What voters hear from the offices of the top Texas officeholders often sounds identical to what they’re hearing from the incumbents’ campaigns. It’s hard to tell their government work from their political work.
Ross Ramsey
Ross Ramsey co-founded The Texas Tribune in 2009 and served as its executive editor until his retirement in 2022. He wrote regular columns on politics, government and public policy. Before joining the Tribune, he was editor and co-owner of Texas Weekly. He did a 28-month stint in government with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Before that, he reported for the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Times Herald, as a Dallas-based freelancer for regional and national magazines and newspapers, and for radio stations in Denton and Dallas.
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Texas 2022 Elections
Analysis: Crime pays, politically speaking, for Texas AGs
A Texas attorney general is a civil lawyer, mostly concerned with regulatory, tax and administrative law. But to listen to the candidates, you’d think the state’s top lawyer was some kind of cop.
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Texas 2022 Elections
Analysis: Running a Texas election while voters are distracted — by politics
With less than five weeks left in the primary election season, there is no shortage of political issues to debate. But most of the political conversation isn’t about the election.
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Texas 2022 Elections
Analysis: For a few Texas politicians, a bad time for bad news
For three of the state’s most experienced politicians, bad news comes with the territory. But bad news in the critical stages of an election is another, more serious, kind of trouble.
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Texas Voting Rights
Analysis: Texas government is business-friendly, but not businesslike
Business people running elections might try to remove obstacles to make everything smooth and secure for voters. But a kink in the supply chain for voter registration forms in Texas highlights a venerable distinction: Government doesn’t run like a business.
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Texas 2022 Elections
Analysis: Texas politicians await our instructions, but what do voters want?
If Texas politicians seem to be tinkering at the edges of major issues like the pandemic, electric blackouts and education, an election year is the best opportunity to set them straight.
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Texas Voting Rights
Analysis: The never-ending fight over voting in the U.S.
Some of the same voting debates underway when Martin Luther King Jr. was alive are still being debated right now in Texas and in Washington, D.C.
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Politics
Analysis: If you can’t beat ’em, change the rules
Here’s something Democrats and Republicans have in common: When lawmakers are deadlocked, leaders turn to the rulebooks, searching for angles and rule changes that would turn things their way.
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Texas 2022 Elections
Analysis: Texas politicians can change their minds. But it helps if the public goes first.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s openness to marijuana decriminalization shows that the state, while conservative, isn’t immune to larger trends.
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Texas 2022 Elections
Analysis: A Texas election in the shade of government’s third branch
Challenges to new Texas laws on voting, political districts and abortion are all pending in court, as is the state’s challenge to federal vaccine mandates. But until the courts rule, those laws remain in place — and they provide political fodder for the incumbents who support them.