In May 2020, as a deadly pandemic raged across the world, Steve Toth decided he needed a haircut — and he was willing to go to jail over it.
The state representative from The Woodlands, a conservative Houston suburb, went to Tune Up: The Manly Salon, donned a barber cape and called the press. The state had forced all non-essential businesses to shut their doors to stem the spread of COVID-19, prompting outrage and legal battles from small business owners, and Toth had had enough. The haircut, he said at the time, was less about split ends and more about sending a message to Gov. Greg Abbott.
“A little less on the sides,” Toth told the hairstylist while on the phone with a Texas Tribune reporter, before noting that “there’s absolutely no reason” why businesses couldn’t reopen their doors under proper health guidelines.
Hours later, Abbott bowed to the pressure, from Toth and others, to allow hair salons, barber shops and a range of other businesses to reopen several days earlier than he’d previously signaled.
It was a classic clash between Toth, an outspoken and unrelentingly conservative lawmaker, and leaders of his own party who he has no problem assailing for falling short of his ideals. Since he first joined the Legislature in 2012, Toth and his band of fellow hardliners in the Freedom Caucus have helped shift the Texas GOP to the right, as much through attention-grabbing spectacles and bitter in-fighting as through traditional legislating.
On Tuesday night, Toth clocked a major victory, marking a high water mark for himself and his cause, when he walloped incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw in the GOP primary. Crenshaw had represented the 2nd Congressional District, which covers increasingly conservative parts of Harris and Montgomery counties, since 2018. Toth attacked Crenshaw’s conservative credentials, accusing the fourth-term congressman of being soft on immigration, overly focused on foreign aid and a shill for lobbyists, rather than his constituents.
Toth said initial polling indicated Crenshaw was unpopular in the district and vulnerable to a challenge, so he decided to take a run at the Harvard-educated, former Navy SEAL. On Wednesday, he chalked his victory up to macro trends, like a rightward shift in the largest deep red county in the country, but said a lot of this race was about the micro work of building relationships in the district.
“I think my greatest asset in this campaign was Dan Crenshaw,” Toth said Wednesday. “He’s a nasty, unhappy person, and he treats people poorly in the district, and people are tired of it.”
Kenneth Depew, Crenshaw’s chief of staff, rejected Toth’s criticisms as a “lack of grace and truth.”
“I pray that Steve finds the Christian sense of grace that he so often claims to have,” Depew said. “Dan has nothing to defend, except a lifetime of service, sacrifice and truth.”
Ambitious climber
Toth was first elected to the Legislature in 2012, unseating a longtime incumbent as the Tea Party wave swept through Texas. A small business owner who runs a pool maintenance company with his wife, Toth promised to cut taxes and reduce government spending. He is also an ordained minister, who brought his conservative Christian values to bear on the Legislature, especially on anti-abortion legislation.
Toth quickly joined newly empowered conservative hardliners in obstructing the careful work of legislating, delaying and derailing priorities from both sides of the aisle. He joined other freshman members in 2013 in filing dozens of budget amendments, proposing defunding what they saw as superfluous state programs and allocating the money towards the Teacher Retirement System as a stunt to raise awareness about the state’s growing unfunded pension obligations.
“The purpose is to put a spotlight on it so that next budget session we spend a little more time seeing what we can do to fix it,” Toth said at the time. “We know this is not a panacea.”
An ambitious political climber, Toth left his House seat to higher office after one session, running to replace state Sen. Tommy Williams in the Legislature’s upper chamber in 2014. It was a four-way race that saw Toth far out-fundraised, but he racked up significant endorsements and eked into the runoff.
“There are four nice guys running — four conservatives — but in the Senate, it’s not enough to just be a conservative voice. You’ll get pushed out,” Toth said at the time. “You need a conservative record and fight to get things done.”
He lost to Conroe Rep. Brandon Creighton in the runoff. Two years later, Toth launched a longshot bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a fellow Republican, accusing him of cooperating with the Obama administration by voting for a bipartisan spending bill. Toth lost in the primary.
Sick of being in the political wilderness, Toth returned to the state House in 2018. It was around that time that he encountered a young, up-and-coming political star named Dan Crenshaw. Toth admits he developed a bit of a “man crush” on the ex-Navy SEAL.
“This guy comes along that says, ‘Look, I’m going to upend the apple cart, I’m going to be a disruptive influence, I am going to absolutely stand against the swamp,’” Toth recounted on Tucker Carlson’s show in October, explaining how he worked to get Crenshaw elected. “So I feel a sense of responsibility for this major screw up, because no sooner did he get there than he became part of the problem.”
Toth wasn’t the only one enamored with Crenshaw. As President Donald Trump roiled the Republican party, Crenshaw preached a style of low-outrage, traditional conservatism that gained him national traction. The 34-year-old combat veteran became a media darling after he appeared on Saturday Night Live the weekend before the 2018 election to reconcile with Pete Davidson over jokes the comedian made about the eyepatch Crenshaw wears due to an IED explosion in Afghanistan.
Crenshaw was feted in the style of many young, bright-burning political newcomers, touted by national news outlets as a “charismatic, Harvard-educated” Republican, a conservative version of Democrat’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who could be the “future of the GOP.” He took hawkish stands on foreign affairs, calling on his military background to encourage further involvement in overseas conflicts, and was praised for his willingness to stand up to party leadership.
But he quickly made some enemies, as when he was caught on tape in 2019 railing against “grifters,” liars and “performance artists” inside his own party. Crenshaw took particular aim at members of the congressional Freedom Caucus, accusing them of fomenting outrage with misinformation and fear-mongering, although he later clarified he wasn’t criticizing the group as a whole.
He sailed to reelection in 2020, but when Trump began promoting unproven allegations that the presidential election had been stolen from him, fissures between Crenshaw and the GOP base began to widen. Crenshaw initially joined a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election results, but later admitted that Biden won and voted to certify the results.
In the eyes of some, in D.C. and back home, that made Crenshaw no better than a Democrat.
“When Dan Crenshaw was elected, he was considered one of the next true conservative fighters alongside Ted Cruz,” Corbin Casteel, a political consultant who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, said at the time. “Now, somehow, Dan Crenshaw is considered not conservative enough. And it’s nuts.”
Crenshaw withstood reelection in 2022 and 2024, though his share of votes in the primary dropped each round. As the Texas GOP base became more MAGA-fied, Crenshaw’s attempts to navigate around a tenuous relationship with Trump became more difficult.
Toth remembers attending a town hall with Crenshaw in the district in early 2024, where Crenshaw touted his support for a deal that would have paired bipartisan immigration legislation with aid for Ukraine, a priority for the congressman. Toth said the local elected officials at the meeting wanted Crenshaw to eschew an immigration compromise in favor of shutting down the border entirely.
Toth left that meeting frustrated with Crenshaw, and, for the first time, considered challenging him for the seat.
“Frankly, it was an easy decision,” Toth said, citing polling he did that showed Crenshaw had low approval ratings in the district. “People don’t win elections like that.”
GOP Antagonizer
In the years since returning to the House, Toth had regained his reputation as a far-right member of an extremely conservative state Legislature. He was heavily involved in pushing Abbott to undo COVID restrictions and took up the “medical freedom” cause pushed by anti-vaccine groups.
In the 2025 regular session, he filed 79 bills, focusing on election integrity, despite no evidence of widespread fraud; abortion, even after the state banned the procedure outright; and restricting what schools can teach about race, gender and sexuality. Just two were voted out of committee. None ultimately passed the House.
But despite this light list of legislative victories, Toth has continued to make a name for himself as a bulldog fighter, within the party and across the aisle. He’s part of a small group of House Republicans known for antagonizing their own leadership, often critiquing Republican-backed proposals to make them less palatable to Democrats or moderates. He’s gotten into arguments on the House floor with Democrats over religion, and said Wednesday that Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has a “wickedness and evil and a demonic presence in the world.”
But he also has gotten crossways with Republicans, like when he reportedly criticized the Senate in 2023 for sending a ban on gender-transition medical care for children over to the House “ridiculously late,” contributing to its failure that year. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a powerful force among hardline conservatives, slammed Toth in response, calling him a “fraud” who had a “reputation for blaming others to cover up his own shortcomings.” Toth insisted it was a misunderstanding, saying Patrick was a “freaking rockstar.”
In the race against Crenshaw, Toth hammered him for insufficient allegiance to MAGA ideology, bashing his support for foreign aid, among other issues. He spotlighted Crenshaw’s support for resettling Afghans who assisted U.S. forces, although in Toth’s retelling, Crenshaw was “demanding we allow more Muslim immigrants” and voting to “bring thousands more from Afghanistan to our neighborhoods.”
After Tuesday’s election results became clear, Crenshaw said in a statement that he was proud of what he accomplished in service of the 2nd Congressional District.
“My life has been about service to this great country, and that will not change,” he said.
Toth will now face Democrat Shaun Finnie, a businessman, in November, in a district that’s projected to strongly favor Republicans. If he wins the general, Toth says he plans to join the Congressional Freedom Caucus, and get to work pushing the conservative agenda his constituents endorsed on election night. His top priority will be helping Trump codify his executive orders, Toth said, and fighting hard on border issues.
“There’s wisdom in knowing when to compromise, but there’s wisdom in knowing when to stand and fight, too,” Toth said.
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