Going to keep thinking about them.
Still a crook any way you look
Former Southlake Mayor John Huffman is struggling to see a place for himself in a Republican Party that put Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on the November ballot for U.S. Senate.
The embattled attorney general’s career has been plagued by professional and personal scandal, including allegations of infidelity and misusing his office to benefit a political donor, but has largely come out unscathed. He reached a new high May 26 when he won a bruising Republican primary runoff against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
For Huffman, who most recently ran as a Republican in a special election for state Senate in North Texas, Paxton’s victory despite perceived character flaws has him questioning what do in November, when Paxton will face Democrat James Talarico, an Austin-area Texas House representative, for the statewide seat.
“I don’t see much of any of myself in the Democratic Party,” Huffman said in an interview. “I also don’t see much of me in the modern Republican Party that has delivered another message that it does not care about character.”
He thinks of former President Bill Clinton’s time in office.
“My formative political years were around Bill Clinton’s scandals and a Republican Party that was very clear that character counts,” Huffman said. He soon added, “Now we nominate Ken Paxton, who doesn’t even pretend anymore.”
“The defense you hear is, ‘Oh, well — we’re not electing a pastor. We’re electing a senator or president or whatever,’ ” he said. It’s ironic, Huffman said, “because that is exactly the defense that the Democrats used for Bill Clinton in the 90s, and it wasn’t good enough then, and it’s not good enough now.”
[…]
There’s “not a chance in hell” Jason Baldwin is voting for Paxton in November.
“Character matters,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat, white, Black, yellow, green: We all have a character, and Ken Paxton does not align with that for me.”
Baldwin previously served as the president of the Log Cabin Republicans of Fort Worth, a political group for LGBTQ Republicans that has since disbanded because Baldwin said it wasn’t welcomed into the party.
Would he not vote in the race? Perhaps. Voting for Talarico is an option, but he needs to do more research.
A lifelong Republican voter and staunch supporter of limited government, Baldwin doesn’t believe in policies like requiring the Ten Commandments be hung in classrooms and dictating what books can and cannot be read.
Baldwin said he particularly needs to learn where the Democratic nominee stands on immigration, ensuring the government is operating with a balanced budget and ending and staying out of wars.
“What I know is I don’t align with what’s happening right now” in the GOP, he said.
The named unhappy people in this story include former U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, though I didn’t see any specific comments from him, former Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley (now also involved in the Collier lawsuit), and former Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price. Whitley as noted endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, so he’s farther off the reservation than the rest. The point as I see it is that once you start down that path, it can take you a very long way.
The questions as always are how many of these people are there, and how many of them will take meaningful action, which I would set as “not voting for at least one statewide Republican”. We know what happened in 2018 – lots of former Romney voters got very unhappy, and we call these people “Democrats” now. There have been some more defections since then, but it’s not clear to me that it’s been significantly above the normal amount of churn that both parties see.
This year’s story is complicated by the former Dem voters who shifted to Trump in 2024, most of whom have deeply soured on him. There’s the broader matter of mostly Latino voters, mostly but not entirely in South Texas, who have gone more generally Republican. I don’t have a clear sense on where these people are now, if they’re materially different from other disaffected Rs or the 2024-Trump-only voters. Some recent polls have still shown fairly robust levels of Latino Republican support. Data like this is always going to be muddled.
What I need to hear from these folks, the high profile types who can get their names in the news for saying how disgruntled they are, is some level of commitment to the bit. Like, are you voting for Ken Paxton or not? Or Bo French, if not being a total shitbag racist matters to you. Give me some reassurance that you have a line and that at least one candidate has crossed it, and I’ll take you seriously. If you can’t do that, maybe don’t talk to the nice reporters when they call you for one of these stories. If there are enough of you to qualify as a thing worthy of notice, there ought to be plenty more opportunities to be quoted in those stories.
Good luck with that final paragraph.