Caution: The voter mood today:
"And yet, it was a total wipeout. It turns out that when voters are thoroughly sick of you, you can spend enough money to fund a small space program, and they will still look at your expensive streaming commercial and say, “That is a very nice high-definition video of a man I never want to see again.”
"If there is one thing we know about Texas, besides the fact that you can fit three entire European nations inside a single ranching estate and still have room for a Buc-ee’s, it is that Texas politics does not do “subtle.” When Texas politicians fight, they do not exchange polite letters or calmly disagree on the Senate floor. They engage in the political equivalent of a monster truck rally, complete with flying mud, deafening engines roaring, and at least one guy getting flattened by an oversized vehicle named The Grave Digger. This morning, the New York Times topped its webpage with the report, “Ken Paxton Ousts John Cornyn, Solidifying Trump’s Grip on Republican Party Voters”
Which brings us to the recent Republican primary for the United States Senate, a race that the New York Times —which views Texas in the alarmed manner normal people view a mysterious leg rash— called “one of the nation’s most expensive and acrimonious.”
When the dust finally cleared, John Cornyn, 74, a man who has occupied his Senate seat for twenty-four years (longer than some of his voters have been alive), was not just defeated. He was politically vaporized. He was beaten by Ken Paxton, the sixty-three-year-old Texas Attorney General and pandemic-era lawsuit machine, in a landslide of epic proportions: 64% to 36%.
To put those numbers in perspective, if you are an incumbent senator and only get 36% of the vote, that means even your own immediate family members were probably looking at the ballot and thinking, You know, Ken Paxton really does have a good point about those Pfizer boosters.
🔥 The most amazing part of this stunning spectacle was the money. During the campaign, Paxton complained that Cornyn and the national GOP establishment outspent him ten-to-one. This sounds like standard political whining, but in this case, it was actually true.
According to public records, a staggering $128 million was spent on primary advertisements alone. Of that mountain of cash, $92 million went to support Cornyn.
Pause briefly and contemplate that number. Ninety-two million dollars. You could use that kind of money to buy a fleet of helicopters, a private island, or even maybe even three bags of groceries at Publix. The National Republican Party did everything short of physically dragging voters into the booths and holding their hands over the “Cornyn” button.
And yet, it was a total wipeout. It turns out that when voters are thoroughly sick of you, you can spend enough money to fund a small space program, and they will still look at your expensive streaming commercial and say, “That is a very nice high-definition video of a man I never want to see again.”
Of course, we should not be too hard on the GOP establishment. The establishment runs on very simple, logical rules designed by Deeply Serious People.
Rule 1: Electability. The Logic: Whoever has a proven record of winning general elections must be supported at all costs. The Reality: This works great until voters realize “electability” just means “has been sitting in the same chair since the Clinton administration.”
Rule 2: Fundraising. The Logic: Whoever can vacuum up the most cash from corporate donors is the strongest candidate. The Reality: This works great until you realize corporate donors do not actually vote, and actual voters are tired of being treated like Macy’s mannequins.
Admittedly, this system prevents nepotism and favoritism, and it stops the party from doing something incredibly stupid, like, oh, I don’t know, sliding in a cackling replacement candidate for president in the middle of the night while voters are sleeping. (Not that anyone would ever do that.)
But the system has a flaw: it assumes highly motivated primary voters have the memory of Dory from Finding Nemo.
🔥 The New York Times, of course, immediately framed this primary as a simple story of Trump’s Revenge! Because in the mind of a Times editor, Donald Trump is a Svengali-like magical hypnotist who controls the minds of every human being between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.
It is true that Cornyn’s “sins” against the Trump agenda were relatively minor on paper. He voted with Trump 90% of the time. But there is a very simple way to tell which Republicans actually matter in the grand scheme of things, and it is what I call the New York Times Hate Index.
If you look at the Times’ topic page for John Cornyn over the last twenty years, you will find almost no headlines criticizing him. In fact, they barely mentioned him at all. In the entire year of 2023, he appeared by name in exactly two stories. When the Times did mention him, it was usually to pat him on the head and praise him for “defying Trump” to help Democrats pass more Ukraine aid.
In other words, John Cornyn was a cardboard senator. He was a placeholder. He was a very nice man who pressed the voting button the right way most of the time, but otherwise took up space that voters now urgently need for other purposes.
On the other hand, Ken Paxton sends the Times Hate Index completely off the charts. If Paxton so much as sneezes, the Times publishes a three-part investigative series on the environmental impact of his tissue paper. And to conservative voters in 2026, there is no greater recommendation than a front-page Times article weeping about how dangerous you are.
🔥 To understand the real reason Paxton won, you have to look back at the dark, bloodstained years of 2020 through 2022.
John Cornyn was part of the old McConnell Club. These were the traditional conservatives who managed the party through the wilderness years. They did some good things, like helping Trump build the Supreme Court we are currently enjoying. They also did some highly questionable things, like passing the Patriot Act (which Democrats immediately used to spy on Republicans) and the PREP Act (without which the entire pandemic-industrial complex would have gone nowhere).
When the pandemic hit, the McConnell Club did what they always do: they passively went along with the flow. Cornyn, to his credit, opposed vaccine mandates. But his opposition mainly consisted of sitting in his office and quietly voting the right way as part of a group. He never raised his voice, he never made a scene, and he certainly never filed a lawsuit or even a strongly worded bill.
Meanwhile, Ken Paxton was behaving like a man possessed by the spirit of a highly caffeinated Doberman Pinscher.
As Attorney General, Paxton spent two years filing lawsuits against the Biden administration, Texas cities, and blue counties over lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates. He didn’t just write angry press releases; he took them to court. And he is still doing it. He is currently suing Pfizer. He is suing hospitals over vaccine incentives. He is creative, he is relentless, and he simply refuses to go away.
The establishment, the media, and Texas RINOs tried everything they could to get rid of Paxton. They tried to criminally convict him. They tried to impeach him over a series of highly publicized and totally made-up scandals. The media gasped in performative shock and outrage.
But the voters looked at Paxton, looked at his record of fighting the lockdown regimes, and said, “We do not care about your complicated procedural scandals. We care that when the government tried to force us to stay in our houses and take experimental injections, you were the only attorney general who stood in their way.”
🔥 Now that Paxton has won and become the Republican candidate for Cornyn’s Senate seat, the Democrats are suddenly very excited, which is why this story made the top of the Times’ home page. They smell blood in the water. They have selected a young, white male progressive named James Talarico to run against Ken Paxton in the general election, and they are convinced that Paxton is so controversial that they might actually win.
The New York Times is drooling at the prospect. Of course, buried deep in the sixteenth paragraph of their coverage, it was forced to admit that Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, and have not won any statewide election there since 1994. To put that in perspective, the last time a Democrat won statewide in Texas, the top movie in theaters was The Lion King (the cartoon one, not the weird CGI one), and people were still using floppy disks and dial-up internet.
But they are hoping against hope for an upset. Mark my words: it is only a matter of time before the media deploys Paxton’s “anti-vaxxer” stance against him to rile up their base. When they do, it will prove once again that the pandemic is still the defining event of modern American politics.
In the meantime, the lesson of the Texas primary is clear: if you are a Republican politician who thinks you can survive in 2026 by being a quiet, polite cardboard cutout who never makes waves, you might want to start updating your resume.
Republican voters are looking for fighters, and they have a lot of cardboard to fold."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-199464661
