AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ Scott Milder, a former city council member and businessman who has been an outspoken advocate for public schools, has announced a longshot challenge of tea party-backed Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Milder is hoping to upset Patrick in the Republican primary in March. He said in an interview Thursday that Patrick’s “extreme” support for ultimately unsuccessful legislation like the “bathroom bill” targeting transgender Texans and school vouchers have alienated traditional, business-minded Republicans.
Milder said the lieutenant governor, who oversees the state Senate, runs the camber “like the bully he is.”
Milder founded “Friends of Texas Public Schools,” an advocacy group opposing Patrick-supported vouchers that would provide public money to students attending private school. In May, he lost his re-election bid to the city council in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall.
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SAN ANTONIO (AP) — An activist who has criticized Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush’s oversight of a $450 million renovation of the Alamo has announced a longshot bid to take Bush’s job.
Rick Range is a retired teacher and firefighter and an amateur historian. He worries that the multi-year Alamo revamp will downplay the importance of the 189 Texas defenders killed there during the 1836 battle. Some of them were slaveholders, and Range fears sanitation of Alamo history for “political correctness.”
He was beginning his campaign for the Republican land commissioner nomination Wednesday outside the Alamo.
Bush, whose grandfather and uncle were president, says the Alamo overhaul aims to make Texans even prouder of the shrine’s history. Bush is expected to cruise to re-election for a post he first won in 2014.