TEXIT Progress: Secession Question Expected To Appear on 2024 Texas Primary Ballot

As the US government hurtles toward insolvency while political and cultural divisions intensify across the country, Texans are poised to take their long-simmering flirtation with secession to the next level, as a non-binding proposition is expected to appear on the statewide GOP primary ballot in March 2024.  

On Friday, the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) announced that it had obtained the number of signatures required to compel the Republican Party of Texas to include this question on the primary ballot: “Should the State of Texas reassert its status as an independent nation?”

The party’s State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) is meeting this weekend to finalize the list of ballot propositions. According to TNM, the SREC’s wishes are not relevent, as the Texas Election Code empowers voters to place a proposition on a ballot by collecting the signatures of 97,709 Texans who want the question to appear. TNM says it has more than 102,000. 

BREAKING: TNM has secured more than the required amount petition signatures to get TEXIT on the ballot this March!

RT NOW to spread the word! pic.twitter.com/ndqd8S8cDi

— Texas Nationalist Movement (TEXIT) (@TexasNatMov) December 1, 2023

“We could actually bypass the SREC’s ballot proposition process and compel the party to place the question on the ballot,” said TNM President Daniel Miller in a Friday letter submitted to the SREC in support of the proposition. He emphasized that including the proposition doesn’t equate to a Texas GOP endorsement of secession. Rather, he wrote, ballot propositions serve as a means of pursuing clarity as to the “greatest concerns of Republican voters.”

The drive for statewide votes on secession has spanned several years. While the SREC’s resolutions committee added it to a preliminary list in 2015, the SREC struck it. At the party’s 2016 convention, a plank calling for a statewide referendum of all voters was forwarded for inclusion in the Texas GOP platform, only for it to be struck down by the Permanent Platform Committee.

ICYMI: I spent some time last month with the TEXIT folks at their first-ever conference — which featured a sitting state senator. They told me they feel more emboldened than ever about the potential for a secession vote. #txlege https://t.co/yL2PPQAJEe

— Robert Downen (@RobertDownen_) December 1, 2023

Later Republican plank attempts were successful. The SREC will be under greater pressure to green-light the primary ballot proposition on Saturday, given presence of two planks in the current Texas GOP platform: 

• Plank 33, addressing “state sovereignty,” asserts that “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”
• Plank 225, “Texas Independence,” urges the legislature to require a general election referendum “for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”

“Whether you are for, against, or undecided TEXIT, we should all be able to agree that the platform matters, the Texas Bill of Rights matters, and the Republican voters matter,” said TNM’s Miller in his letter to the SREC.