There have been numerous developments in Texas politics since my post last month on the MAGA vs RINO US Senate primary between incumbent John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton.
There has even been a bit of action from the nominal opposition party.
Before we dive in, let’s review why Naked Captalism readers should care about Texas politics:
- It’s a huge state
- It’s closer than it appears
- It’s a national money magnet
- It’s on the front lines of a GOP civil war
With that out of the way, let’s look at what’s happened in the last month.
The catastrophic July 4th floods in Central Texas killed at least 132 people. Perhaps because Texas is a MAGA state, a narrative rapidly emerged in the MSM of local, state, and federal malfeasance that contributed to the scope of the tragedy.
Both Cornyn and Paxton have managed to comment on the floods while avoiding the embarrassing gaffes that have dogged Governor Greg Abbott and Cornyn’s US Senate colleague Ted Cruz.
Abbott made a speech full of football cliches saying “only losers point fingers”…while pointing his finger at the camera.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
Ted Cruz managed to (once again) be out of the country when disaster struck and was accused of touring the Parthenon in Athens in July 5, after the disaster struck.
Unfortunately for Paxton, his long-suffering wife, Texas State Senator Angela Paxton filed for divorce, citing “Biblical” reasons.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
The rumored "Biblical" reason pic.twitter.com/vgv3VsSsYF
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
Fortunately for Paxton, he has an almost unbelievable track record for surviving scandals that would derail any other political career.
The chair of the Texas GOP offered a structural explanation for Paxton’s ability to survive allegations of felony securities fraud, taking bribes and other favors from a disgraced real estate magnate, and previous incidents of adultery:
Matt Rinaldi, the chair of the Texas GOP who opposed Paxton’s impeachment, said Paxton has been able to weather controversy for so long for two reasons: He continues to deliver on campaign promises and GOP voters are considering the source of allegations.
“People don’t trust the allegations against him because people don’t trust institutions anymore,” Rinaldi said.
Rinaldi pointed to the trial, where the credibility of the FBI was a major topic and multiple House witnesses expressed faith in the agency, which Republicans have increasingly come to view with suspicion.
“That encapsulates why people distrust all these allegations in the first place,” Rinaldi said
Paxton also has a track record of crushing opponents in Republican primaries:
As Paxton’s problems worsened, he tied himself closer than ever to Trump. He filed a failed lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s reelection loss in four battleground states, and he spoke at a Washington, D.C., rally before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The Texas Bar Association has since sued alleging professional misconduct related to his effort to delegitimize the president.
The whistleblower claims were enough to earn Paxton a serious primary challenge in 2022 from three high-profile candidates: Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler. Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the powerful tort reform group, and its donors got behind Guzman, showing a new willingness by the GOP establishment to try to stop Paxton.
Bush forced Paxton to a runoff, but it was not even close as Paxton took two-thirds of the vote. Paxton leaned on an early reelection endorsement from Trump, and in the runoff, he promised to “end the Bush dynasty.”
Cornyn can’t be enjoying polling results like this:
- …when it comes to Cornyn, a majority (54%) of GOP primary voters believe “it is time for a new Republican to be elected U.S. Senator” compared with 27% who say, “the U.S. Senator has done a good enough job to deserve re-election.”
- While the 2026 GOP primary continues to be a long way off, John Cornyn currently trails Ken Paxton in a head-to-head race by more than 20 points. In a one-on-one trial heat, Paxton leads Cornyn 50%-28% among GOP primary voters. Paxton currently leads Cornyn among very
conservative GOP primary voters (60%-22%), high propensity 3/3 GOP primary voters (57%-27%), MAGA voters (58%-23%), Seniors (47%-35%), as well as among voters across every media market in the state.- Cornyn loses even more ground on an informed ballot test. In an effort to “fast forward” the race among voters in our survey, voters were given a second ballot test after having them assume that A.) President Trump would endorse John Cornyn; B.) Ken Paxton would attack Cornyn for his past comments on Trump, saying that Trump’s “time has passed him by”; and, C.) Ken Paxton would attack Cornyn for, in the past, siding with Democrats on a gun control bill. Following this information, Ken Paxton’s lead over Cornyn widens to 62%-21%.
The Hill provided some context for the Cornyn-Paxton race:
…the Texas GOP is very different than it was in the days of dynastic Bushism when Cornyn himself was elected attorney general in 1998 or his first Senate campaign four years later. But Texas is getting less like Alabama when it comes to politics generally. No Republican presidential candidate has gotten less than 60 presidential vote in Alabama since 2000, while no Republican has done better than 60 percent in Texas since favorite son George W. Bush in 2004.
The real warning sign for Texas Republicans was in 2018, when Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke got close enough to Sen. Ted Cruz (R) to make them really sweat down in Houston. It ended up at a margin of a little less than 3 points, but it was the best proof yet of Democrats’ long and usually exaggerated claim of blue Texas rising. While Cruz fared substantially better against then-Rep. Colin Allred (D) in 2024, this is a midterm cycle, and whoever the Republicans nominate for Senate will face a smaller, more Democratic electorate than the one that came out for Trump last year.
That explains why the same polls that show Cornyn getting brained in the primary keep showing Ken Paxton faring the worst in the general election. If the attorney general does advance to the next round, national Republicans will have to spend potentially $200 million to win a race Cornyn would win handily. And if Allred makes another run for it, he could be the first Democrat since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 to win a Senate race in Texas.
So that’s where we find Cornyn stuck between the two electorates, with only one way out: He has to change the first one.
Cornyn has Trump messaging guru Chris LaCivita ready to unleash what we can expect to be a prairie fire of a negative campaign against Ken Paxton. That will go a long way to persuade those lightly attached Ken Paxton backers. But what Cornyn really needs is to get lots and lots of voters who didn’t usually participate in Republican primaries to come in and water down the hardcore Ken Paxton vote.
That sounds a little like a 2014 contest in Mississippi when then-Sen. Thad Cochran found himself in a primary runoff with a proto-MAGA challenger, or maybe even a little like how Sen. Lisa Murkowski won in 2010. He’s an underdog for sure, but if Cornyn can rally the independents and even Democrats who have been voting for him for Senate in general elections since 2002 to vote in an open primary while simultaneously torching Ken Paxton’s reputation with negative ads, it’s a possibility.
And that’s the tight spot where he will find himself between now and March: staying in good enough graces with MAGA to keep Trump out of the race on Ken Paxton’s side while simultaneously courting the non-Republicans he will need to join a primary stampede.
That dilemma goes a long way to explain why “Texans for a Conservative Majority, the outside group supporting Cornyn in his primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, will have over $12 million cash on hand after the current fundraising quarter.”
As for the hapless Democrats, they have four (or maybe five) potential contenders for the nomination, only one of whom has officially announced.
The four who are openly considering the race, former U.S. Reps. Colin Allred and Beto O’Rourke, along with U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro and state Rep. James Talarico met virtually in a Zoom meeting earlier this month.
Dallas County Democratic Party Chairman Kardal Colemansummed up the four contenders thusly:
“O’Rourke is center-left,” while Castro or Allred “are a little bit more moderate.” He called Talarico a “TikTok sensation who can reach a number of people online.”
I’m not really sure on what basis Castro or Allred are described as being “more moderate” than Beto O’Rourke.
With the possible exception of Talarico, they are all standard issue neoliberals whose idea of “moving to the left” entails engaging in identity politics and culture war issues rather than making left-leaning arguments on economic issues.
Talarico at least puts an interesting twist on the culture war stuff by leaning on his own religious background:
Sitting in a drab committee room last month, Texas Rep. James Talarico, among the youngest members of the statehouse now at 34, was slowly getting fed up as he sat through a hearing for a bill that would mandate putting the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state. A week prior, he’d sat through a committee hearing on a bill that would allow chaplains to replace guidance counselors. He was already dreading another floor debate scheduled for later in the day for a bill denying gender-affirming health care. So by the time the Ten Commandments came up that morning, Talarico had had it.
He looked squarely at the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Candy Noble, whom he acknowledged as a fellow “devout Christian,” before letting loose a two-minute and nine-second exchange that would go viral on TikTok and Twitter, racking up more than 1 million views on Twitter alone.
“This bill to me is not only unconstitutional, it’s not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian,” he told her, as she stood motionless. “And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous. I believe it is exclusionary. And I believe that it is arrogant, and those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.” He cited Matthew 6:5, in which Jesus urges his disciples to not pray publicly like the hypocrites.
Six days later, he went viral again for calling out Texas lawmakers after a mass shooting in Allen, Texas, that left eight dead. “There is something profoundly cynical about asking God to solve a problem that we’re not willing to solve ourselves,” he said on the house floor.
David Axelrod, the veteran Democratic strategist, praised Talarico on Twitter. “WATCH THIS:” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted. “Preach,” former Education Secretary Arne Duncan cheered. After both videos went viral, he received 12,000 calls and emails in a week’s time, a volume that would typically be closer to 300.
“The thing that warms my heart the most,” he told me, “is people who say, ‘I’m an atheist, agnostic, or I left the church or I left religion. But this is the kind of Christianity I can believe in.’”
The day after the Democratic Zoom summit, Allred formally entered the race. Allred’s meh performance against Ted Cruz was anything but inspirational, but he excels at fundraising and is out there early.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) helpfully inserted themselves into the discussion with a poll claiming that all four men trail lightning rod U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett:
Rep. Jasmine Crockett didn’t rule out running in the Texas Democratic Senate primary next year, saying that she has not formally taken steps to that end but that she will make a decision “depending on how many people reach out.”
Crockett addressed the possibility in an Instagram post after the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) published a survey that has her leading the party’s field in a hypothetical primary. Concretely, she leads the pack with 35% of the support, compared to former Senate candidate Colin Allred’s 20%.
High-profile Texas Democrats Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro both come in third with 13% of the votes, while an additional 18% chose not to pick a candidate. The survey was conducted among 566 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of +/- 3.03%.
Crockett rose to fame for exchanging trash-talk with mega-MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:
Speaking to Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, the Georgia Republican suggested that Crockett’s “fake eyelashes” were getting in the way of her reading and understanding the point of last week’s hearing.
In response, Crockett called out Greene for having a “bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body.”
It’s easy to see why the Republicans want to make Crockett the face of Texas Democrats, but they may find themselves putting the corrupt Ken Paxton up against James Talarico, a preacher with the ability to go viral.
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I had to share Gov. Abbott’s full “football” speech about the floods but didn’t have room in the main post:
Somewhere in all this there is a joke about the distinct lack of success of the Dallas Cowboys since the 1990s, and the Houston Texans since, well, ever. Or of any Texas college teams since (checks Wikipedia) 2005. Must be all that blameless non-finger-non-pointing…
These Cowboys?
>We’re going to make sure that we go score again and we’re going to win this game.
The way winners talk is not to point fingers.
They talk about solutions. What Texas is all about is solutions.
Then what’s the solution to the Dallas Cowboys???
Talk about losers.
Sorry, only so much you can comment about corruption in politics, had to bring that in.
The worse problem is that there are GOP voters in TX and elsewhere that fully support that kind of idiocy. About one half of America is bat shit crazy and so consumed by hatred of anyone “different” that they’d go to hell and back for someone like Abbott. Roughly the same number of Americans are bamboozled into thinking that pointing (“loser” metaphor intended) to someone like Abbott or his ilk and saying “Look! See?! They’re crazy! Vote for us!” suffices as vibrant political discourse and is proof of a healthy “democracy”.
We’re Screwed
It’s crazy making to talk to a red state public school teacher who’s voted GOP all her life and listen to her shock when she realizes they’re going to gut public school funding JUST LIKE THEY SAID THEY WOULD.
EXACTLY!
It’s even worse when you read it.
Texas does have the high school football team with the best name, The Nads.
Their cheer is “Go Nads”.
Fascinating. I too love the Christians getting slagged by a Christian Christian.
Talarico needs to watch that he doesn’t fall into doing a bit of “No True Scotsman (or Xian)” argument. The Xian beliefs are a wide-ranging cafeteria and people can end up with entirely different meals and still validly claim to be “a true believer”.
From the MTV era
2 Samuel 11:1 et seq.
::chortle::
:)
Mamdani showed the blueprint, run a campaign focused on economic issues, ignore or minimize everything else. Should be even easier in Texas, cost of living crisis is bitting hard over there and immigration issues loom larger than in the rest of the country.
It’s going to be very hard for Texas Democrats to get past the “othering” of New York socialists like Mamdani and AOC and follow their model. Also it’s been a 10 year grassroots effort by the DSA to organize in NYC, Texas has a LONG way to go on that front.
Isn’t Texas where Crosscheck and other voter supression efforts cut their teeth?
Isn’t Texas one if the states that went all in when the SC hacked away parts of the voting rights act?
Nonetheless, the most troubling part of this post and the situation in general is the distrust of “institutions” which means just believing whatever my guy is saying today regardless of everything else in the whole wide world.
Yes and yes
I will crib a line from “A Man for All Seasons” and have Mz Paxton murmur to her soon to be ex-partner; “But Greg. For Baylor?”
i gave up on statewide texas politics a long while ago…no longer are there folks of the caliber of bob bullock or anne richards(i regularly cooked them breakfast and lunch in the democratic building, across from the big pink granite whorehouse).
merely graspers and churls, these days.
the demparty, due to the cognitive dissonance of clintonism, abandoned texas, some 30 years ago…and cannot be found with a geiger counter now.
they handed the whole state to these rwnj’s and then complain, incessantly, that no one will listen to them.
its a microcosm of whats happened at the national level…but tested out in texas.
meanwhile…because this is about texas, and y’all mentioned the rain events.
i’ve had 30 inches of rain since the 3rd…and more than 50 inches since the wind and dust ended, around the middle of april.
thats almost twice my county’s “average” annual rainfall.
so this is the first time ive even looked at the “news of the world” in days.
ive been busy with the mold and hacking through the jungle that sprung up.
in places harder hit(my problems are a giant annoyance, and mucho extra work for lil ol cripple me, but not life threatening)…as far as i can tell, HEB(the Texas FEMA) is doing more for those affected than anything resembling gooberment.
is this sort of material benefit even mentioned in any of the campaign material currently on offer?
or anything about the total disaster that is texas healthcare? or the even worse disaster that is texas po folks programs?
somehow i doubt it.
if these pols want my attention, its easy to get,lol…
but they wont.
dems will go on and on about abortion…gop will yell about cloud seeding and brown people…same as it ever was.
If the Dems abandoned Texas so many years ago, maybe there was an unspoken deal made at the time. The Repubs would get Texas for their own while the Dems would get California as the voters for both States were aligned with those parties anyway.
The deal wasn’t unspoken. Allegedly the Bush family gave Bullock a huge payoff (including funding his personal vanity project a Texas History Museum in Austin) and in return he quietly backed Bush against the Democratic candidate in 1998.
This was crucial and was the last time Dems had a shot in a statewide election (they came within 20,000 votes of the Lt Gov seat IIRC).
Karl Rove expertly snipered the three most prominent Hispanic Dems in Texas but he had help from the Anglos in the Dem party who boxed Attorney General Dan Morales out of an opportunity to run for Lt Gov.
Belatedly they realized they needed a Hispanic on the ballot and recruited billionaire Tony Sanchez in 2002, but that was the wrong year, he was the wrong candidate and the party atrophies more each year.
I didn’t even get into the succession of Obama-era carpet baggers that have descended on Texas every 2 years since 2008 promising to “Turn Texas Blue” and raising millions that they proceed to spend on themselves, lose all the elections and leave the state.
Good to hear from you!
I was in Center Point for the floods, glad you made it out of yours!
I am not pleased that Trump cut funding and staff from NOAA at a time when weather information is more critical than ever … but though I sympathize with parents who lost children in the recent floods I have trouble sympathizing with the people who ran the camp where the children were lost. I remember reading too many warning signs about flash floods when I camped in State or National Parks with my family in Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Utah as a young boy — which is to say a very long time ago. Washes not greatly unlike the hill country in Texas were very well known for their potential for flash flooding.
I am surprised that anyone staying, living, or visiting in the Texas hill country would be unaware of the dangers of flash flooding and especially the dangers of flash flooding in a place like the Texas hill country. Many properties there, though desirable and relatively high priced, will not perc and the very thin soil covering impermeable rock is not secret to anyone who has tried to put in a septic tank. [I have no idea how difficult and expensive wells might be.] Contemplating on the shallow soil and underlying rock and applying even rudimentary consideration of the consequences of heavy rainfall in an area not unlike the washes between rock monoliths in Arizona or New Mexico, or Utah — no one besides the young campers should be allowed to claim ignorance of the consequences. If rains were predicted and especially potentially heavy rains, I cannot understand how people along the hill country washes would not have monitored the weather reports and checked on the river more than it appears that many did. Flooding in a wash is an extremely rapid event not greatly unlike the closing of the waters of the Red[Reed] Sea in Exodus in terms of its speed and magnitude. I do believe some kind of warning system better than whatever is in place is definitely called for, but if Texas wants to cut budgets the way they like, locals should do something extra to take care of themselves. Something as simple as a phone tree might work to warn anyone sleeping too soundly to check on conditions for themselves. AND flash floods in a wash are much much more rapid and violent than the flooding that has occurred in more urban areas where the storm drains are inadequate to the new rainfall events or flooding when the rivers slowly rise.
I am not blaming the victims in Texas, but I am blaming those responsible for their safety. I must count Trump among those responsible for his mindless cuts to NOAA at a time when NOAA is most needed. Amfortas can correct my errors, bad assumptions, and misapprehensions of the situation in Texas.
If the soil is thin and rock impermeable, this hastens and magnifies the flow from slopes to streams, but the fact is that flood plains and flood flows were mapped and ignored. Building permits should not be issued, and badly located old buildings should have families relocated. This is the way “up north”, but neglected in Texas, be it hills or hurricane prone Houston.
I live close to similar terrain, valleys with stream descending from Allegheny Plateau. Observation: all buildings at least 30 ft above non-minimal streams, if there is a flat area along a stream, it is used to harvest hay and cows graze on slopes (not a regulation but common farmers’ sense).
I live up North and I have seen that a lot of 100 year old buildings are now currently located in areas of extreme risk of flooding based on the recent updates to flooding zone extent and location. The preponderance of housing in this region is similarly aged and similarly situated. I believe the most recent flood zones will soon need to be revised. Climate change is advancing rapidly and I know of no way to predict just how badly rainfall patterns may be affected.
If all the housing in this region that now sits in the new flood zones were condemned, a huge number of families and individuals would be relocated to the street.
I propose an innovative startup to collect vegan flatus, in order to prevent the unchecked release of global-warming causing methane!
The resulting stored gasses could be released into the existing natural gas reticulation system.
I am envisioning a simple and stylish backpack bladder that vegans would want to wear. (Statement garb) The methane gasses would collected in the bladder, which would inflate during the day. The elasticity in the badder could easily deflate the gasses into the gas system.
EUers just need to “think smarter”!
This invention is my gift to humanity.
You’re welcome!
On another note…..
Is it safe to eat insects raw?
I’m asking for an elderly friend, who can’t afford the electricity for the cooking of the bugs?
Reply to clarky90 above: Your friend should locate a bug zapper and place a pail underneath to gather enough dead cooked bugs for a tasty meal.