Tarrant County Republican Party Chair Bo French speaks during a rally, on Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Mansfield.
Shafkat Anowar/Dallas Morning News
“Everything is bigger in Texas” apparently includes political drama, and the recent primary runoffs were no exception. Elections that might normally draw limited attention became national spectacles, making Texas politics feel less like self-government and more like reality television for the social media age.
The Texas Senate primary runoff offers perhaps the clearest example. Despite numerous legal and ethical controversies, Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn after running a campaign centered as much on loyalty to President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement as on Texas issues.
However, Paxton wasn’t the only example. The Republican runoff for Railroad Commissioner — an office that doesn’t even exist in many states — also garnered national attention. Incumbent Jim Wright lost to newcomer Bo French despite French’s campaign focusing not on oil and gas regulation, which is what the job actually involves, but on culture war issues including Islam, DEI and immigration.
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Some of this was likely inevitable. Texas is a large, politically consequential state, so our elections naturally receive national attention. However, national attention isn’t the main problem. The problem is that our politicians are being rewarded for focusing on national, outrage-driven culture-war issues rather than the needs of the people they are supposed to represent.
That fundamentally threatens effective leadership.
Effective leadership is about more than gaining attention. It is reciprocal. Leaders use policy to shape followers’ behavior, but followers also shape leaders by granting or withholding support and trust. This feedback process takes many forms in politics, including polls, town halls, campaign donations and, of course, votes. Whatever form it takes, however, such feedback systems are essential to effective leadership. Leaders must be accountable to those they lead, but they also need accurate feedback to understand what those followers need.
Recent national discourse has actively distorted such signals in Texas politics.
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Ultimately, Texans are the only people whose votes decide Texan elections. However, non-Texan donors, activists, media figures and audiences (especially on social media) can shape what candidates believe they’ll be rewarded for saying and doing. Sometimes these rewards are intangible: high-profile endorsements, going “viral,” landing a sympathetic late-night interview or otherwise generating positive attention. Sometimes it’s more concrete — campaign contributions, Super PAC spending or nationally sponsored attack ads.
Either way, the effect is the same: Actual constituents’ voices are drowned out amidst the louder yet less accountable national voices, degrading the signals necessary for effective leadership.
Those voices have been present on both sides of the Texas Senate race. On the Democratic side, the primary between James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett was framed as a “battle for the soul” of the national Democratic Party, while Talarico also benefited from billionaire-funded super PACs and national media attention. On the Republican side, Paxton drew support from national conservative networks, with CPAC designating him as “MAGA’s choice” and Trump attacking Talarico from afar.
Regardless of good intentions, politicians will respond to such incentives. If garnering national attention is what it takes to succeed, then chase national attention they shall. However, in doing so, politicians become less like prospective leaders seeking office than influencers seeking an audience.
Leadership and influence are not entirely separate. Effective leaders use influence to persuade and mobilize their followers, and influencers and “thought leaders” can do the same.
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However, the signals in an influencer/subscriber relationship are much blunter than those needed for effective leadership and followership in politics or beyond. A subscriber can click, share, donate or unsubscribe. But Texans can’t unsubscribe from an attorney general, senator or even just a school board member. Someone will win those offices and make decisions that impact others’ lives — but doing so effectively will require that they listen to those they affect.
This is as much an issue of followership as it is leadership. Followers can shape leaders’ behavior too. If voters reward loyalty to national political causes or figures over responsiveness to local issues, then politicians will chase national issues regardless of those issues’ relevance to the office in question. The runoff results suggest that many voters, at least on the Republican side, will gladly reward that kind of performance.
However, effective leadership requires higher standards — as does effective followership. Texans can’t control every incentive at play in our politics, but we can choose what we demand from those who seek power.
This can be hard to do. Political leaders’ actual responsibilities are often thoroughly boring: roads, schools, courts, and other issues don’t tend to go viral.
Neither national attention nor outrage-driven performance is likely to disappear from Texas politics by November. The question is whether voters will continue rewarding such antics or whether they will demand more from those who want to become their leaders.
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Neither Texas nor America needs more political influencers. We need leaders who are responsive to their constituents, and constituents who demand that responsiveness. However, if voters insist on being spectators, politicians will become performers.
Aaron Pomerantz is a research psychologist and serves as the assistant director of research and evaluation at Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders.