Texas First Pledge Signer Rhonda Ward Named Texas GOP Political Director

Rhonda Ward will run the Republican Party of Texas’s statewide political operations. The party announced her appointment as political director on August 7. The job puts her over candidate support, grassroots mobilization, and election strategy, the machinery that decides which candidates the party helps and how.

Ward is also on the Texas First Pledge roster. She signed it on May 18, 2024, putting on the record a commitment to let Texans vote on their own independence. A Pledge signer now holds one of the party’s central political jobs.

The Texas First Pledge is a public commitment to put Texas first and to support legislation calling a referendum on Texas independence, in every term a signer holds an office, until Texans get that vote. A party staff post is not an office, and it casts no vote in the Legislature. The Pledge hands Ward no duty in this job. What it establishes is a matter of record, where she stood before the party handed her the role.

Ward is an eighth-generation Texan from Nacogdoches, a former member of the State Republican Executive Committee, and a past candidate for the Texas Senate who ran in District 3 this cycle. None of that is an endorsement, and the Pledge is not one either. It is issue advocacy run by the Texas Nationalist Movement, and a signature is not a seat, and it is not a membership or a declaration.

She is not the only signer in the party’s leadership. Chair D’rinda Randall signed the Pledge in May 2024, and Vice Chair David Covey signed in October 2022. Ward’s appointment adds a signer to the paid staff that runs the party’s political work.

A political director does not carry legislation, and Ward’s new job will not put a referendum on any ballot. What her signature keeps in plain view is simpler and harder to walk back: one more person who runs Republican politics in Texas has said, in writing, that whether Texas stays or goes is a question for Texas voters to answer.