Stay In the Know: Only 25¢Follow what's happening in your community with digital access. Act Now Sale Ends March 22 |
Happy Thursday. Let's talk about what didn't happen, at least not yet, ahead of the May 26 Republican runoff for U.S. Senate. Have questions? Hit reply, and I'll do my best to get you answers.
It's almost as if selecting the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate this year is a three-act play.
The first act climaxed with four-term incumbent John Cornyn surprising the pundits and pollsters by running ahead of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for first place in the March 3 primary, but still falling short of locking down the outright majority needed to claim victory.
And the curtain will fall on the last act, of course, once the votes are counted in from the May 26 runoff.
But in between was the infusion of drama supplied by President Donald Trump that was intended to make May 26 completely unnecessary. Instead, it was the Trump part that proved anticlimactic.
A rare case of Trump vs. MAGA
In the hours after the primary, the president said he would soon make an endorsement in the GOP Senate race, which by then was already astronomically expensive for party donors who still must underwrite the cost of the general election against formidable Democrat James Talarico. And, Trump added almost magisterially, the unendorsed candidate should then withdraw from the race.
Except none of that happened. The smart money was saying that Trump was going to shove the more MAGA Paxton overboard in favor of establishment-backed Cornyn under the notion that the incumbent was best positioned to defeat Talarico. The problem was some very influential members of the Make America Great Again movement, and Paxton himself, said "no way" to the idea of giving Cornyn a free ride.
For the past decade, the Trump-Cornyn alliance has been uneasy. Cornyn is cut from the Bush family mold of the Republican Party.
But Paxton, who actually went to court as Texas' attorney in a failed effort to effectively nullify Trump's 2020 election loss, hasn't let Cornyn off the hook. His super PAC even went so far as to buy post-primary TV time in Florida, where Trump lives when he's not in the White House, to remind the president of Cornyn's independent streak.
A key deadline in the second-act drama passed late Tuesday afternoon with no endorsement from Trump. That was the last chance for a candidate to withdraw his name from the May 26 ballot, and no one did.
The present state of the runoff
And so the march toward May continues. Cornyn had acknowledged as much even before Tuesday's deadline to withdraw had passed. On Monday, he told reporters he had "no updates" in Trump's endorsement plans. But his campaign did release an ad parodying the music video of the B-52s' "Love Shack" using AI-generated images of Paxton cruising in a '60s-vintage convertible on his way to what is suggested to be an illicit rendezvous.
The tune is almost as catchy as the Top 40 single and the reference to the attorney general's well-publicized marital infidelities that led to the equally well-publicized divorce filing was about as subtle as a carpenter's hammer smashing his thumb.
But even though the runoff ballot is set, Trump remains free to make an endorsement. And he says he still intends to. While the expectation has been that Cornyn was the candidate the president felt had the best chance in November, on Sunday, Trump told NBC News that either candidate could beat Talarico.
Republican voters might still be influenced by a Trump endorsement — or the absence of one — but the final decision on who gets their nomination in the the 2026 U.S. Senate race will rest with them.
More stories
No comments:
Post a Comment