Why I Am Endorsing Tami Brown-Rodriguez for Dallas County Republican Chair

Dallas Republicans Should Elect the Builder, Not the Newcomer

When I set out to take the measure of the two leading candidates for chair of the Dallas County Republican Party, I did the simplest thing a curious voter can do. I picked up the phone. I called Tami Brown-Rodriguez, and she called me right back. We agreed to have lunch so that I could get to know her, and when the day came she brought her husband and sat with me for more than an hour. We talked about her plans for the county, her plans for the party, and the unglamorous mechanics of running a volunteer organization that lives or dies on relationships. I came away understanding her, which is the entire point of asking.

I tried to do the same with Monty Montañez. I reached out for a meeting or a call, and he was too busy. After my lunch with Tami, I invited him to join Chris Salcedo and me on our weekly livestream, The Third Rail, either during Tami’s interview or after it, so that our viewers could hear his story in his own words. He declined. When I saw that he was at the Texas GOP Convention and reached out again, he never responded. I tried once more after returning home, offering yet another chance to come on the program, and again heard nothing. Only after I had made my endorsement did I receive a text, and it offered a meeting after the election, with a request that I route future contact through someone named Ajua Mason rather than reach him directly (I reached out to Ajua but have not heard back). There is a small lesson in that sequence, and it is not a personal one. It is a lesson about how a person treats the work of persuasion when the work is inconvenient.

Let me state my thesis plainly, because the rest of this piece is simply its defense. A county party chair is not a candidate for office in the ordinary sense. The chair is the steward of a volunteer army, and the qualification that matters most is not eloquence on a stage but trust earned in the trenches. Tami Brown-Rodriguez has spent years earning that trust. Monty Montañez, whatever his virtues, has not yet begun. On Thursday, Dallas County Republicans should choose the person who has done the work.

Consider first what the job actually is. The Dallas County Republican Party is 100% a volunteer organization. Nothing it accomplishes, not a single block walked, poll watched, or election worked, happens because the chair issues an order. It happens because the chair has friends, and because those friends trust that the chair knows what she is doing and will stand by them when the day is long and the pay is nothing. This is why a serious party operative starts at the bottom. You volunteer at elections. You become a precinct chair. You attend conventions. You volunteer for Republican candidates and you donate to them. You build, over years, the web of obligation and goodwill that lets a chair pick up the phone and get a hundred people to show up on a Saturday. There is no shortcut, and there is no substitute.

By that standard, the contrast between the two candidates is not close. Tami served as Vice Chair under Allen West and remained loyal to him through his entire term, a loyalty that matters because loyalty under pressure is the truest test of character in politics. When West selected her as his Vice Chair, the County Executive Committee confirmed her unanimously, which is to say the people who know the work best, and who are notoriously hard to please, looked at her and said yes without dissent. She has been a precinct chair for six years. She chaired the Training Committee for two years and has personally trained more than 3,000 precinct chairs and over 1,000 election judges, clerks, and poll watchers. She has poll watched at Central Count since 2017, served as an election judge in 2020, and led the 2024 Rapid Response Election Hotline. She ran a separate primary runoff in 2026 with record Republican turnout. She has served on the Bylaws Review Committee and the election integrity efforts that conservatives rightly care about. She has worked on more than 40 local campaigns and attended three Texas state conventions. This is not a resume assembled for a press release. It is a record of presence, the kind of presence that accumulates only when a person shows up, again and again, for years.

Set beside that record, Monty Montañez’s involvement with the Dallas County party is difficult to locate. By the most reliable data I have found, and the one I have used for multiple Dallas County campaigns, he volunteered to be an election judge twice, and on one of those occasions, he cancelled at the last minute. There is no record of his serving as a precinct chair, a member of the Senior Executive Committee, a CEC officer, a committee chair, a volunteer coordinator, a poll watcher, or an election judge besides that one time. There is no evidence of his attending Dallas County Republican Party meetings before 2025. A puzzled reader might ask whether this is merely the absence of a paper trail rather than the absence of involvement. It is a fair question, so consider the surrounding facts. The moment Montañez arrived in Dallas, he ran for Congress. The first election he ever voted in here in Texas was his own primary. Before that, he voted in Miami-Dade County from 2016 to 2024, where he was identified as an independent and cast a ballot in only one primary. The Republican chair of Miami-Dade has no recollection of his involvement in the party there either. The pattern is not local to Dallas. It is a pattern of arriving and seeking the top of the ladder without having climbed it.

The public records sharpen the point. According to L2 Data, the most reliable voter file I have worked with, and one I trust enough that I checked my own entry against it and found it accurate, Tamara Brown is registered as a Republican, registered in 2008, with a vote frequency near the top of the scale. Montañez is listed as Democratic, registered in Texas in October 2025, with a vote frequency of zero. Residency tells a similar story. Tami has lived in Dallas County for 26 years and owns three properties here. Montañez has rented a house in Dallas County for one year. These are not insults. They are the plain facts of who has roots in the community a chair is asked to lead, and who has just arrived.

There is one more duty of a chair that deserves its own paragraph, because it is the duty most easily measured and most often decisive. A chair must raise money. The party cannot function on goodwill alone, and the person who leads it must be able to ask for resources and receive them. Here the record is not a matter of interpretation. During his own congressional race, Montañez raised $39,224, of which $22,286 was self-funded, and he finished seventh. To grasp what that figure means, set it next to his primary opponents. Ryan Binkley raised $1.9 million. Paul Bondar raised $1.9 million. Jace Yarbrough raised $424,554, and Jace won. A candidate who could persuade donors to part with only $16,938 is telling us something important about his ability to perform the single most quantifiable task the chairmanship requires. Tami, by contrast, has spent a lifetime raising money, more than $7 million for nonprofits over her career and over $300,000 for her current organization since January 2026 alone, and she arrives with a network of elected officials, candidates, and grassroots leaders across Texas. Fundraising is not a vanity metric. It is the oxygen of a county party, and one candidate has shown she can supply it.

I did not rely only on records and my own impressions. I asked people who know the terrain. I spoke with Doug Deason, a major Republican donor, who said Montañez was a nice guy but admitted he was surprised to see him running for chair after running for Congress in the primary. When I told him Montañez would be running against Tami, Deason said immediately that Tami would be awesome, a much better pick for the chair. I spoke with Chris Putnam at the Dallas Express, who had genuine concerns. Putnam was troubled that Montañez had not been involved with the county party in Dallas or in Miami-Dade, and that he had arrived and gone straight for a congressional seat. These are not partisans for Tami. They are serious people offering candid assessments, and the assessments pointed the same direction.

I want to be fair, and fairness requires that I say this clearly. Monty Montañez may be a perfectly good man. He is, by all accounts, an excellent public speaker, and ambition is no sin in a republic. But ambition is not the same as readiness, and a good speech is not the same as a built relationship. At the county level, half the job is simply knowing the people in the county party, and the other half is having earned the right to ask them for help. I would be the first to admit that I am not even slightly qualified to be chair, and I say that as someone who has been more involved in the Dallas party than Montañez has. That is not a knock on him. It is an honest accounting of what the position demands and what it does not forgive.

So I will end where I began, with the phone call. When I reached out, one candidate made time, brought her husband, and talked with me for an hour about the future of the party she has served for years. The other was too busy until the election was nearly over. Character in this work is revealed not in the grand gesture but in the willingness to show up when showing up is inconvenient. Tami Brown-Rodriguez has been showing up for years, and Dallas County Republicans would be wise to elect someone who has been in the arena rather than someone who has only just walked through the gate. On Thursday, I am proud to endorse Tami Brown-Rodriguez for chair of the Dallas County Republican Party, and I urge you to join me. If you want to meet her you can tonight at 7PM.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.