Still a crook any way you look
Texas Republicans are once again sounding alarm bells about the state’s U.S. Senate seat, saying that if Republicans nominate state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the May 26 primary runoff, it will create a drag on the entire Texas GOP ticket.
A polling memo commissioned by a super PAC backing Republican Sen. John Cornyn in the runoff said that nominating Paxton would be catastrophic, potentially costing Republicans the Senate seat, multiple House races, and possibly even control of the state House.
“A Paxton nomination creates measurable risk across every tier of the Texas ballot,” said the memo, which was obtained by Texas Tribune reporter Gabby Birenbaum. “The Senate race tightens significantly. Congressional pickup opportunities close. Republican-held seats that should be safe require active defense. And the Texas House majority—which took years to build—faces exposure it would not face with Cornyn at the top of the ticket.”
Among the poll’s findings is that the gerrymander Trump forced Republicans to undertake—which was supposed to net the GOP five U.S. House seats—could collapse if Paxton were the nominee.
The memo highlights four prospective GOP flips, saying, “With Paxton at the top of the ticket, all four opportunities effectively disappear. The drag is consistent across every key voter group—independents, suburban women, soft Republicans—and large enough to turn each district from a competitive opportunity into a likely Democratic hold.”
What’s more, the memo says that Paxton would jeopardize otherwise safe GOP House seats, including that of now-former Rep. Tony Gonzales and GOP Rep. Beth Van Duyne. The survey finds that suburban, independent, and Hispanic voters would likely turn away from the party in droves.
“The damage does not stop at lost opportunities. Redistricting produced several Republican-held congressional districts that should be safe holds under any normal electoral environment. With Cornyn at the top of the ticket, they are—comfortable margins, no defensive spending required, resources free for offensive races. Under a Paxton nomination, many of these seats become a problem,” the memo said, though it overstates Cornyn’s benefit to those seats, many of which are still competitive even if he is the nominee.
The Cornyn-supporting super PAC released the memo a little more than two weeks before the May 26 runoff in a desperate attempt to build support for Cornyn’s flailing candidacy.
The most recent public poll, commissioned by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, found Paxton leading Cornyn, 48% to 45%.
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It’s possible Cornyn’s supporters hope this memo scares Trump into backing Cornyn.
In the process, though, they released a memo that shows Texas is competitive even if Cornyn is the nominee.
The poll showed Cornyn up only 2 points over a “generic Democrat” in the race, while Paxton trailed by 4 points. (Of course, Talarico is far from generic.) It also showed Democrats holding onto two of the gerrymandered U.S. House seats even with Cornyn atop the ticket.
I recommend you read the memo, it’s quite elucidating. The first thing to note is that this is all based on modeling, not on polls conducted by Deep Root Analytics, the outfit that produced this memo. I’m sure this is all based on polling data, but it is not itself an analysis of a poll or set of polls done by Deep Root. It’s likely that they have access to poll data that has not been made public. I don’t think any of this is suspicious or casts any doubt on their results, but it means we have limited means by which to critique their analysis. And I want to emphasize again, this is not a poll. It’s poll-like and poll-based, but not itself a poll.
The first thing I noticed was the districts that this memo didn’t include. Specifically, for Congress, that was CDs 15 and 28. The most obvious reason why that would be is that they found the outcome was most likely going to be the same whether Cornyn or Paxton was the candidate, and in the context of this memo, where they are showing close races everywhere, that can only mean that those districts are won by Dems in either instance. The concession that Republicans are likely doomed to lose a district they now hold in addition to having trouble winning most if not all of the districts they drew for themselves is absolutely wild. That they found CD32 to be potentially in danger, despite it being the most impervious of the new districts to 2018-like conditions, is even wilder. This memo isn’t suggesting Republicans are in for a rough year. It’s shouting it from the rooftops.
Same thing for State House districts, where more obvious targets like HDs 108, 112, 132, 133, and 138 are all left out of the discussion. The inclusion of HD128, which by my reckoning is one of the two reddest districts in Harris County (HD130 is its competition for that title) just made my jaw drop. I mean, Trump won HD128 by 35 points. If they’re modeling it as R+9 in what they see as the best case scenario, then Democrats should be wiping out huge swaths of Republican legislators. I’d want to see them do a similar analysis for the State Senate, because even that could be in play in their “Paxton wins the runoff” scenario, and there just aren’t any swingy Senate seats on the ballot beyond SD09.
Honestly, seeing the inclusion of HD128 as a possible seat in peril makes me question some of the assumptions used in this model. I’m sure they included it because it’s an open seat, which I presume they considered to be more volatile. But come on, some factors are stronger than incumbency. I mean, even in 2018 this was an R+34 district. For it to be legitimately R+9, that’s an extinction-level event for Republicans. I cannot believe no one at Deep Root looked at that and felt the need to do some quality assurance.
To be fair, HD128 is an outlier, in that the other districts they highlight are ones that I would expect to be somewhere between “flippable” and “on the verge of competitive” in a strong blue year. It just stands out to me in a bad way because there’s no comprehensible way in which that district should be objectively competitive. I’ll accept it as a one-off and move on, I just wouldn’t have felt right not mentioning it.
How reliable should we take all this to be? I don’t know anything about Deep Root Analytics, I don’t know what they based their model on, and they’re working on behalf of John Cornyn and thus are attempting to craft a narrative in his favor. Other polling data we have had, including the UH/Hobby poll of the runoff but going back to before the primaries, suggests there isn’t much difference in performance between the two candidates. I could be persuaded there are more Cornyn voters who will refuse to vote for Paxton and indeed may cross over if he’s the Republican nominee, but we’ll never know for sure. It’s the assumption that even with Cornyn on the ticket that there will be so many competitive or at least closer-than-you’d-think races that makes me sit up and pay attention. That much is consistent with everything else we’ve seen. I’m happy to add this to the data pile, and when we get some Congressional-level polls later on, we’ll see how they compare.
One last thing, in related news, The Downballot notes two other GOP Senate primary runoff polls, one by a pro-Cornyn outfit that has him up by one, and one by a pro-Paxton group that has him up by eleven. Make of that what you will. And this recent Texas Public Opinion Research poll has some insight into “moderate” and “swing” voters in Texas. It doesn’t provide any insight into the Cornyn/Paxton duel, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.
We were visiting Houston this week and I had a great experience at a restaurant in the Heights. My bartender asked me if I knew how Greg Abbott became paralyzed, and I confirmed what I knew about that. This didn’t begin as a political conversation, but soon shifted into a discussion of agricultural policy because the bartender has a small farm on Houston’s Northside. A second bartender joined the conversation and both of them were very well informed about Abbott’s policies. Both of them said they hoped this is the year we will vote him out. Before I left, I offered a toast to victory for Gina Hinojosa. So good to hear young guys who are planning to vote against the GOP this November.