The Red Wave That Wasn’t: A TEXIT Banner Over the Capitol and a Movement on the Move

Daniel Miller opens this Late Night Coffee Talk the day after the 2022 midterms, and his read on the results is blunt. The promised red wave never arrived. What landed instead was, at best, a thin margin and a little obstruction against more Biden policy. The deeper point is the one that matters to him: the election proved beyond doubt that there are entire states, and millions of people in them, who will never think the way Texans do. With John Fetterman headed to the Senate, Beto O’Rourke washed out for a third time, and a corruption-plagued Harris County leadership surviving intact, Miller argues both sides are now permanently entrenched. We are past the point of divergence, and there is no fixing Washington.

He recounts the message the movement sent to the Capitol on election day: a TEXIT banner flown over downtown Austin and I-35 during rush hour, a shot across the bow timed without any knowledge of how the races would break, because the movement was coming regardless. Miller ties this to House Bill 1359, the Texas Independence Referendum Act, whose final draft language is about to be released, and plays a clip of Chad Prather raising the bill on Glenn Beck’s show. He also surfaces old footage of Dade Phelan, now his own state representative after redistricting, saying he would not stand in the way of a vote if his constituents demanded one. The work now, Miller insists, is holding Texas First Pledge signers to their word and closing the knowledge gap among legislators one constituent conversation at a time.

Along the way he addresses the giveaway, the TNM Academy relaunch, billboards and radio ads going up, and the academic case for independence, citing a new book by a leading scholar on independence referenda and the historical odds: of 54 modern referenda of this style, 50 passed on the first ballot. He closes on a personal note about the pledge he made in 1996 and Sam Houston’s promise that Texas will again stand among the nations.