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sixty fifty five eight eight four three. Welcome. It is Verdict with Center, Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you, and right now I'm in New York City getting ready to host out Numbered on Fox News Channel.
It is two a m.
Center.
Ted Cruz is in Texas right now where it is one am. He is traveling the state and we for the last hour have been trying to get a connection that was stable for us to do the podcast. This is what happens on a regular basis when he's on the road and I'm on the road. And tonight the internet won and we lost. So what does that mean, Well, it means that the Senator and I were chatting a moment ago on the phone about all right, what do
we do now. There was an interview that we did with Eric Johnson and his incredible story being an African American Democrat who switched to the Republican Party. In fact, when we did this interview, it was the most listened to episode of the month, the month of this came out and it was one that went viral. So many people were inspired by this story of Eric Johnson and the bravery of switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and talking about his life being the sixtieth
mayor of Dallas. We've decided we were going to replay that for you now and the Senat and I were going to be back with you on Friday as normal. We did everything we could, I want to tell you the last hour and dealing with it and tech sport, everything we could to try to get a connection to record, and it just didn't work. So what we're going to do instead is we're gonna let you hear that interview. If you missed it, we really want you to hear it because it was an incredible interview. It was a
great conversation. And also please share it on social media.
Now.
I my podcast, the Ben Ferguson Podcast, is also out. I will give you an update on the latest breaking news, so if you're looking for that as well, today download my podcast, the Ben Ferguson Podcast. It is done and you can hear that on those in between days when we don't put out vertic. You can grab the Ben Ferguson podcasts as well. So, like I said, here is our conversation with the Mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson in
the center. I will see you back here on Friday with all the latest breaking news.
Do not worry well.
I am incredibly proud to welcome onto the Verdict podcast a good friend of mine, the sixtieth mayor of the City of Dallas, the current sitting mayor, Eric Johnson, and I want Eric welcome.
Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here, so thanks.
For having me.
Now I want to tell our podcast listeners some of Eric's background, because many of you may know him, but some of you may not. Eric is the current mayor of Dallas. Eric was He went to Harvard College, he went to University of Pennsylvania Law School. He got a master's from mi alma mater, Princeton, UH. He was elected to the Texas State Legislature and he was an elected Democrat in the state legislature.
And Eric is African American.
I am.
It's an audio show, so I so one.
Has to paint the picture.
And then Eric was elected mayor of the City of Dallas again as a Democrat. And then he was just recently re elected mayor of the city of da He was re elected with ninety three percent of the vote in the City of Dallas.
Technically ninety eight point seven, but i'll take ninety three. We'll take ninety three.
And then after his reelection, Eric announced to the city of Dallas in the world that he was switching parties and he left the Democrat Party and he became a Republican.
And it was.
A decision that those of us who knew him and had worked with him, I have to say I was not shocked or surprised, but it did shock and surprise a lot of people. And so Eric is I think, a very important leader in Texas and a very important leader in the country. And so Eric, I appreciate your coming and joining us this evening and being a guest on Verdict.
I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Thank you so much. This is a real honor to be here. Thank you for the invitation, and great to see all of you.
All Right, So you go to the Texas State Legislature, you get elected mayor of Dallas, You get re elected mayor of Dallas. This entire time you've been an elected Democrat and there's an elected Democrat, there's an ecosphere around you. You've got donors, you've got volunteers, you've got supporters. Walk us through your decision making, because switching party is a big deal and and I know you didn't make that decision lightly, so so what led you to change parties?
Yeah, and you know, I don't know how how deep we can dive into this guy.
Was exactly the joy of a podcast, as we can go as deep as you want. And that's that's actually what's fun That we're not on TV with a six minute sound bite.
We can actually get about what's really going on.
That's exactly what I wanted to know, because unfortunately, because of the structure of the traditional media, you really have to sort of hit that question quick and then get out of it. And you don't really get to give a full answer to that because it's because it's way more complicated than you know. There was this one thing that happened and I just said, I'm out of here.
It's an evolution for me and just kind of coming to accept who I have always been and why I've struggled as a Democrat the whole time.
Was it the issues that made you think about becoming a Republican.
The issues were a manifestation, a policy manifestation of problems I had been having with the Democratic Party because of who I am as a person for a long time. So I'll give you, I'll give you some idea what I'm talking about. I was born in West Dallas, very poor community, to working class parents who never went to college, but you know, got married right out of high school, still married to this day, raised four of us. And I was raised in a community that was very and
in a family that was very, very faith oriented. The church was hugely important to us. I mean, grew up, I spent more time in church than really any place else. We'd go to church Sunday morning, stay almost all day, go home for just a couple hours, and come back for Sunday evening. We'd go to Bible class. On Wednesday, we'd have you know, I wasn't in the choir, I couldn't sing, but you know, we had song practice and
things like that. So I spent a lot of time in the church, spent a lot of time with grandparents who were very, very very about the Church of Christ. And that's how that's the tradition I was raised in.
And so.
We were sort of taught and it was separate apart from anything political. My family wasn't political at all. No politicians in the family. I'm not even sure we had a real awareness of what was going on around us politically, but a very strong sense of just right wrong. You know, this is how you treat people, this is how you behave you follow the law, you obey the law, you work hard, you you know, an honest day's work, honest day's pay. That is sort of that was just always
in the background. And so I think I was always politically in a weird posture with the Democratic Party because at its core, and I didn't understand this at the very beginning. Because and I hope we can actually get to this and talk about this, there are some you sort of inherit the Democratic Party as a cultural heirloom when you're African American in this country. Yeah, this sort of gets handed to you as part of who you are. I probably had more phone call I know I had.
I had more phone calls with people distraught about this party switch than I ever would have gotten if I had told people that I was actually leaving the church. There's no question about it. Wow, there's no doubt about it.
I will say that loudly and on the record. I had more panicked phone calls from people genuinely concerned about what I was doing and why I could do how I could do this, then I would have gotten if I'd said, I just don't think I'm into this Jesus thing anymore like this, don't think I'm not a Baptist, or I'm not a Church of pristper or I'm not. I don't think I would have had anywhere near the same reaction. It's that cultural.
How intense was that?
Was it?
Family?
Was it friends?
It was? It was a lot of consternation. The family and friends was well meaning, but I think a lot of other folks it was just, you know, we have to we have to take this guy down now. And it got it was it got to be pretty quickly. This the traditional standard partisan warfare stuff. But kind of going back to what I was, and I said, I want to know how deep we could go, because this is actually pretty I haven't had a chance to talk about this with anybody. The fit was almost in some
ways inevitable. It was going to there was gonna be a problem because at the Democratic Party's core. Who I was saying is a belief that how things turn out for you in this country are largely determined by things that are outside of your control. The race you're born, the neighborhood you're born in. It just kind of it excuses away your failures, and it excuses away your success
is to something that's out of your control. If you're successful and you're white and males, because of course you are, and if you're unsuccessful as an African American, it's well, the deck was stacked against you. And I just wasn't a person who ever believed that, and that wasn't how I was raised and it's not how I was taught, but it was the overarching political philosophy of my party.
And there was always just that tension between wanting to tell people, hey, this actually is a country where anything you want to do you can do. And I'm living proof of it, yep, Because at every turn, if I put the work in, I was told repeatedly, over and over by people who didn't look like me, who didn't come from my community, were proud of you. We'd like to give you more opportunity. I was having doors slammed in my face. The harder I pushed, I was having
more of them given to me. So the story of my life and then the rhetoric that my party wanted me to put out there as the justification for what we were doing politically just never really matched.
Because I've always thought one of the most important differences between the parties is that the Republican Party believes in individual responsibility and believes in merit and a meritocracy. Now that's not to say that there aren't things that are unfair, but in the reason people come from all over the world to America is there's no country on Earth where people can achieve their dreams the way you can hear and you know, and I do think a lot of
the a lot of the Democrat Party is there. The ideology in today's Democrat Party is about eliminating individual responsibility and eliminating merit. And I think about you're a black man, I'm an Hispanic man. I think about what my father said to me when I was a kid about racism.
And my dad, you.
Know, as you know, he came from Cuba as an immigrant. And my dad said when he came out of University of Texas in nineteen sixty one, and my father said, look, I'm obviously an immigrant. My father had had and still has a very heavy Spanish accent, you know my dad, And he said, listen, if I'm applying for a job and I'm applying against an American and we're equally qualified, my dad said, you know what, they'll hire the American. Now, my father wasn't particularly outraged at that. He said, you
know what, in Cuba, they'd hire me. That's just kind of human nature, that's the way people often behave. And my father's answer to that, he said, I'm just going to be three times as good as the other guy.
I'll make it so.
You'd have to be a blithering idiot to hire the other And when you take individual responsibility, and it's not to say racism doesn't exist, racism absolutely exists, but how you respond in the face of adversity. And I think the the the principle of work harder, be better, be more excellent.
I think that is a path that every one.
Of us think about what you teach your kids.
That's if you don't mind, please, I'll jump in here and say this because there's so much that I could say about this and again, this is the slow burn over a career. But there's the specific policy things that came about as the mayor that made this decision something that needed to happen and something that became much more
urgent for me. But while we're talking about sort of the underpinnings of this, and you talk about what you teach your children, that's really kind of the point in terms of the problem that I have with the Democratic Party's philosophy on this particular issue is you have to decide, one way or the other, what you're going to tell a generation of African American kids or kids who are growing up in tough circumstances. Are you going to tell
them that your country doesn't work for you. Doesn't really matter what you do, it doesn't work for you. It's not built for you, it's not designed for you. The system is stacked against you. And just hope that they don't turn to crime or turn to other things because you've told them that essentially that's fine, that's okay, because there's no way you could do the things you'd like to do legitimately. You can't get where you want to
go legitimately anyway. The deck stacked against you. Or do you want to tell them the truth, which is the system that we have is the best on earth for translating people's hard work and effort into tangible increases and
improvements in their life's circumstances. It just is. And I've told old my liberal friends for many years, even before I switch parties, I said, for the ones who go around sort of bashing the country, I say, guys, if there was a place on earth where they did it better, where they really did convert your effort and your work into benefits better, why don't you live and raise your don't you owe it to your children to raise them there? If you really believe there's a place that's doing it better.
And they don't believe that. It's rhetoric, but it's rhetoric with the purpose. And this is kind of where being a part of the party for so long and understanding sort of the you know, the thought behind the strategy. Really it's strategy. How do you how do you convince large swaths of people, large groups that are just really holding themselves together by identity, politics, race, or how do you convince them to give their loyalty so completely to
a political party? If you can't convince them first that they really need this political party to help them overcome these horrible flaws in the system.
So basically this well, the Democrat Party, I think is is vested in selling dependency.
Correct. And there's no question.
Example I've used also in my family, you know, with my dad in nineteen fifty seven, when he showed up in Austin, Texas.
He couldn't speak English, and so.
The first job he had was washing dishes, and he made fifty cents an hour. And I've said a lot of times, thank god some well meaning liberal didn't come along and put his arm around him and say, Ralphiel, let me take care of you. Let me give you a government check, let me make you dependent on the government. You don't need to work anymore, you don't need to be responsible for your life. I'm going to take care
of you. That would have been utterly destructive. It would have been the worst thing you could have done to him.
Yep.
And it's you know, we're talking about what you teach your kids. You know, you think about it. If you have a kid in kindergartener first grade who'struggling with how many of us will do your kids homework? None of us will, because doing your kid's homework is not helping the kid. Now, you may, you may work with the kid, you may get a tutor with the kid. You may walk through and say if you having problems with But you understand, you know, you and I are both fathers.
Uh Ben, You're a father, You understand when you're when you're raising your kids, they need to learn those skills and if someone else does it for them, it doesn't help our children. That same thing is true for all of.
Us, Absolutely true. I had a conversation with one of your colleagues, Senator Scott, when he was through Dallas a few months ago, and we had a private lunch and one of the things that we talked about, and I said to him that resonate with him because he also, you know, believes this is absolutely the.
Case, and it's right Him's a great guy.
It's right in line with what we're talking about right now. I said, Tim, do you agree that there's really nobody in our community who's achieved a high degree of success who actually did it using anything other than conservative principles as applied to their life. I go, but why do so many of us when we get to that level of success with these principles, pretend like it's something else
that got us there. It was working hard, staying out of trouble, persevering when other people had given up, and basically playing by the rules what we called it, that got you there. But you get there and then you pretend like you know, those aren't essential values and success. And I told him, I said, here's why I think that happens, because there's a price to pay socially in terms of being accepted if you don't pretend like you don't know what you know and you don't sort of
excuse the things that we were talking about. In other words, long story short is every successful African American in this country basically got to be successful by working hard and doing what they're supposed to do. But they don't want to be once they've achieved that level of success not accepted by the community at large and appear to be out of touch, and so they pretend like they don't know the formula. They don't know the winning formula. I just think we need to be more honest about what
the winning formula is. And the winning formula ends up being exactly what the conservative ideology would tell you. It has to do with taking upon yourself the responsibility for yourself and not believing that the Democratic Party or any party is there to save you. And the Democratic Party wants you to believe they do. They want you to believe you can't get there without them, which you.
Know, there's an old saying that every time I see luck luck, it looks amazingly like hard work.
Yep, it's very true. It's very true. So now to the policy things. So this is you know, so I'm bumping if anybody who's I don't presume that anyone in this room has followed my you know, my relatively insignificant legislative career, but it was marked with just fighting with the Democratic Party about various issues, and we're just bumping heads the whole way.
Well, as mayor, you showed enormous courage. So there were Democrats on the City Council pushing with the radical left movement to defund or to abolish the police, and you were a fellow Democrat at the time, and you stood up and fought them, and that that that's when you and I first got to know each Other's when you were newly elected and I came by your office.
I wanted to meet you, and we worked.
Together closely, but the courage you showed fighting for the people of Dallas really stood out early on in your.
Tam Well, I appreciate you saying that, and I was going to get to that eventually about how we met and about what the you know, what we've been doing for the past five years. I've been mayor, but in the legislature, even when I was part of a partisan caucus, I was a terrible by the Democratic Party's own. Once I left the party, they were honest. Their statements are
very interesting. If you read the statements with the state Party, they all say some pretty interesting things like he was always a terrible Democrat, good riddens were glad he's gone. It's like, I'm not sure they understood what they were admitting to. It's like, you know, but they acknowledged that it was always a bad fit. But what they're really
talking about is when I would be honest about voter fraud. Well, the voter fraud that happens in our large cities in Texas that I'm aware of, but I've seen it happening to me in my own races. I'm like these there are people who are outright stealing the votes of the elderly.
As a period, elaborate on that a little bit.
I came out very vocally and upset the party by saying that there is a systematic in the large urban cities like Dallas, Absentee or you know, ballad arvesting operation where people are going to old folks homes and taking ballots out of their mailboxes and voting these ballots for these people, or going and collecting ballots from these folks, and if they don't like the way the vote was
already cast, it goes into garbage. And I said that that that kind of thing is wrong, and it upset people and upset people in the party when I spoke out against corruption in the party. And so I started off in a posture with the party that was already a little bit antagonistic, and it's got worse and worse. So this is the slow burn. Well, now I've become the mayor and my whole job changes. I'm not a part of some legislative caucus where I'm just sort of,
you know, having to be a good team player. I'm responsible for people's lives, like I'm responsible for making the call to keep people alive and make sure that my city is you know, people are safe there and so oh it's supposed to it should. Once you've been given that kind of responsibility, it should change you, like you should look at things differently. And sure enough, I get
tested pretty early on with this to fund the police thing. Yeah, And I'm just going to break it down for about what the choice became very simple.
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That's support IFCJ dot org. Thank you and God bless you guys for getting involved. Here's some people know that listening around the county because I think it's an important point. The defund the police movement that was rolled out nationwide. They wanted it to be successful in big cities. Dallas was one of them. This was a lot of outside pressure as well, from coming from outside of Dallas where they were organizing.
What happened I've never seen since they didn't even live in I don't even know where. They don't even show. It was a national it was a national campaign with people who were you know, rent a protester types, I guess. But here's my point. It's absolutely true there was a
national movement. But the choice was pretty clear. If you were a mayor of a major American city, and more than likely you were a Democrat, then because I think the number is roughly seventy five percent of the top one hundred seas in America are run by Democrats, and every mayor in the top ten before me it was a Democrat, you really had two choices go along with to defund the police idea, because that's where the left was, that's where the activists were, That's where the pressure was,
was to defund and defund men anything from like what they did here in Austin, a forty percent across the board cut to your police department for no reason, not based on any fact, just because some activists decided that sound like a good number. The proposal in Dallas was sixty that's what they wanted in Dallas sixty percent. You can either do that and be a good Democrat and people to leave you alone, or you could be a sellout and a bad Democrat and not do it and
incur the ire. You're looking at the one Democratic mayor that I'm aware of in the United States who said
I'm not doing that. And the result and this is, like I said, when we started to get close closer, I mean, the result was protests for weeks on end at night against Dallas City ordinances with amplification and bullhorns and all stuff, against Dalla City ordinances, standing on my private property, not on the street in an acceptable protest perimeter, but like on the grass, looking in the windows with two little children and a wife, like intentionally trying to
intimidate me into changing my position to defund the police. And I never caved, even though it was horrible, horrible, horrible from my family. And that is when I really start to understand this isn't the fringe anymore of the Democratic Party. This is the Democratic Party. Like this is where we are on public safety as the Democratic Party now. And if you actually believe in law and order and making sure that people are safe, then there is no more part of the Democratic Party that is with you
on that, because I'm looking for those people. I'm waiting for the phone calls from just one, for just one Democratic congress person or one Democratic officeholder to say we're with you. You know you're doing the right thing, and here's the truth. And I've never said this public but i'll say it now. The only calls I got during that entire time saying hold the line, keep your people safe,
you're doing a good job. We're from Republicans and I was a Democrat as far as they knew, and there was no you, There's no there was no reason other than it's the right thing to do what you're doing, and we won't let you know that. There was nothing to be gained politically from you standing with me publicly and saying this is the right thing to do. Greg Abbott did it, You did it, Dan Patrick did it. A lot of people just said that mayor's doing the
right thing. And so Democrats, I saw at that point were pretty lost on the public safety issue. But then on top of that, I started to see and I didn't have this responsibility as a legislator and I got it. As the mayor, I have to protect people's incomes and make sure people can actually afford to live in this city because we are bleeding residents to lower tax jurisdictions.
So I started to really dig into our tech policy and saying, you know, what are we doing to help our residents be able to live here, have businesses here, and be competitive with our local you know, our competitors. And it turns out that we were doing a pretty bad job of actually even making an attempt to protect our taxpayers. We had the highest tax rate in Dallas of any of the cities in the area, and we have the second highest of any major city in the state,
and so I really wanted to change that. The resistance that I got from the left leaning members of our council was incredible, and the way the argument was couched, and the way the strategy is to couch any effort to rein in spending at all, even to hold it steady from your to year, is being heartless and not
caring about people. That resonated with me because I realized now that's actually been what the Democratic Party has been about all along, and what I've sort of been an unwitting accessory to which is painting people who just want to leave people alone or leave people with more of their income, people do what they want to do for their families, supposed to taking it from them and spending it on things they never asked for in the first place,
primarily so that politicians can have something to campaign on. They perfected the art of making anyone who was opposed to that seem like they were against the people they were trying to help.
Them, that they demonized you, they attack personally.
And so I became heartless. I became someone who didn't care about people. I'll give you an example of just last week. I'm in a I'm in the minority. I'm in a twelve to three minority vote that I lost on my city council last week because I voted against us appropriating almost three quarters of a million dollars to make sure that anybody in Dallas who needs tampons or other femine hygiene products could have them from the City
of Dallas. I said, I don't know why on earth we think that is something that we ought to be doing as a city with people's tax dollars. Well, there's three hundred more programs just like that, and when you add them all together, that's how you end up with a budget that grows year after year after year. We've gotten into more and more things that we don't need to be into, and so I said, I'm in the wrong party of public safety for sure, but I'm also
not really into this hole. Just tax people to death so you can do all this liberal experimentation and so on.
The matter, on the issues that were most important as a mayor and that were most important in my family, the Democratic parties was battened a goose egg on those issues, and I started to think, there really is very little reason why a person who is a common sense, fiscally responsible person ought to be voting Democrats, particularly at the local level, unless there's some sort of social reason that you just can't give up where you need to be accepted by your friends and family, and I just don't
have that. I don't have that need.
Well, let's talk about that a little more.
But I will say one of the greatest ironies is the rhetoric that the left uses in support of their policies I think is one hundred and eighty degrees opposite reality. So, for example, the effort to defund the police is advanced by movements and activists and billionaire donors who are embracing
the slogan black Lives Matter. Now as a statement, black lives matter is unequivocally, absolutely true, but the undeniable fact is that when you defund the police, inevitably more African Americans are more Black lives are lost because for a great many of our African American citizens and our Hispanic citizens, they live in in more low income neighbor neighborhoods that are that are more subject to crime. And when you pull law enforcement out, you know, we're we're at a
dinner right now. I guarantee you anyone here if we told you, hey, we're gonna pull the cops out of your neighborhood, everyone here would say no, no, that's a terrible idea. But yet we see these left wing activists, in the name of a slogan black Lives Matter, removing police protections from vulnerable black families, and the result is far more African American murders, and yet they continue to embrace that same rheter.
So I don't have to guess about it, because not only do I have the knowledge of being the mayor and knowing the crime statistics for my city. But I also have the the experience, the lived experience of growing up African American in Dallas in the very communities that we're talking about. So I am familiar with this issue is intimately as you can possibly be, both from sort of the policy making standpoint and just the life experience. And I can tell you I'm going to end the
suspense for folks. I'm not guessing about it. I can speak on it with authority. And It's why the people I'm left or even they don't even challenge me on this because they know that I'm not only am I right, but that I have the credibility on that I got
the street credit to speak on this. The Black Lives Matter thing and the defund the police thing are kind of issues that have been conflated, but the truth of the matter is is defund the police, for sure, was a construct of frankly white liberals who don't live in those communities at all yep, and was never asked for irrespective of their partipulation by African Americans who lived in crime ridden neighborhoods. Never African Americans never at any point said
we want the police out of our communities. They said, we want more police than our communit. We want them to be well trained, we want them to know, we want we want to live in a safe community, and we believe the police are part of that. So it was never true to begin with. It was a political thing to begin with.
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But you were a Democrat.
You have a large police force with a lot of minorities in it. What were they saying to you privately during that time?
Well, I'll just I'll answer that one really quickly. Everybody I believe in law enforcement could not believe and was so relieved that they had the one person who in this role everywhere else in the country was caving who was standing up. They were very grateful and it's what earned me the just enduring support of law enforcement for my entire mayoralty because I stood by them. But I wasn't standing by them just to send a message. I was saying because it was absolutely what the city needed.
Law enforcement hadn't done anything wrong where they deserved for that rhetoric to be thrown out around them, and having cutting sixty percent from a police department that's not trimming around the edges. That's salary and benefit, that's recruitment, that's I mean, that's a real that's putting them in more danger doing our aready a dangerous job, and so they
really appreciated that. But I want to put a fine point in this issue with African American community when as it relates to public safety, because it relates to what I believe is part of why I think that this party switch to mind is not important because I switched part.
It's a that's almost insignificant, But what it represents for the potentiality for this group of people who I honestly believe just have not had anybody come to them in a spirit of love and concern who's operating from within the community, not saying I sort of exist outside of it, and let me lecture you about what you should a acknowledged and accepted and proud member of it, saying, let me explain to you why we've been duped a little bit here and why what was once maybe a good
idea or sounded like one has now actually been categorically proven to be a failed strategy.
Me drill down on that a little bit. And this is just something that they're.
Strong about, this one. This is a this is bigger, way, bigger than one guy switching. This ought to be about people going, why am I still a Democrat? If this is what I care about?
You know well, and this is a theme you of referenced several times that I think is really important. I emphatically believe and I think you do as well, that the policies of the left, the policies of liberal Democrats, have been deeply harmful to the African American community, to the Hispanic community. That they exacerbate poverty, they exacerbate crime, They they have that they throttle educational excellence and opportunity. And yet we still have in Texas at across the
country an overwhelming majority of African Americans voting Democrat. And so I guess I want to ask two things. One, you made reference to it before about how kind of culturally you're essentially told you're a Democrat, that's what it means to be black. I'd like you to kind of
explain a little bit why you think that is. And then the second part of it is, Look, we're seeing, especially in Texas, but other parts of the country, we're seeing the Hispanic community is getting more and more Republican every day, and we're seeing the African American community. I think there's some movement, but we've got a lot further to go in the African American community. What do you think,
what do you think is persuasive? What should Republicans do to earn more support in the African American community going forward.
I think it's an amazingly important question, and I appreciate you asking it, and it's complicated, yeah, but I think if we're going to start that conversation tonight a little bit, and I really appreciate you having this conversation with me. I've not ever had an opportunity to talk about this is stuff that I've been thinking about my whole life. Yeah, and that had really any opportunity to really do anything
about it. And I feel like I'm at this at this point in my life now where maybe we can actually see the numbers of African Americans change to support the Republican Party. I think this. I think it's perfectly understandable in a limited resource environment, which is what any political campaign is or any political party is, Like resources are infinite. To say to any group that at any point in time is only throwing you ten percent of their support, they're against you ninety percent of the time,
that that's not where we ought to be investing. I think that's a perfectly rational decision. Well, that the perfectly rational decision in a lot of ways to not play the game at all because it's it's not perceived to be a particularly fruitful game plays very easily into a
narrative that and therefore that party doesn't care at all. Right, So you got one party that may be able to be criticized for being inefficient and ineffective, but they're telling you they care, and you got another party they might not be telling you they hate you, but they're just sort of focused on groups that produce more efficiently support. I mean, it's a it's a tough slog when you're talking about ninety ten, and so it's understandable, but it's
coming a cost. What I'm saying, and what I'm feeling instinctively politically right now, is that there's a there's been a maturation that was inevitable in African Americans position in this country. We are better off than we've ever been. Are we as well off as we like to be? No, but we we are better off. We're better educated, we're
better everything. There's anybody who says we're not better off today than we were, you know, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War or Durns Rights era is just playing a game. They're playing a retortal game. Yes we are, We're not where we'd like to be, but we are
better than We're further than we've ever been. What that means, though, is that people maybe have more of an opportunity now to sit back and look at things and ask that question of how has this approach of making everything about the community in terms of everything I do is written off to societal factors? Right? We can't hold we can't
even hold a criminal accountable because it's society's fault. Everything in the Democratic Party, my experience was anything you tried to actually pin on an individual was written off to society. So as a mayor, for example, I am really deeply concerned about the victims of crime because they did nothing wrong. The law enforcement folks who are out there risking their lives to prevent crime and to address crime, and and then there would be victims of crime that we're trying
to protect. Right, That's why I care about victims, would be victims, cops. The Democrat Party really seems, i mean legitimately seems to care more about the perpetrators of crimes than the victims of crimes or the would be victims
or the police. And I tell you what my evidence of that is is whenever somebody does anything, the finger gets pointed at the rest of us and we get told how if we just had built another recreation center, or you know, if we had put more money into the schools, this person may not have murdered that person,
or this person may not have raped that person. I grew up as poor and as black as you can grow up, and I can tell you in every poor black community in this country, eighty percent of the people, like in any other group, are making the decision every single day to follow the law and do it by the rules. It's twenty percent, like in any group.
Well, look, the whole country saw the image just couple of weeks ago of the six illegal immigrants in New York City who beat up to New York cups. They get arrested and within hours they get released no bail, and they walk out and with both hands they're flipping the bird at everyone.
And that.
To me, that image.
Of those angry illegal immigrants flipping the bird, I think sums up the absolute depravity of the view of the left. And we're seeing, Look, we're seeing great American cities being destroyed. As you know, Heidi, my wife is a native California, and you look at California, look at a city like San Francisco. San Francisco is an iconic American city. In the last couple of years, twenty two major retailers have shut down downtown because the crime has gotten so bad.
And I remember Heidi's family lives in California, called and they just said on the phone door said, well, gosh, you know, what can we do? People just go into stores and and you know, just take stuff. There's nothing we can do about it. I remember I'm listening to that, and I said, yes, there is. You throw their ass in jail.
Like put them in handcuffs, or arrest them.
It's worse than But if it's worse than that center, and this is what I'm getting at too, it's worse than that. It's it's quite predictable when you when you literally change the policies in the prosecutor's office and you say we won't prosecute theft of any amount underneath one thousand dollars, and then you don't just make that some sort of and it would still be bad internal memorandum.
You go on the news, the publicize, you let every criminal know.
Is it really a surprise that you have an uptick, not even an uptick, a sharp increase in smash and grab jobs and and shoplifting again in an effort to do some of these things that sound good on paper. Because society is at fault, not individuals, we do crazy things, these das and things. Stop prosecuting crimes because it's not fair. You know what, back to the eighty twenty split, which is just sort of the metaphorical split in any group of people who are doing the right thing, people aren't.
That twenty percent just needs to be held accountable for making an individual choice to break the law and kill someone or rape someone or terrorize the community. And we need to stop pretending like everything can be attributed to some societal factor. It's just not the way it actually is.
All right, we need to wrap up soon, but I want to ask two questions to close.
One.
In your view, part of what you answered in terms of how Republicans can do a better job in the African American community is just showing up and demonstrating that they give a damn.
And I think that absolutely is.
I didn't really say all I need to say on that because it's not just about it's not about emoting and showing up into saying we care. It's I think having an alternative to the liberal approach.
Well, and that's where my question was going to go, which is what issues do you think resonate most powerfully in the African American community that by focusing on those issues, have a potential to earn their support by saying, look, this is an issue that is going to make a difference in your life and your family. I am deeply passionate on school choice. I think school choice is the most fundamental civil rights issue in the entire country.
But I'm interested in your.
Thoughts of what issues actually will resonate and cause voters who have voted Democrat their whole life to reconsider. Gosh, maybe that maybe the policies that they're foisting upon me are not working.
I think if a Republican candidate for president, candidate for governor, candidate for mayor, candidate of anybody who's actually perceived to be running for an executive type position in charge went to an African American community, I'm talking of people who are members of the community who are going to vote
and participate in the process. You know, people who are invested in their community and said, I'm the person who's going to come in here and I'm going to make this a safe community for you, because no one before me has done that, no one either side this community is you deserve a safer neighborhood than you're living in. I want you to be able to walk from your house to the end of the block and back home
without being worried about being mugged. Or robbed or killed out and you don't feel safe doing that right now. I want your grandson to feel safe walking from the school bus home, and he doesn't feel safe doing that right now. I want to restore a genuine sense of safety to this community. That's number one. Number two, understand that the burden of high taxes falls disproportionately on you.
I have polling from my mayoral campaigns that shows in Dallas, Texas, the groups of voters who most want their taxes lowered are African Americans, followed by Latinos. Whites are in third place because they're paying a higher percentage of their income and the taxes it hits them the hardest. They are the most worked up about their property tax. Build would most like to see. I'm going to take it.
It's a barrier entry.
If you're climbing the economic ladder, it hits you the hardest on the earliest round.
This is supported by polling data. It will show you that poorer folks actually are most crippled by reckless tax policy at the local level, in particular, because there's no there's no game, there's no play a game around that. There's no tax credit this, and you know, figure that out. Like the tax bills just do or they foreclose on the house and you just gotta find a way to pay it. And that's just all there is to that. So high property taxes is a horrible thing for poor folks.
You come in and you tell them we're gonna we're gonna deal with this, these tax burdens that you're facing. We're gonna deal with the safety in these communities, and we're gonna give your kids viable choices for schooling. We're gonna make sure that you actually have a shot at a decent education. I think at that point people are like, I don't care, I don't know what party you said you're with, but I'm ready to sign I'm ready to
sign up for that. And you say, well, actually, everything I have just describe to you is right dead down the center of the fairway Republican policy. Yep, everything I just told that's Republican policy. I think people will literally say, then, I don't know why I've been voting Democrat this whole time.
All Right, there's gonna be a lot of people that are listening and they're gonna want to ask this questions. I'm gonna ask it if you were up for reelection right now running into Republican for mayor. Yes, your policies haven't changed. The only things changed they d went to an car.
Correct, could you win? I'd win overwhelmingly. I don't have any doubt about it, no doubt about it. And I'll tell you why I believe that. I'll tell you why I'm glad someone finally asked me that on the record. That's sort of the chatter as well.
That's why I ask I going to say, oh, well, this thay I could never win. That's why he waited till the end of his serve and then switch parties.
So here here's the reality that people have to ignore to even make that argument. But I understand why people need to make it. I mean I told someone, I said, you know, you don't switch parties in the two parties from one or the other and think the other party is going to say, well, you know, we wish him the best.
He was great and it's our loss.
You know, they got to come up with something and that kind of These are the kinds of arguments they've come up with. But here's the reality. I won my last election with It wasn't ninety three percent. Dallas City, you know, has ordinances about how right in candidates get on the ballot, and if you write in a name other than the actual right in candidate's name, that's there.
You just essentially didn't vote. You threw your vote, your bowt in the trash of the cast votes, which we were canvassed by the city and are the official records of the city. Ninety eight point seven percent of the vote. That's Democrats and Republicans in that group. That's a pretty hearty endorsement of the incumbent mayor. And I didn't run
with a D or an R behind my name. I ran just with you, know, as Eric Johnson, because you don't run in Texas, in any city with a D or for folks who aren't from Texas, we don't actually have partisan elections in Texas for mayor. You just run, and you don't run with a party support. Now, what do I think would have actually happened if I had just come out and said six months before the election,
I'm actually a Republican. Here's what would have happened. Some Democrats would have gotten together and said, well, this is an opportunity for us to run an ostensibly just overtly partisan candidate. We're going to do something that's never been done in dallasmore, which is to just make it partisan, like to say, Okay, we got an R running and now we're going to run a D against him. The problem is that the are you're talking about for four years well enough to clear the field and win with
ninety eight or seven percent of the vote. But that didn't happen yet. So let's just go back and say a Republican has been that effective who happens to also be African American and supported by the African American community. We think that that person would lose simply by saying I've become a Republican. I think what happens is is I won the first race in a contested nine person field that it went to a runoff with twelve percent of the vote. I won, you know, fifty six forty four.
I think that goes down to the normal, you know, pretty solid win of a you know, fifty four fifty three percent win. But I still win. There's still question I still win that race because I'm the incumbent at that point. No incumbent mayor if we've had Republican and Democrat mayors before. By the way, no incumbent mayor seeking re election in Dallas has ever lost ever.
Let me ask a final question, which is you have started now a national organization, a Republican Mayor's Association, and you have been out articulating that Republicans need to have an agenda for the cities, that we can't just write off big cities where an awful lot of Americans live. And I think that's a very important message. It's something and I want to ask you what's your vision for the message Republicans should have in the cities and how do we end up with a lot more.
Republican mayors the big cities. What's the path forward there?
I said this in the Wall Street Journale, and I meant it. It's a two way benefit for America and for our party. America needs the leadership that Republicans provide at the local level because of the things we talked about just a few minutes ago. A Republican mayor is going to is going to because it's part of the DNA of the party, is going to be right on order issues, going to be right on public safety. People who've asked me about that I've said, let me just
quiz you very quickly. Every bad idea you can think of about public safety came from one side of the aisle. There's not even a mixed bag on this issue. If it's a bad idea when it comes to public safety, you know, defund the police, don't prosecute, shop with whatever. Republicans don't propose ideas that undermine law and order. They not every Democrat believes them, but they only emanate from
the Democrat. Yeah, that's just a factual statement. So a Republican is going to be right on law and order in public safety, a Republican mayor is going to be right on taxes. A Republican mayor ought to be right
on infrastructure spending and investing prudently. And there's studies that show, I mean been they have proven that you actually have lower debt levels and you issue less debt when you have a Republican mayor versus a Democrat when they've mit professor actually studied this and concluded that it is a statistically significant different level of debt associated with a city when there's a Republican in charge and a Democrat in charge.
So we actually need Republicans running our major cities because eighty percent of Americans live in the cities. By twenty fifty, that number is going to be ninety percent. So the country actually needs the leadership. But I'm actually telling you as a group of partisans, we actually have to pay attention to this. And I think we have to pay attention to it because I, in my heart of hearts, believe that by being competitive in the cities, by basically
re engaging, because we were once engaged. There was a Republican Majors Association at one time. It had a similar name. It was like the Republican Conference. It was during the Ford administration, and it's at some point we just lost interest in competing at that level and it sort of just faded away. But it was very active at one time, and we were more competitive in our cities at one time.
We need to get more competitive there again, because the margin of victory at the state level in states like Wisconsin, in states like Michigan, states like Pennsylvania, is the difference between performing at the city level in You're ready, Madison, Green Bay, and in Detroit and in Philadelphi and Pittsburgh by just five or ten percent points better. So in other words, engaging in the cities in a more significant way and having the GOP brand associated with the things
we're talking about. At the local level. It doesn't take that many votes, and now all of a sudden, the whole state is no longer lock stock and barrel going one direction because of the advantage has been run up in the cities. You've cut into the advantage that the cities have.
You know, Eric, I'll tell you on that point.
So Heidi and I met twenty five years ago when we were both working on the George W. Bush campaign in two thousand, the presidential campaign. And actually in that campaign, you know, I was a young, twenty nine year.
Old staffer, but I wrote.
A memo urging that the campaign consider at the time Condoleeza Rice as a VP nominee. And in the course of the memo, I laid out all sorts of reasons why I thought this was worth considering carefully. But one of the things I did is I did an electoral analysis. I looked at the three preceding presidential elections, and I
posited a series of hypotheticals. I said, what would have happened if Republicans had gotten five percent more ten percent more or fifteen percent more of the African American and Hispanic vote. So I didn't posit what if we get
fifty percent more? I did five, ten or fifteen, so goals that were achievable, I believe, And I ran through the numbers, and the one that was most that stood out the most was if the Republicans had gotten an additional fifteen percent of the African American and Hispanic vote in nineteen ninety six, Republicans would have won an additional ninety six electoral votes. I mean, it flips the election dramatically. But to do that, we've got to compete.
It's a whole different national conversation about the competitiveness of this party if we are a factor at the city level, yep, because it's just where so many people are concentrated. It's getting harder and harder to figure out how to win elections where we're just not even playing there, and we just it's just not even we ought to be competing in every major city where we're currently just sort of saying, you know, a Democrat hasn't won, I mean Repokic had
won there a long time, so let's not try. We just flipped just in this last cycle, the mayor, the current mayor of I believe is Charleston, South Carolina, is now a Republican. They hadn't elected a Republican mayor in Charleston in like one hundred and seventy five years. So it can happen. It can be done. You have to run the right Candi. He was a former legislator like I was, and he ran a great campaign. Now they've got a Republican mayor. So what's gonna happen next is
he's going to do a good job. And when he does a good job, these people who've been voting for Democrat mayors for one hundred and seventy five years are going to say, you know, when Republicans are in charge, the city just seems to be it's safer, we hire more cops, and crime goes down, and you know what, the taxes go down, and you know, things are just better.
The brand means something to them at the local level, and not just the brand will always have a federal aspect to it, it will always have a state aspect to it. But right now in this party, we're missing a brand at the local level. It doesn't mean anything right now, at the local level, and we get to decide what it means. And I'm saying we should be running solid conservatives at the local level winning elections in cities. Well, and then that makes people with the look let will go, Yeah,
I'm actually a Republican. I love my Republican mayor, and so I'm a Republican. And that has benefits for people running for US Senate, running for president, running for governor. But we are right now just aren't doing anything. I mean, I was shocked to find that there was no one even in this lane. I wasn't even stepping on anybody's nose by doing this.
Well, let me say, Eric, I appreciate you. I appreciate your friendship, I appreciate your leadership, and I appreciate your joining us on the Verdict.
Buckcat, appreciate that. Man.
Give a big round of a pause from Mayor of Dallas. Thank you for coming on Verdict. Don't forget We do this show Monday, Wednesday Fridays. Make sure you hit that download subscribe auto download button shared on social media wherever you are in social media and the center.
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