The Year the Establishment Could Not Ignore: 2022 in Review and the 2023 Fight Ahead

For the last Late Night Coffee Talk of 2022, Daniel Miller poured a cup and walked through a year that moved so fast he had to reconstruct the list of what happened in it. What came back was a year he called one of the most pivotal in the history of the Texas movement. The TNM spent the first two months still on the campaign trail. Miller had run for lieutenant governor and finished second to Dan Patrick, while three of the four Republican candidates for governor and well over 100 candidates and officeholders, down to the county level, signed the Texas First Pledge. That wall of signatures, he said, is what floored the Dallas Morning News and a press corps that had been pretending TEXIT was not happening under its nose.

The wins kept stacking. At the Republican Party of Texas convention, nearly 90 percent of delegates put two state-sovereignty planks on the platform, one of them demanding the legislature pass a vote in 2023. The SurveyUSA poll showed 66 percent of likely Texas voters, and 74 percent of Republicans, want a referendum on independence. The back half of the year brought a surge of new local groups, the Catalyst campaign, an Edwards County resolution calling for secession on the ballot, and a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for branding the TNM dangerous. The opposition, Miller argued, does not melt down over a movement going nowhere, and they are melting down.

Then he turned to 2023 and the Texas Independence Referendum Act, the bill that would put the question on the November ballot. The draft had gone to Legislative Council and not yet returned in fileable form, the session was days away, and House committees would not be seated until late January. His ask was blunt and repeated: download the bill at tnm.me, register as a supporter, get into Outreach, and pressure legislators now, because by his own account they are not hearing from supporters nearly enough. He closed by recognizing the years top recruiters, led by Cypress coordinator Chris Powell at 260 supporters connected.