As the 2017 legislative session churned into action, then-state Sen. Don Huffines went to a meeting with parents and students visiting the Capitol for the annual PTA Rally Day. Things quickly grew testy.
One of the students, from Richardson ISD in Huffines’ North Texas Senate district, questioned the tea party Republican about his support for a proposal to offer taxpayer-funded stipends for parents to send their kids to private schools. The money wouldn’t be enough, the student argued, for low-income families to cover the cost of tuition. Huffines snapped.
“Do you want me to give them $15,000? Is that what you want?” Huffines asked the kid. “You want to give them a full tuition? That is the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”
When a video of the incident emerged, Huffines sent a written apology to the students.
“I’ve apologized to everyone for my bad behavior, for my tone, my demeanor,” he told Dallas journalists, though he stood behind the substance of his point.
Huffines’ passion for the stipends took on a greater meaning this week when he won the GOP primary for the Texas comptroller’s office, an influential state agency responsible for implementing the state’s new $1 billion school voucher program. If he wins in November, Hufffines will also oversee important tasks like collecting taxes and calculating how much money lawmakers have to work with when drafting the state budget.
The office’s oversight of the voucher program is all the more notable because it is the crowning political accomplishment of Gov. Greg Abbott, whom Huffines unsuccessfully challenged in the Republican primary four years ago behind the idea of bringing “actual Republican leadership” to the governor’s mansion. Abbott poured millions of his own campaign cash into the comptroller race to deny Huffines the seat and elevate Kelly Hancock, an ally he appointed acting comptroller last summer. But Huffines swamped the primary with millions more of his own wealth, self-funding his way to a dominant 57% finish in the four-way race, according to unofficial results.
Huffines said that he and Abbott had a “very nice conversation” this week after the dust settled on the election.
“He wanted to reiterate that we’re gonna work together to defeat the Democrats in the fall, and work together on the problems that affect Texas,” Huffines told The Texas Tribune. The governor’s campaign confirmed the call and added that the two talked about their shared commitment to cut property taxes in the state and winning in November, when Abbott will be up for a fourth term as governor.
Huffines has long been at the vanguard of pushing for hard-right conservative policy, through his time as a donor, state lawmaker and political antagonist of Abbott. He has campaigned on issues such as eliminating property taxes — an issue the governor has now taken up — banning abortion in all cases and studying the costs of illegal immigration. In an early sign of how he would wield his office’s power, Huffines said he plans to take up the immigration study if he becomes the state’s next chief financial officer.
“I’m gonna do an accounting of that, making sure that we know what that number is, particularly in our school systems, health and services system, incarceration, border security,” Huffines said in an interview. ”It’s really not an equitable situation that Texas has been in for decades.”
“A decade ahead of his time”
Huffines’ family has been a mainstay in North Texas business circles for decades, from their car dealerships to the real estate development company Huffines started with his twin brother, Phillip. The firm bills itself as one of the largest residential developers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, through which Huffines has amassed a personal fortune.
After years of doling out money to other candidates, Huffines decided to seek public office in 2013. He set his eyes on Senate District 16, a seat covering the North Dallas suburbs held at the time by Republican John Carona, who had served in the Capitol since 1990.
On the campaign trail, Huffines ran as a tea party insurgent and claimed Carona, a sometimes-bipartisan collaborator, was “too liberal for the district.” He upset the veteran lawmaker, claiming the seat by fewer than 700 votes.
Once in the Senate, he proved himself to be an insurgent lawmaker, not just a rabble-rousing candidate. One of the first bills Huffines filed would have required the state to study how much a private school voucher program would cost. By then, the issue was already gaining steam at the Pink Dome, though it ultimately fizzled, as did Huffines’ approach to study the matter.
But the proposal revealed his passion, and commitment, for the idea.
“Huffines was a decade ahead of his time,” said John Colyandro, an Austin lobbyist who’s represented a pro-voucher group and is a former Abbott aide. “He’s going to want to see the program managed efficiently and effectively.”
The comptroller has great discretion over how the voucher program is implemented, in accordance with how the Legislature created it. For instance, the comptroller could expand the number of eligible providers or increase accreditors to meet demand. Huffines said his priority will be marketing the program to ensure parents know it exists.
“That’s exciting for me,” Huffines said of overseeing the voucher program. “I look at it simply from a free market perspective. And what is the best solution to make our government schools the best they can possibly be? It’s competition, of course.”
Huffines’ other early proposals as an elected official demonstrated where he stood on some of the biggest issues in Texas politics: to the right of right. He proposed a bill to repeal the state’s franchise tax, which the state charges companies for doing business. The comptroller’s office administers the tax.
“It’s a sad fact that many lawmakers tell voters one thing, but do another once they’re elected,” far-right activist Cary Cheshire wrote in March 2015 in an essay praising the idea. “Fortunately, some new leaders, such as State Sen. Don Huffines (R-Dallas), are standing strong despite attempts to drag them down.”
Additionally, Huffines pitched ideas to undo local LGBT protections and let people openly carry guns, along with the proposal to tally the costs of illegal immigration to Texas — all once-fringe ideas that have become reality as the state government has veered to the right.
The immigration impact bill, which like the others failed, would have assigned the responsibility to the comptroller’s office. The last time the state conducted similar research, published in 2006, former Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn found that immigrants contributed more to Texas’ economy than they cost the state.
Immigrants’ rights advocates and Democrats have long welcomed replicating the study, so long it is comprehensive and not only focused on costs as there are 1.7 million undocumented immigrants who pay a variety of taxes and buy goods, and can’t use many social services because they are in the country without authorization and the paperwork those services often require.
After one term in the Senate, Huffines lost his reelection to Democrat Nathan Johnson. But it would not be the last of him.
In 2021, Huffines launched a long-shot bid against Abbott, a frequent recipient of Huffines’ criticism. By then, Huffines had called the governor “an elitist know-it-all,” and he went on to knock the governor for being too weak on border security and too overbearing on big government, particularly over an early COVID-19 pandemic mask mandate.
On the campaign trail, Huffines also cast doubt on his 2018 defeat, after President Donald Trump had popularized election denial. He said he would not rest until the state had no more abortions, and he welcomed the idea of ending property taxes at the cost of increasing consumption taxes.
But Abbott easily defeated him.
Once reelected, Abbott grabbed the reins of the school voucher movement and claimed victory last year after he got a package through the Legislature by helping oust opponents in their legislative primaries. Now Huffines, his onetime foe, could be in charge of the program.
Huffines will face state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, who won the Democratic nomination Tuesday. The state last had a Democratic comptroller in 1999.
