The gloves are off in Texas. Already, the primary race for the US Senate has distinguished itself as among the most expensive in US electoral history, with campaign advertisement spending already coming in at $110 million – with a full eight months to go until someone wins the coveted seat.
It’s fair to say that the adverts airing on local television are seeking impact rather than art. Already, one advert in support of senator John Cornyn, who now finds himself in the battle of his life to save a seat that has been comfortably his since 2002, has acquired a degree of notoriety with its attack line on rival candidate Ken Paxton.
“It’s voting time so let’s cut through the bull,” the announcer says in cinematic baritone.
“Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing him on biblical grounds so now Paxton’s wrecking another home, sleeping around with a married mother of seven. A wife cheater and fraud? Or the Texas workhorse?”
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The advert closes with a reassuring picture of 74-year-old Cornyn, the putative workhorse in the message, firm of jaw and wearing a cowboy hat straight from the wardrobe of Jock Ewing.
The danger of asking a straight question is that you get a straight answer. Poll after poll has Paxton, the hard right, Maga-credentialled Texas attorney general, leading Cornyn. Because Texas representative Wesley Hunt is also drawing considerable support, at around 17 per cent, the prediction is that none of the three leading Republican candidates will attain the 51 per cent quota at Tuesday night’s primary, requiring a head-to-head run-off in May.
Paxton has been so buoyed by the figures that he predicted at an event last week that he might just be declared the outright Republican candidate by Tuesday night. If not, he vows to keep campaigning as the anti-establishment candidate: the people’s choice, if not that of the official party.
“It’ll be grassroots, just like it always has been, and we’ll be out trying to compete,” Paxton said. “Obviously, he [Cornyn] has got a lot of money, DC money. I don’t have that money. We’ll have our money from Texas.”
It has been a turbulent year for Cornyn, a Mitch McConnell acolyte who missed out on his long-held ambition to become Senate majority leader in a vote to John Thune last year. Within Texas, he has increasingly appeared as a throwback to a figure that is vanishing from the landscape: a Bush-era Republican in bearing – cautious, hard-right conservative, morally rigid and, ultimately, a Washington careerist.
Intimations of what lay ahead could be heard in the volatile reception which greeted him at the Texas GOP convention in the summer of 2022, when after being introduced to his trademark “Big Bad John”, a take on the old Jimmy Dean riff, he was booed and jeered, primarily because of his role as the primary legislator in a bipartisan bill on gun control. Cornyn told the crowd then that he had “fought and kept president Biden’s gun-grabbing wish list off the table”.
But the boos kept coming.
“Democrats pushed for an assault weapons ban, I said no. They tried to get a new three-week mandatory waiting period for all gun purchases, I said no. Universal background checks, magazine bans, licensing requirements, the list goes on and on and on. And I said no, no, 1,000 times no.”
Six years ago, Cornyn crushed his primary opponents, returning as the Republican candidate with 74 per cent of the vote. His campaign’s inability to deliver its warning message about Paxton leaves him on the brink.
Paxton has been drifting around Texas politics for years and a recent profile by Texas Monthly described his various scandals as “so numerous, so byzantine, and so wide-ranging that any full accounting would be tedious. Some involved the easily understood sins of lust and adultery, others the far less tabloid-friendly intricacies of state securities law and federal mortgage regulations. One scandal concerns him pocketing a $1,000 Montblanc pen that another lawyer had left in a security bin at the Collin County courthouse”.
But the nub of the Cornyn argument is not about pens. It’s that the nomination of Paxton is a sure way for the Republican Party to lose the seat. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, when “Big” Lloyd Bentsen was in the twilight years of a Senate run that stretched back to 1971.
The big-picture polls, forecasting potential November election choices, suggest Cornyn holding his seat against either of the Democratic front-runners, representative Jasmine Crockett and state legislator James Talarico. But similar polls have Paxton losing, allowing Cornyn to reposition himself as the staunch, Republican saviour of the Lone Star state.
“We haven’t elected a Democrat since 1994,” he said in a recent interview. “But this would be the first crack in the Red wall, and unfortunately, that’s what is being put at risk as a result of the corruption and the baggage that Ken Paxton brings to this race.”
John Thune, the Senate majority leader, has also conceded that “it’s not outside the realm of possibility” that the Republicans relinquish the seat, “depending on who the Democrats nominate”.
Recent figures from the Texas Political Project suggest a glimmer of hope for Cornyn in that the race remains narrow among “likely primary voters”, showing Paxton with just a 2 per cent lead, at 36 per cent to 34 per cent, among that category. If that held true, it would at least allow Cornyn a few months to make up lost ground.
In the Democratic primary race, the Texas Political Project has Crockett now holding a commanding 56 per cent to 44 per cent lead over Talarico, the highly regarded state representative and seminarian preacher. The race between two young and charismatic candidates has energised the Texas Democratic voting base, with record-breaking early numbers. Crockett is adamant that her presence on the ballot in November will attract an untapped base of previously disillusioned or interested voters.
“One of the things I told a reporter recently is that I think the story nobody realises they are going to write is the impact of young women in this election,” she said after an event in west Texas on Monday.
“Young women of all racial backgrounds are so enthused by my candidacy, and I can’t wait to see the numbers. People are hurting. They want to know they are sending someone who is not only a fighter and has the ability to add a little spice to DC but also understands their struggles, also sees them, and also has plans and bills proposed and a strategy to get things across the finish line.”
Crockett said she is not running on race, but the issue still lurks in the background of the campaign. She has repeatedly criticised an advert supporting Talarico for darkening her skin. The tag line “If-she-wins-we-lose” has been interpreted as a thinly disguised coda suggesting that Texas will not send a black female candidate to the Senate.
Democratic strategists schooled in bitter experience would contend that when the moment comes, the state will not elect any Democratic progressive, irrespective of gender or skin colour. The myth of the bluing of Texas has been around for almost as long as John Cornyn. It could well be that when the dust settles next November, “Big Bad John” will, somehow, once again be the last man standing.
But right now, it’s hold on to your hat time in Texas until Tuesday night’s primary election count.
