Farris and Dan Wilks gave 2/3 of Ted Cruz's Super PAC funds

A new CNN documentary special premiering on Sunday, Deep in the Pockets of Texas, traced the money trail between a small group of Texas billionaires and the state’s far-right political shift — and reported how two of those billionaires were responsible for about two-thirds of the Super PAC funding that backed Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) 2016 presidential campaign. Texas politics have been dominated by Republicans for nearly three decades since George W. Bush defeated the incumbent Gov. Ann Richards (D-TX) in 1994, but as senior national correspondent Ed Lavandera highlighted, there has been a notable shift to the right, and it’s due in no small part to the financial influence of two West Texans who have made billions of dollars in oil and fracking, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. It’s a fairly recent phenomenon, Lavandera noted, with Dunn and Wilks and their immediate family members (including Dunn’s wife Terri Dunn, Wilks’ wife Jo Ann Wilks and his brother Dan Wilks and his wife Staci Wilks) rolling millions of dollars into conservative candidates and PACs across the state over the past decade.

Texas campaign finance law allows unlimited donations to state candidates, making it possible for Dunn and Wilks — directly and through their various PACs — to underwrite staggering sums for their chosen candidates, sometimes providing a majority of their total contributions. Repeatedly throughout the special, CNN displayed a graphic like the one below showing the percentage of a GOP legislative candidate’s funds that came from these sources. Dunn in Midland and the Wilks brothers in Cisco had been able to leverage their wealth into enormous influence, said Lavandera, as hard as it might be to believe “a handful of billionaires” could do that in a state of 30 million people. But Dunn’s critics don’t find his activism in other policy areas to be quite so benevolent. CNN noted opposition to the state’s abortion ban, open carry laws, and legislation affecting LGBTQ+ issues, and how the money he and Wilks throw around means that even when their chosen candidates don’t win, they still score points due to the effect these far-right conservatives have on the other candidates.