Daniel Miller spent this Late Night Coffee Talk drawing a hard line between the people who talk about Texas independence and the people who do the work to win it. Fresh off a weekend of leadership training in San Antonio, he tackled the critics who take pot shots at the TNM for “doing nothing,” and made the case that the movement’s progress was never magic. It was hard work, smart use of technology, and years of relentless on-the-ground organizing.
The numbers tell the story he keeps coming back to. In 2005, when the organization formed, support for independence polled in single digits because almost no Texan believed self-government was even possible. By 2020, 66 percent of likely voters said they would vote yes. Miller broke that down to a concrete figure: roughly 10 million Texans who already support the core mission and are simply waiting on someone to connect them to the movement. The goal now, he stressed, is not to convince but to find the convinced.
He laid out the four-stage strategy the TNM has run since 2005. Build capacity by connecting supporters to the organization, leverage that political capital to force a vote on Texas independence, mobilize those same people to win the referendum, then hold the line afterward so anti-independence politicians cannot unwind the result. Pointing to the United Kingdom and the Theresa May era as a cautionary tale, he warned that winning a vote is not the end of the fight. He also doubled down on his Twitter prediction that by the end of the year the TNM will field a larger ground organization than either the Texas GOP or the Texas Democratic Party, and set a target of 1,000 local groups across all 254 counties. His benchmark for the effort required: Beto O’Rourke’s campaign knocking a million doors in the shortest month of the year.
Questions answered in this episode
- Is the Texas GOP improving, perhaps more than the party at the federal level, and what should we make of the platform planks calling for a vote on independence?
- How would a Texas government handle licensing such as pilot certifications, amateur radio and ham licenses, and aircraft certification after independence?
- Does the TNM actually run radio ads, and what do they sound like?
- Should the TNM hold a full master class on how mass movements are built, from the ground up?
- Why does it matter to register supporters with the TNM specifically rather than just talk to people about independence?
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