The official Texas GOP Convention schedule did not make note of the event, but on Friday afternoon, the Log Cabin Republicans held a cocktail reception at the state party’s annual meetup. In a small room on the second floor of the Henry B. González Convention Center, in San Antonio, the pro-LGBTQ Republican group drew a modest crowd of around thirty attendees. One thirtysomething man, in business casual attire with slicked-back black hair, had flown in from Huntington Beach, California, and distributed rainbow wristbands displaying the group’s name. Matt Gaetz, the right-wing U.S. representative from Florida and the keynote speaker at a gala that night, fraternized with attendees and picked at pastries the group was serving. Though they had come to discuss GOP politics, the Log Cabin Republicans had been shunted away from their party mates, thousands of whom were meeting in a much larger exhibit hall downstairs to cast votes to decide the Texas GOP’s chairman. 

For the past two decades, the state party hasn’t allowed the Log Cabin Republicans to operate a booth at its convention, because some members are still openly hostile to LGBTQ rights (the Texas GOP’s platform in 2022 called homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice”). But even by the party’s standard, the votes taking place in the exhibit hall Friday promoted a highly curated vision of conservatism, one unallowing of minor differences. Under their former chairman, Matt Rinaldi, a pugnacious Dallas lawyer and former state legislator, the Texas GOP became an even smaller tent coalition: closed off—and oftentimes downright hostile—to GOP elected officials and groups it deemed to have fallen short of the party’s ideals. While chair, Rinaldi worked as an attorney for Farris Wilks, a billionaire oilman and prodigious right-wing political contributor, and used his position to bring the party in line with the politics shared by Wilks and Tim Dunn, another billionaire oilman and a Christian nationalist. Rinaldi’s party censured politicians who hadn’t given their full-throated support to whatever crusade du jour the right wing had embarked on. Rinaldi routinely amplified attacks over the last year against more moderate Republicans, including Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan and others who voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, and sought to have them deposed at the ballot box. 

“When they [the state party leaders] shrink the room, they can control the narrative,” one delegate at the Log Cabin meetup, who talked under the condition of anonymity to speak more freely, told me of the approach. 

By the time he announced in March that he wouldn’t seek reelection to lead the state GOP, Rinaldi had enjoyed electoral victories—extending Republicans’ run of dominance in statewide races to three decades—but the purity tests had harmed the party in other respects. The Texas GOP currently has only five employees on its payroll, compared to fifty at the same time in 2020. The GOP’s fund-raising has cratered, dropping last year to its lowest level since 2017, and the coffers have grown dependent on the contributions of the right-wing Defend Texas Liberty political action committee, which is funded primarily by Dunn and Wilks. During a scrum with reporters before the vote to replace Rinaldi, even U.S. senator John Cornyn expressed concern about the party’s dwindling finances. Given the warning signs, one might have expected the delegates to jump at the chance to change the leadership. 

The party faithful who showed up to vote—around 6,700 of the total 9,600 party delegates who attended the convention Friday—had other plans, however. While six candidates competed for the position, the delegates swiftly, and by a comfortable margin, elected a new chairman: Abraham George, the former leader of the GOP in Collin County, in the northern suburbs of Dallas. Some attendees of the convention I spoke with as they left the exhibit hall grumbled that the race was decided before it even started. The top three finishers in the first round of voting were not even allowed to make speeches before the final ballot, as they have in previous years. 

George, Rinaldi’s handpicked choice, shares many of his predecessor’s friends and echoes many of their talking points. Born in India, the 44-year-old moved to Texas when he was in high school and found his way into GOP circles in North Texas. A staunch defender of Paxton, George enjoys the attorney general’s support. Earlier this year, he ran for office against a foe of the attorney general, Candy Noble, who voted for impeachment, with the financial backing of Dunn and Wilks. His main pitch in the race was that he opposed the longtime practice in the Texas House of giving Democrats committee chairmanships—a hobbyhorse issue of the far right. His candidacy didn’t stick, and he lost by five percentage points. But what puts him too far right for the Texas electorate makes him fit right in with the current state party; indeed, George’s two most immediate predecessors, former Florida (congress)man Allen West and Rinaldi, also lost their most recent elections in the state. (West challenged governor Greg Abbott from the right in 2022 and was crushed in the primary; Rinaldi served two terms in a North Texas state House seat before losing his election in 2018 to a Democrat.)

“The likelihood is that the party will continue for the next two years on the same trajectory it’s been on,” said James Dickey, who led the state GOP from 2017 to 2020. “Unfortunately, that has included reductions in funding and stability of funding as the number of donors and the number of sponsors for the party dwindles significantly.”

In a prevote convention speech, George committed to his predecessor’s vision. He vowed to help lead the fight against “the Democrats, radicals, and RINOs [Republicans in name only].” George also said he believed in holding party members accountable for not being “real conservatives,” via censures, and was pleased the GOP chastised Phelan in February. “This is why people call me names, like far-right, ultra-MAGA, Trump hat–wearing supporter,” he said, to raucous applause. “I’m even called a white supremacist. . . . I want to bring the party to the next level.”

Other challengers flirted with extremist ideologies too—four of the six, including George, signed a pledge to support putting a nonbinding proposal for Texas to secede from the United States on the ballot—but among those who ran for chair, George was one of the most controversial. Last year, one of his children called law enforcement because, according to police, George was trying to leave his house with a loaded gun to confront a man he believed was having an affair with his wife. George, who did not respond to an interview request, issued a statement when this was first reported in March, accusing “activist media outlets and political opponents” of trying to smear him. 

While George’s coronation was the coup de grâce of the convention for the Dunn and Wilks faction of the GOP, the rest of the events also underscored the party’s drift rightward. Delegates had two separate opportunities, on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, to attend a meet and greet with Kyle Rittenhouse, the 21-year-old who became a cause célèbre on the right after he shot and killed two men and injured another at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. (Rittenhouse was cleared of murder charges the following year.) While the Log Cabin Republicans were banned from having a booth in the exhibit hall, attendees were treated to a litany of other vendors hawking swag. A woman selling MAGA T-shirts and mugs displayed a hologram projector, loaded with images of Trump, with a $25,000 price tag. The Texit movement, which pushes for Texas secession, had a booth in the room. So too did the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative anti-communist group founded in the late fifties that opposed the civil rights movement and went dormant for decades until recently reemerging to advocate for returning America to its so-called Christian foundations. (Its ideals, once seen as too fringe for the Republican Party, now align with those of the modern-day GOP.) 

Outside of voting for a chair, attendees also had the opportunity to debate the state GOP’s platform and rules—and much of the debate focused on pushing the party further toward the right. On Friday, as attendees took seats in the first-floor exhibit hall, literature rested atop their chairs encouraging them to “hear out” the case against in vitro fertilization (IVF). “God has ordained the act of conception to take place within the intimate, sexual, and bodily union of a husband and wife,” it read. “Because IVF is an artificial means of conception, there is a third party, introduced to the act of conception: the lab technician.” The brochure went on to compare the procedure—supported by nearly 90 percent of Americans, former president Donald Trump, and Senator Ted Cruz—to adultery. 

Later that afternoon, one delegate said she wanted to debate a party rule requiring that the executive committee have an even number of men and women. “As a party, we should be voting for . . . the best chair and vice chair, not necessarily the woman and a man,” she said. Her amendment failed. Then another delegate rose, proposing that the language be changed to “biological man” and “biological woman.” In an ensuing 25-minute debate, other delegates bickered over whether they were giving too much respect to trans Texans by even making the distinction. “Let’s just teach our children,” one man began, “ ‘This is what a man is. This is what a woman is,’ and leave it simple.”

In the evening, delegates debated whether to close Texas elections—restricting party primaries to voters who declare their allegiance to a particular party. Texas is one of fifteen states with open primaries, meaning that anyone eligible has the choice to vote in either primary, but many Republicans, including Rinaldi, have complained that this system allows Democrats to help elect more centrist conservatives. (There’s no evidence that this is true on a large scale.)  

But until Democrats show they can compete in general elections, the GOP, with George at the helm, will likely continue to drift rightward. Around when George won, Jason Vaughn, the former policy director for Texas Young Republicans who recently moved to Florida, noted the absurdity of the situation. “Imagine how embarrassing it must be to be a Texas Democrat and look [at] the Texas GOP convention,” he tweeted, “and realize that is who you lose to.”