Trump’s Senate endorsement of Paxton buoys Democrats in Texas
The catalog of unrequited hopes and hearts is long.
Captain Ahab went crazy searching for “Moby Dick” for revenge. Jay Gatsby’s ostentatious wealth failed to win Daisy Buchanan’s affection. Charlie Brown never kicked a football.
Then there is Texas, the land of Democrats’ broken dreams.
It’s been half a century since the party carried Texas into the presidential election. The last time Democrats won a statewide office was in 1994, “The Lion King” was breaking box office records, Boyz II Men dominated radio and the World Wide Web was about to change everything.
As Texas became increasingly Republican and politically unattainable, Democrats insisted that every election year was the year they would end their uselessness and take back power in Washington or Austin, the state capital.
This never happened.
But is this it?, finally year?
With Ken Paxton crushing incumbent John Cornyn in a violent and astronomically costly U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, many Democrats believe so — and even neutral observers agree they’re given their best shot at a revival by a long shot.
“Paxton will be a much tougher guy [for Republicans] “Unlike Cornyn, who has never lost an election, we will cross the finish line in five months,” said Richard Murray, a retired University of Houston political science professor who has researched Texas voters for decades. “We are facing a very expensive, tough race.”
Paxton, Texas’ three-term attorney general, is simply a flawed candidate. The GOP candidate, accused, impeached and indicted by his ex-wife of adultery, is, to put it mildly, “an ethically problematic individual,” as the notoriously (and concerned) Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins put it.
But Paxton was President Trump’s choice – also for impeachment, impeachment and adulterous infamy – and that solved the problem.
Trump called Cornyn, a four-term senator and former Texas Supreme Court justice, a “good man” but said he wasn’t supportive enough in “tough times.” In between these abandonments, Cornyn voted to certify the indisputable outcome of the 2020 presidential election and block Trump’s illegal bid to remain in office.
The Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate is James Talarico, 37, a state representative from Austin and a Presbyterian seminarian and former public school teacher who has built a nationwide following for his open and scriptural takedowns of Republican foes. Imagine if Beto O’Rourke had a priest’s collar and the capacity to print money.
In 2018, O’Rourke seemingly came from nowhere and nearly upset Republican Ted Cruz in the closest Texas Senate race in decades. Before that, it was the filibuster Wendy Davis who fired the imagination of Democrats across the country. He seized the state Senate to briefly block anti-abortion legislation – This year! — before coming up pretty short in his 2014 run for governor.
The key difference this time around, with due credit to Talarico and his phenomenal fundraising, is his damaged goods rival. Normally, a Republican ‘R’ next to a candidate’s name is enough to win in Texas. But polls show that a significant portion of GOP voters may have a hard time supporting Paxton; That doesn’t mean they will support Talarico. They may not be able to vote in the potentially costly Senate race.
(The counter-argument is that Paxton, the martyred hero of the MAGA movement, could increase turnout among the party’s base at a time when Trump is leaking support within the established GOP.)
Either way, the president’s me-first political self-indulgence isn’t making it any easier for his fellow Republicans as they fight to keep control of the House and Senate in November.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Trump fielded a series of unattractive misfits (whose sole attribute was their loyalty to him) with poor results. Republicans lost highly winnable Senate contests in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and with them their chance to take control of the chamber.
Even if Paxton prevails in November, Trump’s support could cost the GOP dearly, and not just figuratively.
Democrats need to win four seats to flip the Senate. To do that, they must successfully defend seats in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire, and then pick at least four more seats from a menu that includes Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and now Texas.
This is important access. But the Democrats’ chances look much better than they did a few months ago, when Trump led the country into the Iran quagmire and gas prices and just about everything else started going through the roof.
Retaining Cornyn’s seat will cost Republicans a regal sum; It’s money that “can’t be spent in two places at once,” as longtime Texas GOP strategist and Cornyn campaign adviser Matt Mackowiak put it. “He could go to Michigan, New Hampshire, Georgia, Iowa, Alaska. Or he could go here to Texas, which is extremely expensive.”
Talarico and the Democrats are unlikely to win the Senate race in November because Texas remains a fundamentally Republican and conservative-leaning state. Paxton can win for that reason alone.
“This is as good an environment as Democrats can realistically get,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, who has seen much-lauded Democrats fail in a blaze of misplaced hyperbole. “But when you start doing the math, it gets a little hard to see how it all adds up.”
not to say that can’t to be.
The truth, as the saying goes, may be stranger than “Moby Dick” or any other fiction.
