Pax Texana

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Warren Kenneth Paxton.

Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of the not-so-great state of Texas.  He is best known for drastically reducing the sentence of an imprisoned pedophile and allowing him to go free, and he has used his office to enrich himself and his Big Oil donors in the Lone Star State.

And now he's the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.

That alone is scary enough.  He also has a chance of winning, because . . . it's Texas.

Texas hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, and the last Democrat to occupy the seat Paxton has been nominated for was Lyndon Johnson.  Texans have learned to hate the Democrats for their policies and their positions, and Democrats have learned to hate them back, rarely winning any elections in the state beyond a few mayoralties and a few state and federal legislative seats.

But now Texas has a Democrat who could win the seat Paxton seeks to acquire.

He is State Representative James Talarico, thirty-seven years old, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.  He's running hard on the economy and on the stink of Paxton's corruption, which is pretty fetid.  Paxton is considered the most corrupt politician in Texas and the second most corrupt person in America after the Trumps, who are tied for first.  He is so laser-focused on the hard times Texans are going through and the cavalier disregard Paxton has for the people that he is on track to give Paxton a tough fight.

But is he on track to win?  Texas has moved from "solid Republican" to "lean Republican" in the Cook Political Report's analysis of U.S. Senate campaigns, meaning that he's not exactly winning now and he certainly hasn't won.  Because . . . it's Texas.  Democrats have spent the past thirty-odd years trying and failing to win a statewide election, and Talarico could end up being no more than another shooting star like the politically dead and unlamented Beto O'Rourke, but as long as he can avoid culture-war issues and identity-politics pitfalls, he might just make it.

I bring up identity politics because Talarico defeated U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, who is black, in the primary election earlier this year.  Talarico has a head start, though, as Paxton and incumbent Senator John Cornyn had to slug it out in a runoff primary, which Paxton won last week thanks in part to Trump's endorsement of him.  But after he defeated Crockett, many black female voters in Texas were ticked off that a smart, progressive, accomplished black woman lost to a honky that they've vowed to boycott the general election and let Paxton win, even if it means the end of free and fair elections in Texas and beyond as we know it.

It's Texas.