From The Texas Tribune:
Over the past two decades, Tim O’Hare methodically amassed power in North Texas as he pushed incendiary policies such as banning undocumented immigrants from renting homes and vilifying school curriculum that encouraged students to embrace diversity.
He rode a wave of conservative resentment, leaping from City Council member of Farmers Branch, a suburb north of Dallas, in 2005 to its mayor to the leader of the Tarrant County Republican Party.
Three years ago, O’Hare sought his highest political office yet, running for the top elected position in the nation’s 15th-largest county, which is home to Fort Worth. Backed by influential evangelical churches and money from powerful oil industry billionaires, O’Hare promised voters he would weed out “diversity inclusion nonsense” and accused some Democrats of hating America. His win in November 2022 gave the GOP’s far right new sway over the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, turning a government that once prided itself on bipartisanship into a new front of the culture war.
“I was not looking to do this at all, but they came after our police,” he said in his victory speech on election night. “They came after our schools. They came after our country. They came after our churches.”
In Texas and across the country, far-right candidates have won control of school boards, swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs. O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government, offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.
Since he was elected county judge — a position similar to that of mayor in a city — O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach. He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights. And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically. In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time. Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism. The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.
“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like, and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism. “The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”
Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
O’Hare declined multiple interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions emailed to him. His spokesperson instead touted a list of eight accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans. When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020, many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.
Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades. After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents. The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.
The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, Glen Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022. Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race. “You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”
Political rise
In 2005, when O’Hare initially ran unopposed for a seat on the City Council in Farmers Branch, a small town just outside of Tarrant County, his platform included plans to revitalize the public library and bring in new restaurants. In 2006, however, O’Hare began taking positions that were outside of the Republican mainstream at the time. He pushed for the diversifying town to declare English its official language, ban landlords from renting to residents without proof of citizenship, and stop publishing public materials in Spanish.
“The reason I got on the City Council was because I saw our property values declining or increasing at a level that was below the rate of inflation,” O’Hare said at the time. “When that happens, people move out of our neighborhoods, and what I would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people who don’t value education, people who don’t value taking care of their properties.”
Hispanic residents mobilized and sued to block the rental ban’s implementation. O’Hare doubled down: He pushed for Farmers Branch police to partner with immigration enforcement authorities to detain and deport people in the country illegally, and urged residents to oppose a grocer’s plan to open a store that catered to Hispanics, arguing it was “reasonable” to prefer “a grocery store that appeals to higher-end consumers.”
O’Hare was elected as mayor in 2008. Foreshadowing moves he’d make as Tarrant County judge, he abruptly ended a public meeting after cutting off and removing one resident who criticized him. He led opposition to the local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and fought against a mentorship program for at-risk high school students that included volunteers from a Hispanic group that opposed his immigration resolution.
Meanwhile, the city continued to defend the immigration ordinance after it was repeatedly struck down by federal judges. As costs for the seven-year legal battle ballooned, Farmers Branch dipped into its reserves, cut nearly two dozen city employees and outsourced services at the library that O’Hare had campaigned on improving during his City Council run. “At the end of the day, this will be money well spent, and it will be a good investment in our community’s future,” O’Hare said after the town laid off staff in 2008.
O’Hare stepped down as mayor in 2011. Three years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, Farmers Branch stopped defending the ordinance. It was never enforced, but the related lawsuits cost the town $6.6 million, city officials said in 2016.
After leaving office, O’Hare moved his family a few miles away to Tarrant County, where demographic changes have dropped the share of white residents from 62% of the county’s population in 2000 to 43% in 2020.
Home to some of the nation’s most influential evangelical churches and four of former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisers, the county is an epicenter for ultraconservative movements in Texas, including those that call for Christians to exert dominance over all aspects of society. In 2016, O’Hare was elected chair of the Tarrant County GOP. Under him, the party distributed mailers that listed the primary voting records for local candidates — breaking with the longstanding nonpartisan tradition of county elections.
In 2020, following a series of racist incidents at the mostly white Carroll High School in Southlake — including one viral clip in which white students chanted the N-word — O’Hare co-founded a political action committee that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to oust school board members who supported the Carroll Independent School District’s plans for diversity and inclusion programming. The dispute helped catapult the small Tarrant County suburb into the national spotlight amid Republican panic over critical race theory and “gender ideology,” and created a blueprint for right-wing organizing that was copied in suburbs across America.
In 2021, O’Hare launched his campaign for Tarrant County judge, squaring off in the GOP primary against the more moderate five-term mayor of Fort Worth, whom he painted as a RINO, or “Republican in name only.” O’Hare rode a wave fueled by backlash to COVID-19 mandates, baseless election fraud conspiracy theories and opposition to what he called “diversity inclusion nonsense,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. O’Hare’s campaign was condemned by moderate Republicans, including Whitley, the outgoing judge, who accused him of trying to “divide and pit one group against another.” O’Hare won the primary by 23 percentage points.