We still have over a month to see how it plays out, and ‘Vote for the crook: It’s important’ has been a winning message before.
Like Yogi said, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” and Leader Thune is in it to win it, but things have long looked grim in the Texas Senate race. “Precriminations” have predictably begun with each faction within the party pointing fingers at the other. Luckily, there’s plenty of blame to go around!
Blame first goes to the nominee who chose to run for the seat despite his myriad deficiencies and then proceeded not to run all that hard on the seeming assumption, “It’s Texas. I’ll be fine.” But you neither expect a five-year-old to balance a checkbook nor a fox to be kind to a hen. People have their native capabilities and characters and you have to take them as you find them. It’s hard to blame Paxton for making poor choices here; he could do no other.
Unfortunately in situations like this, the role of the adult in the room falls to the adult, and the adult here was Senator Cornyn. For whatever reason, he was adamant about not just keeping Paxton from being the nominee but beating Paxton himself. Others can debate why he chose to do this, but in hindsight this was probably the race’s most consequential decision.
The problem is that foresight probably should have caught it, too. I don’t know what Cornyn’s private polling showed but, given the outcome, it can’t have been good. Perhaps he did well with polls “pushed” to include support from President Trump and derogatory information about Paxton and Cornyn? Again, it unfortunately falls to the adults to resist motivated reasoning.
I saw a similar situation firsthand in 2017 when I was a top staffer to then-Senator Jeff Flake. Jeff was up for reelection in 2018, and it was going to be a slog. Jeff was a sworn mutual enemy of Trump and co-sponsor of the “Gang of Eight” amnesty, so the Republican base in Arizona was not especially friendly to us. But we made a go at it, at least for a while. It was clear that even keeping Trump neutral — perhaps the best possible situation — would require a level of toad-eating that Jeff simply could not do in good conscience. Without getting into details, it eventually became very clear that the path was not just fraught but closed. Perhaps most importantly, where Jeff’s path ended, “Chemtrails Kelli” Ward’s path began. A conspiratorial firebrand who would go on to helm the Arizona GOP and steer it into an iceberg, nominee Ward was the probable result of Jeff sticking it out, wherein she would either lose the election to Kyrsten Sinema or become a U.S. senator. Pick your poison. So Jeff ended his campaign, torched Trump in a floor speech, and supported the nomination going to Martha McSally, who was no great shakes herself against Sinema but at least was a credible nominee.
It’s hard not to conclude that this was the ideal play if Cornyn really wanted to stop Paxton. “It’s been a good ride; time for some new blood.” He could have thrown in with Wesley Hunt or put his formidable machine-and-money muscle behind someone else who would lack the je-ne-sais-quoi that the base irrationally and unfairly held against Cornyn. In choosing to beat Paxton rather than stop Paxton, Cornyn helped set the current stage.
This is especially the case when you consider that the primary would be (and would need to be) savagely negative. In order to beat Paxton in the primary, his opponent would be remiss not to use the voluminous oppo file readily on hand. The inevitable result would be a limping, wounded Paxton in the general were he to win. This means that, in order to prevent Talarico from winning, it would be critically important for a Paxton opponent to win the primary himself. Instead what happened resembles a kamikaze mission, which is not ideal for the establishment wing of the party in the coming recriminations.
Of course blame falls, too, to the president. No matter what the final-results posters on Twitter say, the president’s choices made Paxton inevitable. Yes, Paxton won running away, but that was not actually a foregone conclusion; it was merely likely. Going into the primary, secondhand word from Paxton world was that he expected to win outright. In the end Cornyn, in fact, won the primary! But he lost the runoff. Momentum, for once, was on Cornyn’s side and there was every reason to believe that, were Trump then to endorse him, then Cornyn could draw the inside straight he needed to beat Paxton. Again, it’s not certain it would have played out that way but I think it’s likelier than not. Instead the president endorsed nobody, using a possible Cornyn endorsement as a futile inducement for the Senate to eliminate the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act. Once it became clear that, absent Trump supporting Cornyn, Paxton would glide to victory, the president did his thing and endorsed the likely victor. Trump should have endorsed Cornyn when he initially was poised to do it.
The blame here is almost synthetic, though. Trump is responsible for not endorsing Cornyn but Cornyn is responsible for seeking the endorsement. Perhaps only in hindsight (but also not really) Trump was never going to endorse Cornyn. He didn’t care that Cornyn was a reliable vote any more than he cared that, by knifing Cornyn, he’d be buying a senatorial enemy for the rest of this Congress. Ken Paxton is a hero of the 2020 “stop the steal” effort who exudes unthinking commitment to the MAGA agenda, while Cornyn is the ultimate elder statesman. Trump’s choice was always obvious. Just like you have to assume Paxton is going to run and run badly, you have to assume Trump is going to put personal politics over electoral necessity. It may be unfair, but in politics it falls on the individuals who behave responsibly to, well, behave responsibly and to avoid bad bets.
Last but not least is the governor. He’s running for his fourth term. Texas is a big state, chock-full of ambitious Republicans — both “Heritage Texans” and carpetbaggers alike. When one individual seeks to dominate the top magistracy for nearly two decades, it generates anxiety among the ambitious who wonder where they can go to move up. That’s almost certainly why Paxton is himself finishing up his third term as attorney general. Had Abbott hung up his spurs after two terms, along the lines of his successful, term-limited peers like Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis, Paxton’s current gunfight would almost certainly be for reelection as governor.
There’s a reason the Romans resisted the reelection of consuls for centuries. Ambition needs to be channeled upward. Because Paxton hit a ceiling, he moved to federal office and went after Cornyn. Without that ceiling, it’s not clear we’d be in this mess, and that ceiling was put in place by the governor.
We still have over a month to see how it plays out, and “Vote for the crook: It’s important” has been a winning message before. (It is, in fact, very important.) When it comes to the Texas Senate race, though, failure will be a James Talarico sermon: It will have many fathers.