Sen. Jane Nelson
State Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, announced Monday she is not running for reelection.
Nelson has been the top budget writer in the Senate and is the most senior Republican in the chamber.
“It has been a great honor to represent our community in the Texas Senate,” Nelson said in a statement. “I promised to listen, work hard, and deliver results and have strived to fulfill that pledge. Our accomplishments have improved the lives of Texans, which makes me proud.”
Nelson has served in the Senate since 1993. She has chaired the budget-writing Senate Finance Committee for the past four sessions.
When Nelson was first appointed to lead the committee in 2014, she became the first woman tapped to lead a standing budget-writing panel in the Legislature’s history.
Nelson represents Senate District 12, a Republican-friendly district that wraps around the northern suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth.
This is a reminder that it is totally normal to see a higher-than-usual level of voluntary turnover in a redistricting cycle. It’s just a thing that happens.
If we froze all of the Senate districts as they are now and held the 2022 elections in them, Sen. Nelson’s retirement would put SD12 on the board as a race to watch. Not a top tier race by any stretch, but one in which a strong Dem could make life interesting, especially against a weaker Republican. SD12 was carried 55-43 by Trump in 2020, and was one of many Republican-held districts that trended blue over the decade, but it was just entering that conversation. If Nelson were still running, and especially if she had been expected to stick around for awhile longer, I don’t think Republicans would have felt much urgency to shore her district up – they would put a higher priority on SDs 08 and 09, and might even allow themselves to make SD12 a bit more challenging in the name of holding ground elsewhere, in the justifiable belief that Nelson would overperform electorally. Having it open in 2022 may change that calculus a bit, as the risk level is now higher. Not my problem, of course, and the overall trends will most likely continue regardless, but this now adds and extra wrinkle.
That said, and barring something weird, SD12 will remain Republican in the foreseeable future. For 2022, the most likely scenario is the same as with James White and his now-open district, which is to say that the Republican that will (very likely) replace Jane Nelson will (very likely) be a step down in legislative quality from Jane Nelson. As was the case with White, I have nothing nice to say about Jane Nelson, but anyone would acknowledge that she was a serious and knowledgeable legislator who cared about policy and understood how things worked. The Republican primary is the grievance politics version of a Bachelor in Paradise audition, with more or less the same metrics for success. The Senate, which already sucks, will be a worse place for it.