Heading into what is expected to be one of the most favorable cycles for Democrats in Texas in nearly a decade, the statewide Republican ticket retains two key anchors, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, both of whom faced no real primary opposition this year. 

But the Republican primary electorate had plenty of work to do to fill out the balance of statewide (and downballot) nominations, determining the overall milieu of the Texas Grand Ol’ Party.

In broad strokes, the Republican intraparty dynamic was basically old-guard establishment hands trying to hold on or ascend, versus a batch of ambitious and uniquely hardline insurgents. The typical story, with the now-longstanding wild card of Trump’s kingmaking powers. In many cases, it took a bruising round of runoffs to determine the final lineup—and in almost all cases, the most problematic, extremist, unqualified, and Trumpian candidate won the day. 

Let’s start from the top. First, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton utterly demolished longtime U.S. Senator John Cornyn by nearly 30 points in their May runoff. Along the way, the Republican establishment lit over $120 million of pro-Cornyn campaign cash on fire, and the remnants of an old-line Texas Republican lineage were put to rest. Questions of morality, ethics, and political principles were sidelined by more important matters like hunting RINOs and suckling at Trump’s teat. This was a theme.

In the race to replace Paxton as AG, there was the runoff showdown between Congressman Chip Roy, a pugnacious budget hawk and tea party veteran, and state Senator Mayes Middleton, a silver-spoon oil heir-turned-right-wing political striver. On the issues, both talked about stopping the so-called “Islamification” of Texas and dismantling the radical left. But the real differences came down to experience and to Trump.  On the matter of legal pedigree, there was Roy, a former federal prosecutor who was once Paxton’s first deputy and who served as chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz. Then there was Middleton, who just happens to have a law degree—and lots of money, which he used to purchase goodwill and political support over the years. On the other hand, Roy had come to blows with the Trump admin in Congress over various spending matters through the years, while Middleton used his wealth to dub himself “MAGA Mayes” and spend a ton of money casting Roy as anti-Trump. Despite a last-minute funding surge from an Amarillo megadonor to try and get Roy over the hump, Middleton’s self-funded wallet whippin’ ultimately carried the day, as the state senator won by about 10 points. 

Then there was the battle for the Texas Railroad Commission, which was previously just a parochial den of oil industry-captured government regulation but was made, by former Tarrant County GOP chairman (also, an oil heir) Bo French, into a battleground fought for through opinions on Sharia law and various other matters of concern to past and present fascists. Oil and gas? Well, clearly a lot of that is Muslim—and therefore must be deported. Despite some rather meager attempts by Governor Greg and Lieutenant Dan to save the incumbent Jim Wright, French eked out a victory—an outcome that should give a moment’s pause to any Texan who values the U.S. Constitution or democracy.

That fills out the statewide ballot. Paxton at the top, Abbott and Patrick perhaps providing some electoral buoyancy, MAGA Mayes for AG, the self-styled DOGE cutter Don Huffines for comptroller, a fascisty French man for Railroad Commission, and the incumbent Land Commish Dawn Buckingham. 

It’s a ticket filled with moral pockmarks and festering ethical boils, plus idolatry politics and unrepentant bigotry, and it’s a ticket made up of candidates backed by voters who were not so quietly divided—the sort that one could imagine leading to, dare I speak it, the first statewide Democratic win in the state in over 30 years. 

Further down the ballot, the trend continued with Texas Republicans putting their Trumpiest foot forward.  In the president’s bespoke congressional districts created last year, a bunch of Trump-annointed newbies with seemingly no prevailing principles other than loyalty to him won out. Ironically, that came at the expense of the Republican state reps who’d dutifully helped deliver those new districts—only to be snubbed by the president when they tried to run themselves. This list includes small government crusader and Deer Park state Representative Briscoe Cain, who was blown out by Alex Mealer in a runoff for outer Harris County’s new 9th Congressional District, and state Representative John Lujan, who lost to Carlos De La Cruz in the 35th, which includes part of Bexar County and surrounding red counties. (His sister is the Republican congresswoman in a neighboring district.) 

These candidates now join a current class of congressional candidates in Texas that includes right-wing “gunfluencer” Brandon Herrera, who prevailed with the scandal-driven resignation of more-moderate incumbent Tony Gonzales in the 23rd; a longtime GOP operative and Elon Musk lawyer Chris Gober, who won the primary to replace outgoing Republican Michael McCaul in the 10th; and Jon Bonck, a Trump-backed mortgage banker who will replace Wesley Hunt in the 38th. 

Most of these candidates will easily win their general elections in deeply Republican districts. Others, namely Herrera and De La Cruz, could face tough fights against Democratic candidates in somewhat less surefire districts.

The question for those who care about the fate and future of this state is, will these flawed and sundry characters on the ballot accumulate into a net electoral backlash? Are these Republicans, in reality, less electable than the average replacement? 

At the top of the ballot,Paxton will face off against the latest Democratic darling in James Talarico, whose platform of religious morality and basic decency, plus massive campaign coffers, seems to make for a lab-created foil for the ethically impaired state AG. 

There were several hundred thousand Republican voters who cast their votes for Cornyn in the primary and runoff. Most of those are diehard Republicans who will ultimately come home and cast votes for Paxton, even if with pinched noses. But a certain proportion of those will refuse to do so—and will either not vote or pull the lever for Talarico. If more of those do the latter than the former, then that is a clear formula for victory. It’s the formula that helped fuel Beto O’Rourke’s near-win back in 2018, when hundreds of thousands split their tickets between him and Abbott. 

The same dynamic could hold true down the ballot in less high-profile races, like that for railroad commissioner, wherein voters will be forced to choose between French and Democratic nominee Jon Rosenthal, an oil engineer and state representative from Houston who is decidedly more level-headed. And for comptroller, in which Huffines, who might just blow up the Texas state budget in the name of accelerationist austerity politics given the chance, will face experienced state Senator Sarah Eckhardt. Or in the once-swingy 23rd, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, where people will decide between Herrera, an extremely online meme and gun enthusiast, and Katy Padilla Stout, an attorney and former teacher. 

The stakes are high. If the Texas electorate acts like it has in the past few cycles, it will elect Republicans up and down the ballot—in every statewide office and in every feasible legislative district. But if they do so again this time, it will be a new, especially pernicious breed of Republican pols who will be taking hold of power.

The post Did Texas Republicans’ Restive Runoffs Imperil Their November Ballot?  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

At long last, Texas Democrats have their statewide slate.

On Tuesday, the easy victories of Austin state Representative Vikki Goodwin for the lieutenant governor nomination and Dallas state Senator Nathan Johnson for attorney general completed the team that will attempt to take advantage in November of what seems to be the most promising year for Lone Star liberals in at least four cycles.

So, here are some reasons that might be a bad thing. 

First, this is a very white slate. Goodwin and Johnson join Austin state Representative Gina Hinojosa for governor and Austin state Representative James Talarico for senator in November’s top four ballot slots. 

That means three of the highest-profile quartet are Anglo. And, for the four remaining statewide executive-branch positions up for election—comptroller, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner, and railroad commissioner—all are Anglo save for Benjamin Flores, the land commish hopeful who adds a second Hispanic surname to the octet. Texas, by way of reminder, is a plurality-Latino state that also has the largest total Black population of any state (and which just saw a bruising March Senate primary that fractured along racial lines).

This is also—maybe you already noticed the trend in the honorifics—a very Austin-centric lineup. 

Three of the top four slots are held by state reps from the capital city—the bluest of Texas’ blue cities. The would-be comptroller, furthermore, is Austin state Senator Sarah Eckhardt. Texas, by way of reminder, is home to two mega-populous metros—and they are Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. (There’s also a booming metro to the south, by the name of San Antonio.) 

On the other hand, here are some counterpoints.

By the standards of Texas Democrats, this is a highly qualified electoral offering. All four of the top candidates are currently sitting state legislators. And seven of the eight statewide executive aspirants hold state- or city-level elected office. In terms of experience—and willingness to risk something to run—this is a massive upgrade over any other recent election.

It’s also possible that none of the above quibbling matters a whit. Because perhaps the best news for the Texas Democratic Party was delivered Tuesday courtesy of Republican voters.

In a nearly 30-point rout, Attorney General Ken Paxton, propelled by a late Trump nod, vanquished incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn to seize the Texas GOP’s top ballot position come November. While early polling didn’t always show a wide electability gap between the two Republican men, there are times when one must trust one’s lyin’ eyes.

This is about more than Paxton’s sordid string of past scandals as compared to Cornyn’s relatively clean past. This is about a fairly straightforward question: If the (narrow) path to victory for Talarico depends on ticket-splitting between him and Governor Greg Abbott—which the conventional analysis says it does—then who was the GOP candidate more likely to repel an Abbott voter? 

An Abbott-Talarico-sized door needed to open, and it’s simply much easier to imagine voters stepping through it when they’re presented with the walking ethical nightmare and 110-percent pot-committed Trump minion that is the state’s sitting attorney general. (Now, if Abbott himself enters the danger zone this year, we’re talking about another, more historic scenario with much greater implications for the actual lives of Texans, but for now I’m going to leave such speculation stranded between these parentheses.) It’s worth noting, as well, that the last time Texas saw a somewhat competitive midterm—in 2018—Paxton notably underperformed the other statewide Republicans outside of Ted Cruz.

Talarico could be strong enough, and Paxton should be weak enough, that another five months of terrible news for Trump and Republican rule just might bring the senatorial finish line beneath a blue wave’s high-water mark. 

That’s a lot of conditional clauses amounting to this: It is now plausible that hope is not delusional. (For any non-Texan readers out there, this is actually a very bold claim I’m making here.)

Meanwhile, a few rungs down, GOP voters also nominated Bo French over incumbent Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright. French is what you might delicately call a promoter of fascist beliefs. Or, rather, the man is a fascist. But even the staunch opposition of Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick couldn’t stop the Paxton ally from seizing the nod, creating another possible soft spot.

Facing a difficult midterm year, Texas’ hardcore Republican electorate voted its highly questionable conscience rather than playing the electability-seeking pundit. If this tiny and zealous assemblage doesn’t pay the price for this decision in November, then we all will.

In assorted downballot Democratic news, the rising Houston star Christian Menefee easily prevailed in his congressman-versus-congressman showdown with the 78-year-old Al Green. And in two other congressional matchups also created by the GOP’s mid-decade scrambling of the electoral map, Colin Allred regained a position in the U.S. House at the expense of Congresswoman Julie Johnson, and a candidate widely condemned as antisemitic was defeated by a Blue Dog Democrat for the redrawn 35th Congressional District—a San Antonio-area seat that the GOP plans to flip but that could be in play in a blue-wave scenario.

In the Rio Grande Valley, the Bernie Sanders-backed Julio Salinas prevailed in a McAllen-area state House runoff for the seat previously held by the conservative Dem Bobby Guerra, and Ozzie Ochoa earned the nod for the Cameron County-based state House District 37—which Dems fumbled away back in 2022. Both of these South Texas districts went for Trump in 2024, so their fate this year will be part of a broader story of whether this region swings back toward the Democrats. Also hanging in the balance of regional Latino opinion are the 35th, mentioned above, and the U.S. House seats represented by Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez—all of which were around plus-10 for Trump in ’24. And, as a reach, there is the 23rd Congressional District, a plus-15 Trump seat for which the GOP has nominated an extremist Youtuber (for completeness’ sake, Bobby Pulido is also challenging Monica De La Cruz for the plus-18 Trump 15th).

In Austin, progressive labor candidate Montserrat Garibay prevailed over a former city council member in the race to replace Gina Hinojosa in the state House. Up in Dallas, incumbent state Representative Venton Jones easily prevailed against a runoff challenger, but over in Houston, longtime state House member Hubert Vo joined Tarrant County-based representative and colleague Chris Turner—who was ousted in the March primary—in falling prey to both a strong intraparty opponent and the vicissitudes of a changing district.

The post They’re Mostly Anglo. They’re Largely from Austin. And They Just Might Have a Shot. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s only fitting that the last campaign video Congressman Al Green posted to Facebook—far and away the most-used social media platform among senior citizens—featured “Let’s Stay Together,” the greatest hit by the other Al Green, the last of the great soul singers, about a smooth talker imploring his lover to stay by his side, “whether times are good or bad.” 

But not even 1970s sensuality was enough to keep about 69 percent of voters in Texas’ newly drawn 18th Congressional District from choosing 38-year-old Christian Menefee, Green’s junior by some 40 years. 

Perhaps the times are just that bad, or perhaps it was simply time. Would the world really be that much better off if Green left office two years from now, at 80? First Sheila Jackson Lee, then Sylvester Turner—the 18th Congressional District had evidently seen enough of Houston’s towering Black icons, pugnacious as ever but well past their primes, securing the office only to succumb to the end that we all must face. It must feel heartless: Green gave decades of his life to the cause, and this is what he gets, a wallop on his way out the door? 

As for Menefee, others will try to claim his victory as their own. Custom dictated that he thank “the people of this district” for voting, but the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was quick to congratulate him on defeating “one of the most outspoken anti-Israel voices in Congress.” (AIPAC didn’t even back Menefee in the race, but it was eager to punish Green, a reliable ceasefire vote.) Meanwhile, David Hogg, the self-exiled vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, was quick to plug his Leaders We Deserve PAC for helping “elect & re-elect” this “next-generation leader.” And if money talks, the more than $5 million Menefee received from crypto-aligned super PACs is probably giving him an earful, too. 

In mid-January, Menefee completed a Stand With Crypto questionnaire and received an “A” (for “Very Pro Crypto”) from the advocacy group, putting him in league with Texas Blue Dogs like Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Green, for his part, has an “F.” Reporters, local and national, liked to say there was little daylight between Menefee and Green, and Menefee certainly downplayed this grade disparity to make that seem true. When The New York Times asked Menefee about it, he all but played dumb, as if surprised by all the hubbub, and referred to himself as a “local yokel.” Crypto lobby? You mean the stuff that hurts Superman?

Menefee’s response was frightfully similar to that of Jasmine Crockett, who has also been needled by questions about crypto funding. In 2022, having received $2 million from crypto super PACS, she told journalist Patrick Svitek that the groups simply gravitated toward her due to the “strength of my candidacy” and that, while she knew little about crypto, she was “committed to researching all these things.” Later, quite uncharacteristically, she joined Republicans on a vote to help Trump deliver one of his campaign promises: To make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” For what it’s worth, Crockett received a “C” (for “Neutral”) from Stand With Crypto, but when crypto-affiliated PACs cut their ads for Menefee, they specifically featured her endorsement. 

Texas’ mid-decade redistricting had pitted a veteran of the Congressional Black Caucus (Green) against one of its newest members (Menefee), endorsed by one of its most popular (Crockett). The whole affair foreshadows fights to come across the South, as Republicans—armed with the recent Supreme Court decision torching the Voting Rights Act—gerrymander Black districts like Green’s out of existence. As many as one-third of CBC members are under threat, kicking off a panicked set of planning sessions within the CBC to discuss what fighting back might look like. As of mid-May, that plan is reportedly “still coming together,” but so far it looks a lot like what the plan always is: turning out Black voters come November. 

It’s an expensive job. Not for nothing, Menefee has shown he can raise money. So has Crockett. She’s on her way out of Congress, but that hasn’t stopped her from stumping for Menefee and fellow CBC member Wesley Bell in Missouri, who relied on AIPAC and crypto cash to boot progressive Squadmember Cori Bush out of office in 2024. (Their rematch is set for early August.) This isn’t to say Menefee is in lockstep with Crockett’s national tour. Despite its reputation as the “conscience of Congress,” the CBC tends to turn a blind eye to how its members fundraise anyway. But the game is bigger than him now. Much has been said about “experience” this cycle—who has it, what it’s worth—but Menefee will have to learn quickly who his friends are, and who their enemies are, because those are his enemies now, too. 

When Al Green refers to himself (quite frequently) as “unbought and unbossed,” he’s alluding to the words of Shirley Chisholm, a founding CBC member and the first Black woman to run for president. “It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices,” she once wrote. “It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their prestige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang onto those jobs?” 

She died in 2005, the same year Green entered Congress. How long ago that seems.

The post Christian Menefee’s Win Foreshadows Fights to Come Across the South appeared first on The Texas Observer.

And so Colin Allred’s three-year journey through the wilderness of ambition ends more or less where it began.

Three years ago, the NFL player-turned-civil rights attorney left behind a deep-blue U.S. House seat composed largely of Dallas County residents. On Tuesday night, he effectively won a deep-blue U.S. House district composed entirely of Dallas County residents. In ordinal terms, he budged an integer: from the 32nd to the 33rd. 

In between, he established himself as a politically mercurial, occasionally perplexing figure in Texas Democratic politics—the final avatar of statewide liberal hopes in those murky middle ages between Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 near-win and this year’s (projected) blue wave of possibility. 

His 2024 campaign for U.S. Senate is generally discussed as a cautionary tale, his overreliance on TV ads and weak reach among even the Dem base treated as missteps to be avoided this time around. This is what today’s Democratic Senate hopeful, James Talarico, referred to earlier this year as “mediocre” (more on that in a moment). 

One could see this narrative as unfair; after all, Allred did run 5 points ahead of Kamala Harris by margin of defeat. But, when your opponent is Ted Cruz, you’ll simply always be held to a higher standard, and a 9-point loss just can’t be spun into a moral victory. That, and, well, the vibes were what they were.

In his fruitless bid, the flat-affected Allred dutifully moved to the right where the consultant class had deemed it necessary. He came out against trans youth participation in athletics, in a confusing and bloodless way; he voted for a mendacious GOP resolution against “open borders” and even praised the announcement of new border wall under President Joe Biden—somehing the president himself had described as an unfortunate legal inevitability. Six years prior, when first campaigning for the House, Allred had called the border wall “racist” and said his generation would “tear it down.” 

It all amounted to little at the polls, even after he raked in a record-breaking fundraising haul. The following year, when he announced he was trying again for the Senate, the reception was sufficiently lukewarm that Talarico, an unseasoned state House representative from Austin, was undeterred from jumping in—as was Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who stepped over Allred and into the race herself on the last possible day, a move that caused Allred to begrudgingly lower his sights and aim to recover a spot in the House.

He took with him the money from his Senate bid, which helped give him a significant cash advantage over Congresswoman Julie Johnson—who had succeeded Allred in his old district before last year’s Trump-mandated gerrymandering yanked the seat from under her. Johnson was less than pleased with Allred’s last-minute entry, and she tried to paint him as a parachute candidate, but she was defeated by about 10 points in the runoff nomination contest Tuesday. The general election will be a formality.

The stakes and meaning of the Allred-Johnson runoff were exquisitely murky. “This is not a classic progressive versus moderate war the way that it used to be in the Democratic Party, but there are definitely shades of a more centrist coalition-focused Democrat like Allred, who is challenging a more progressive activist-oriented Johnson,” an oft-cited political science professor told an Observer reporter last month. 

Indeed, these “shades” bordered on invisible. If Johnson was the progressive—and she did rightfully hit Allred for his reactionary posturing on immigration—she was a progressive amply supported by AIPAC who’d trade shares in Palantir. And if Allred was the moderate, he was a moderate who now said things like: “ICE has to go. I think we should get rid of ICE, abolish ICE, whatever you want to call it”—while being backed by the Texas AFL-CIO and by Crockett, who in her own convoluted primary, which ended cleanly in March, found herself painted as the progressive.

Somewhere back in the haze of all this, after Allred switched seats but before Talarico won his Senate nomination, Allred also engaged in perhaps the most interesting and pointless of his political interventions over the past three years. Clearly aggrieved at the party’s passing him over, he latched in early February onto comments made by an influencer, who had relayed that Talarico had privately called Allred a “mediocre Black man” (to which Talarico has responded that he simply referred to Allred’s campaign as mediocre.) 

In a straight-to-camera broadside, Allred told Talarico, referencing the latter’s frequent deployment of liberal Christianity: “You are not saving religion for the Democratic Party or the left. We already have Senator Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock for that. We don’t need you.”

He endorsed Crockett, called Talarico a “hater,” and advised: “Don’t come for me unless I send for you.”

Recall: This was a candidate who seemed to be studiously unstimulating, to the dismay of many Democrats, throughout the 2024 cycle. It was an (admittedly entertaining) outburst almost impossible to fit with what came before, and it amounted to little—as Talarico prevailed a month later. Allred has since, though without much enthusiasm, said that he will back the Democrat for Senate after all.

So it is that the pursuit of power can make any of us seem a bit silly, and yet victory releases us from the past. Now is not the time for relitigation; it is the time for shielding one’s eyes from the blazing dumpster fire that is the Republican side of these runoffs, and for acknowledging a man who left his haters, whoever they may be, behind. 

You can’t go home again, but Colin Allred came close Tuesday night.

The post The Eternal Recurrence of Colin Allred appeared first on The Texas Observer.