Col. Allen West, a former congressman from Florida, announced Wednesday night he is exploring a run for chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. West, originally from Atlanta, moved to Dallas five years ago.
“We must defeat here in the state of Texas this scourge called progressive socialism,” he said on YouTube, explaining why he’s looking at running for Texas GOP chair instead of a congressional seat.
West’s micro-site calls for keeping Texas red.
The current GOP party chairman, James Dickey, is running for re-election, citing the need for the party to be unified ahead of the “greatest Democratic onslaught that we have seen in decades.”
Should he run and win the chair position, West, a dedicated Trump acolyte, would further harden the Texas Republican Party into extreme positions, particularly on immigration.
A flavor of Allen West:
- He called President Obama and Eric Holder “vile and disgusting racists.”
- In 2014, on Boston Herald radio, he said the “Democrat Party is an anti-Semitic party.”
- General James Mattis, Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, reportedly once said West was a “commander who has lost his moral balance or has watched too many Hollywood movies.”
- “You have proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!” he once wrote to a Democratic congresswoman.
Many expected West to run for a congressional seat in Dallas.
“After months of playing footsie with running in #TX32, even a nut job like @AllenWest was able to figure out he had no chance of beating @ColinAllredTX. With this latest @NRCC recruitment failure, the Washington Republicans chances of taking back the House keep getting worse,” the communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote on Twitter following the announcement.
The election for GOP chair is May 2020 in Houston.
