Highlights
James Dickey of Travis County and Rick Figueroa of Brenham are rivals in a tight race for Texas GOP chair.
Dickey was opposed to Donald Trump before Trump received the party’s nomination in July.
Figueroa would be the first Hispanic to lead the Texas Republican Party.
The first is the improbable and embarrassing loss of his chairmanship in the March 2016 Republican primary to Robert Morrow, an exotically fringe political player on the Austin scene who wore a jester’s hat throughout his short reign before Dickey reclaimed the gavel.
The second was his participation in an effort before last July’s Republican National Convention to “free the delegates” and block the nomination of Donald Trump. In a letter co-written with three other Texas delegates, Dickey warned that Trump “does not share our conservative values and will lose to Hillary Clinton in a landslide that will debilitate the Republican Party for a generation.”
But on the eve of the showdown with Rick Figueroa, a Trump supporter of long standing who could become the first Hispanic to lead the Texas GOP, Dickey is raising Trump-based questions of his own.
Dickey’s campaign has questioned Figueroa’s criticism of a Trump immigration speech last August, saying it might have hurt Trump more than anything Dickey did, and has cast doubt on whether Figueroa’s views on immigration are compatible with the hard-line approach of Trump and the Republican Party’s 2016 platform.
As for his pre-convention critique of Trump, Dickey offered a simple mea culpa at a Williamson County forum Thursday night in Round Rock: “The bottom line is I’ve never been so glad to be wrong in my life. President Trump has turned out great.”
Saturday’s vote might be close.
Mechler, who succeeded Steve Munisteri as state party chairman in 2015, has presided over a divided state GOP executive committee — made up of one man and one woman from each of the state’s 31 senatorial districts — where he is sometimes the tie-breaking vote. Mechler has gained the ire of tea party members who say the state party hasn’t worked hard enough to persuade the Legislature to push issues enshrined in the state GOP platform.
Tea party leaders have lined up behind Dickey, who was a co-founder in 2008 of the Dallas Tea Party before he moved to Austin.
Mechler has made plain his preference for Figueroa, whom he appears to have been grooming for the job. Ten months ago, Mechler named Figueroa co-chair of the Republican Party of Texas’ New Leaders on the Rise Committee, and the two have been crisscrossing the state on a Republican Party of Texas Hispanic Engagement Listening Tour in recent months.
Dickey said he thinks Mechler, who resigned two weeks ago, might have called the election on short notice in hopes that a strong alternative to Figueroa wouldn’t emerge. But Dickey got in quickly and established a slick and efficient campaign, and he has some critical advantages.
He is a far more familiar figure to the members of the executive committee, and he’s more deeply knowledgeable about party rules and party politics. His supporters view him as someone who has paid his dues and would follow the committee’s lead rather than try to lead it where he wants to go.
While naming a Hispanic chair might seem a potent symbol, many Republicans bristle at anything they think smacks of pandering. Figueroa, who has a ranch in Brenham, hasn’t explicitly played that hand, talking instead, like Mechler, about the pressing need for the Texas Republican Party to look more like a changing state.
“As the demographics continue to change, our state will soon have a majority-minority voting age population. If we do not continue to make efforts to engage in the diverse communities across Texas, our state will turn blue,” Mechler wrote in his letter of resignation. “If we do not engage in the diverse communities across Texas, we will lose the state, then the nation, and there may be no coming back.”
Thursday night, Figueroa said Mechler “planted a lot of great seeds” that he, as chairman, would hope “to harvest.”
Michael McCloskey, the committee member from Cedar Park who questioned both candidates Thursday, asked Figueroa about some criticism he tweeted last summer about Trump’s immigration speech in Phoenix, which was notable for its harsh tone, with Trump saying, “Anyone who is in the United States illegally is subject to deportation.”
In those tweets Figueroa said, “I am very disappointed in Mr. Trump’s immigration speech,” and expressed his regret that Trump had ignored the “wise counsel” being offered by his Hispanic supporters.
“It was a leadership mistake. It was a political mistake. It was a moral mistake,” Figueroa tweeted.
The speech led some members of Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Committee to quit in protest, but not Figueroa, who said, “With all his flaws, Mr. Trump is still a better choice than Hillary Clinton.”
On Thursday, Figueroa noted that he had just recently visited with Trump at the White House as part of the president’s National Coalition of Hispanic Leaders.
But Dickey said Figueroa’s criticism of Trump during the do-or-die general election campaign was a greater breach of loyalty than his own pre-convention doubts about Trump.
And, in a post this week on the race for chairman, Austin political consultant Matt Mackowiak, a Dickey ally who serves as executive vice president of the Travis County Republican Party, went further, suggesting that Figueroa’s “many statements about immigration raise questions about whether he can put aside his personal views and effectively and actively promote the platform of our party, and especially the key immigration planks.”
“His strong criticism of our then-nominee Donald Trump’s immigration speech last September showed a fundamental disagreement with the Republican Party of Texas’s fundamental core position on this top policy issue,” Mackowiak wrote. “That was just 9 months ago. His view, which sounded more like John McCain or Lindsey Graham, was diametrically opposed to our Party. Is this what a potential Chairman Figueroa will try to do to our platform? How will each SREC member explain that to their district Republicans?”
But Mackowiak, who would likely be a close adviser if Dickey were to become state party chair, has his own history of strongly criticizing Trump.
On election night, when it appeared Trump was losing, he went on a Twitter tirade telling Trump, “the lede of your NYT obituary will be that you are a loser, losing the most unlosable election in modern American history.”
He has since deleted the tweets and apologized.
