After suing the city of Houston for the right to hold a 6,000-person convention in Harris County, the Texas county with the highest number of coronavirus cases, the Texas Republican Party decided against it and held their convention online. It was, to put it lightly, a disaster.
The disaster began before the convention even started with party leadership arguing online for four hours about how best to proceed.
“Walter West, a member of the party’s executive committee, swung a bottle of Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey toward his webcam” and warned his colleagues, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” according to Texas Monthly‘s write-up of the failed convention. West said the state party’s lawyers handling the lawsuit must either be stupid or under the control of party elites who didn’t want to hold a convention at all. After his Kool-Aid remark, the digital sergeant-at-arms booted him from the meeting.
The remaining members on the planning call floated such ideas as holding hold “the convention in an outdoor rodeo expo hall with dirt floors in Montgomery County, north of Houston. In mid-July. In triple-digit heat,” Texas Monthly writes.
Usually the convention is a moment for state delegates to vote on the state party platform and other intra-party matters as well as to hear from its leadership about the coming election. When the actual convention started, the livestream simply played three videos: one from Republican Governor Greg Abbott, one from Agriculture commissioner Sid Miller and another from railroad commissioner Ryan Sitton. Then, the same videos looped over and over again.
Eventually, James Dickey, the state party chairman, appeared on camera looking exhausted and said the convention was having “technical difficulties.” The software meant to ensure that only credentialed delegates could attend wasn’t working, so they canceled the rest of the convention for that day and the following day so they could get it in working order.
While the party’s convention committee began a Google document to figure out solutions to the mess, its URL was shared on the Zoom stream, so anyone could edit it. Some troll began drawing yellow lines all over the document and another added something to the Saturday schedule that read, “Peepeepoopoo.”
When the convention resumed on Saturday, delegates who had trouble getting credentialed were furious, thinking the technical error was some shadowy plot to silence them. For some reason, the videos from the first day began replaying at random and speeded up, “like the first flashes of a very boring acid trip,” Texas Monthly writes. So little business had been completed by Saturday night, that delegates realized that they’d have to stay up the entire night just to wrap up all the details.
After debating for hours, the exhausted delegates voted to end the convention and hold a second one, but when the delegates began nominating people to help plan it, the number of nominees ballooned from 1,200 to 2,600 to 5,000. Many of the names of possible candidates were duplicated, making a massive list that would need hours of organizing before anyone could vote on it. While trying to sort it all out, some party officials lost their internet connections and rushed to find new ways to reconnect.
By midnight, Dickey was exhausted and just recessed the rest of the convention. But before it was all over, party members voted him out as party chairman and replaced him with Allen West (no relation to Walter), “a former Iraq vet who was court-martialed for torturing a man that he suspected was a member of the Iraqi insurgency.” He’s now the state party leader.