With dozens of contested races up and down the ballot, the upcoming primary elections pose the biggest opportunity for hard-right insurgents to gain ground in the Texas Republican Party in nearly a decade.
And wherever there’s intra-party combat, you can bet that the biggest benefactors of the state’s right-wing movement—billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks—will be there, checkbooks in hand. In the final weeks before the March primary, these mega-donors are sinking millions into the GOP primary wars.
For more than a decade, the two West Texas oil and gas moguls have used their fortunes to finance an ideological crusade to oust the torchbearers of the party establishment and install champions of their far-right, theocratic agenda. For several years, Dunn’s vehicle of choice was a PAC called Empower Texans, into which he dumped millions of dollars trying to elect right-wing insurgents to the state Legislature. By 2018, the civil war he instigated had fizzled out and, with a tarnished political brand, Empower Texans quietly folded.
