This is Texas now: While the Lone Star State has long been a stronghold of Republican politics, new laws and policies have pushed Texas further to the right in recent years than it has been in decades .
Elected officials and state political observers say a big factor in the transformation goes back to West Texas. Two billionaire oil and fracking magnates from the region, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have quietly bankrolled some of Texas’ most far-right political candidates, helping to reshape the state’s Republican Party in its worldview .
Over the past decade, Dunn and his wife, Terri, have contributed more than $18 million to state candidates and political action committees, while Wilks and his wife, Jo Ann, have given more than 11 million dollars, placing them among the state’s top donors.
Beneficiaries of the energy tycoons’ combined spending include far-right members of the Legislature and the authors of the most prominent conservative bills passed in recent years, according to a CNN analysis of Commission data of Texas Ethics. Dunn and Wilks also steer the state’s legislative agenda through a network of nonprofit and advocacy groups that push conservative policy issues.
Critics, and even some former associates, say Dunn and Wilks demand loyalty from the candidates they support, punishing even deeply conservative lawmakers who believe they are funding primary rivals. Kel Seliger, a longtime Republican state senator from Amarillo who has clashed with the billionaires, said their influence has made Austin feel a bit like Moscow.
“It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” Seliger said. “Really rich people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get politics done the way they want, and they get it.”
Dragged to the “far right”
Dunn and Wilks did not respond to repeated requests for comment. In previous interviews and op-eds, Dunn has argued that his political spending is focused on making Texas state government more accountable to its voters, while Wilks has described his donations as going to elect principled conservative leaders.
Former partners of Dunn and Wilks who spoke to CNN said the billionaires are particularly focused on education issues and that their ultimate goal is to replace public education with a private, Christian school. Wilks pastors the church his father founded, and Dunn preaches at the church his family attends. In their sermons, they paint the picture of a nation besieged by liberal ideas.
“The cornerstones of our government are crumbling and beginning to fall apart,” Wilks declared in a 2014 sermon at his island church, the 7th Day Assembly of Jehovah. “And it is because of the lack of morals, the lack of belief in our heavenly Father.”
The far-right shift in Texas has national implications: The candidates Dunn and Wilks have supported have turned the state legislature into a laboratory for far-right politics that is beginning to gain traction across the United States.
Dunn and Wilks have had less success in the 2022 primary than in recent years: Nearly every GOP lawmaker opposed by Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee funded primarily by the duo, won their primaries this spring and the group spent millions of dollars supporting a far-right challenger to Gov. Greg Abbott who lost by a wide margin.
But experts say the billionaires’ recent struggles are partly a symptom of their past success: Many of the candidates who are challenging from the right, from Abbott on down, have taken increasingly conservative positions, on issues from transgender rights to guns and voting.
“They dragged all the moderate candidates to the far right so they wouldn’t lose,” said Bud Kennedy, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper who has covered 18 sessions of the Texas Legislature.
“I don’t think ordinary Texans are as conservative as their elected officials,” Kennedy said. “The reason Texas has moved to the right is because there’s money in it.”
Political investments pay off
Over the past decade, many of the most conservative bills in the Texas Legislature, on issues from LGBT rights to guns to private school vouchers, were killed by the moderate Republicans who dominated the House. state That changed last year, thanks to people like Valoree Swanson.
Swanson was a Sunday school teacher and political activist when she challenged 14-year Republican incumbent Debbie Riddle in 2016 in a district covering Houston’s Republican-dominated northern suburbs.
Swanson, who ran to Riddle’s right, surprised political observers by outpacing the incumbent, an unusual feat for a first-time candidate. His top donor: Empower Texans, a political action committee created by Dunn and largely funded by him and Wilks. He defeated Riddle in the Republican primary by more than 10 percentage points and easily won the general election.
Last year, Swanson won a major legislative victory: She authored the Transgender Sports Bill, which prevents transgender students from playing on K-12 school sports teams that don’t align with their gender at birth While other bills on transgender issues had failed in previous years, the sports bill was passed by a legislature now firmly controlled by the right wing of the GOP after the former moderate speaker of the House retired. Observers saw it as a validation of the billionaires’ early investments in Swanson’s first campaign, which paid off years later.
“They are effectively investing their money and moving the political needle in Austin,” said Scott Braddock, the editor of the Quorum Report, a publication that has covered the Legislature for decades, referring to Dunn and Wilks. “These are extreme people who are investing a lot of money in our politics to reshape Texas to match their vision.”
Swanson is hardly out of the ordinary: All 18 current Republican members of the Texas Senate, and nearly half of the Republican members of the Texas House, have taken at least some money from Dunn, Wilks or organizations they fund. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton have also been major beneficiaries of billionaire spending.
Texas is one of 10 states that allow people to make unlimited contributions to state political candidates, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, giving Dunn and Wilks more influence than they might elsewhere in the country. While Dunn and Wilks focus on state politics, they have also been involved in national races. Wilks, his brother Dan and their wives were among the biggest donors to the super PACs that supported Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz in 2016, contributing a total of $15 million. And Dunn has given millions of dollars to super PACs supporting former President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in recent years.
In a statement to CNN, Cruz called the Wilks brothers “the epitome of the American dream” and “fearless champions of conservative causes, much to the dismay of the corrupt corporate media.”
Until 2022, the political investments of Dunn and Wilks have not been as successful as in recent years. Defend Texas Liberty, the group they fund, gave more than $3 million to Don Huffines, a former state senator who challenged Abbott in his Republican primary and won just 12 percent of the vote. Despite his loss, experts noted, throughout the campaign Abbott adopted some of the positions Huffines had expressed, including strong opposition to transgender rights and support for the deployment of National Guard members to the U.S. border and Mexico.
Texas Liberty’s second recipient this year has been Shelley Luther, an unsuccessful far-right legislative candidate who gained national attention after she was arrested for refusing to close her Dallas hair salon to comply with restrictions on coronavirus
In an interview with CNN, Luther, who has proposed banning Chinese students from Texas universities and said she is “not comfortable with transgender people,” said Dunn and Wilks had been an integral part of her campaign.
“Without them, I wouldn’t have even been able to run,” Luther said. But he added that the expense would not have given the billionaires influence over his votes or decisions: “He wants me to do what I say I stand for,” he said of Dunn.
Enforcing the “law of the jungle”
Dunn and Wilks don’t just use campaign donations to play a role in state politics. They also fund a network of organizations that have been influential in advancing conservative causes.
Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, a nonprofit chaired by Dunn, has released a “fiscal responsibility index” each legislative session that ranks state lawmakers based on their positions on conservative bills. The scorecard, often cited in election ads that appear in voter mailboxes, is known in Texas political circles for its ability to make and break Republican primary campaigns.
“If it doesn’t show up well on the scoreboard, you’re going to spend a lot of money against you,” Seliger said.
Texas Republicans say even a deeply conservative record doesn’t protect someone from a primary challenge funded by Dunn, Wilks and the groups they fund.
State Sen. Bob Deuell had won election in his northeast Texas district for years and amassed a conservative record, including co-authoring an abortion bill in 2013 that was considered among the strictest in the country at the time, and was rejected by the US Supreme Court. But in 2013, Deuell, a physician, supported a bill that overhauled Texas’ end-of-life procedures. Texas Right to Life, a group whose largest donor in history is Wilks, falsely claimed the bill would “strengthen Texas’ death panels.” The following year, Deuell was challenged by Bob Hall, a tea party activist.
Texas Right to Life spent more than $150,000 on mailings, voter guides and political consultants for Hall and other…