Petition First, President Never: A Late-Night Plan to Force the Texit Question onto the Ballot

Daniel Miller poured a cup and ran a free-form Q&A on the state of the fight, and the through-line was a single tactical bet. The Movement made a promise at the start of the 2021 legislative session: give Texans a referendum, or face a referendum on the legislators themselves. With the session over and no binding vote secured, Miller laid out how the Texas Nationalist Movement intends to make good on both halves of that threat at once.

The first half is a petition. Reaching back to a play the Movement ran in 2015, Miller explained a little-known provision of the Texas Election Code that lets citizens place a non-binding question on an official primary ballot. The ask is blunt: do you support the State of Texas reasserting its status as an independent nation. The catch is the work. This is a physical paper petition, notarized and verified, not an email blast, and it takes north of 80,000 valid signatures gathered inside a 180-day window that closes alongside the candidate filing deadline on December 13. The plan calls for a thousand certified petition circulators by the end of July. At the time of the stream, roughly 200 had signed on.

The second half is candidates. Every legislator who refused to sign onto House Bill 1359 is now fair game for a primary or general-election challenger, and Miller was emphatic that the Movement will only slate and endorse candidates who are actual members, citing accountability after being, in his word, buffaloed too many times. He answered the impatience in the chat with a redistricting reality check: with the census data delayed, new maps will not even exist until a special session expected in September, those maps will draw an immediate court challenge, and filing windows and the March primary could slide as late as June or July, exactly as happened during his own 2012 House run. He also weighed an Article 3, Section 28 challenge, the constitutional argument that redistricting must happen in a regular session, as a tool to blow up heinous maps if the establishment plays games.

Along the way he defended the single-issue-voter label by pointing to Article 1, Section 2 of the Texas Constitution: if an official will deny the people their inalienable right to alter their government, he will not be trusted on anything else. He also recapped the trip he and executive director Nate Smith took to PorcFest in New Hampshire, where he joined a panel with CalExit’s Marcus Ruiz Evans and New Hampshire independence organizers, and reflected on reviving the cross-movement summit work he began years ago with the late Vermont independence scholar Dr. Thomas Naylor.

Questions answered in this episode

• What exactly is the new petition, and how does it differ from a binding referendum or House Bill 1359?
• How do I sign, where do I find a circulator, and does it cost anything to sign?
• Is there a deadline for the petition, and how does the 180-day collection window work?
• Will the Texit question appear on the 2022 midterm ballot or as some kind of referendum?
• What is the redistricting timeline, and why can’t candidates know their districts yet?
• Will the Movement vet and run candidates against statewide officials, and which incumbents are safe?
• How does Article 3, Section 28 of the Texas Constitution affect the redistricting maps?
• Are there petition-signing events and circulators in my area, and how do I find them?
• Why is being a single-issue voter the right posture toward these legislators?
• If Texas becomes independent, should Donald Trump be its president?
• Will Daniel Miller run for president or another office after independence, and what role would he want?
• How do district directors, local coordinators, and meetups actually get organized?
• Will these late-night coffee talks become a regular show?