Jennifer Stoddard-Hajdu, the current chair of the Dallas County Republican Party, spoke to The Dallas Express in an exclusive interview about her re-election campaign.
Stoddard-Hajdu filed for re-election on November 11, the first day possible, and is set to campaign against the former chair of the Texas GOP Ret. Lt. Col. Allen West.
Since taking over as Dallas County Republican Party chair in 2021, Stoddard-Hajdu has been working to make improvements from within the party, she said, telling The Dallas Express that she helped get the party out of debt.
“I came in and just really had to reinvent the whole wheel. I’m proud to say we’ve done a really good job of doing that,” she said to The Dallas Express.
“The party is financially stable for the first time since 2017. I’ve raised almost $1.4 million in two years. I’ve reestablished critical relationships with the Dallas donor base. I think that they are confident in my stewardship of the money.”
While Stoddard-Hajdu understands the importance of donors for the Republican party, she also stressed how critical it is to get every member of the party involved, adding that there are “tremendous grassroots organizations within the party.”
“We train our precinct chairs and grassroots almost every Saturday. We’ve provided a lot of materials. In the most recent municipal election, we not only provided cards for all kinds of candidates, but we had them come up here,” she told The Dallas Express.
“We made cards for them to distribute and helped them get distributed. We had a lot of grassroots people go door-knocking for municipal candidates. So we do a lot.”
Stoddard-Hajdu noted the significant increase in precinct chairs since she first became the party chair.
“Another thing we’ve done is we’ve doubled the amount of precinct chairs that we have. When we walked in the door, we barely had about 100 or maybe 110. But we have almost 300 precinct chairs now,” she said.
“And we’re consistently reaching out to communities … where we’ve never had precinct chairs. We’ve acquired several new precinct chairs from the south Dallas area. We’ve gotten Coppell and Irving very involved.”
Moving forward, Stoddard-Hajdu said that ensuring election integrity is on a short list of “number one issues” that she wants to focus on in the upcoming elections.
“I am the leader of county chairs on election integrity in Texas. Just last week, I was at the secretary of state’s office — Jane Nelson’s office — with State Senator Tan Parker and renowned election integrity expert Russ Ramsland, who is from Dallas. And we went down and talked to the secretary of state and some of her senior staff about some of the serious e-poll book issues that we’ve been seeing in Texas,” Stoddard-Hajdu told The Dallas Express.
“It was a really great conversation. I believe the secretary of state recognizes that we have some serious issues with this, and she wants to work with us to see how we can resolve those. State laws are going to have to change for us to be able to get rid of these e-poll books and get back to precinct-based voting. But that’s where we need to go.”
Stoddard-Hajdu said it would not be easy to accomplish all her goals, but she is prepared to “play well with others in the sandbox, even if I don’t agree with them.”
“To get anything done right now in Dallas County, you have to be able to work with Democrats. You can’t just go in with bombastic rhetoric. You’ll get nowhere. I’m able to get some things done with the elections commission I sit on because I believe my fellow Democrats respect me. They respect that I have a reasoned and researched position.” she said.
“They listen to me, and there are things they have voted my way because I convinced them. You can’t have somebody who is just going to go in there with fire and brimstone and burn the place down. Because you won’t get anything done. So I have the ability to do that, and I think that is really important.”
