On the menu today: Two South Carolina primaries don’t give much clarity about Trump’s sway on the right, a Texas special election features a significant Republican upset, and Caterpillar moves its headquarters from Illinois to Texas.
The South Carolina Results
In yesterday’s Jolt, I gave a preview of a few primary elections taking place on Tuesday, including two in South Carolina that featured Trump endorsements. In South Carolina’s first and seventh districts, upstart challengers backed by Trump were challenging incumbent Republicans who had crossed the former president.
One of those incumbent representatives, Tom Rice, lost his seat decisively. State lawmaker Russell Fry, whom Trump endorsed, raked in more than 50 percent of the vote in the state’s seventh district to Rice’s mere 24.5 percent. For Rice, the writing did already seem to be on the wall — and Fry performed even better last night than the most recent polls had suggested he might. The Rice campaign, knowing it was in for a stiff fight, was essentially hoping to make it to a runoff rather than win outright, but even that didn’t happen.
Are we to draw from this the conclusion that Trump’s revenge candidates are the ones to beat? Not so fast. Over in South Carolina’s first district, incumbent Republican Nancy Mace held on to her seat, defeating Trump-backed challenger and former state lawmaker Katie Arrington by about eight points.
What are we to make of the discrepancy? One way of looking at it is the degree of separation from the former president: Both Rice and Mace had angered him enough to get him to back a primary challenger, but only Rice had voted to impeach him over the events of January 6. Mace condemned the president in a speech and voted to certify the election results, but she didn’t join the ten GOP representatives who voted for impeachment.
Another possible explanation is Mace’s opponent. Arrington has played the role of a right-wing, Trump-supported challenger before, when she unseated former Republican representative Mark Sanford over his criticism of the former president. But Arrington went on to lose to the Democrat candidate in the general election, and perhaps voters were wary of a similar problem this November, though the climate this election year is, of course, quite different. The New York Times adds this bit of insight:
Ms. Mace raised more money than Ms. Arrington by a 2-to-1 margin and outspent her by more than $300,000 on the airwaves, according to the political spending tracker AdImpact. She courted the district’s most influential political and business leaders and, in the race’s final days, campaigned alongside a number of high-profile figures on the right, including a former Trump White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and former Gov. Nikki Haley.
So in South Carolina, we’re once again left with a confusing set of data. Thus far this cycle, Trump’s favored primary candidates have won some of the time, but, more often, they’ve lost. My theory: Trump’s grievance politics aren’t enough to boost a candidate against an incumbent whom voters really like (see: Brian Kemp down in neighboring Georgia). But sometimes, his endorsements are enough to prop up a candidate whom voters were already inclined to take a serious look at, or to carry a challenger over the finish line when the incumbent is already lagging.
A Republican Upset in Texas
In March, Democratic congressman Filemon Vela resigned his seat in a comfortably Democratic, majority-Hispanic district in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Last night, Republican Mayra Flores defeated Democrat Dan Sanchez outright to fill the seat in a special election. Flores won by margin of about 2,000 votes, 51 percent to Sanchez’s 43 percent.
Her win is certainly something of a surprise, but perhaps less so for those who have been following changing trends in the region. More on that from Politico:
Democrats mostly stayed out of the special election until late, while national Republicans leaned in to push for Flores. Then-President Donald Trump cut the Democratic advantage in Texas’ 34th District to single-digits in 2020, part of major GOP gains in the heavily Latino region. Previous Republican presidential candidates had lost the district by double digits to the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Now, Flores is part of a larger movement of GOP Latinas from south Texas vying for congressional seats, including Monica De La Cruz and Cassy Garcia. Republicans gained ground near the border in 2020, with Trump carrying half of those counties for the first time in a century.
With heavy Republican support, Flores far outraised her fellow special election candidates, plastering the airwaves with TV and digital advertisements in the month leading up to the primary. Many ads focused on her marriage to a Border Patrol agent and her achievement of “the American Dream,” while others criticized President Joe Biden for not controlling the border.
Sanchez argued in his concession speech that his loss was largely the fault of the national party, which he claims didn’t do enough to support him. “Based on the results, we came up short tonight despite being outspent by millions of dollars from out-of-state interests and the entire Republican machine,” he said. “Too many factors were against us, including little to no support from the National Democratic Party and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.”
Flores and her GOP backers spent more than $1 million in television ads, which was certainly more than the Sanchez campaign spent. But it wasn’t as though Democrats did nothing. “Despite their downplaying of the stakes, national Democrats ended up spending a little on the race once early voting got underway. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee helped fund a $100,000 digital ad buy with Sanchez’s campaign, and House Majority PAC — the top Democratic super PAC in House races — launched a $115,000 TV ad buy against Flores,” the Texas Tribune reports.
As a result of redistricting that will take effect before the midterms, Flores faces a much tougher race in November, this time against incumbent Democratic representative Vicente Gonzalez. This race is being pitched as a bellwether for November, but it’s really not as though we need a bellwether race to know that Democrats are cruising for a real bruising. In my view, last night’s outcome in the 34th district has less to do with rising sentiment against Democrats, although it’s probably a bit of that, than it does a real, meaningful change in the way Hispanics vote — which would be a much more ominous sign for Democrats in the long run.
Another Big Company Decamps to a Red State
Construction-equipment maker Caterpillar is moving its headquarters from Deerfield, Ill., to Irving, Texas, where the company already has a smaller office. The Wall Street Journal has the details:
The maker of construction and mining equipment said Tuesday that its existing office in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, would serve as its new global headquarters. Caterpillar said that the move from its current base in suburban Chicago would help it grow and that the company wasn’t getting any economic or tax incentives related to the headquarters move.
The move—expected to affect the roughly 230 corporate employees at Caterpillar’s headquarters—is the latest in a series of recent relocations that have drawn major manufacturers closer to corporate and government customers, and tech giants from Silicon Valley to Texas.
And the Journal likewise notes that Caterpillar is joining a movement that’s become something of a real trend:
Companies including Tesla Inc., Oracle Corp. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. have cited cheaper real estate and access to bigger or more flexible workforces as reasons to pack up and move their corporate offices over the last two years. Boeing Co. said in May that it would move its global headquarters to Arlington, Va., from Chicago, bringing its leadership closer to federal officials and an engineering talent pool.
Defense giant Raytheon Technologies Corp. said this month that it would move its global headquarters to the Washington, D.C., area from Waltham, Mass., seeking proximity to the Pentagon, regulators and lawmakers.
Manufacturers have increasingly turned to the Southwest as a destination for new factories, drawn by available space, appealing tax policies and an expanding technology workforce.
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada added more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs from January 2017 to January 2020, representing 30% of U.S. job growth in that sector and at roughly triple the national growth rate, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It’s not really news that companies prefer to be in states where it costs less to do business and where regulations aren’t as stringent. But I do find it interesting that these moves are coming even as high-profile companies insist on funding abortion-related travel for employees and lament how supposedly difficult it is to do business in states with pro-life laws. Turns out that that doesn’t actually matter much when it comes to saving money.
ADDENDUM: Tomorrow, the excellent Isaac Schorr will take over writing the Jolt for the rest of the week, before Jim returns next week. Since I’m not sure when I’ll next see you in this space, I’ll take the opportunity to share the exciting news that I’ve written a book! It’s called Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, and I’ve co-written it with Ryan Anderson. We intend the book to be a roadmap to the future of the pro-life cause and the abortion debate post-Dobbs. It’ll be out on June 28, and you can pre-order it now.