I’ve found myself wondering, in the wake of the primary, whether Texas Republicans are secretly tired of winning.

Some of the party’s leaders aren’t, clearly. But the activists who have failed to defeat them are sore losers — and not very bright, apparently.

Last week, for example, I moderated a panel at the Harris County GOP’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner. The panelists did a good job, I thought, as did Lt. Gov Dan Patrick and the keynote speaker, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise. But according to EmpowerTexans, the highlight of the entire evening was me.

“Grieder’s inclusion came as a surprise for many conservatives in attendance, who didn’t expect to be subjected to Democrats at a Republican Party event,” claimed Brandon Waltens, the group’s Capitol Bureau Chief.

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It’s true that Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t look thrilled when he realized I was sitting at his table. And some of my conservative friends were surprised to see me. As one of them explained, one of our mutual friends had a free ticket; he wouldn’t have bothered, otherwise.

Still, Paxton survived the event. So did state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who confided in Waltens that he was “astonished” to see me. In fact, so did all the attendees, a majority of whom were grown men, at least in theory.

Paul Simpson, the chair of the Harris County GOP, isn’t actually scared of journalists, even if we, like all Texas voters, have the option of participating in either primary.

And right-wing activists at groups like EmpowerTexans would still accuse me of being a leftist, either way. They’ve been doing that for years, regardless of what I do. They do it to other conservatives, too.

That’s why I’ve been wondering if Texas Republicans, collectively, are tired of winning. Simpson isn’t, clearly. But our statewide leaders seem to think that the secret to success is insisting that voters help them keep Texas red, regardless of whatever Republicans like Paxton have done or might do.

This week, for example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that he had decided to include a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census.

Read more: Why did state leaders agree to let the feds mess with Texas?

Many Republicans applauded the decision. And Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, told the Kansas City Star that he had discussed the issue with President Donald Trump last year, shortly after his presidential inauguration.

But in my view, this is not actually an ideological issue. Including a question about citizenship on the Census would serve no productive purpose, and it would have severe consequences for Texas.

That’s because 17 percent of the 28 million people who live in Texas are foreign-born. The majority of them are here legally — and some of them, of course, are naturalized citizens.

But it’s never easy to get an exact count of unauthorized immigrants, for obvious reasons. It was bound to be trickier than usual to do so in 2020, since Census workers will be asking people to report their information to a federal government led by a president who takes advice from outright nativists — and whose administration has not been characterized by overwhelming competence.

So Ross’s decision to include a question about citizenship on the Census itself, rather than the supplemental American Community Surveys, raises the risk of a serious undercount. And that’s a problem for all Texans, because the size of a state’s population determines the amount of federal funding it receives for core services such as health care or public education.

Read more: Census controversy on citizenship hits Texas

A state’s population also determines the size of its Congressional delegation, of course. That’s one of the reasons Ross’s decision went over so well with Republicans from states like Kansas. Texas, however, is a growing state. If the state population is fully accounted for, we would probably get another two or three seats in Congress as a result of the 2020 Census.

That would have been good news for Republican leaders like Rick Perry, who was able to win statewide in Texas even after we became a “majority-minority” state. But our current Republican leaders may have realized, at this point, that winning wasn’t as easy as Perry made it look.

At the same time, it wasn’t as hard as they think.