Inside the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston last week, digital banners told delegates “unity drives victory.” Speaker after speaker urged Republicans to set aside a brutal primary season and turn their attention to November. But underneath the unity messaging, the three-day biennial convention offered the clearest look yet at what the Texas GOP plans to run on heading into the midterms—and it wasn’t an economic agenda.
It was Islam.
No issue drew more attention in committee meetings, platform deliberations, and hallway panels than what Republicans repeatedly called the “Islamification” of Texas. “This is a crisis, this is an emergency,” one woman told a group drafting the party’s legislative priorities, according to the Texas Tribune, demanding action against Sharia law, which is not in place in Texas. The sentiment wasn’t fringe—it shaped one of the convention’s most visible confrontations, and it dovetailed with a broader hard-right agenda centered on immigration crackdowns, election control, and what delegates described as restoring Christianity’s role in government.
That broader push was on full display on Friday, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick took the stage and turned his attention to Democratic US Senate nominee James Talarico, an Austin state representative and Presbyterian seminarian who has made his faith central to his campaign. “It’s James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election,” Patrick told the crowd. “And let me tell you, that’s not a Bible I’ve ever read. I’ve never seen so much blasphemy from anyone running for office …That’s what we’re up against. That’s the darkness. That’s the light. That’s why we must be one.”
Talarico responded on social media that night, writing that Patrick has “sold out the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable to enrich his donors.” The exchange escalated a religious fight that has defined the early stages of the Senate race, in which Talarico will face Attorney General Ken Paxton—himself a vocal evangelical—in November.
Critics outside the party said Patrick’s comments crossed a line that should concern voters regardless of their politics. Human rights activist Dana Wilson Smith wrote “a government official telling a political opponent he will ‘go to hell’ for his view of Scripture is exactly why church and state must stay separate,” calling it Christian nationalism—”one political faction claiming ownership of God, salvation, patriotism, and moral authority.” In his speech, Patrick happily embraced the Christian nationalist label, which he said the left has been keen to attach to him for years.
The convention’s most heated moment, though, had nothing to do with the Senate race. At a booth for the newly formed “Sharia-Free Texas Caucus,” delegates Amjad Muhtaseb, Samar Halabi, and Tarek Hussein got into what was described by a Texas Tribune reporter as “a heated exchange” with the caucus’ founder, state Rep. Brent Money of Greenville, over religion.
The party attempted to remove Muhtaseb and Hussein as delegates over their ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, which Gov. Greg Abbott has designated a terrorist organization. Under the party rules, the convention could not remove the delegates. Hussein is the founder and former president of CAIR’s Houston chapter, while Muhtaseb had attended a CAIR press conference in solidarity with the group after Abbott’s designation.
Outgoing party chair Abraham George told them from the lectern in the main ballroom: “You know where the entire body stands. I would strongly advise you to leave our caucus. There is a Democrat convention happening in a couple of weeks. Join them.”
The anti-Islam push came even as party leaders repeatedly stressed the need for solidarity heading into a midterm cycle in which Democrats hope for their first statewide win since 1994. US Sen. Ted Cruz told delegates that primary divisions “feel massive” until looking toward November’s “very real differences.” Gov. Greg Abbott, speaking at the convention in-person for the first time since 2018, vowed to “demolish” Democrats while urging Republicans to stick together. Former state Sen. Don Huffines, the GOP nominee for comptroller, told the crowd they needed to “crush the atheists and the leftists.” Some attendees donned “Make America Great Again”-style red caps that read, “Defend Texas Defeat Sharia.”
Two days after the convention closed, voters in Frisco offered an early signal about whether this messaging translates into votes. In Saturday’s mayoral runoff, Mark Hill defeated Rod Vilhauer—a candidate who had likened immigrants to “rats” and called Islam a terrorist ideology—by a wide margin, with Hill taking 58% of the vote. Hill received 19,632 votes to Vilhauer’s 14,146, in a runoff that drew more than double the turnout of the original May election.
Vilhauer had built his campaign around opposition to Frisco’s growing Muslim population, and the race had become a proxy battle over who belongs in one of America’s fastest-growing cities—and who gets to decide. Voters decided against the rhetoric by a wide margin.
Whether that result is a one-off in a single fast-growing suburb or a preview of how anti-Muslim speech and sentiment performs statewide remains to be seen. But it lands at an awkward moment for a party that, just days earlier, made halting the “Islamification of Texas” one of its central rallying cries—with little discussion, by comparison, of the cost of living, property taxes, healthcare or any of the other issues polls consistently show Texans rank as priorities.
