As of 11:00 pm, Sheets was beating Miller by 5 points. Sheets declared victory—as did Abbott.

Miller’s apparent defeat marks one of the very rare instances of a statewide executive-branch Republican incumbent getting toppled in a Texas primary. Apart from an upset defeat of one-term Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton back in 2020, the last time an incumbent lost was back in 2014 when tea-party insurgent state Senator Dan Patrick toppled his weakened boss, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. 

That Trump’s endorsement only came in at the last second for Miller wasn’t the first sign that the rancher and former rodeo roper from Stephenville was in trouble. In recent sessions, he’d allegedly found himself at increasing odds with Republican leaders in the Legislature—seeing his authority at the Ag Department clawed back. 

He’s also been in a bit of a political cold war with Abbott since at least 2020, when he joined a lawsuit against the governor over his COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and briefly considered waging a primary challenge against him in 2022—and took shots at Abbott over the governor’s handling of the power grid and decision to initiate state inspections of trucks at the U.S.-Mexico border, among other things.

Heading into his bid for reelection to his fourth term as Texas’ top ag man, Miller seemed unbothered by the threat posed by Sheets—who has billed himself on his campaign website as a “veteran, agriculture entrepreneur, family man, and Trump conservative.” 

Miller said: “Texas is littered with the political bodies of my previous opponents.” That’s perhaps a bit of an overstatement—but he did beat his last primary challenger, conservative state Representative James White by nearly 30 points in 2022. His opponent this time around was surely no match either—Miller said Sheets had “never milked a cow, sheared a sheep, or shod a horse.” 

And it’s not like Miller hasn’t had any vulnerabilities. In his second term in office, Miller’s political consultant was indicted for bribery for trying to sell hemp licenses that were controlled by Miller’s office. (The ag commish was never implicated himself, but he did later hire the consultant on as the agency’s chief of staff.)

When Abbott announced his endorsement of Sheets, he zeroed in on Miller’s ethics concerns. “Texans deserve an Agriculture Commissioner who is focused on promoting Texas Agriculture, with zero tolerance for criminality,” Abbott said. “Nate Sheets is the true conservative champion for the job and is the leader we need to keep Texas the global powerhouse in agriculture.” 

Abbott also took aim at a vote Miller took well a quarter-century ago as a state representative in favor of the Texas Dream Act to provide in-state tuition for undocumented students. That law was killed, with Abbott’s approval, last year by a joint legal maneuver between the state and Trump’s DOJ. 

In the final stretch, Miller began to go scorched earth. Some of his allies created an opposition website dubbed “Soiled Sheets” that detailed Sheets’ professed struggles with marital fidelity, pornography, and alcohol. He also posted attacks on social media maligning the supposed purity of Sheets’ “raw” honey products—and more.  

“He is a grifter and a conman. His honey is fraud. His campaign is fraud,” Miller posted. “He has shown over and over again that he cannot be trusted with the truth so he must never be trusted with power.” 

In the end, however, it was Miller who appears to have electorally soiled himself. Thanks for the memories. 

The post Abbott-Endorsed Honey-Dealer Bids Sid Adieu appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On Tuesday night, a three-term Republican congressman dogged by an affair with a staffer who ended her life by self-immolation lived to fight another day against a gun-obsessed YouTuber who’s used his platform to make light of the Holocaust. Or is it the other around? Perhaps I should say that Brandon Herrera, “the AK guy” who’s in his second bid to unseat incumbent U.S. Representative Tony Gonzales after narrowly failing in 2024, is the one who’s lived to aim a possible death-blow at Gonzales in the May 26 runoffs.

Either way, the Texas GOP is clearly in fine shape. (Quico Canseco, who once represented an earlier version of the same congressional district, came in at single digits in the four-way primary Tuesday.)

Congressional District 23, a sprawling monstrosity from El Paso to San Antonio—60-percent Hispanic but plus-15 for Trump based on the 2024 results—was Texas’ swingiest U.S. House seat before the GOP redrew it firmly into their column. Gonzales, a Navy vet, has repped it since 2021. He very narrowly avoided defeat in a 2024 runoff with Herrera. Gonzales was running then without the endorsement of Donald Trump; the congressman had blasphemously voted for a commission to investigate January 6 (but, on the other hand, Herrera had mocked Barron Trump, so the then-ex-president stayed neutral). Gonzales had also dared to support a milquetoast piece of gun-related legislation following the school massacre in 2022 in Uvalde, which is in his district. 

This time around, Gonzales got the Trump nod back in December, which likely would’ve set him up for an easier go-round—until a truly disruptive scandal burst onto the primary scene. A cloud had hovered since last fall when Gonzales’ aide committed suicide and the right-wing outlet Current Revolt reported the congressman and she’d had an affair. But the issue seemed perhaps containable until last month when the San Antonio Express-News nailed the story down. The details of the aide’s death are horrifying, and I won’t recount them here—you can find them elsewhere if you need. In a recent social media thread, Trump declined to restate his endorsement of Gonzales, and a growing number of fellow House Republicans called for the latter’s resignation.

The supercharged scandal seemed to raise the possibility that Gonzales could now lose outright. That didn’t happen Tuesday, but he fell well short of 50 percent. Typically, Texas incumbents who are pushed into runoffs lose—the math is simple: 50-percent-plus-one didn’t want you the first time; why would they the second time? Gonzales bucked these odds once by a hair, but he faces new headwinds, to understate the matter. 

All of this raises the very bleak prospect that Herrera, a professional gun fanatic and gun-rights extremist, could come to represent Uvalde, home to the worst school shooting in state history—one that likely could have been prevented with a simple age-limit increase for weapons of war. We’re talking specifically here about a man who was praised by a mass shooter as recently as August in Minneapolis. 

Of course, there is another major political party in Texas, at least in theory and perhaps this year in reality. Despite the heavy Trump lean of the district, the state Democratic Party chair recently called it a “real opportunity for Democrats.” And if Texas Latinos are shifting back into the Democratic column, maybe it really is. (It probably won’t hurt that Texas Hispanic primary voters clearly broke for James Talarico at the top of the ballot and that Talarico prevailed.) 

In the 23rd’s Democratic primary, Katy Padilla Stout easily outpaced the pack of four candidates on Tuesday. As described in her Express-News endorsement, she is a former schoolteacher who’s served on the Bexar County Child Welfare Board and is a mom with four kids, two adopted through foster care. She told the paper’s editorial board she hoped to help build a middle class of “happy, healthy families.”

On her campaign site, she writes in her Gun Violence section: “As a mother, I can’t describe the pit in my stomach when I drop them off at school every morning, knowing that they are more at risk than I was growing up”—and she lists at least some basic firearm control measures.

Well, Amen to that.

The post In Battle for Shriveled Soul of GOP, Congressman and YouTuber Will Face Off Again (Again) appeared first on The Texas Observer.