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.

Primary News

I never got back to this story before now, but as you likely already know, Analilia Mejia is my congresswoman.  She won the April 16 special election.

A Latina progressive who used to work for Bernie Sanders is now representing a centrist Republican-leaning district in the U.S. House of Representatives - whod'a thunk?

But the show's not over yet, this one's a double feature.  Representative Mejia has to go through another Democratic primary a week ago from today against, as far as I know, three competitors to stand in November for the full two-year term that starts in January.  And in November, is she wins the primary next week, she'll face the persistent Joe Hathaway on the Republican side once again, meaning I'll have to deal with more racist GOP flyers in the mail.

Meanwhile, the Texas Republican primary runoff to decide the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate is today, in which Republican voters have to choose between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and the Trump-backed, wholly corrupt state Attorney General Ken Paxton.  The winner faces James Talarico, who's competing to be the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas since . . . 1988.

Wake me when it's over.   

Texas Two-Step

After tomorrow's Texas Democratic U.S. Senate Democratic primary, the party nominee for the seat currently held by Republican John Cornyn will be either State Representative James Talarico . . .

. . . or U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett.

As far as I can discern, Talarico and Crockett agree on basic Democratic Party orthodoxy, but of course they are stylistically different.  Talarico is a teacher who holds a master's degree in divinity, while Crockett is a civil rights lawyer who doesn't suffer fools gladly.  Oh - is one of them a white man and the other a black woman?  I didn't notice.  

Yeah, right.  Texas Democrats certainly have.  Moderate Democrats obviously feel comfortable with Talarico and his righteous indignation toward Trump and Texas Republicans, while progressives see  Crockett as an angry warrior who loves to take MAGA down several notches, as she did in trading insults with then-U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene over physical appearances.  And race certainly has to do with this.  Progressives in Texas see Talarico as just another polite white boy - too eager to seek cooperation in Congress - while mainstream Texas Democrats think that Crockett will be seen as just another angry black woman who's out to humiliate anyone who disagrees with her on the most trivial differences.

I don't have anything against Jasmine Crockett, but I have a feeling that she would have had a better chance of getting elected to the Senate from Missouri, her native state, instead of Texas.  Similarly, Talarico, despite his obvious political talent and his equally obvious knack for connecting with people, looks to be another conventional liberal who is going to fall short of wining a Senate seat from Texas if he is the nominee.  The reasons for my doubts are one and the same for each - it's Texas.

I think I can say without fear of contradiction that a black woman can't get elected to the Senate from Texas.  Texas is far different from Delaware and Maryland, which, respectively, elected black women Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks to the U.S. Senate.  Texas voters are still rigidly conservative (read bigoted) and oppose Crockett's Big Government agenda (read "are greedy bastards").  But whenever I hear Talarico be described as a once-in-a-lifetime political talent in the manner of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, I remember that the same thing was said about Beto O'Rourke, and look what happened to him.  Nothing.

The polls are close, but right now, Talarico seems to have the edge.  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) certainly thinks so, as it banned an interview Stephen Colbert conducted with Talarico on his soon-to-be-defunct late-night talk show from being aired because it did not offer equal time to Crockett.  FCC Chairman Brendan Carr knows that the seat is much more winnable for the Republicans if the Democrats choose a nominee who rubs too many Texas voters the wrong way, and he thinks Crockett is it.  Talarico, he seems to believe, would likely be in a better position to win, so he made sure that no one would see his interview with Colbert.  Except for one thing - Colbert released the Talarico interview online and it quickly went viral . . . and raised lots of cash for Talarico just as quickly.

All things considered, if Democrats nominate Talarico, they may still lose in November.  If they nominate Crockett, they likely will already have lost.

And the Republican nominee is likely not to be Senator Cornyn but Ken Paxton, the intolerable state Attorney General who's so corrupt, he was impeached (but not convicted) by state legislators in his own party.  Which means that he is only a couple of easy steps away from serving in the U.S. Senate alongside Ted Cruz.

Good luck, Texas.  You're going to need it.