Among friends at an annual crawfish boil in Heath, state Rep. Justin Holland wore shorts, shades and Nike dunks, a relaxed outfit that belied the urgency of his political situation.
Holland, a Rockwall Republican, is trying to retain the District 33 seat in the Texas House against an armada of opposition, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.
They are all backing Katrina Pierson, the former tea party activist who was the national spokesperson for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Early voting ends Friday for the May 28 GOP primary runoff.
Holland’s biggest threat is Abbott, a former ally who targeted him after Holland voted to block a voucherlike plan that would let students use public dollars for private schools. In addition, Paxton is seeking revenge against Holland for voting with 60 other Republicans last year to impeach him.
The result is a Holland-Pierson showdown that has taken a lead role in an increasingly bitter struggle for supremacy within the state’s Republican Party, with ultraconservatives leading an effort to oust incumbents seen as weak on priority issues like school choice.
The race also revives the cliche that politics makes strange bedfellows. Abbott has endorsed and campaigned for Pierson, who supported an Abbott rival in the 2022 GOP primary, saying, “Texas needs a new governor.”
At the crawfish boil, Holland said he is at peace with whatever the voters decide. The co-owner of a real estate business, he’s lived in the area all of his life and comes from a family of public servants. His grandfather was a Rockwall County constable and his great-grandfather a Heath police chief.
“I’ve given back blood, sweat and tears to my community for nearly 15 years as an adult,” Holland told The Dallas Morning News. “The folks that have endorsed against me can’t vote for me. The people that can vote for me are who I am focusing on. I can’t control what the governor of Texas does.”
Holland, 40, said Pierson is not the right choice.
“We don’t know anything about her,” he said. “I certainly don’t think we can trust her.”
Pierson, 47, led Holland in the March 5 primary, 39.5% to 38.7%, in a three-candidate race for a district that includes Rockwall County and part of Collin County.
Abbott did not endorse in the primary but backed Pierson after the race was forced into a runoff.
Pierson has been staging meet and greets with voters and held two large rallies featuring Abbott. She told The News it’s time for Holland to go.
“The people in the district recruited me to run for office, and the March 5th primary results are a reflection of Holland’s failure to represent Republican values,” Pierson said in an email.
“If my opponent was doing such a great job, why is everyone rejecting him?” she wrote. “His own colleagues in the Legislature don’t even support him. In fact, not a single conservative Republican legislator has expressed support for his re-election.”
Two years ago, Holland received nearly 70% of the vote in a three-candidate primary and entered the 2023 legislative session on solid political footing.
His impressive 2022 victory came after an endorsement from Abbott, who also contributed to his campaign.
Abbott soured on Holland last year when he was among 21 Republicans to vote against school choice, the governor’s top legislative priority. In Texas, proposals to spend public money on private schools have long been opposed by a coalition of mostly rural Republicans and urban Democrats.
Abbott also criticized Holland for voting to raise the age limit to buy assault-style weapons from 18 to 21, an unsuccessful bill pushed mainly by Democrats after the massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde. Holland said he supported the bill to make gun policy consistent. The age to purchase and carry a pistol is 21.
“I would be in favor of lowering the age for a pistol to 18,” Holland said.
When asked about Pierson’s past criticism of the governor, Abbott’s chief campaign strategist, Dave Carney, retorted: “Who cares?”
“The governor is not a guy that holds grudges,” Carney said. “There are a lot of cases where people were not informed enough and said some things that they probably regret, but the governor wants to get this educational reform package done to get more money flowing to the school and empower parents.”
Carney said Holland chose to go against the governor and shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome.
“They had a choice. This wasn’t a surprise,” Carney said of Republicans who voted against the voucherlike plan. “They knew from day one of the session that this was a priority for the governor.”
Holland called Abbott’s backing of Pierson perplexing.
“It was going to be his way or the highway,” Holland said of Abbott. “The thing that troubles me is that I’ve agreed with Greg Abbott on every major issue, except for one.”
Pierson rose to political prominence as a tea party activist with considerable communications skills.
In May she told supporters at the Fish N’ Tails restaurant in Rowlett that she was dubbed the “tea party darling,” particularly for how she framed issues during television appearances.
Pierson helped on Ted Cruz’s successful 2012 Senate campaign, then gravitated toward Trump for his 2016 presidential run. She also launched an unsuccessful 2014 primary campaign against incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, who at the time represented District 32 in North Texas.
Missing from her list of current endorsements are Cruz and Trump.
Asked about Cruz and Trump, Pierson wrote in an email: “Everyone I have personally asked has endorsed my campaign,” including Abbott, Patrick, Paxton and Miller.
Pierson was one the organizers of the Jan. 6 rally near the White House that preceded the 2021 riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
She has since been at times critical of Trump, including a January 2023 post on X saying Trump had “done a lot of good things” but “also a lot of bad things.” She criticized his pandemic response as “generational damage with COVID and the vaccine.”
Even so, Pierson is promoting her association with Trump, who is popular with Texas Republicans.
On an online forum developed to counter what she calls distortions by Holland, Pierson said she testified on Trump’s behalf during a Colorado trial over his possible removal from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
“I am President Trump’s key witness for January 6th,” Pierson said in an email. “The record shows that I protected the President and his family from the grifting troublemakers, which is why I remain on-call in the event that his legal team needs me to testify on the President’s behalf again.”
She declined to discuss any of her testimony about Trump.
“Having been subpoenaed several times, I do not speak publicly about any of the cases to protect my integrity as a witness,” she wrote.
Some voters say they like Pierson’s willingness to criticize elected officials, even allies.
“I’m all for Katrina Pierson because she’s all for us,” said John White, a retired Rockwall businessman who has worked on the state party’s platform committee. “She is supportive of all of our key issues and all of our prior priorities in the platform.”
Pierson said the top issues facing the district are “the border, property taxes, school choice, protecting the Second Amendment, and Austin’s encroachment on local government.”
Pierson also told supporters at Fish N’ Tail that Texans needed to secure elections because liberals were trying to make gains.
“They are here to take our state,” she said.
Mark Wientjes, a Rockwall County GOP precinct chair, said Pierson addresses issues important to him.
“I like what she says about school choice,” he said at Pierson’s Rowlett event.
Holland spent five years on the Health City Council before his 2016 election to the Texas House.
“He’s been working in Austin to form relationships that I think our representative government requires,” said Rockwall Mayor Trace Johannesen. “The part that frustrates me is that he’s been doing a great job, and the district thinks so because he’s been reelected three different times. For outside people who don’t live in districts to say that he’s not good enough seems a bit ridiculous.”
“By the way, it’s not very gubernatorial of our governor to start stumping to unseat candidates over one issue,” Johannesen added. “It’s just straight up pop political theater.”
Brady Hill, a Rockwall businessman who hosted the crawfish boil that Holland attended, said Holland has District 33 at heart when he takes votes.
“Justin’s big strength is that he has a big, strong foothold in this community and has a loyal backing of people who know him well,” he said. “Every decision he makes doesn’t necessarily have all of Texas in mind, but has his district in mind and heart.”
Holland acknowledged that his opposition to education savings accounts for private schools has hurt his relationship with Abbott, but he stands by his opposition to the plan.
“My schools are great,” he said. “I’m proud of them.”
Holland said he doesn’t believe polls that show voucher plans are extremely popular with all Republicans.
“They could be, if you asked a certain group of Republicans in the March primary,” he said. “Vouchers are not 85% popular in my district.”
Holland said Abbott has treated him unfairly, given their past relationship. Holland said he carried a bill for Abbott that made Texas a “Second Amendment sanctuary state,” as well as issues favored by the governor related to electricity and the Public Utilities Commission.
“We worked on other issues,” he said. “I played a large part in that last session and worked with the governor himself on many of the small details that we had to work through with the House and Senate and carry numerous bills for him.”
Holland said issues he’ll tackle if reelected include securing the border, reducing property taxes and bolstering public education.
“We are getting to be a lonely group in Austin that truly cares about public ed,” he said. “I want to be there for that.”