It was the first week of June, and dozens of Texas Republicans, some of whom had been their party’s state House nominees for only a week, were at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown for a summit convened by Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows to game plan the general election five months away.
The message from the top, according to attendees: Don’t let us care about your campaign more than you do. The political environment will be difficult. Every Republican, even ones who’ve won their districts by decisive margins before, has to run a real race.
Amid intense political headwinds, Burrows has spent his first election cycle as speaker waging an expensive and unusually visible effort to defend the GOP majority. He has deployed millions of dollars to his party’s most vulnerable members, headlined fundraisers for them and stumped in their districts, most recently as part of his ongoing bus tour. And, according to Republican strategists, he has pushed candidates even in seemingly comfortable red districts to run like their seats are in play…