The Democratic establishment successfully thwarted Maureen Galindo and her increasingly unhinged and conspiratorial tirades against American Zionists—which were roundly denounced as antisemitic—in the runoff for the newly redrawn 35th Congressional District in South Texas. Johnny Garcia, an official with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, easily beat Galindo by around 20 points Tuesday night. 

Galindo, a sex therapist, tenant organizer, and first-time candidate, had come in first in the March primary. 

Garcia’s decisive win comes after the Texas Democratic Party and national Democratic leaders roundly denounced Galindo for her antisemitism. On social media, Galindo said that she would “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers.” She added that it would become a “castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Last week, Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder and the 35th District’s four county party chairs issued a joint statement that said: “Antisemitism and hateful rhetoric have no place in the Democratic Party or in our communities. Maureen Galindo’s comments do not reflect our values as Democrats or as Texans.”

Prior to the increased attention and controversy over Galindo’s comments, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the national party’s congressional campaign arm, known as the DCCC—was already taking a safe bet on Garcia’s “old-school” Democrat values. On May 4, the DCCC added Garcia to their “Red to Blue” program, opening him up to a network of funding and party resources. 

The district—which is under its current boundaries represented by progressive Austin Congressman Greg Casar—is one of five Texas Republicans recently gerrymandered into likely Republican seats. Under its new boundaries—which now include part of San Antonio and Bexar County, extending into a handful of deep-red rural counties in South Texas—Trump would’ve taken the district by 10 points in 2024.

Galindo’s campaign, in which she branded herself as an unabashed progressive, also raised suspicion as a Republican-connected PAC poured over $900,000 into promoting her. GOP operatives said they believed her untamed radicalism and antisemitic comments would ensure them victory in the general election.

Instead, the battle will come down to a standoff between Garcia and Carlos De La Cruz in November. De La Cruz beat state Representative John Lujan handily in the Republican runoff for the seat. He’s the brother of Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, who has represented some of the counties that now reside within the 35th. He is an Air Force veteran and founder of a kickboxing gym in San Antonio who notably won the endorsement of President Donald Trump, vowing to be his “wingman” in Congress.

Garcia’s platform focuses on lowering costs by ending Trump’s tariffs, renewing Affordable Care Act subsidies, and expanding Medicaid. He says he believes in creating orderly pathways to citizenship while protecting communities from gun violence and crime. As a young man, he worked in construction and plumbing before joining the Bexar County Sheriff’s office “to keep the lights on.”

Throughout the race, Galindo frequently targeted Garcia’s law enforcement background. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office oversees one of the deadliest jails in the state and entered into a limited 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in January. Garcia has asserted that he brought more transparency to the department as its public information officer, but investigations by the San Antonio Express-News accuse the jail of being a “black box” with “public information scattered across multiple agencies.”

Still, Garcia believes his nearly two decades in law enforcement taught him to put people over politics.

“When I was responding to a call for service in my community, I never asked dispatch once whether that home I was headed to was Democrat or Republican,” Garcia said in an interview with KSAT 12. “I responded like lives were on the line—and we know in this midterm election cycle, lives are on the line.”

Garcia was also backed by the Blue Dog Democrats, which spent over $1 million boosting his campaign. In nearby Congressional Districts 28 and 34—which are also in South Texas—Blue Dog incumbent Congressmen Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez are also hoping to hold onto their seats in the face of Republican gerrymandering. They are considered among the most conservative Democrats in the U.S. House, and they managed to defeat Republican challengers in recent years. Just two weeks after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, they both voted with Republicans to approve funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

In debates, Garcia sounded ideologically somewhat distant from typically conservative Blue Dog policy stances on matters like abortion and immigration enforcement. He said he was adamantly pro-choice, and he wouldn’t accept ICE attacking and dividing his community. Still, he proudly accepted the Blue Dog PAC’s endorsement.

“I’m a proud Blue Dog Democrat because I’m ready to get to work and deliver common-sense solutions for hard-working Texan families,” Garcia said.

Like District 35, the new boundaries for 28 and 34 would have handed a victory to Trump by 10 points in 2024. The 70-year-old Cuellar has held his seat since 2005, but he may face a unique challenge in this general election warding off Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who represents the core base of the district. Gonzalez will face Eric Flores, an Army veteran and lawyer from Mission. 

If they’re lucky, Garcia may find himself joining the ranks of those two remaining Texas Blue Dogs in Congress—but it will be an expensive uphill battle to avoid being swept aside in what is now more favorable red terrain in November.

The post Blue Dog Dem Fends Off Maureen Galindo in Wake of Anti-Zionist Tirades appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The highly dramatic—if not as thoroughly entertaining as advertised—U.S. Senate Republican runoff between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn ended about as soon as counties started reporting their early vote totals Tuesday night, with the attorney general challenger leading by around 20 points—effectively skunking the incumbent. 

This, of course, was little surprise by the time it came to pass—after President Donald Trump made a late endorsement for Paxton in the race last week. The political winds were always at Paxton’s back, while running headlong against Cornyn, who was irreparably tagged as an anti-Trump RINO, a squishy moderate in an era that demands battle-hardened “warriors”—those whose total fealthy to Trump is unquestioned. 

Cornyn had hoped to pull off a rare incumbent runoff victory as Trump stayed on the sidelines through much of the race. But the well-over-$100 million that he and his allied GOP groups pumped into ads blasting out Paxton’s numerous and varied scandals—from letting a charged child sex offender off with a sweetheart deal to his alleged self-dealing while in office, to his sordid extramarital affairs and on and on—did nothing but line the pockets of local Texas TV affiliates. 

Cornyn had repeatedly stated that Judgement Day would come for Paxton on runoff night. And the judgement that came was that the base of the party wants: more Ken Paxton. 

So down goes Cornyn, the silver-haired senior senator from Texas who spent nearly 40 years in elected office in the Lone Star State, riding into power as a district court judge, Supreme Court Justice, and state Attorney General—as the GOP built up its majorities and disassembled the Democratic Party—and meticulously built upon that power. 

He got to the U.S. Senate almost 25 years ago, serving through five presidencies and four presidents. He was an emblem for the sort of country club, Chamber of Commerce conservatism that helped Republicans win power in Texas and nationwide, then waned as Trumpism and right-wing hardliners ascended. 

Paxton, meanwhile, has been a key tribune of that hardline ascendancy in Texas. His political career has been prematurely eulogized with some frequency over the course of his 11 years as state AG: when he was first indicted on state securities fraud charges; when his top aides blew the whistle to the FBI accusing him of official corruption; when he was primaried by well-heeled challengers in 2022; when he was impeached by Republicans in the Texas House; when he was put on trial in the Texas Senate; when rumors of coming federal indictments swirled and swirled; when his wife and state Senator Angela Paxton publicly divorced him on “biblical grounds,” citing his repeated infidelity just as he began to launch his Senate bid; when his right-wing big donors in Texas declined to finance his Senate run; when Cornyn performed strongly in the March primary and Trump was rumored to be throwing his endorsement behind the incumbent. And on and on. 

Ken Paxton has repeatedly proven himself to have the politician’s equivalent of nine lives; he’s the Kevlar Ken to Teflon Don. 

Now, he will face off in what will be a very high-profile, very expensive general election contest against Democratic nominee and Austin state Representative James Talarico. National politics observers are already handicapping the race to benefit Democrats because of Paxton’s unique weaknesses as a candidate. And there may be some truth to that. Surely Talarico has a much better chance of pulling off a generational upset in Texas against Paxton rather than the staid Cornyn. 

But those who bet against Paxton do so at their own peril. As he’s proven time and time again, his perceived weaknesses have repeatedly morphed into political strengths. 

His victory Tuesday marks the final, if somewhat superfluous, nail in the coffin of the so-called Bush era of Republican politics in Texas.

Republican state Representative Mitch Little, who ascended to office after serving as one of Paxton’s defense attorneys in the AG’s impeachment trial, tweeted Tuesday evening the poem “Ozymandias”, which muses on the grandiose hubris of rulers and the fleeting nature of their power. 

Paxton’s celebratory watch party up in Plano was attended by troves of enthusiastic supporters. The only ones who showed  up for Cornyn’s impending political funeral were, apparently, members of the media. 

In his somber farewell address in downtown Austin, Cornyn mentioned Paxton not once, saying only that he’d support the Republican ticket writ-large. Bidding adieu, Cornyn went with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech. 

Prior to that, however, the senator did get in some final ribbing shortly before the polls closed. Asked about his decision not to pull his negative ads against Paxton, he told CNN: “He’s gotten away with so much for so long and not been held accountable for it, but I think he is an embarrassment … and he’s completely unrepentant.” 

The post Judgement Day Comes for John Cornyn appeared first on The Texas Observer.

For as long as his hair has been silver (going back to his 20s), John Cornyn has been winning elections. 

Among those victories seemed, perhaps, to be the 74-year-old U.S. senator’s surprising first-place finish in the March primary—over expected frontrunner Attorney General Ken Paxton—which set up next week’s decisive runoff. On primary night, Cornyn called the scandal-plagued AG “flawed, self-centered and shameless” and boldly called his shot: “Judgment Day is coming for Ken Paxton.”

The next day, The Atlantic published a purported scoop—reported by two prominent ex-Washington Post political correspondents—stating that President Donald Trump would soon throw his endorsement to Cornyn in an attempt to end what would otherwise be a protracted, expensive bloodbath. Trump confirmed he would be endorsing one of the two and calling on the other to bow out.

What a coup this would have been for Cornyn, the consummate Senate hand who had spent his life cultivating influence in the deepest ends of the D.C. swamp—the sort of figure that’s fallen out of fashion in the brash era of unbridled Trumpism. Here was a man who was never a full convert, who had the gall to—in brief spurts in the distant past—not always speak of Trump with pure reverence, now seemingly about to get the nod over Paxton, a favored MAGA son. 

Then came… nothing. Hours passed, then days, weeks, and months as the painfully long period between Texas primary and runoff dragged on without Trump intervening. 

Both camps kept lobbying Trumpworld for his endorsement—each playing to the president’s personal vanity, his guiding principle when it comes to picking sides. 

For Paxton, there was no amount of groveling that would come off as shocking. For Cornyn, though, it was sometimes cringeworthy to see him go through the motions: posing with The Art of the Deal and giving up on his beloved filibuster. 

Meanwhile, each also commenced with campaign bloodsport—spending tens of millions of dollars attacking the other (to be fair, more so the Cornyn side than Paxton). Then, just before noon on May 19, on the second day of early runoff voting in Texas, Trump put his proverbial hand on the shoulder of his chosen one, and lo, it was Warren Kenneth Paxton. 

In a 683-word, typically self-absorbed missive posted on Truth Social, where posts are supposed to be known as “truths,” Trump wrote that Paxton is “an America First Patriot, and someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT.” 

Cornyn, on the other hand, was merely “a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.” 

In a tight runoff, the Trump endorsement, though late, almost certainly ensures the scandal-tarnished attorney general the nomination. (As incumbents from Louisiana to Kentucky—who’d risked considerably more independence than Cornyn, to be clear—recently discovered in their own primary contests.)

And, of course, this will almost certainly ensure that Cornyn’s decades-long run as a statewide official in Texas is brought to a likely end with a flippant tapping of a button on Trump’s own social media app. 

As John Cornyn rose, over the course of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, from a San Antonio lawyer to district court judge, from Texas Supreme Court justice to state attorney general, and ultimately to the Senate in 2002, he served in many ways as a sort of cipher for the political arc of the traditional Republican Party in Texas—its rise to power, its deepening and maintenance of that power, and, ultimately, the fading of that power in the face of insurgent forces. Cornyn pioneered the Republicanization of the Texas Attorney’s General Office that paved the way for his successors: Greg Abbott and Paxton. And, in the Senate, Cornyn helped usher in the 21st century brand of conservatism that fused the religious and social right with the power of Corporate America (while, in his own way,never really managing to become a consistent favorite of the hardcore base). 

All along the way, Cornyn was the most loyal of servants for the GOP cause—and he steadfastly rose through the ranks of power in Washington as his tenure advanced. 

Ken Paxton, meanwhile, has been a cipher for the Trumpification of the Republican Party in Texas and nationwide—the beneficiary of an era wherein one can enjoy the trappings of a Christian conservatism brand while possessing the personal ethics and morality of an unrepentant hustler. He is of the tendency that cast aside some traditional pro-business principles (including the tort reform revolution that Cornyn rode to power) in favor of a wildly vindictive, heat-seeking agenda to take out the scourge of “Woke,” “DEI”, etc. Despite his generally dull personal affect, Paxton has used each ounce of his official and political power to fan the flames of conspiracy theory and neo-McCarthyism. 

The day before Trump’s (likely) fateful endorsement, Cornyn was hitting the campaign trail across Texas. The list of guests who were at his side was instructive. Up in North Texas, there were the Republican state Representatives Jeff Leach and Matt Shaheen, both once faithful Collin County conservative allies with Paxton who have since become outspoken adversaries—and public enemies among the pro-Paxton grassroots. In Austin, Cornyn rallied a small crowd with Michael McCaul, a longtime congressman and Cornyn mentee who was once seen as his potential successor in the U.S. Senate, who’s now had his fill of Congress in the age of Trump. 

Then, down in San Antonio, the senator was flanked by former Governor Rick Perry who has now been out of political office for nearly 12 years, plus Cornyn’s own predecessor, Phil Gramm. (Both men, it should be noted, made the transition from conservative Dem to Republican during the Texas political realignment of the 1980s.) 

In short, this was not really a crowd that met the current moment, even as Cornyn has sought to pucker up and display his Trump fealty. (One of his most recent official acts was a proposal to name a Texas highway after the president.) 

The undignified way in which Cornyn’s political career appears to be meeting its maker now begs a bigger question.

In many ways, his Senate career was already over—becoming so when he narrowly lost his long-coveted shot at becoming majority leader of the U.S. Senate last year. His path to power in that case was blocked, in part, by a pressure campaign led by Paxton and his allies. Trump ultimately chose not to endorse in that contest. 

So why exactly did he, well into his 70s, even want to spend another six years in the U.S. Senate, a political body that has lost its august sheen and become yet another venue for unvarnished politicking, a body that couldn’t even feign to pass a non-budgetary, non-defense piece of legislation. A body whose core tradition, the filibuster, he felt forced to abandon in a desperate campaign tactic? Why not retire and ride off into the sunset? 

Cornyn has explained repeatedly that this was mostly, perhaps entirely, about preventing a man of Paxton’s immoral character from ever stepping foot in the Senate—not about passing some long-denied piece of legislation, or solving the immigration policy dilemma that he helped blow up over a decade ago, or anything else beyond the symbolic. Congress, after all, is no longer a place where things get done. 

But now, it appears that even his seemingly straightforward goal of stopping Paxton’s ascent is on the verge of failure. 

In the end, Cornyn always had a rather unnatural, if not unpleasant, relationship with Trump and the Trump era—and those points where he chose to speak out against the GOP uberleader probably led to his (also probable) demise. Even still, his resistance ultimately amounted to little more than stray comments. 

So, if he loses his runoff, will Cornyn become another in the line of Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or, most recently, Bill Cassidy, who at least managed to exit the stage with what seemed a genuine flourish of principle over position?

Don’t count on it.

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