Outgoing Republican Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said late Thursday afternoon that he will not support either candidate vying to be his successor, including his party's nominee, Tim O’Hare
Whitley made clear on social media his displeasure with the campaign O’Hare ran to defeat former Fort Worth mayor Betsy Price in the Republican primary, calling it a “disingenuous attack campaign.”
“I’m just not planning on supporting anybody,” Whitley said. “At this point, given the type of campaign that Tim ran and the various things he’s saying … he doesn’t seem to be saying he wants to bring people together. He wants to do more to divide and pit one group against another, and I’m not going to support that.”
O’Hare, a Southlake lawyer, defeated the county’s leading Republican figure handily by riding a wave of activist constituencies in the northeast of the county who were roused by red-meat populist wedge issues of diversity and equity social issues, as well as executive orders emanating from the pandemic. The former five-term mayor was immediately labeled too liberal to apply for the job and a friend of Black Lives Matter activists, including in his campaign literature Price speaking with BLM protesters.
That message resonated to motivated voters who bothered to show up, catching on like a lit cigarette to dry grass in a drought.
O’Hare, a former Tarrant County Republican Party chair, will face Deborah Peoples, the winner in the Democratic primary. Peoples is a two-time candidate for mayor of Fort Worth, losing to Price and Mattie Parker in 2019 and 2021.
Both are seeking to replace Whitley as the county’s chief elected officer. Whitley chose not to seek reelection after 25 years on the court, including 16 as the successor to Tom Vandergriff as county judge.
“I knew Tim when he was party chair,” Whitley said. “He came to me early last year and asked me if I was going to run for reelection. I said no. He told me he planned to do so and asked if I would give him my support. I told him at that point that I felt very strongly that Betsy was going to be running and I would be supporting her.
“I’ve never liked attack campaigns, and I did not expect this from Tim.”
Whitley said he hoped the race would shift to the issues facing the county and the candidates’ qualifications.
Asked earlier in the day if he had any concerns about whether Whitley would support or endorse his candidacy, O’Hare said “none.”
“They can’t point to a single thing we ever said about my opponent that is untrue,” O’Hare said. “I did not personally attack any of my opponents in any way, shape or form. Those issues we talked about were obviously important to Tarrant county voters, and I would also say masking people up and closing down businesses were important issues we talked about.
“We may not have talked about the issues he thinks are important, but I was talking to voters, not Glen Whitley.”
County judges in Texas serve as head of emergency management in their jurisdictions.
Whitley, admittedly grudgingly at the time, put in place orders requiring facemasks and restricting capacities of restaurants and bars. All were in line with the executive orders of Gov. Greg Abbott, who also directed that the state’s big counties and cities could make their own judgments on what they deemed appropriate to mitigate the spread. Price supported those measures and implemented her own within the city’s jurisdiction.
All were done at the recommendation of medical professionals and virologists, and the CDC.
“It was hard to do, but it saved lives,” Price said during the campaign. “Would we do it again knowing what we know now? No. But at the time we didn’t have adequate testing, we didn’t have PPE [personal protective equipment], our hospitals were crowded, doctors were screaming we have to control this. We didn’t know where the pockets were because we couldn’t test everybody. It did save lives. It was hard. The county judge chief emergency operations director. You’ve got to make hard calls.”
Tarrant County is in the bullseye of Texas Democrats. Beto O’Rourke’s appearance at Peoples’ election night watch party made that clear. As goes the county, so goes Texas.
The county has trended Democrat over the last few years. In 2018, the county voted for O’Rourke over U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. Joe Biden won the county in the 2020 presidential election.
Both of those races had something in common: a Republican candidate unafraid to deploy populist themes. O’Hare’s history indicates he could make this race very much the same.
He attacked Price’s conservative sincerity over the course of a very contentious primary season.
The race with Peoples sets up to be as and probably more heated.
As the mayor of Farmers Branch, a city of almost 40,000 in Dallas County, O’Hare advocated for ordinances banning landlords from renting to immigrants in the country illegally and requiring that flower pots and other landscape receptacles contain living plants, according to documents. Opponents denounced the laws as illegally targeting the city’s Hispanic population.
The controversy attracted a national audience and ultimately cost the city about $6.6 million in legal fees defending its position. A federal court eventually found the city ordinance unconstitutional.
After moving to Southlake in 2013, O’Hare founded the Southlake Families PAC, which was designed to oppose the Carroll school district’s Cultural Competence Action Plan. The group raised more than $200,000 for school board candidates. Each of those candidates won in landslides with 70% of the vote in 2021.
Southlake Families PAC is, according to its website, “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” The organization asserts that it stands against racism, acknowledging that racism “remains an issue across the globe.”
If he wins in November, O’Hare vowed to continue to work against critical race theory, the concept born in academia that racism is not simply an individual bias but embedded in legal systems and public policy.
The state Legislature has already passed a bill to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools. It’s unclear what more can be done from the Commissioners Court.
O’Hare now takes this recent history to a county of more than two million, including 30% who identify as Hispanic and 17% African American.
O’Hare is convinced that his message will resonate with all people, regardless of race, who are tired of the "America bashing."
Of Peoples, O’Hare said that she is “a perennial candidate who can’t seem to win anything but thinks calling Trump supporters racists and touting endorsements from Bernie Sanders is a good thing. I don’t think Tarrant County is going to see it that way.”