President of Abilene Republican Women addresses division within the Republican Party

TAYLOR COUNTY, Texas ( KTAB/KRBC ) — In this week’s episode of Big Country Politics, Diana Hartman, president of the Abilene Republican Women, discussed grassroots efforts in Texas politics and addressed the division within the Republican party.

Abilene Republican Women was established about two years ago as a part of the largest group of politically active women in Texas, the Texas Federation of Republican Women. Hartman explained that the chapter was created because she saw that the Taylor County Republican Party wasn’t very active at the time.

“We got started. A friend of mine, Darla Keeling, and I were one day very angry after watching Fox News. We were like, we’ve got to do something. So it prompted us to start looking into getting active in our local Republican Party. We had gone to several of the Taylor County Republican parties, and we were trying to get into doing something to activate our precincts; we looked at our precincts, and we found out that neither one of our precincts had a precinct chair. We put in our application to be precinct chairman,” Hartman shared. “We basically went in there and tried to get active in the Taylor County party. We found out that they weren’t doing much they were just meeting like maybe once a month, and at that point in time, I don’t think they were meeting once a month, every like meeting every quarter. So they have to do that by the law of the GOP. That’s their rule. We just started getting active and doing things and we found out that things weren’t really moving along. So what we did is we started Abilene Republican Women.”

Just a few weeks ago, Chris Carnahan, chairman of the Taylor County Republican Party, appeared on Big Country Politics to discuss his re-election and reuniting the local Republican Party following his resignation earlier this year, before the primary election. Hartman believes that what he said was not uniting the party.

“The one thing that the Taylor County Chair is supposed to do is have a convention before our state convention to get representatives to represent our county and go as delegates to the state convention. He had no intentions of doing that. Back in February, he went on another show, and he said that he was resigning and told everybody he was resigning from his position as the Taylor County Chairman. What prompted that was some of the CEC, which is the county executive committee, got together and wanted to have a meeting to get prepared for our precinct Convention, which we have to have before we go to the state convention. And he had no intentions of doing that,” Hartman said.

She shared that she believes he resigned due to personal beliefs during the House District 71 race between Stan Lambert and Liz Case.

“I don’t think he wanted to support her [Liz Case]. And that’s why he resigned because, as a whole, you’re supposed to support all the candidates that are running, not just make, at that point in primaries, we don’t pick who it is until the voters decide. Then we’re all in on whoever the voters voted in. I think he wanted to support Mr. Lambert, who was running because Liz was running against him. So he resigned because they were wanting to have an executive committee meeting because he had nothing planned for any kind of a state convention or anything like that. So, we do not think his intentions were to do that. And, of course, it didn’t happen,” Hartman shared.

She said his resignation split the party right down the middle, and half of them went to one side and one to the other.

“We had to bumble around and try to get pulled back together to have our precinct convention to get ready for state. There were a lot of good people that helped us and Mr. Pickens was one of them. That helped us, as well as rich Sanders, Dr. Rich Sanders, and several others who pulled the party back together. We had our precinct convention. We had more delegates go this year than I’ve ever remembered. I think we had like something like 32 delegates go from this county, which doesn’t seem like a lot. But when you only had six in the years passed, that’s a lot of people,” Hartman said.

Divisions within the Republican party have been a longstanding issue. Hartman mentioned that she attributes some of it to a lack of activity and teamwork, although she is unsure about its exact origin.

“It’s that old saying, teamwork makes the dream work. A lot of times, there was a lot of opposition from Chris when people would come up with ideas on how to get the vote out or go door-knocking, or just do anything new and different. He wasn’t on board for that. He kind of liked it to be just the little feudal people that were running it, there was about four of them at that time that were running it. People weren’t encouraged to do anything other than what their agenda was. I know that during the scramble of trying to reorganize, they had to come up with a new set of bylaws. They actually have made it where there’s now committees, different committees that all get together and make the decision for the party. It’s actually using the talents of the people that are coming in and we’ve had a growth in membership. I know that we’re up to nearly 50 members, just in Republican women,” Hartman explained.

She recommended making amends through apologies to bring the party back on the same page.

“I always think that apologies all around would work, you know, just coming out and apologizing for doing that. Whether it was ego pride or whatever, he could still come back and just say ‘I’m sorry, I did this. Let’s try to work together.’ I think that would go a long way with a lot of the people who are in the party right now because it’s not just women; it’s men too. Because we were left in a large, a big large for many, many weeks, and we had to decide how we were going to get back to sending those delegates, and it really, unfortunately, it kind of pulled us together when he stepped out of the way and we were just like, you know, got it all organized and ready to go,” Hartman shared.

Hartman shared that division is not uncommon, but you can still stand alongside someone without seeing eye to eye.

“The grassroots effort is a diversity of people who are coming together with one common purpose. So there is sometimes division and our party, but, you know, this isn’t the first time this has happened. And Ronald Reagan said it best when he said, If a man is with you 80% of the time, and you disagree 20%, He’s still on your side, you know, so that’s what we have to look at now,” Hartman shared.

She mentioned that they are progressing with their plans to urge the seven ‘golden cities’ to maintain the state’s red status.

“We’ve been planning this for over a year to have the seven golden cities, and I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but when Cortez first came to Texas, he was looking for the seven golden cities that the Aztecs had somewhere. And, of course, he was doing it for a different reason. We are looking at it as a way to hold and keep Texas red. In the last election and 2020, that actually did happen. West Texas did hold the state as a red state because the metropolitan areas, a lot of them were already turning mostly blue, or you perceived as blue. we are trying to start that effort again. There are seven cities, which are Abilene, Amarillo, Midland, Odessa, Lubbock, Wichita Falls, and San Angelo, and the seven cities; if we can get our little cities around us to also join us, then we will be able to hold that line. Because if we get 70% of our vote out, we can hold the Metropolitan studies,” Hartman explained.

The Abilene Republican Women is hosting an event on July 12-13. The $75 fee includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Friday and breakfast and lunch on Saturday. The event will feature Troy Jackson, Abraham Enriquez, Ben Quine

“Troy Jackson comes from the site party as one of their trainers. He’s gone out and done this before in the Dallas area. Abraham Enriquez, I had heard today from somebody that Trump has got him on his radar to work their six precincts in the United States right now that Trump needs help with and they’re mainly Hispanic. He is going to get Abraham to come out because he has some things to make the Hispanic voters realize that maybe they may be Republican after all. It’s really exciting some of the things that he’s bringing to the table on that,” Hartman shared. “We have Ben Quine, who is from the Christians Engaged, and he works with Bunni Pounds, who just wrote a book, Jesus and Politics. It basically talks about how we always think that you don’t separate church and state. But that’s not what we think God intended. He was the creator of politics and everything. He’s going to be bringing to the table how we can engage the Christian voter because only one out of four Christians vote, and that is so shocking because I think everybody from my church voted, but it’s not always true. We also have Steve Hemphill, who is our keynote speaker for Friday night after a nice barbecue dinner. He wrote the book, ‘What Are the Stakes,’ and he also searched for the real heaven. He is also going to teach us about the spiritual warfare aspect.”

To learn more about the Abilene Republican Women and their events, visit their website .

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