As Donald Trump advances his candidacy for president in 2024, his support among Texas politicians is waning.

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Once a political force of nature with the Texas Republicans, former President Donald Trump’s influence appears to be waning in the state as he launches the 2024 presidential campaign and the state legislature begins.

About two months after his return bid, few prominent Texas Republicans have backed Trump, and some are showing a greater willingness to publicly contradict him. His recent blaming abortion restrictions on Republicans losing the midterms caused controversy across the Texas Republican Party spectrum, and state Republicans ignored his preference as they led races for Speaker of the US House of Representatives and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

These developments represent a marked shift from the past few years in Texas, where Trump had a large circle of loyal political allies. State Republicans went out of their way to praise his presidency and enthusiastically lobbied for his support in their own campaigns. If anyone disagreed with him, they basically kept it to themselves for fear of retribution from primary voters or Trump himself.

Trump, the only president to be impeached twice, received little support in Texas beyond the usual suspects after announcing his bid for re-election to the White House in mid-November. He got the backing of two predictable loyalists: Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who had already backed Trump on the campaign trail about a year ago, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Trump teased as a potential U.S. Attorney General if he won the White House. again.

Gov. Greg Abbott remained silent on the former president’s candidacy. Abbott, himself a potential 2024 candidate, won Trump’s endorsement in his primary last year but kept his distance during the general election, missing an October rally in Texas.

Meanwhile, the two-time Trump Texas campaign chairman, Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick, has voiced support for Trump’s comeback proposal but has refrained from giving full support.

Notably, the vast majority of Texas Republicans in the 118th Congress — 20 out of 25 — received Trump’s support in the 2022 election. Of those members, only three have reciprocated and supported Trump for 2024: U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston, Rep. Troy Nels of Richmond, and Rep. Ronnie Jackson of Amarillo, Trump’s former White House physician. Texas U.S. Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz have declared their willingness to support someone other than Trump, and Cornyn said he would like to “see some new blood.”

Ahead of the legislative session, Dade Phelan Speaker of the House, R-Beaumont, became especially outspoken against Trump after not having been in the fray since he took control of the gavel in 2021. After Trump nominee Herschel Walker lost the last round of the US Senate in Georgia. month, Phelan tweeted that “having the best candidate really matters” and retweeted other users saying the same thing. Then, on New Year’s Day, after Trump posted on social media that it was the “abortion issue,” not Trump, that caused Republican upset in the midterms, Phelan responded with his most direct criticism to date.

“The Republican Party lost control of the Senate for THREE cycles in a row, and it was not the fault of the pro-abortion movement,” Phelan. tweetedaddressing Trump. “These were the candidates chosen by you, who did not cope with the tasks set and lost “big”. May 2023-24 will bring new GOP leadership that is PROUD to defend the unborn.”

Phelan faced some backlash within his party for speaking out. On the contrary, a growing number of Republicans in the state House of Representatives have sided with him, sharing his posts, showing support and acceptance.

“New leadership is needed to restore civility to the Republican Party – and will be essential to prevent the White House from being handed back to the Ds (as Mr. Trump did last time),” said Rep. Justin Holland, R-Rockwall, said on twitter. “I’m proud that Speaker Phelan spoke, and I want the rest of the GOP speakers and state legislators to follow suit.”

Phelan’s team declined to comment beyond his recent tweets. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment on the story.

Phelan was not the only prominent Texas Republican to object to Trump’s midterm announcement. Matt Rinaldi, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, who is more right-wing than Phelan, also sent out a tweet disapproving of Trump’s stance. Rinaldi argued that Republicans did well in states like Texas that “virtually stopped abortion” after Roe v. Wade was overturned. “Dobbs wasn’t the problem,” Rinaldi said.

Trump has experienced a series of setbacks within his own party. After the Republican Party came under fire in November for a lackluster performance by the Republican Party, a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives sent him for prosecution by the Justice Department for his role in instigating the deadly January 6, 2021 uprising. In December, Trump called for the repeal of rules, including those “found in the Constitution,” in order to revise the 2020 election. The post drew recriminations from Republicans on Capitol Hill, including from Cornyn, who called it “irresponsible.”

Polls show that Trump is still popular among Texas Republicans, but not as much as he once was. In a December poll by the University of Texas at Austin, he registered a 75% approval rating among GOP voters, up from 82% in October and 85% in February 2021 after he left office.

More interesting, according to the same poll, was the declining intensity of GOP support for Trump. The percentage of Republican voters who said they were “very positive” about Trump was 39% in December; it was 50% in October and 58% in February 2021.

Chris Sasia is a conservative pollster who tracks voter preferences in the 2024 Texas primary on a monthly basis. He noted that before the November election, Trump averaged a lead of 22 percentage points, but in his latest poll, his lead was reduced to 1 point, almost equal to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“While direct support for President Trump has declined markedly, it is clear that primary voters are not interested in switching back to the pre-Trump Republican Party,” Sasia said in a statement.

Indeed, DeSantis has supplanted Trump as a sort of new guiding star among Texas conservatives, and several proposals imitating Florida’s new laws could be introduced in the next legislative session. Patrick has already said he wants the Legislature to pass a version of the Florida law that bans class discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity, which critics have called the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Patrick and Trump have had a close relationship for a long time, and it was most pronounced in 2021. Patrick used his friendship with Trump to criticize Phelan and pressure the Texas House to audit the election. He also convinced Trump to make a series of initial endorsements that allowed Patrick to enter the 2023 legislative session, which began on Tuesday, with his most loyal Republican caucus.

However, Patrick responded to Trump’s 2024 launch with a four-sentence Facebook post praising his speech but not expressing explicit approval. The Trump campaign subsequently sent out emails to reporters that marked Miller’s and Paxton’s statements as an endorsement; there was no such email in Patrick’s application.

Patrick’s aides did not respond to a request for comment on whether he supports Trump for 2024.

Patrick gave an awkward response when asked about his support for Trump in a podcast interview published Sunday.

“If he is running in 2024 – I say ‘if he is running’ – he has announced that he is running, so I assume he is running. I haven’t spoken to him since he announced it, but we talk, we talk often,” Patrick said. “If he runs, I will support him there. I think he will win the primary, but that’s how we sit here today in January. Who knows what’s ahead.”

In the fight for the speaker’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, three Texas Republicans helped block Kevin McCarthy’s candidacy for several days, despite Trump’s support for McCarthy, which Trump strongly reiterated amidst the chaos. The three Texas Republicans – Congressmen Michael Cloud, Chip Roy and Keith Self – all hail from all-red districts where opposing Trump may be vulnerable in the primaries, but they don’t seem to mind.

While McCarthy credited Trump with helping broker a deal for his performance late Friday night, the Texan trio had already come off the fence hours earlier after they believed they had won enough concessions from McCarthy.

There is no lost love between Roy and Trump — they clashed in previous House leadership elections, and Trump refused to back Roy for re-election last year, despite backing virtually every other GOP in the Texas delegation. But it was a bigger decision for Cloud and Self, a new freshman who ran as a more pro-Trump Republican, than the incumbent he challenged. Trump backed Cloud in his 2022 primary as he garnered a growing pool of contenders; Trump endorsed Self after he became the Republican nominee in his constituency.

Trump’s support for McCarthy drew open criticism from Michael Quinn Sullivan, the far-right leader of Texas politics.

“Why is Donald Trump sticking with this massive loser/swamp creature?” Sullivan tweeted after McCarthy lost another round of the speaker’s vote the previous week.

Texas Republicans’ indifference to Trump also showed up in the race for the GOP National Committee chairmanship. In December, the Republican State Executive Committee unanimously passed a resolution expressing no confidence in Ronna McDaniel, the current chairman of the RNC, who was a Trump supporter.

Neither the resolution nor its brief discussion in SREC mentions the former president. Trump has since weighed in on the race, saying he likes both McDaniel and one of her rivals, Harmeet Dillon.

When it comes to donors from Texas, Trump can lose steam too. Roy Bailey, a Dallas business owner who helped run Trump’s joint fundraising operation with the NRC, told The Dallas Morning News last month that many attendees are looking forward to seeing DeSantis enter the 2024 presidential primary.

“There is no question that political star Ron DeSantis is on the rise and that is why you have a primary trial,” US Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, said in a television interview last month. “I’m looking forward to this process and I think the two heavyweights right now are Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.”

But who does Fallon support? “It’s too early to talk about it now,” he said.