A Texas lawmaker north of Dallas is facing a tough insurgent challenge in Tuesday’s Republican primary from a candidate who was convicted of breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The challenger, Larry Brock, is an Air Force veteran who spent two years in prison for entering the Capitol that day.
President Trump pardoned Mr. Brock in granting clemency to more than 1,500 people soon after taking office for his second term. Now Mr. Brock is running to unseat State Representative Jared Patterson in their deeply Republican district. Mr. Brock has argued that he is aligned with the party’s increasingly hard right primary voters.
At a campaign event last month in The Colony, a Dallas suburb, Mr. Brock defended his behavior during the Capitol riot, arguing that he and others had been caught up in what he said was an “entrapment operation by a government bureaucracy” that “had stolen an election.” (There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.)
Part of his argument for assuming representation of a district that stretches across a fast-growing portion of North Texas was an attack on Islam, part of a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Republican primaries in Texas.
“I’m an America first guy, and I am a Christian,” Mr. Brock said in an interview with The New York Times at the event. If elected, he said he would work to pass bans on Islamic head-coverings and on investments that conform to Islamic religious rules.
Mr. Patterson has held the seat since 2019 and is running for re-election on what appears to be a solidly conservative platform: protect the border, lower taxes and keep sexually explicit books out of school libraries. He wrote the state law for rating the appropriateness of books for children.
But far right political operatives have painted him as insufficiently conservative.
Mr. Patterson has shrugged them all off.
“Effective conservatives are under attack from a fringe element in the party, but I don’t think they’re going to successful,” Mr. Patterson said in a phone interview from the road on Election Day. He called Mr. Brock “completely unfit” to serve.
“He is a victim of his own choices that he’s made in life and I don’t believe that will be rewarded at the ballot box,” Mr. Patterson said.
A third candidate in the race, Rick Abraham, a Navy veteran, is also running in the Republican primary, meaning the race could end in a runoff. The eventual winner will face Joe Mayes, a Democrat, in November, who is running unopposed.
J. David Goodman is the Texas bureau chief for The Times, based in Houston.
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