This Is Our Time

On November 7, 1835, the delegates to the Consultation at San Felipe sat down to decide what Texas was fighting for. By a vote of 33 to 14, they chose to stay in Mexico and fight for the federal Constitution of 1824. Six weeks later, on December 20, 91 men at Goliad signed a declaration of independence anyway. The General Council called it "inconsiderately adopted" and filed it away.

Stephen F. Austin had been arrested in January 1834 for carrying Texas's petitions to the capital and was held in Mexico until an amnesty in July 1835. He had been the most careful man in Texas, and for years he argued against breaking away. By January of 1836 he was writing from New Orleans and urging an immediate declaration of independence. On March 2, the Convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos made it unanimous.

It took Texians approximately four months to go from loyal federalists to an independent people. What changed was not their character. The arrangement they had been loyal to stopped working, and once enough of them saw it, the question was settled faster than anyone at San Felipe would have believed.

I've been thinking about those four months since Tuesday night.

What happened Tuesday

Democrats won both houses of Congress. In Texas they won every statewide race on the ballot, from governor and lieutenant governor to the Railroad Commission. In the unofficial count, the Texas House leans 84 to 66 Democratic, and 15 sitting members trail. The Senate looks to stay Republican, 19 to 12.

I know how a lot of our people woke up Wednesday morning. Some have already written to me, and many are asking the question I expected: how are we going to TEXIT with the Democrats in charge?

I understand the question. However, the answer depends on what Tuesday actually decided, and when I go through it race by race, I believe no organization in Texas comes out of this election in a better position to do what it exists to do than the Texas Nationalist Movement.

Texans did not vote against independence

Independence was not on the ballot Tuesday. The Texas First Pledge was, in 28 races, and it carried no penalty.

Every pledge signer running for re-election to the Texas House leads in the unofficial count. There are nine of them: Brent Money, Janis Holt, AJ Louderback, Wes Virdell, Keresa Richardson, Shelley Luther, Andy Hopper, Mitch Little and David Lowe. On the same night, 15 incumbents who never signed it fell behind. Where we can measure it cleanly, signers ran within a tenth of a point of their own party's ticket. In short, putting Texas first cost them nothing.

More than 4.3 million Texans voted for a candidate who signed the pledge. Those Texans did not vote for independence, and I will not claim they did. Yet nobody who signed a public promise to put Texas first paid for it at the polls, in a year when plenty of people who made no such promise lost.

This movement is bigger than their margins

As of Wednesday morning, the Texas Nationalist Movement has more than 700,000 registered supporters. In the unofficial count, 17 of the 18 statewide races on Tuesday's ballot were decided by fewer votes than that. Gina Hinojosa won the governor's race by 682,984 votes. Vikki Goodwin won the lieutenant governor's race by 582,669.

The House races are closer still. In at least 13 Texas House districts with every precinct counted, the winner's margin was smaller than the number of registered TNM supporters who live in the district. In House District 61, the margin was 134 votes, and approximately 1,800 TNM supporters live there. In District 26 it was 135 votes, with about 2,300 supporters. In District 14 it was 315, with about 4,200.

Our supporters did not vote as a bloc on Tuesday, and nobody expected them to. They are spread across both parties and every line of the ballot, which is how it should be in a movement that takes no side between them. Now consider what those numbers mean once those same people are organized. A movement with more supporters than the governor's margin of victory is a force every officeholder in Texas has to reckon with, statewide and in district after district. Yet that is true only if our supporters know each other, are connected in their own counties, and show up together when it counts.

Today, many of those 700,000 Texans have never met another supporter in their own district. Changing that is the work in front of us. When 1,800 people in House District 61 call their representative about the same bill in the same week, that member will notice, whichever party they belong to. Multiply that by 150 House districts and 31 Senate districts, and you have the strongest organized force for self-government Texas has seen since 1836.

The majority that buried our bill is gone

We have been asking Austin for a vote since this movement was founded in 2005. For most of those years the answer was silence. When a referendum bill was finally filed, it went nowhere, and the record shows why.

In 2021, Representative Kyle Biedermann filed HB 1359. Speaker Dade Phelan sent it to the House State Affairs Committee, chaired by Chris Paddie, and it died there without a hearing. In 2023, HB 3596 went to the same committee, now chaired by Todd Hunter, under the same Speaker, and it died the same way. Nobody voted it down, because nobody ever let it come up. By 2023 the governing party's own state platform called for letting Texans vote on independence, and its leadership in the House still would not give the bill a single public hearing.

The leaders who made those decisions were chosen by a House majority that has held power since 2003. As of Tuesday, if the count holds, that majority no longer exists. On January 12, 2027, a new majority will elect a Speaker, and that Speaker will name the chairs. In the Senate, the lieutenant governor's power over committees and referrals comes mostly from rules the senators adopt on the first day, and with a Republican Senate and a Democratic lieutenant governor, those rules are in play.

None of that guarantees a hearing. Frankly, there is no way to know yet what the new leadership will do. Yet for the first time since a referendum bill was written, the answer is not already decided.

The new majority's own voters are with us

In June of 2022, SurveyUSA asked 625 Texas adults whether they would support Texas peacefully becoming independent. The question even tied it to "other conservative states," which is not how we would ever word it. Even so, 54 percent of Texas Democrats said yes. So did 73 percent of Republicans and a majority of independents.

That poll is four years old, and I would like a newer one, which is why we are working to field one before the session opens. Still, it shows something the people writing our obituary this week have missed. The idea that Texans should decide their own future does not belong to one party, and the people who just took over Austin answer to voters who, by a majority, said yes to independence.

Texas has no citizen initiative. Only the Legislature can put a question to the voters, and it has done so by ordinary statute before. Our bill needs a simple majority in each chamber. With the House leaning one way and the Senate the other, it will need members of both parties. That suits a movement that has never belonged to either one. Our ask of every candidate for Speaker, and of whoever ends up with referral power in the Senate, is the same: send the bill to a committee that will hear it, give it a public hearing, and give it a vote.

"But Texas is turning blue"

Some of our own people will argue that a Texas trending Democratic is a reason to stop, because an independent Texas might not govern the way they want.

Independence settles who decides, not who wins. On Tuesday, Texans changed their state government in a single night, and they can change it again at the next election. A Texan's vote is one among about 31 million in Austin and one among about 340 million in Washington, and the decisions that matter most to Texas families are being made where a Texan's vote counts least.

Consider what did not change Tuesday. The federal debt stood at $40,502,080,966,097 on November 2, and nothing that happened Tuesday moved it a dollar. In the fiscal year that ended September 30, Washington spent $1.052 trillion on interest, about $87 billion more than it spent on defense. The trustees say Social Security's retirement fund runs dry in late 2032, and that benefits are cut 22 percent automatically the day it does. Washington is now divided until January 2029. The last time a divided Washington passed a deal that actually addressed Social Security's solvency was 1983.

Every Texan has now watched their side lose power within two years. In 2024 it was Democrats who lost Washington, and this week Republicans lost Congress and Austin both. Any plan for protecting Texas that depends on one party winning the next election has now been tested from both directions, and it failed both times. Independence does not have to be won again every two years.

Movements grow after shocks, not before them

On September 18, 2014, Scotland voted against independence. That afternoon, the Scottish National Party had 25,642 members. Four days later it had 47,746. By November 22 it had passed 90,000. The movement lost the vote and nearly doubled in a weekend, because its supporters joined instead of going home.

In 2022, Quebec's Parti Quebecois was down to three seats, and plenty of people declared Quebec sovereignty finished. On October 5 of this year, the PQ won the election and formed a government committed to a referendum. In May, Wales elected an independence party to lead its government for the first time, and the party that had been the largest in the Senedd for its entire history fell to nine seats.

There is a warning in the Scottish story as well. Years later, SNP membership fell by roughly 40 percent, and the reason was not a lost vote. Members left when the party stopped showing them a path forward. We're not going to make that mistake, because our path has dates on it.

What comes next

Prefiling for the 90th Legislature opens Monday, November 9. The session opens January 12. The bill we will ask the Legislature to pass sets the vote for November 2027.

Between now and then, I am asking two things of every one of you, and neither of them is to wait. First, if you have not made your Declaration, make it this week, since it is free and takes a minute. Second, get connected with the TNM supporters in your county and your district, then find out who will represent you in Austin in January, whether you voted for them or not, and tell them together that you want the bill heard. Many of them are new, and many of them have never been asked. When you make that call or that visit, take someone with you, preferably a neighbor who did not vote the way you did on Tuesday.

In 1835 the Texians who wanted independence were outvoted 33 to 14, and the declaration at Goliad was filed away as an embarrassment. Four months later, the whole Convention declared Texas independent. They did not wait for the right party to come to power in Mexico City, and we are not going to wait for the right party to come to power in Washington or in Austin.

Prefiling opens Monday. Let's go to work.