jeff sandefur

The civil war within the Texas Republican Party — billionaires, enormous egos, blood grudges, subterfuge, religion, debauchery — is one of the best and most under-told stories in American politics, but it also has a Tolkien-length backstory. The simplified version is this: A decade ago, as the Bush administration started melting down, the Texas GOP began to split into two. One faction aligned with a more genteel and traditional form of business conservatism; the ideology of the other was nativism, Christianism and a nihilistic approach to government.The second faction eventually won. But at the beginning, all they had were a few ideologically aligned millionaire and billionaire donors — Tim Dunn, Jeff Sandefer, the Wilks brothers — who wanted to buy legislators, a long-standing trade in Texas. The state’s weak ethics laws inhibited, albeit very modestly, their ability to do so. So they went guerrilla. They set up a constellation of organizations to quietly funnel their money into legislative races, and they used the threat of that money to put enormous pressure on elected officials. It was very effective: They didn’t always win elections, but they changed the way politics is done in Austin.