At present the Texas Republican Party is at the plateau of a dramatic rise in stature and power that took it from playing a bit part in what had been largely a Democratic Party show to practically owning the political theater of Texas government.

Although Republicans now control all statewide offices, both houses of the Legislature, and both U.S. Senate seats their period of unambiguous dominance was relatively short-lived. After taking control of the House of Representatives in 2002 with a commanding 88-62 majority, the Republican lead has been honed to a very narrow 76-74 after the 2008 elections. The result was that the 2009 legislative session started with the replacement of Tom Craddick, an architect of the Republican surge in the legislature, by relative newcomer Joe Straus, who was elected with significant Democratic support. Speaker Straus, a Republican from San Antonio, enjoyed a much less powerful majority than had Speaker Craddick in the Texas House, even as Texas remained a majority Republican state.

So despite the ebbing of Republican dominance in the House, the Republican party retains the initiative among the electorate, where political strategists still tend to assume a statewide electoral advantage for Republican candidates; and in Republicans' continuing monopoly of statewide executive offices, where a Democratic candidate has not won a statewide race for more than a decade. What happened? How did things turn around so dramatically during the last two decades?

Deep seated tensions in the Texas party system had existed throughout the twentieth century. These tensions generated periodic ruptures and longer term evolutionary changes that accumulated to critical levels, causing a sharp reversal of political party fortunes by century's end.

To understand these tensions, ruptures and changes we need first to expose some of the underlying bedrock upon which Texas political culture and history rest.