Texas Nationalist Movement Passes 700,000 Registered Supporters

The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) passed 700,000 registered supporters on Friday, according to the organization’s official count, with supporters in all 254 Texas counties.

The milestone arrives four days before the November 3 election. TNM’s current petition, Let Texas Decide, calls on lawmakers to put independence on the ballot.

TNM was founded in 2005. Its mission statement, adopted that year and unchanged since, is “to secure and protect the political, cultural and economic independence of the nation of Texas and to restore and protect a constitutional Republic and the inherent rights of the people of Texas.”

“We are closer than we have ever been,” TNM President Daniel Miller wrote in his letter on the organization’s website. “There is a bill to put independence on the ballot, a plank in the platform of the dominant party in this state, and Texans organizing county by county across all 254 of them.”

Miller’s letter says the movement has put the question of Texas independence “to hundreds of thousands of Texans” and carried it “from the edge of the conversation into the center of it.” He wrote, “We did it by being right on the facts and refusing to go away.”

From supporters to officeholders

The supporter count is one of several measures TNM publishes. The organization reports 6,654 public events. As of Friday, 264 officials and candidates had signed the Texas First Pledge, including 27 who hold public office and 30 who appear on the November ballot.

The pledge is permanent, and it is not an endorsement. It is a standing commitment by officials and candidates to defend the right of Texans to govern themselves.

In the March Republican primary, more than 1.6 million Texans voted for candidates who had signed the pledge, roughly three of every four primary voters, TNM reported at the time.

“The people of Texas keep saying the same thing at the ballot box,” Miller said then. “They want the right to decide their own future.”

The party and the bill

The Republican Party of Texas has carried independence planks across four consecutive conventions, according to TNM. A plank affirming the right to leave passed with 93 percent of delegates in 2020. Delegates adopted a call for a referendum in 2022 and reaffirmed it in 2024 and 2026. TNM also reports that the Libertarian Party of Texas has formed a TEXIT caucus.

The Texas Independence Referendum Act, the bill written to put the question to voters, was filed in 2021 as House Bill 1359, and a revised version was filed in 2023 as House Bill 3596.

A SurveyUSA poll in July 2022 found that 66 percent of likely Texas voters would vote yes in an independence referendum.

This fall’s launches

The count passed 700,000 during a run of new TNM programs. On September 1 the Partisan reported that the movement had published a free, 34-lesson course in Texas civics on the TNM Academy, open to anyone, with about nine hours of study built from primary sources.

In October, TNM opened buyTexian, a free directory of Texas businesses whose owners support independence and have taken the Declaration. It launched TEXIT Party, a free kit for Texans who want to host a house party about independence. “All it takes is a host and a table,” Miller said.

On October 13, its education affiliate, TNM Education, launched tnmeducation.org, a free public site for the record of Texas.

The next session

The Legislature convenes January 12, 2027. The Let Texas Decide petition asks it for one thing when it does: put Texas independence before the people of Texas.