Dade Phelan, the former Texas House speaker who presided over a hard-right legislative agenda, delivered a scathing diagnosis of his own party in an interview published this week, saying Republican candidates across Texas are visibly rattled.
Phelan, who was branded a RINO, or Republican in Name Only, after helping lead the 2023 impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, sat down with Texas Monthly in Dallas during the Texas-Oklahoma football weekend, a big annual fundraising weekend for state lawmakers.
“It’s real,” Phelan said. “People are freaking out. You see it in their faces. There’s serious concern like I’ve never seen before.”
Phelan, a Beaumont Republican who isn’t running for another term, told the magazine that Texas-OU weekend lets lawmakers knock out a dozen or two donor events in an hour. “Especially this cycle, you need all the friends you can get,” he said.
His sharpest critique landed on the party’s advertising strategy in the Senate race, where Paxton faces surging Democratic state Rep. James Talarico. Talarico has consistently led Paxton in recent polling, Texas Monthly reported, in a state Donald Trump carried by nearly 14 points in 2024.
“We’re still running transgender ads. It’s just not resonating,” Phelan said. “$100 million in ads, $125 million in ads, and nothing’s moved the needle here in Texas in a month in the Senate race.”
He argued the issue misses swing voters entirely.
“The 8 to 10 percent of voters in the middle who are going to decide this election, when they hear stuff about boys in girls’ sports, they don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Meanwhile, Phelan said, Republicans are avoiding the issues voters actually care about.
“When people are spending $1,500, $2,000 a month on healthcare for their family, and we’re too afraid to even talk about healthcare, and we’re still talking about defund[ing] the police, which happened six years ago . . . I mean, we’ve got to catch up with the times,” he said.
He also said eight to 10 Republican state House seats could be at risk, with more within the margin of error, pointing to suburbs around Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio. “These suburbs are nasty. Nasty,” he said.
A Talarico win could make it worse, Phelan said. “And if Talarico wins this and gets the margin up to six or seven, it’s a bloodbath down [the] ballot. I don’t know how people survive.”
Phelan also accused Paxton of using against him “the exact same network of influencers” that he said targeted Talarico last week with the false claim that the Democrat was treated at a mental health clinic, a story that quickly fell apart.
He placed much of the blame for the party’s struggles at the top of the ticket.
“I’m not a Trump guy. Never have been a Trump guy,” Phelan said. “If I were running for election, I would be pushing back and calling out all of Trump’s mistakes.”
As for Paxton, Phelan said he is skipping the Senate race for now.
“There’s not a world in which I can vote for a Ken Paxton,” he said.