In Tarrant County, Texas, there’s no need to speculate on when or whether Republicans will attack the democratic process to stop voters from participating in fair elections. It’s happening now and has been underway since January 1, 2022.
That’s when extremist MAGA County Judge Tim O’Hare was sworn into office and launched a nonstop vendetta against voters that he had promised even earlier when he said, “If you’re a Republican officeholder and you haven’t been called a racist, then you probably haven’t done a thing.”
O’ Hare has done a lot to earn that poisonous title since taking office
- He regularly insults, lectures, and rejects citizens testifying before the Commissioners Court with obvious venom directed to Black and Hispanic citizens,
- Fired the best elections administrator in Texas,
- Set up a phony voter fraud task force,
- Cut over 100 polling locations in 2025,
- Supports and promotes white nationalist-led group True Texas Project,
- Canceled funding for Girls, Inc, a broadly supported youth support program,
- Kicked off the national redistricting firestorm by pushing through an extreme racially gerrymandered mid-decade redistricting map in Tarrant County.
And O’Hare’s most recent move is particularly overt and malicious. He intends to ram through the County Commissioners Court a plan to eliminate 140 of the 316 voting centers used by Tarrant citizens in 2022.
O’Hare’s plan will close a full 44 percent of the Tarrant voting locations used in the last nonpresidential year election – where nearly 50 percent of all in-person votes were cast. And to no one’s surprise nearly all the locations marked for elimination are within the central and southern sectors of the county where the population is disproportionately people of color.
Expect Democratic Commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles, backed by a hearing room full of angry citizens, to put up a fight. But also expect O’Hare’s political hand puppets, Republican Commissioners Manny Ramirez and Matt Krause, to follow orders and fall in line.
There’s no subtlety in what O’Hare is doing, and there’s no mistaking his intention. Over the past decade, Tarrant has evolved into a highly diverse county with a majority minority population. Its politics are changing. A previously safe Republican county is now not just a battleground and a political bellwether for the entire state.
It is especially dangerous for MAGA extremists like Tim O’Hare and his MAGA cohorts. The county voted for Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz in 2018, backed Biden over Trump in 2020, and rejected Cruz again in 2024.
So rather than try to appeal to voters on policy or even ideology, Tim O’Hare is moving to block their ability to vote altogether. And we can safely assume that he’s not just acting on his own but with at least the implicit support of Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Dan Patrick and other statewide Republican leaders who reject debate-and-convince campaigning for divide-and-disenfranchise power grabs.
O’Hare and Abbott and the others may be badly underestimating Tarrant voters. Even wholesale closures of polling places may not save them. It’s a move made of fear and increasing weakness.
A coalition is building in Tarrant that is broader than Democratic activists. It includes mainstream voters who care more about the cost of gas, groceries, housing, and healthcare than partisan politics. And for the first time in years they have a full slate of responsible service first Democrats from James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa statewide to O’Hare’s opponent for County Judge, Alisa Simmons, A+ District Attorney nominee Tiffany Burks, and many other ready-to-serve Democratic nominees.
Just a few months ago, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election in Senate District 10 which is significantly more Republican than Tarrant County as a whole. Rehmet is not an outlier. He’s an early indicator of a county that is poised to reject mean-spirited and destructive extremism for constructive leadership.
