Veteran Denton County GOP lawmaker Jane Nelson will not seek 11th term in Texas Senate

AUSTIN — State Sen. Jane Nelson, after nearly three decades in the Senate, will not seek re-election next year, she announced Monday.

Nelson, a Denton County Republican, has been the Senate’s top budget writer for four sessions.

She’s also been a key framer of Texas’ conservative approach to health care and social programs during the GOP’s 18 years of total domination of state government.

Nelson’s most far-reaching legislative accomplishment may have been helping spearhead, with cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, a successful push in 2007 to win voters’ support for $3 billion of state bonds to create the Cancer Research & Prevention Institute of Texas.

In 2019, voters overwhelmingly agreed to renew the institute and give it another $3 billion.

Nelson, who turns 70 in October, said in a written statement that she has been honored to represent Senate District 12 for 28 years. It includes northeast Tarrant County and southern Denton County.

“I promised to listen, work hard, and deliver results and have strived to fulfill that pledge,” Nelson said. “Our accomplishments have improved the lives of Texans, which makes me proud.”

After she won a 10th term last November, Gov. Greg Abbott credited Nelson with having “paved the way to expand mental health resources, combat opioid abuse and crack down on human trafficking.”

She was also the Legislature’s principal architect of policies placing almost all of the state’s more than 4 million Medicaid recipients into managed-care plans run by insurance companies.

Nelson also helped push through a new method of state procurement of foster-care services known as “community-based care,” which recently hit bumps, especially in San Antonio.

A former teacher, Nelson also will be remembered for championing the return of physical education to public schools.

On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a written statement that Nelson “is the finest Finance Chair in Texas history.”

“She is a respected leader in the Senate,” said Patrick, the Senate’s presiding officer. “She was a mentor to me and made me a better senator and lieutenant governor. She is my friend.”

University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus said Nelson is “an institution” who “can’t easily be replaced. She held a conservative line in spending in boom and bust times for Texas.”

In recent election cycles, newly elected GOP senators “have been much more ideologically extreme than the member they replace,” Rottinghaus said.

Because North Texas “is such a hotbed of conservative activists, look for senator Nelson’s replacement to be more to her right, more in line with Dan Patrick’s conservative Senate,” he said.

Rice University’s Mark Jones, who closely tracks legislative politics, said GOP Rep. Tan Parker, who hails from Nelson’s hometown of Flower Mound, would “have the inside track” to succeed Nelson.

Though Parker could not be reached for comment, Fort Worth Republican Rep. Matt Krause said in a text message, “If I had to guess, I would think Tan Parker runs for that seat.”

Senate district boundaries will be redrawn in a special session this fall, Rice’s Jones noted.

With Nelson leaving District 12, “We don’t know what the district’s final boundaries will be, but if it drifts south into HEB [Hurst-Euless-Bedford] country with a larger share of NE Tarrant County, Jonathan Stickland might run,” he said, referring to a tea party-style former state representative from Bedford. “The same could hold true for Craig Goldman,” a five-term GOP House member from Fort Worth who is close to Speaker Dade Phelan, Jones said.

Neither Goldman nor Stickland immediately responded to requests for comment.

Plagued by slower population growth in their districts than is occurring in the I-35 corridor, two West Texas GOP senators — Charles Perry of Lubbock and Kel Seliger of Amarillo — may want to seek new voters in SD-12, Jones said.

“With Nelson not running for re-election, GOP mapmakers may send a few of its Republican voters over to SD-8 to provide Angela Paxton with a cushion,” or give some of Nelson’s current area to Sen. Drew Springer, a Muenster Republican who represents parts of Collin and Denton counties, Jones said.

Nelson, who grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, attended the University of Texas at Arlington and graduated from the University of North Texas. She was an elementary school teacher in Arlington for six years. She and her husband, J. Michael Nelson, who have five children and 12 grandchildren, owned and operated a Denton manufacturing firm started by his father. It made parts for the military and civilian aerospace industries.

After serving two two-year terms on the State Board of Education, Jane Nelson first won election to the Senate in 1992, knocking off longtime Democratic Sen. Bob Glasgow of Stephenville.

Nelson campaigned on term limits for lawmakers. She unsuccessfully pushed for that and for initiative and referendum in Texas.

In 1998, Nelson, who was only the third Republican woman ever elected to the Senate, became the first to head a standing Senate committee. Then-Lt. Gov. Rick Perry named her to lead the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, a position she held longer than any other senator.

In 2014, then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst named her chairwoman of the Senate Finance Committee, making her the first woman to run a budget-writing committee in Texas. In 2019, she was the first woman to preside over opening day of the Texas Senate.