A decade ago, the Texas Nationalist Movement fell two votes short of bringing Texas independence to the floor of the Republican convention. At the 2026 convention, the independence planks the movement authored are in the platform; Texas First Pledge signers and registered supporters hold the chair, the vice chair, and at least 17 seats on the party’s governing committee; and the movement’s booth was one of the busiest in the hall. This is the full report on a convention ten years in the making.
Ten years ago, the Texas Nationalist Movement came to the Republican Party of Texas convention with independence resolutions from twenty-two county conventions behind it, and fell two votes short of getting the question onto the floor for a debate. The press treated it as a curiosity and the party establishment as a nuisance to manage.
This week, at the 2026 convention, no one fought over whether Texas independence would be heard. It is written into the platform, the people who now run the party have signed a pledge to the cause, and the movement’s booth was one of the busiest spots in the building. For the independence cause, the distance between 2016 and 2026 is the whole story, and what follows is the report on how far it ran.
The platform held: two planks, intact
Start with the platform, because that is where the headline news sits. The delegates kept both planks that the Texas Nationalist Movement wrote the language for, unchanged in their essentials.
The first is Plank 231, Texas Independence:
“The Texas Legislature should pass a bill in its next session requiring a referendum in the next General Election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation. This referendum should be a legislative priority.“
The phrase at its center, “reassert its status as an independent nation,” is the operative language of the Texas Independence Referendum Act, the model bill the TNM has pushed for years and seen filed in the Texas House in 2021 and again in 2023. It is the exact question that Bill would put before Texas voters, and the party left it word-for-word.
The second is Plank 21, State Sovereignty:
“Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated acts that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas shall be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified—by passing the Texas Sovereignty Act. Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto and pass the Texas Sovereignty Act.”
The delegates left every load-bearing piece of it in place: the finding that the federal government has impaired Texas self-government, the four verbs of defiance, the retained right to secede, and the call for a referendum. Read together, the two planks have the state’s governing party asking for a vote of the people on Texas reasserting its independence, in the exact words of the bill that would call that vote.
The movement, in office and on the floor
A platform states where a party stands. The offices and the floor are where you see who put it there, and on both counts the movement’s mark on this convention was unmistakable.
The delegates elected D’Rinda Randall as the new state chair and David Covey as vice chair, both of whom are signers of the Texas First Pledge. Randall won the chair outright, unseating the sitting chair in the Senate District caucus voting. The chair she replaced, Abraham George, is a pledge-signer himself, so the top of the Republican Party of Texas passed from one signer to another, with a signer alongside as second-in-command. On the State Republican Executive Committee, the sixty-two-member body that runs the party between conventions, at least seventeen of the incoming members are Texas First Pledge signers or registered supporters of the Texas Nationalist Movement. The committee that steers the party between conventions now seats a substantial independence bloc.
That strength showed up well before the gavel. Of the delegates the movement was able to identify heading into the convention, nearly one in ten were already registered TNM supporters, a level of reach into the party’s most active ranks that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. On the floor, the movement’s booth, number 724, was one of the most active in the exhibit hall, where at least a thousand delegates stopped to put their names to a pledge of support for the TNM’s planks, signing on in person, by the hundreds, to the idea that Texas should decide its own future.
None of that runs on its own. It runs on people, and the Texians who staffed the booth, worked the caucuses, and carried the case from one delegate to the next were the engine behind every one of these wins. The convention’s gains have a thousand quieter authors, and most of them were volunteers.
Ten years from two votes short
The contrast that opened this report deserves the full telling, because the ten-year arc is the strongest evidence of where this is headed.
In 2016, the movement arrived at the convention on the back of a years-long, county-by-county campaign. A petition drive had gathered more than 125,000 signatures and driven a surge in membership and web traffic, and a thirty-day tour in 2015 had carried the case through twenty-three Texas cities. By the time the convention opened, twenty-two county conventions had passed resolutions calling for a vote on Texas independence. And still, the push to bring it to the floor fell two votes short. Outlets from TIME to the Washington Post to the Texas Tribune covered it as a fringe spectacle that had been safely contained.
It did not stay contained. In 2020, a plank affirming Texas’s right to secede passed the convention with the overwhelming support of delegates. In 2022, the convention went further, adding a plank that called on the Legislature to pass a referendum and let the people vote, and that plank drew more delegate support than border security, election integrity, support for the armed forces, or the Convention of States. It was one of the most popular planks at the convention. In 2024, the delegates reaffirmed both planks, elevated the referendum to a stated legislative priority, and beat back an organized floor attempt to strip the language out. In 2026, they kept all of it.
Ten years took the movement from the edge of the room to the center of the platform of the largest state party in the United States, with that party’s own leadership pledged to the cause. It covered that ground the hard way, one county and one convention at a time.
What else the platform carries
The two planks calling for a vote are the headline, but they are not the whole of what the platform does for the independence cause. A long list of planks line up with the mission the Texas Nationalist Movement has pursued for two decades, and each is a tool the movement and its allies can carry into the 90th Legislature.
On the grid, the language is flat: “Texas Electric Grid shall remain independent from the United States power grid system.” That is a directive to keep the only major grid in the United States that already stands apart, and to harden it against foreign and cyber threats. On money, the platform moves to restore gold and silver as legal tender in Texans’ hands and to block a federal central bank digital currency from being forced on them. A people that controls its own money cannot be disciplined through someone else’s.
The platform’s land-and-resource planks set out to safeguard Texas’s finite resources, critical infrastructure, and private property against foreign influence and government overreach, in their own words, “to ensure long-term independence, affordability, and liberty for future generations.” They pair that with planks barring hostile foreign interests from Texas farmland and infrastructure, pushing in-state energy production, and asserting Texas authority over its own water and coastal resources. None of it starts from zero, which has always been the movement’s argument. Texas already runs its own power grid, its own National Guard, its own ports and pension funds, with an economy that would rank among the largest in the world on its own. These planks are about expanding that head start into the full capacity of a state that can stand on its own.
The platform reaches the machinery of self-government, too. It backs hand-marked paper ballots, precinct-level counting, and auditable results, which is exactly the groundwork a clean independence referendum would need, a vote whose outcome opponents could not litigate away. It affirms that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, the principle written into Article 1, Section 2 of the Texas Constitution, which holds that all political power is inherent in the people and that they keep at all times the right to alter, reform, or abolish their government. A referendum on independence is the right used, not invented.
And it does the cultural work. The platform calls for Texas schoolchildren to study Texas’s own founding record: the Texas Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, and William Barret Travis’s letters from the Alamo, the documents that made Texas a nation before it was ever a state. A people who know their own story understand why self-government belongs to them, and that has been this movement’s cultural argument from the start.
The Texas Sovereignty Act keeps moving
One more piece of convention news deserves attention, with clear eyes about its limits. The Texas Sovereignty Act, the mechanism that would let Texas review and refuse to enforce federal acts it judges unconstitutional, is the party’s preferred nullification tool, and unlike the referendum, it is already moving in the real world. In May 2025, a version of it passed the Texas House, the first time the bill cleared a chamber.
That is real movement, and it makes half the movement’s case. When the majority party in Texas formally commits to building a standing mechanism to resist federal law, the obvious question follows: why stay in a system Texas has to resist without end?
The movement’s answer has not changed, and the convention does not change it. Nullification is the right direction, but not far enough. Refusing federal acts one at a time is a permanent defensive crouch rather than an exit. The Texas Sovereignty Act lets Texas resist federal law, but it cannot put the question of independence to the people. Only a vote of the people settles that, and it is the one thing the Sovereignty Act cannot do, no matter how many chambers it clears.
The priorities, and what the planks actually do
A word about the party’s legislative priorities, because the mechanics are easy to misread. The party does not lobby its entire platform. It picks a short list of priorities, and the convention sets that list by vote: the eight priorities drawing the most delegate support become the official priorities for the coming session. A vote on independence was not among the eight this cycle.
That is worth understanding correctly, because it is not the setback the movement’s opponents would like it to be. A plank does not need priority status to do its work. The platform is the party’s stated conviction, and a plank carried by the delegates is the political and ideological mandate that tells a legislator they stand on solid ground when they file the bill, gives them cover to champion it, and turns any Republican who fights it into a member voting against the party’s own platform. The independence planks, and the long line of sovereignty, grid, election-integrity, and resource planks beside them, are the argument legislators will reach for in the 90th Legislature when they file and defend Texas-first bills. The priority list is one lever; the platform is the foundation the whole effort stands on.
The honest accounting
None of this is the finish line. These are the positions of the party’s delegates, the people who run its precincts and show up to its conventions, and they are not the same thing as a vote of every Texan. That vote is still ahead.
But what the movement has already done is the rarest thing in politics: it moved the Overton window on Texas independence. Ten years ago, a vote on independence could not survive a committee, let alone reach the floor. Today, it is the official, repeatedly reaffirmed position of the largest state party in the United States, with that party’s chair and vice chair pledged to it. That shift did not come from the political establishment having a change of heart. It came because the Texas Nationalist Movement spent two decades making the case, county by county and candidate by candidate, until the unspeakable became the official. The movement authored the independence language now in the platform, built the resolution pipeline that carried it from the grassroots to the floor, wrote the model bill the referendum plank points to, and put its people and its allies in the party’s highest offices. Strip the TNM out of the last twenty years, and none of it exists: no independence plank, no referendum language, no Texas First Pledge, no convention story to tell. That is a record, and it belongs to the movement and the Texians who built it.
The road to the vote
What remains is the hardest and most important part, turning a platform the party has adopted into a referendum the people of Texas actually vote on. The platform says, in writing, that the referendum should be a priority. The party’s own leadership is now pledged to the cause. The mandate exists. What it needs is a Legislature that acts on it, and a Legislature acts when the people behind a cause make themselves impossible to ignore.
That is where this comes back to you. The work of the convention was done by Texians who showed up, and the work ahead is the same work scaled up: enough Texans, declared and counted and refusing to be waved off, that no officeholder can pretend the demand is not real. The party has made its position clear, and the next move belongs to the people of Texas.
It asks for more than a rally or a slogan. It asks you to be counted among the Texians who intend to see this through.
