Was John Carter the first elected Republican in Williamson County?

Speaking before Republican leaders from Williamson County, U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock, highlighted his conservative credentials while honoring Bill Fairbrother, the outgoing chairman of the county GOP organization.

“I was the first elected Republican in Williamson County history,” Carter said to those gathered for the Williamson County Reagan Dinner on Feb. 18. “That was 1983. And think what we’ve done since Bill Fairbrother has been here. We have become the dominant power in Central Texas for the Republican Party.”

But was Carter really the first Republican to be elected in this conservative stronghold north of Austin?

County lore says Carter was first Republican

Emily Taylor, spokeswoman for Carter, said the congressman should have said that he was “the first county-wide elected Republican in Williamson County in modern history.”

Carter, an attorney, became a district judge in Williamson County in 1981, when he was appointed by Republican Gov. Bill Clements after a new judicial district was created.

He was elected to the post by voters in the county the following year, when he ran unopposed.

Several current and former county and GOP officials interviewed for this fact check agreed that Carter was the first Republican to be elected countywide in modern history.

We conducted a thorough search of newspaper archives and election returns to verify this claim ourselves.

Historic election returns from the Texas secretary of state are available through the Texas State Library, but records were incomplete.

Newspaper archives helped fill in some gaps and offered insights into state political trends, but publication of county-level election results was inconsistent at best.

Texas supported Democratic candidates

Like much of the South after the Civil War, Texas was dominated by the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was not established in Texas until 1867, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

After the Civil War, several Democratic officials in Texas were removed from office and replaced with Republicans by federal military officers stationed in Texas.

One of these Republicans was A.J. Hamilton, who was appointed to be the state’s provisional governor in 1862. Williamson County supported his election in 1869, according to results published in the Texas Almanac.

“The county did vote for a Republican in the 1860s,” said Walter Buenger, chief historian for the Texas State Historical Association. “But in reality, (Hamilton) and many who supported him, including a majority of voters in Williamson County, were in the midst of a transition back to the Democratic Party."

While he can’t say for certain (and local election records from this time period are scarce), Buenger said it is also possible that the county supported Republicans in some local elections, especially as the African-American population in the area started to grow. At the time, black voters were consistently Republicans.

But even if complete election records were available, it would have been unusual for candidates seeking local office at the time to list a party affiliation at all, said Ann Evans, curator of the Williamson Museum.

In more recent memory, voters in Williamson County supported Republican candidates at the top of the ticket while continuing to elect Democrats to serve in local office.

In 1972, voters in the county supported President Richard Nixon’s re-election bid and also voted for U.S. Sen. John Tower, the first Republican senator to be elected from Texas since reconstruction.

In 1980, the county favored President Ronald Reagan.

Locally, Republicans first started running in 1976, according to an American-Statesman story at the time. 

When Carter was elected as district judge in 1982, after being appointed a year earlier, he was one of two Republicans elected that cycle.

Rose “Dusty” Gilliam, a Republican, defeated Democrat Margaret Wood and was elected to serve as Justice of the Peace for the 1st Precinct in Williamson County that same year.

Our ruling

Carter said he was “the first elected Republican in Williamson County history.”

While Carter is one of the first Republicans elected in Williamson County in modern history, he shared the distinction with another GOP candidate, not mentioned in Carter's statement. And, it's hard for him to say definitively that he was the first of his party ever elected to serve locally because party affiliations often weren't identified on local ballots during Reconstruction, election records are incomplete and newspaper reports inconsistent.

We rate this claim Half True.