Texas GOP Suffers Major Losses in Local Elections

Texas Republicans suffered a staggering defeat in Saturday’s municipal elections, with GOP-endorsed candidates losing races across the state—especially in traditionally conservative strongholds like Tarrant County.

In Tarrant, the largest Republican county in the United States, every single candidate endorsed by the county GOP—eleven in total—lost. All of these were nonpartisan races, but the endorsements were highly publicized, and Democrats and independents responded accordingly at the ballot box.

The results were just as clear in school board races across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, where candidates who supported school vouchers were rejected by voters in nearly every contest. The message from voters: hands off our public schools.

One Tarrant County Republican precinct chair, who requested anonymity, put it bluntly: “We got killed on Saturday. [Governor] Abbott’s school choice bill is killing us at the local level. People don’t want it.”

The comment refers to House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 2, which were recently passed by the Texas Legislature. The bills set aside $1 billion in taxpayer funds for a statewide school voucher program that would allow families to use public money to send their children to private schools. Notably, the program would be open not only to legal residents, but also to all 111,000 undocumented students currently enrolled in Texas K–12 schools—so long as they are under 21 and have not yet earned a high school diploma.

Despite strong backing from Governor Abbott and major Republican donors, the school voucher program has faced increasing opposition from local communities, especially in suburban and rural areas where public schools serve as the backbone of civic life.

Saturday’s election results may be the clearest signal yet that Republican voters are not on board with the state’s current direction on education policy—and that local races, even those that are nonpartisan, are now battlegrounds in the broader fight over Texas public education.