In February, as campaign season ramped up across Tarrant County, Republican leaders and Mansfield residents filled a private room inside a popular bar for a fundraising event titled “Path to Progress: Restoring Conservative Leadership in Mansfield.”
“You are the most important race right here in May, literally, in the entire state of Texas,” Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare told event attendees, who donned GOP apparel and MAGA hats. He encouraged them to donate to conservative politicians in the city and “change the direction of Mansfield.”
He listed out a slate of six candidates for local Mansfield races — three incumbent school board members and three candidates for City Council — who served as the main faces of the event. The group would go on to run conservative-aligned campaigns with endorsements from the Tarrant County Republican Party.
None won their races May 3 following a tense spring featuring fierce debate over partisanship, cultural issues and their role in the future of Mansfield.
The losses were part of a broader trend across Tarrant County May 3, as voters threw support behind candidates who either leaned left or publicly rejected partisanship altogether.
True Texas Project, a Tarrant County-based conservative activist group formerly known as the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, made 33 candidate recommendations in local county elections. Nineteen lost.
The Tarrant County Republican Party, whose 26-candidate-long list of endorsements shared many names with True Texas Project, saw 14, including all seven challenged school board candidates, lose.
One Republican-backed Mansfield City Council candidate, Melisa Perez, took a lead in the four-way race for the council’s open Place 5 seat, but not one strong enough to avoid a June 7 runoff.
For many Mansfield voters, the election results came as a shock. Beth Light, who served on the school board from 2006 to 2018, endorsed Ana-Alicia Horn, a school board challenger who unseated board president Keziah Valdes Farrar May 3. Since her election in 2021, Valdes Farrar has been the proponent of several controversial revisions to Mansfield ISD’s library policies.
Though she was hopeful for Horn’s candidacy, Light didn’t expect all the incumbents to lose.
“I just never dreamed that every single one of those school board incumbents would not be reelected,” Light said. “It’s the first time I can remember that happening.”
She called the results a “clear message” that voters want to keep outside PACs and partisanship out of local elections.
Light, who describes herself as a conservative who votes Republican in national elections, said she doesn’t think Mansfield leans Democrat. She feels it’s more centrist, if not right-leaning, but residents want elections “run by people, not run by the parties.”
Local races become ‘battleground’ for ideology
In recent election cycles, local races have gradually become the “latest battlefield for policy making” for both sides of the political spectrum, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
“We are seeing more money poured into local races, more attention to individual candidates and more advocacy policies,” Rottinghaus said. “That competitiveness of local politics makes it easy for people to see clearly where candidates stand ideologically. That’s not something that was sort of obvious in the past.”
He said it’s difficult to gauge broader political sentiments based on local, off-cycle elections, which consistently see lower voter turnout than November elections with national candidates on the ballot. The results in Mansfield are likely more the result of a group of passionate, civically engaged residents who are angry about the partisanship they’ve seen in recent years, Rottinghaus said.
About 8% of registered Tarrant County voters cast ballots in the May 3 election. Across the three Mansfield ISD races, an average of 12,263 voters cast ballots — up from an average of 10,393 voters in the four May 2022 school board races. School board members are elected at-large, allowing all voters in the district to weigh in on candidates.
“It would be misleading to read too much into these results, or to ascribe what’s happening as a direct rebuke to what’s going on at the federal and state levels,” Rottinghaus said.
Clayton Waters, who as founder of MISD Future PAC supported the school district challengers, said he feels conservative voters weren’t motivated by the incumbents’ partisan message. He said the results were a “loud and clear message that partisanship isn’t welcome on the school board.”
Conservative leaders agreed their voters weren’t motivated this election cycle, but they don’t agree that it’s due to a rejection of partisanship.
“I know the Left will spin this to motivate their troops saying Tarrant is blue. It’s not. One election can’t make that determination,” Julie McCarty, CEO of True Texas Project, said in a statement to the Report, adding that it was only six months ago that Republicans swept Tarrant County in the November election.
“The problem for the Right is we win in Federal and State elections, and we let that lull us to sleep,” McCarty said. “The Right needs to learn to stay the course. We will rally, and we will win again. Just watch.”
Bo French, Tarrant County GOP chair, said in a post on X the results are less a sign of Tarrant County turning blue and more a sign of Republicans not caring about local elections.
“Many (Republicans) seem very content with what is happening in DC because Trump is winning on so many issues,” French wrote. “I think the average Republican voter sees that and thinks there is no urgency locally.”
Good question. We did more than we have ever done in terms of voter contact. We endorsed, got RPT to endorse and then contacted voters. We will have to analyze who turned out and who didn’t before we know everything. But, it seems the average Republican just doesn’t care about…
— Bo French (@BoFrenchTX) May 4, 2025
Mayoral race turned personal
In Mansfield, residents handed four-year incumbent Mayor Michael Evans, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, a 20-percentage-point lead over opponent Julie Short, an outgoing City Council member who prematurely ended her third term to challenge Evans with an openly conservative campaign.
Short, who sits with O’Hare on the board of the conservative Keep Tarrant Red PAC, ran events with True Texas Project, which earned headlines and protests last year with its “War on White America” conference at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden.
The race between Evans and Short grew tense and personal, with each candidate’s Christian faith and view on diversity taking center stage in mailers and exchanges.
Evans outwardly shunned partisan politics, and in February called them “bad for business on the local level.” He has a personal history of supporting Democrats, donating to progressive PAC ActBlue Texas and receiving support from Democrat Tarrant County Precinct 2 Commissioner Alisa Simmons. He told the Report he wants to build “consensus bridges” with those he disagrees with.
Light, the former school board member, said both mayoral candidates sent inflammatory mailers. She felt Short’s message focused too much on Evans, and too little on what she’d do for Mansfield.
“The tactics that were used are more of a national party tactic, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, they tend to talk so bad about the other person, but never say what you’re going to do,” she said.
Mansfield resident Elizabeth Casas said she decided not to vote in the election because “there was too much underhandedness and mud slinging.”
Casas, a dental office manager, pulled her children out of Mansfield ISD to homeschool them after feeling the district was “broken.”
Mansfield voters also handed incumbent Tamera Bounds reelection to her Place 2 seat, voting against her challenger Lori Williams, the president and CEO of the Mansfield Area Chamber of Commerce, who received Republican backing similar to Short’s.
In a post-election Facebook post, Short said she was proud of her family and friends for their support. She added in a statement to the Report that she has been honored to serve Mansfield for the past seven years.
“We were obedient to the call and we have acted with honor and integrity,” she said in her Facebook post. “There is still much work to be done in Mansfield! Never give up!”
School board incumbents backed by PACs lose footing
Since the pandemic, at-large school board elections across Tarrant County have seen increased Republican dollars and influence.
In Mansfield ISD, a school district serving about 36,000 students, residents voted out three Republican-backed incumbents, including their board president and secretary. The incumbents’ races in 2022 were marked by Patriot Mobile Action streaming $500,000 into school board races across the metroplex.
The PAC is owned by Christian cell phone company Patriot Mobile, which says on its website that its mission is to keep Tarrant County red and “defend our God-given constitutional rights and freedoms while glorifying God.”
Since that election, the school board has seen three years of controversy over election integrity scandals.
This year, three incumbents shared endorsements, donors and campaign events with the Republican-backed City Council candidates. Incumbents ran campaigns boasting their past achievements, student success initiatives and school safety improvements
Their challengers ran campaigns arguing the district’s current school board needs change, less division and fresh collaboration.
They were backed by nonpartisan organizations, progressive PACs and both Republican- and Democratic-leaning community leaders. They were all endorsed by the MISD Future PAC and Texans Defending Democracy, a nonprofit organization for civic engagement that publicly opposes many Republican-led education initiatives in the Texas Legislature.
In a Facebook post the morning after her loss, board president Valdes Farrar congratulated her challenger Horn for her victory and wished her well.
“While I am, of course, disappointed in the outcome, I know that when God closes one door, He opens another,” wrote Valdes Farrar, who is also the president of Reagan Legacy Republican Women, a Texas Federation of Republican Women club. “I am trusting in His plan and am excited to see what He has in store next.”
No Mansfield ISD incumbents responded to the Report’s requests for comment.
Conservative candidates also fared poorly in Keller ISD, a school district of about 35,000 students recently rocked by turmoil from a now-abandoned controversial proposal to split the school district.
In 2022, voters elected three Patriot Mobile-backed candidates, two of whom went on to support the split. This year, all were replaced by challengers vocally opposed to the split.
Grapevine-Colleyville ISD incumbent Tammy Nakamura, whose election in 2022 was also backed by Patriot Mobile Action, lost by less than three percentage points to Matt Foust, an attorney.
The winners of the school board races take their seats as districts across Texas face looming budget shortfalls and ongoing debates over school vouchers and curriculum.
The three Mansfield ISD winners are aware of their challenges, telling the Report they’re ready to get to work and fulfill the promises of nonpartisanship.
“Voters clearly stated that our community values transparency over partisanship, substance over fear, and unity over division,” Horn said in a statement. “I believe voters saw through the noise and chose candidates committed to real solutions, steady leadership, and a long-term vision for our public schools. They are ready to move forward — together.”
‘Impossible’ to definitively say what caused results
Light said she appreciates the service of trustees who lost reelection. She hopes the losers can move on and the winners will be humble.
She feels the challengers’ victories were a “rebuttal” of Patriot Mobile Action and the influence of national party politics on Mansfield. PACs will likely continue to target the city in the future, Light said, but Republican organizations will have to regroup and rethink strategies after their losses.
“Everybody I’ve talked to today has said the same thing,” Light said on Monday, two days after the election. “They’re happy that a message was sent, but still, people are just surprised.”
Rottinghaus said there is a possibility that Republican PACs were “off the mark” this election cycle or too extreme, leading to less Republican turnout. If Republican-backed incumbents have already addressed the issues they previously campaigned on, voters likely won’t see those issues as a threat anymore and will be less motivated to cast ballots.
“It could be that the issues didn’t motivate the way that they used to because they weren’t quite as raw and didn’t touch a nerve in the same way,” he said. “It’s also conceivable that the groups went too far that they’re out kicking their coverage and making arguments that people don’t believe.”
With just a few thousand votes to analyze, Rottinghaus added: “It’s impossible to say definitively what’s going on.”
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected] or @shawlings601.
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