On the Road in Waco: A Brutal Campaign Week, a Lost Brother, and Abbott’s First Surrogate

Daniel Miller ran this coffee talk solo from Waco, off the road and out of his office, with Kara out sick and the chat scrolling like a slot machine. What followed was a raw decompress from one of the hardest weeks of the campaign so far. He recapped a punishing run of candidate forums in his bid for lieutenant governor: the Texas Republican Assembly endorsement convention, where only he and one other candidate bothered to show up and where he is convinced he took a majority of the delegates and denied Dan Patrick the endorsement outright by holding him under the two-thirds threshold. He recounted fastballing it across the state to Bastrop, to a Vanzant County forum in Canton billed as a debate, and to a Waco meet-and-greet where he ran into his first Greg Abbott surrogate in the wild.

That surrogate turned out to be Mike McCloskey, a former member of the State Republican Executive Committee who once called the TEXIT referendum question un-American and then went quiet when Miller challenged him to a debate. Now, Miller said, McCloskey is on stage insisting Abbott has secured the border and the wall is built. Miller was blunt about the mental gymnastics that takes, and just as blunt about the legislative priorities that never got done: constitutional carry, banning taxpayer-funded lobbying, ending gender modification of minors, and monument protection.

The night carried real grief. Don Tier, the TNM’s former field director and a steadfast member since 2012, had just passed. Miller, who calls himself the last living founder of the organization, spoke about what it costs to lose people who poured their hearts into Texas independence before they get to see the finish line. He named the others he has lost, including his own father, and framed the work as a promise to the people who will not be here to taste it.

Questions answered in this episode

• If property taxes are immoral, why talk about relief instead of abolishing them, and what would replace the revenue without a state income tax?
• Will the Texas independence referendum question be on the March 1 primary ballot?
• Has the legislature revoked Greg Abbott’s emergency powers yet?
• Would a Republican red wave in 2022 halt Texas independence, or is TEXIT now a necessity for Texas?
• What is the real effect of Brexit on the British economy, and what does it tell us about the doom-and-gloom predictions?
• How do you answer the claim that the TNM is built on Civil War nostalgia and is just a Southern League?
• If the United States keeps D.C. and Puerto Rico, would Texas just leave?
• In an independent Texas, what is your stance on private for-profit prisons?
• How do you feel about the Chinese land grab and foreign ownership of strategic Texas assets?
• Will TNM supporters be at the Trump rally in Conroe, given Trump’s endorsements of Abbott and Patrick?
• What should we make of the Canadian trucker convoy and the vaccine mandates driving it?