Stephen Peter Munisteri (born December 25, 1957) is an American attorney who served as the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas from 2010 to 2015.

[3] He is the first challenger in modern Texas Republican history to defeat a sitting incumbent for the position of state chairman.

[6] Munisteri founded the firm on November 1, 1982, the day before the defeat of Bill Clements as the first Republican governor of Texas since 1873.

[8] Munisteri was active in politics early in his teenage years, first working as a volunteer for the campaigns of Texas Republicans Hank Grover and John Tower in 1972,[9] though the two were bitter intraparty rivals.

In 1976, he was elected State Vice Chairman for Texas Young Americans for Freedom, was an active volunteer for Ronald Reagan and attended the Republican National Convention.

Under Munisteri's chairmanship, YAF began the practice of issuing legislative rankings for members of the Texas House of Representatives.

In 2008, he traveled to Iowa to assist Texas Land Commissioner Jerry E. Patterson in supporting Fred Thompson for president.

On October 24, 2009, the SREC elected Texas GOP National Committeewoman Cathie Adams as Benkiser's successor by a vote of 36–25.

[12] On January 22, 2010, Munisteri announced his candidacy for state chairman, citing a desire to make the RPT a "more effective organization" by using his "strong business administrative skills".

[13] He was the second declared challenger in the race, as former SREC member Tom Mechler of Amarillo, had announced his candidacy the previous summer.

[14] Munisteri's election marked the first time in modern history that a challenger defeated a sitting incumbent at the state convention.

When Munisteri stepped down early in 2015, Mechler was elected his successor on the third secret ballot by the 62-member Republican State Executive Committee.

Since no candidate received a majority of districts, a vote was held in the nominations committee of the convention, and Munisteri won the second ballot by a count of 22–9.

After the nominations committee presented their results to the full convention, Adams then proceeded to force an unprecedented floor vote for the position, at which point Tom Mechler officially endorsed Munisteri's candidacy.

The party has continued to be debt free since December 2010 and has now adopted a policy to pay down all invoices to $0 by the end of each calendar month.

In June 2013, Munisteri announced a partnership with the RNC to establish Victory Centers that will operate on a year-round basis and that the party would be hiring significant number of new field staff for these offices, including staffers assigned specifically to outreach to the Hispanic, African American, and Asian American communities.

Specifically, he noted that the new statewide Asian American, African America, and Hispanic engagement organizations had been very active and attending numerous events around the state signing up hundreds of new contacts.

The chairman also reported that the RPT has opened permanent Victory centers in Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Corpus Christi, El Paso, and The Valley.

In November, Munisteri announced that the party had set a new record for the number of Republicans elected to office around the state.

[24] The RPT also announced in November that under Munisteri's chairmanship, the party had brought in approximately $22 million and had reached the milestone of being completely debt-free for four consecutive years.

[25] At the final quarterly meeting of the SREC, Munisteri announced that he had secured funding to maintain permanent Victory centers and staff across the state.

[27] In an official statement explaining his reasoning behind the decision Munisteri writes: Today I informed the SREC that I will be stepping down on March 7th.

[28]Munisteri said he's supporting Paul, in part because of the Kentucky Republican's strategy to court nontraditional GOP voters, like African-Americans and young people.

Munisteri was one of 48 delegates from Texas bound by state party rules to support Donald Trump at the convention.

[31] He left the Trump administration in 2019 to help run the 2020 re-election campaign of Texas senator John Cornyn.