The Road to Convention | Texas GOP 2026 State Convention Explained

Welcome back, Texas Republicans. I'm Micah Cavanaugh, the Executive Director for the Republican Party of Texas, and I find myself in the studio again with Chairman George. How are you? Good. Welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be here. All right. Let's talk about convention, I guess. Let's do it. It's been a hot topic, you could say, a lot of questions coming out of it. So one of the things, we'll just dive right into it, that we've been hearing both at the party and out amongst the grassroots is that a lot of people are excited about participating in the convention process. But sometimes they think that they've missed their chance to go to state convention because they didn't attend their precinct convention. Is that true? Well, not really. So the state convention's nomination process is separate from the precinct convention. The precinct convention is where you go to go to the SD convention, you had to be nominated from there. You don't have to attend, but your precinct committee, convention committee have to appoint you or nominate you. And if you miss that, it's fine. You can still go to the SD or county convention, but when you get there is where you can actually say, I want to go to the state convention, or you can actually fill out the application that it's available online and send that to the county chair or the county party and make sure that you get elected to the state convention. So you could attend county or SD convention as a guest, but if you want to go to the state convention, best thing you should do is communicate with your county party and say, hey, I need to this application out and get it to you guys. I want to go to my state convention and be a delegate. So communication is key here because a lot of times, well, most of the times that I know that most of the counties don't have enough people going to the state convention. They'll have a 300 people delegation and they end up with 285. So there's 15 more seats and you have another 300 alternates that's available. So you should definitely communicate and say, I want to And even if you can't be a delegate, be an alternate because there's a really good shot that you're going to get to participate at the state level when you get to the state convention. So you have the equal amounts of delegates and alternate delegates who can go. I have several friends back home who found out that their precinct convention only put in, you know, so many out of, like you said, the allocation that they had. So the opportunity is there. Take advantage of it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Show up and most likely you're going to, you're going to get to be a delegate. Very possible. Okay. In that regard, then if you go to your county convention or your SD convention, I know we've talked to a number of county chairs. They want to make their, their conventions exciting. They want to make them enjoyable, right? They want, and I know at ours, last time we had our state senator came and spoke and sponsored some food and that was neat. So what are ways that, that county chairs and the convention process can make this more, more engaging for, for the folks that are coming? Right. So a couple of things that I've seen that is very effective is essentially talk to your elected officials, your sheriff, your county judge, your commissioners, your elected officials in the state level, senators. It's most of them are Senate and senatorial conventions, right? In some county. So talk to your state senator, talk to your house rep and, you know, SBOE people, all of them and say, come on over. Even your congressman. Even your congressman, because you're a lot of your legislative priorities could be about Congress. Have them come over, tell them to sponsor the convention, pay up a hundred bucks or 500 bucks or a couple of thousand, whatever it is, and be interactive with them because they have to go do the work in the next cycle. It's a great way for you to communicate and engage with them at that level. Yes. And, and, and it's fun for someone from your precinct who is not involved in the party to show up and see 20 different elected officials and be able to talk to them and say, these are my concerns. I want you to work on this. The most grassroots interaction you're going to get with an elected official is that one-on-one time at a convention. I even heard of one county, I will not say who, they're having a food truck at their county convention. And I'm just saying, I'm not from that county. I can't participate in the convention, but I kind of want to, you know, I'm just saying, I'm not going to do that, but I might sneak over there and be like, Hey, that sounds nice. Can I be a, can I be a guest at your convention? So there are ways, there are ways to do that. So at, at precinct convention, we had this, but now we're going to have it at the county and SD at the senatorial district convention. You have this thing called resolutions, right? And we don't know a lot about them, but that's kind of a big deal. Resolutions are important. What is the process by which you go through to pass resolutions and what happens to them once they get to state convention? Right. The resolution, in my opinion, is a statement or a request from the grassroots all the way to the elected officials, like regardless of what the office is, right? If you are writing a resolution about federal, let's say about SAVE Act, you know, which is a hot item, we want that. You were writing a resolution that, that says, I want all of our congressmen to support this, all of our senators to do this. You start with the resolution from the, the county precinct convention. Then you have it at the SD convention. You pass that, amend it, however you want to do it, clean it up. Then it comes to the state convention. The state convention goes through the process and it becomes our platform, essentially, or the priority. You've seen people, house reps, essentially, in the past cycles where they will take the party platform on the house chamber and talk about it and say, on this page, in this line, this is what it says by the Republican Party of Texas. And I want every one of you to get on board with this. That started at the precinct convention. And that's what, that's why this is so important. People need to get on board with understanding what a resolution is and also to go through the process to make sure that we have good resolutions that matters to Texans five generations from now. They will reap the benefit. It's going to affect the 90th legislative session, which is coming up next year. But, you know, because we've seen resolutions a number of times from the state Republican executive committee that we meet quarterly in, where those things wind up, you know, getting discussed and used. They're a way to affect the legislative process and what happens. But I did have one staffer, and I mentioned this to you earlier, but she had been a delegate to state conventions. So she was, she was like grassroots. Like she knew the process. She goes, we went and took platform language from RPT platform and just verbatim copied it and put it in the legislation because we thought, what better way to show that we're on board with that? And I'm going, oh, so it does work. They are listening. We need to press that, make sure that we have that in good order. And the things that are in there are things we want them to see. Yeah. It gives the good conservative legislators a cover to have a conversation. They can go and tell the other saying, the Republican party wants this. The convention wants this. The grassroots wants this. I conservative base wants this. That's right. You should follow. You should follow this. Yeah. Right. So this is great. We need it. We need good resolutions to become a platform. So resolution is very important, but let's transition slightly to what happens at state convention, because there's a couple, three offices that get elected there, right? That are going to determine what the party looks like for the next two years. What is that? Well, the state chairman's race is determined at the convention, the vice chair, every single SREC member is elected for the next session. And that's in their SD? In their SDs. So every SD gets a male and a female SREC member to the state party. They serve basically as the grassroots voice at the, at the party level. They're kind of like the board of directors. They're elected by the grassroots. You show up to the convention. That's where the elections happen. And you, you elect your state chair, your vice chair from the convention as well. So being a delegate to convention is so much more than just going to a convention. You actually are going to affect not just who represents you, but the messaging that's going into the next legislative session and will be used for the next two years until we come back to convention again. That's right. So you're, you're, you're putting the messaging together. What do you want? Right. You're also putting the people in charge. Are they going to go make that happen? Right. It becomes I want a state chair or vice chair or the SREC member who knows and what is going to do what it takes to get that done. That messaging that I, I have all of these problems that I want done. Are they going to go do it? That's, that's, so that's the two parts of the convention. One other thing I think that's significant that I was hoping I want you to touch on is we get several questions from grassroots people, county level folks who say, look, I want to be on a committee. You know, we've got resolutions, we've got legislative priorities, we've got rules, we've got credentials. There's several committees that happen at state convention. And a lot of folks say, hey, I'd like to be a part of that process. I want to serve on it. Of course, anybody's welcome to come as a guest and observe, but how do they actually take the step of being on that committee or is there a path for them to do that? Right. So the committees happen primarily from Monday to Wednesday afternoon, even sometimes all the way to Thursday afternoon, because it depends on which committee it is. The members of the committee is, is nominated to the state committee by your SREC members. So your SREC members that represent you at your SREC decides who do they want for the rules or platform for legislative priorities. So they send those credentials, they send those people and they get to decide. If they don't do that, then I get to decide. But I haven't seen anyone who's going to say, I'm not going to put anybody in. They want to make sure they get people from their place to represent. So they'll send that to you and then that determines the, the makeup of the, of the That's right. Okay. So we, on our, on our website, we have, if you go to texasgop.org, you go to the leadership directory, which we have under that leadership directory. There are a number of things. And one of those is the list of state Republican executive committee members with their email, a picture of them. So if you want to reach out to them, if you don't already have a relationship, that's a way to, to connect with them. That's correct. And, and, and if somebody doesn't have it, we can, you know, contact us, we'll get you the name and the contact information of the person. They have the ultimate power. They, they make that decision and they send that in and I just take it from there and move on from putting the whole committee together. At the end of the day, Republican Party of Texas and our convention is, is a grassroots organization and process, right? So the convention gives Republicans the opportunity to directly shape the future of the party and what that looks like, right? Like that's, that's what we're, we're looking at as we're going forward. This is the most grassroots event or whatever we can call it that, that happens every two years in Texas, right? It's one of the largest in the country. I've been told it's the largest in the country. We have about 9,000 delegations strength, which means we have 18,000 people that could show up like all the alternates, right? Then you have the guest elected officials, the press, everything, right? So this is a huge, huge deal. And this is where you set up everything. You elect everyone, you set the direction for the party, then you make sure that you can follow up on during the sessions and through your congressmen to make sure everything that we asked them to do is there that it's happening. Hold their feet to the fire after that, to all the things that were done and decided at convention. Now you got to go make sure those guys and gals do the right thing when they're in the office. Yep. Yep. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this. I have a feeling we're going to be doing a little bit more of this conversation, which is good for the grassroots and it's right. It's good for our state. Yeah. Our goal is to get as much information to the grassroots, the county parties as possible. So we'll see you again. Excellent. Look forward to it. Thanks guys.