DALLAS — The next chair of the Dallas County Republican Party will have their work cut out for them.
Dallas County is the second-most populous county in Texas, ninth-most in the United States, with around 2.4 million people.
It is the political inversion of statewide politics, with Democrats controlling all countywide offices. And there are only two Republicans, Angie Chen Button and Morgan Meyer, in the Texas House.
In the March 5 primary, two candidates are running for the position, former Congressman and chair of the statewide Republican party Allen West and incumbent Jennifer Stoddard-Hajdu, who says the party is starting to see some success in its recruitment and voter engagement efforts.
“Primarily, we’re seeing change starting to happen in the surrounding cities. Not so much in Dallas proper. But we just won a conservative runoff in Rowlett City Council. So, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the outer cities that we feel like we can pick up,” Stoddard-Hajdu told us on Inside Texas Politics.
Her opponent claims there are no GOP candidates in 75% of the countywide races this year and that hundreds of Republican precinct chair positions haven’t been filled.
Stoddard-Hajdu says those claims are misleading, countering that many of the open positions are for judicial candidates, which she says are notoriously hard to recruit.
And the chairwoman says some of those empty precincts have no voters in them.
“We have a lot of precincts in Dallas County that have no people in them,” said Stoddard-Hajdu. “We have precincts that are ditches. We have precincts that are waterways. We have precincts that are businesses.”
She says the party is on a great path, including using its own messaging platform and data to target and inspire Republican voters.
And Stoddard-Hajdu implied West may be running against her for personal reasons.
“If you look at his tenure as the state party chair, you know, it seems to me he’s trying to boost his paid speaking engagements. He wants to be on Fox News more. And perhaps, like when he was the state chair, he wants to build a platform to run for a higher office,” she said.
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