A Few Texas Primary Thoughts
Plus I indulge in a little political fantasizing.
So, as we know, Ken Paxton defeated John Cornyn for the right to face James Talarico in the coming general election for US Senator. The contest was not close. Via the Texas Tribune:
Via Ballotpedia, we can see that Cornyn lost ground since March.
While I am sure that Trump’s endorsement helped boost the final numbers, the reality is that he was a Donny-Come-Lately, as Paxton has been leading in the polls pretty handily the whole time. Here’s FiftyPlusOne’s polling average of the race:
Regardless of the role the endorsement played, there is little doubt that this contest has affected the evolution of the Republican Party. This is just another data point in its MAGAfication. There is an unfortunate (in my view) faction of the GOP electorate who value a certain kind of politician whose obvious ethical foibles are not deal-breakers.
I do not have a deeply thought-out theory as to why primary voters preferred Paxton. My back-of-the-envelope guess is that his relative youth played a part (Paxton is 63 and Coryn in 74). I think, too, that Paxton is perceived as a disruptive fighter (as per his lawsuits against the Biden administration). He just seems to tick a lot of the MAGA boxes.
This result has also been seen to be favorable to the Democrats. As The Hill reported: Cook Political Report shifts Texas Senate race toward Democrats after Paxton runoff victory. Note that the shift is from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican” before anyone reads too much into this. The only polling on Talarico-Paxton that I could find was The Texas Political Project: Senate Race Polling Reveals Republican Turnout Challenges – and the Trajectory of the Texas GOP.
The April 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll was the latest in a handful of surveys that included hypothetical two-party, head-to-head matchups between either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton as the the Republican candidate and Democrat James Talarico. In each matchup in the Texas Politics Project Poll, fielded April 10-20, Talarico led – by 7 points against Cornyn (40% to 33%) and by an indistinguishable 8 points against Paxton (42% to 34%).
The most important takeaway for me is that those numbers clearly include a lot of undecideds, and that in a deeply red state, a lot of those undecideds will revert to their default, which is Republican.
For the moment, however, I will indulge in something I try to avoid, which is a bit of wishful thinking, if not outright fantasy.
While, as a general matter, I would prefer that Democrats take the Senate in November as a bulwark against the authoritarianism and corruption that gushes from this White House, I also have a specific interest in the Talarico-Paxton contest.
Specifically, I would love to see someone as odious as Ken Paxton lose just on moral grounds (here is a list to consider). Losing would be just desserts for Paxton. Moreover, it would be just desserts for the moral cowards in the Texas State Senate who voted to acquit him during his impeachment trial. I would also like to see the voters, at least in small measure, repudiate Trump by having his endorsed candidate lose.
Having said all of that, I am not going to hold my breath. Ted Cruz, who isn’t exactly beloved, won re-election in 2024, 53.1 to 44.6 in 2024. Worse, Trump was +13.64 in 2024. Granted, turnout in a presidential contest and in a midterm are not the same.
Yes, in my fantasies, there will be a Blue wave sufficient to sweep Paxton away, but realistically, I fear that we will end up with Senator Paxton, which is worse than Senator Cornyn–perhaps not in terms of how they vote, but definitely in terms of corruption and what it means for the further devolution of the GOP.
Beto O’Rourke never led a single poll in RCP. And he actually ended up doing more than 4 points better than their final average, in what is still the best performance to date for a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen’s final reelection in ’88.
RCP shows a few other polls on Talarico vs. Paxton than the U. of Texas one. Two show them tied, two others show Paxton narrowly ahead.
Obviously it’s way too early to know who has the advantage, and polls can be wrong, of course–in either direction. But the limited data we have suggests Talarico is better-positioned to win than O’Rourke was.
@Kylopod: I do think that Talarico is better positioned than was O’Rourke, so hope springs eternal and all that. This year is likely to be even more anti-Trump than 2018, and Paxton isn’t the incumbent.
On moral grounds, you couldn’t design a greater contrast of choices than Paxton versus Talarico. If morality mattered a whit in American politics, your fantasy would come true. But, alas, it doesn’t.
The oligarchs will invest heavily in making this race into Us versus Them and they will invent horrifying attributes for the national liberal Them to contrast with equally inventive virtues for the Texan real American Us.
@Kylopod:
Nate Cohn addresses these two points in his latest article, which I recommend.
A Blue Texas May Be More Than a Dream for Democrats
(Emphases mine)
One of my long-time electioneering mantras is “Win the suburbs, win the state.” Colorado turned blue because the urban corridor suburban voters turned blue. Is there any evidence that Texas suburban voters are getting fed up with Texas Republicans?
Texas is another planet so logic need not apply.
But the base (8% of voters?) voted in this primary and Cornyn still got over 30% of even those nutjobs.
Paxton is Trump with absolutely no charisma. A corrupt liar with a bunch of sexual baggage. He even supported aquitting a pedo.
Still I wouldn’t bet against Paxton.
It’s planet Texas.
Don’t count your chickens before the hen lays the eggs.
Trump has renamed Talarico as “Alfred E. Neuman.”
@Steven L. Taylor:
One thing that helped Republicans in 2018 (besides the absurdly lopsided GOP-friendly Senate map) was that the party base seemed to “come home” in the end, in what has sometimes been attributed to the Kavanagh hearings. What has appeared in the last year that we really have never seen before is a faction of the far right that has turned against Trump. Ann Coulter tried to forge that kind of niche during his first term, and all it did was push her into further irrelevance. Now, it seems to have fire in it.
The reasons why are complicated. You have the Epstein files, you have the increasingly vocal anti-Israel segment on the right taking advantage of the overall turn of the public against Israel since Oct. 7, you have the death of Charlie Kirk and the conspiracy theories it inspired, you have the terrible economic numbers; even Trump’s age is probably part of it, as they’ve become increasingly aware Trump won’t be around forever and they’re looking ahead to the party after Trump.
It’s still not clear how widespread this new phenomenon is. But we didn’t see anything like it during Trump’s first term. Indeed, a lot of these people back then (if they were around) were at the forefront of complaining about the Russiagate hoax and cancel culture, themes that easily coalesced with defenses of Trump against his enemies. These weren’t Never-Trumpers, they weren’t even Liz Cheney types who turned against him after Jan. 6. It’s a very conspiracy theory-loving crowd, which used to be very in line with Trump when it came to stuff like the “stolen” 2020 election or the Covid “hoax.” Now, they’ve started to drift away from him. And I think it is part of what we’re seeing in the lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters this year, something that really wasn’t happening during his entire first term, where his base largely stayed with him in 2018 and 2020, it’s just that it was overwhelmed by massive turnout on the other side.
Congress doesn’t seem to do anything — so why not vote for the craziest motherfucker around?
Between gridlock, the filibuster and congress deferring to the executive, there’s not much happening that voters will feel in realtime. The feedback loops are pretty broken unless you are following very closely.
Supreme Court confirmations are pretty major but the results take years to show up, if not decades. And even then… there were a not insignificant number of voters upset that Biden and the Democrats had overturned Roe v. Wade because of the timing.
If you were designing a democracy to be as unresponsive to voters as possible, the US constitution would be a pretty good starting point. The founding fathers weren’t really fans of democracy, they just wanted local entrenched elites (themselves) in power rather than the king and English parliament.
@CSK:
That reference is way too obscure for the typical Trump supporter.
@CSK:
He said that about Pete Buttigieg some years ago.
@Pylonius:
I disagree. That might be true about the youngest parts of his base, but they still skew older overall.
@Kylopod:
Yeah, but they still have to read, and even Mad Magazine might be too much.
@Kylopod: Trump better be careful how he treats Talarico who is a sincere evangelical. Any off-the-cuff disparagement trump spews could really alienate other evangelicals.
In your opinion would religious conservatives prefer a fellow evangelical over Paxton and would they vote that way?
@CSK:
Inscrutable that someone who read Mad Magazine could become a Trumpie.
@Mr. Prosser:
Of course not. Hillary is famously Methodist. Biden, doggedly Catholic — as is Pelosi. All three took their “for better, for worse” marriage vow before God and man with dead seriousness; Hillary did so to her political detriment.
Meanwhile, Trump is an irreligious, profane rapist, bully, and Epstein-bestie pedo with multiple wives he publicly cheated on. The Putin-puppet pederast is a pathological lying thug who terrorizes immigrant kids, rips healthcare and food assistance from the poor, and mocks the disabled and the dead.
Did religious conservatives side with Hillary, Biden, or Pelosi over Trump? Nope. Because as any black Southerner will tell you, much of the white evangelical church has long been little more than a thinly-disguised front for the KKK.
Their Bible requires them to house the poor, welcome the foreigner, heal the sick, feed the hungry, and not lie, cheat, or steal. Instead, the godless, fraudulent, Satanic hypocrites of the Amerikklan evangelical church are building golden idols of a incompetent, warmongering orange crook who is the antithesis.
There’s no need for Trump to be careful. The phony Jesusmongers who support him will side with Paxton the Pedo Protector over Talarico every day of the week, and twice in their fake churches on Sunday.
@Mr. Prosser:
First of all, I didn’t know he was evangelical. (Google AI denies it.) But the larger question is how Republicans deal with a Democrat who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve.
Jimmy Carter, an actual evangelical, did well among that crowd in 1976, but the resolutely nonchurchgoing Reagan won them over in the next cycle. That was around the time of the rise of the Moral Majority (which appeared in 1979) and the hyper-politicization of Christianity over such issues as abortion, homosexuality, prayer in public schools, and so on.
We’re nearly 50 years from that era, and a lot of it was already baked in by the time the century rolled around. Voters from this bloc respond less to a candidate’s actual faith than to whether they check the right boxes.
(I’ve also long had the belief that one of the things that appeals to them about Trump is that much of his style bears striking similarities to that of megachurch pastors.)
At the very least I don’t expect Talarico’s faith to hurt him. He might peel away some of the more earnest right-leaning voters, and I don’t think he’ll turn off too many atheists or people from other religions. But make no mistake: the Republicans will attack him as a fake Christian (they already have), and I’m not expecting him to win a majority of regular churchgoers in the state.
@DK: From my readings in history, including the history of Christianity specifically, this:
is what happens when politics becomes tied to Christianity. It is always bad for the Christianity. Always.
@Neil Hudelson:
This is what happened in California during the Pete Wilson era and right after. Mexican-Americans in the state got a solid notion of who welcomed them there and who didn’t.
And by the way, most of the Mexican-Americans I’ve spoken with about this love the whole multi-culture thing going on in California as much as I do.
I have been expecting this to happen on the national stage, but it has taken a lot longer than I expected to happen. It’s welcome, just the same.
A more conservative party should be welcoming to them. They are generally religious and family oriented. But the racism has taken over the national party. I don’t like the guy, but Abbot has been absolutely brilliant at threading the needle on this, I think, but I don’t know if he can keep it up much longer. He kind of doesn’t own the narrative as much any more.
This senate seat setup sort of reminds me of the governor’s race in Missouri back in 1992. Bill Webster was the popular attorney general (R), and Roy Blunt I think was the secretary of state (R). The primary battle between the two of them was vicious. Webster eventually won the primary, but some of the allegations stuck (Webster was eventually convicted of misusing campaign resources), and the party was deeply divided. Mel Carnahan (D) won.
The TL;DR–There is a path for Talarico here, I think. The big difference between the race I described above and this one is that Missouri’s primary was in August, this one is two months earlier, in May. That could be enough time for voter amnesia to kick in.
@Jen:
Do you know much about Missouri politics? I’m related, by marriage, to Bob Holden, the former Governor. I was fortunate enough to go to his inauguration weekend in 2001. I had to bring every suit I owned as there were events pretty much every four hours for three days. Ana amazing amount of amazing food and booze (and it was the good booze). It was cool, and I’m glad I got to experience it. Bob Holden is a good and decent man.
@EddieInCA: I know quite a bit about Missouri politics, it’s where I got my start. Bob Holden was the type of public servant I wish we could clone, an honest and decent person. Although I was on the other side of the fence at the time, we all worked together (notably, Republicans were in the minority in MO at the time–seems very strange to think about that now).