In 2024, the Texas House Republican primaries were a bloodbath.
The cutthroat cycle saw historic levels of campaign ad spending, including the usual cash influx from West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks supporting far-right primary challengers. Gov. Greg Abbott spent millions more to oust GOP incumbents who opposed private school vouchers, his signature issue, while Attorney General Ken Paxton targeted lawmakers who voted to impeach him in 2023.
Two years later — after a legislative season that saw Republicans push through GOP priorities including vouchers, congressional redistricting and a host of long-sought socially conservative bills — the primary landscape has transformed.
This cycle, after a decade of defining Texas GOP legislative primaries by their efforts to eject establishment Republicans, Dunn and Wilks’ political machine appears to be taking a step back. In the last six months of 2025, groups backed by the two Christian nationalist megadonors gave only to a handful of House Republican incumbents and candidates running for open seats, according to fundraising and spending activity disclosed last week. It is a striking shift from previous cycles, when Dunn and Wilks channeled vast sums of their money toward firebrand challengers.
Instead, the main battle line dividing Republicans this cycle is over tort reform, with Texans for Lawsuit Reform — the state’s leading crusader for restricting business’ legal liability — targeting three GOP incumbents who helped quash its priorities during last year’s legislative session. Trial lawyer groups, meanwhile, are spending big to defend those lawmakers.
The most expensive race is playing out in San Antonio’s House District 121, where Texans for Lawsuit Reform has spent nearly $900,000 supporting David McArthur, the Republican challenger to GOP Rep. Marc LaHood.
Fueling LaHood’s reelection bid, meanwhile, are a number of big-dollar donations from personal injury law firms and affiliated groups, including the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and Texans for Truth and Liberty, a PAC funded entirely by the high-powered Houston firm Arnold & Itkin. Collectively, the two groups contributed $268,000 to LaHood’s campaign over the course of last year, adding to a haul north of $1 million he received from assorted medical groups, personal injury lawyers and law firms.
LaHood was instrumental in the demise of Senate Bill 30, an effort to rein in payouts from personal injury lawsuits and one of Texans for Lawsuit Reform’s top priorities last year. A personal injury and criminal defense attorney by trade, LaHood sought significant changes to SB 30 and helped kill two of the group’s other priority bills as a member of the pivotal House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee.
He traded barbs with TLR’s president after the session, accusing the group of negotiating in bad faith and slamming SB 30 as a “poorly drafted, frankly indefensible, scheme to deny aid to those who have suffered life-altering harm.”
The legislative defeats marked a low point for Texans for Lawsuit Reform, or TLR, which at its height played an influential role in turning the state red and has consistently driven bills through the Legislature making it harder to sue big businesses and medical providers.
SB 30 originally set strict limits on the amounts accident victims could receive in monetary damages. The bill was significantly watered down in the House before ultimately dying when it missed a key deadline.
The group’s other two priority bills — which would have curbed payouts from lawsuits against commercial vehicle owners, including trucking companies, and limited public nuisance claims — both stalled in the House’s judiciary committee.
TLR’s waning influence in Austin comes as the group finds itself more frequently at odds with the GOP’s rightmost flank, particularly after the group endorsed a GOP candidate challenging Paxton in 2022. Paxton’s allies also accused TLR of working behind the scenes to orchestrate his impeachment the following year, a charge the group’s leaders have vehemently denied.
Among TLR’s targets in the lower chamber are a growing cohort of right-wing trial lawyers — including LaHood and one of Paxton’s impeachment attorneys, Rep. Mitch Little of Lewisville — who have become increasingly prominent within the Texas Republican apparatus.
For years, trial lawyers were virtually synonymous with the Democratic Party, fighting a losing battle as TLR helped bring the Texas GOP to power in the 1990s. Now, with top trial lawyer groups playing an active role in Republican primaries, Dick Weekley, TLR’s chairman and founder, penned a Houston Chronicle op-ed last month in which he accused “Democratic trial lawyers” — singling out Arnold & Itkin — of “posing as allies of the right.”
“They’ve discovered they don’t need to win general elections to block reform — they only need to shape who gets on the ballot,” Weekley wrote.
The tort reform factions are also spending heavily in the race to succeed outgoing Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, in North Texas’ House District 98.
In the second half of last year, the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and Texans for Truth and Liberty together gave $127,500 to Armin Mizani, the Republican mayor of Keller who runs his own personal injury law firm. Meanwhile, campaign finance records show that Texans for Lawsuit Reform put six figures behind his opponent, Fred Tate, a businessman and former Texas Republican Party treasurer.
On his campaign website, Tate argues that everyday costs are being driven up by the “tort tax” that stems from “frivolous lawsuits from greedy personal injury lawyers.”
“Fred will champion common-sense lawsuit reforms to curb abusive litigation and hold personal injury lawyers accountable so they can’t use our courts as a personal jackpot,” Tate’s campaign priorities page reads.
Elsewhere, Texans for Lawsuit Reform has supported primary challengers to Reps. Mark Dorazio, R-San Antonio, and Andy Hopper, R-Decatur, both of whom supported an amendment watering down SB 30. The group spent more than $60,000 last month in support of Dorazio’s GOP opponent, Willie Ng, and gave $50,000 to Hopper’s challenger, Lisa McEntire.
TLR to pull back on spending?
That Dunn and Wilks are taking a less active role in this year’s primaries reflects how much the Texas House was transformed by last year’s contests, which pushed out so many establishment Republicans that there remain only so many to primary. The incumbent wipeout pushed the chamber further to the right and set in motion a leadership change that elevated a new speaker, Rep. Dustin Burrows, who marched largely in lockstep with the Senate’s conservative agenda.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a permanent condition, but I guess he’s pretty happy with the body as is,” Bill Miller, a longtime Texas lobbyist, said of Dunn. “They’re complacent, which says they’re happy, they’re satisfied. They’ve done a lot.”
Another factor shaping the primary picture: Abbott’s absence from the battlefield, thanks to his success pushing through the school voucher program last year with the support of every House Republican lawmaker running for reelection.
That vote earned the members a blanket endorsement from President Donald Trump, which may be complicating efforts by tort reform groups to target incumbent lawmakers, given the weight of Trump’s approval in Republican primaries.
Despite its prolific spending in the final months of 2025, Texans for Lawsuit Reform has recently indicated to some candidates in competitive primaries that it does not plan to continue spending in support of its endorsed primary challengers, two sources familiar with the matter told The Texas Tribune. The development was first reported by the Texas Bullpen.
But others in the Texans for Lawsuit Reform universe are continuing to contribute to the challengers, the sources said, helping plug the hole left by the group’s apparent move to halt funding.
“We’re thankful for what TLR has done so far to get us to this point,” a spokesperson for McArthur’s campaign said. “We’re fortunate that others have stepped up to continue the work they started.”
In a statement, TLR chief executive Ryan Patrick declined to say whether the group would continue spending on behalf of its three endorsed primary challengers. But, without naming specific candidates or races, Patrick said the group would continue supporting conservative Republicans and spreading its message about the “hidden tort tax that is crushing families and businesses.”
“That message will continue to resonate in districts where candidates are heavily invested with Democrat megadonors and the trial attorney lobby,” Patrick said.
Soon after TLR reportedly indicated it would turn off the spigot, McArthur launched a $100,000 ad buy on TV — a substantial purchase that features a Newsmax anchor describing LaHood as being “on the ropes for his staunch support for the trial lawyer lobby.”
LaHood, meanwhile, responded with an ad that said he “stopped Big Insurance’s attempt to pick the bones of the American people.”
Earlier in 2025, Texans for Truth and Liberty also made big contributions to hard-right incumbent lawmakers who helped sink or weaken tort reform measures during the legislative session, putting them in a stronger financial position going into the primary season and potentially helping stave off Republican challengers. The group’s donations included $100,000 to Little and $50,000 apiece to Reps. Katrina Pierson, R-Rockwall, and Wes Virdell, R-Brady.
Renzo Downey contributed reporting.
Disclosure: Texans for Lawsuit Reform and Texas Trial Lawyers Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
