News & Politics
On May 1st, Texas will hold a special election to fill the seat of late U.S. Congressman Ron Wright, who passed away in February from COVID-19. The contentious, all-party election has 23 candidates vying for the seat, including Rep. Wright’s widow Susan. One of the Republican candidates, Michael Wood, joins Avik Roy, President of FREOPP, to discuss his platform and why he describes this election as “the first battle in this war to take back [the Republican] Party.” In Woods’ words, “It’s time for us to move past [Trump] now before we lose to Democrats in the midterms next year and in the presidential election after that.” Can Texas’s 6th congressional seat—once a reliably red district that turned purple in the Trump era—be claimed by an anti-Trump Republican like Wood? What does next week’s special election tell us about the changing politics of the state of Texas and the country at large? Will we see more GOP candidates emerging from the corner of the Republican Party that has been turned off by Trump’s tone and rhetoric?