Rep. James Talarico
For months, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn battered each other in a nasty and expensive race for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Texas.
Now that Paxton has emerged victorious, GOP leaders from Texas to Washington are urging intraparty peace and unity, warning that a divided GOP could lose the seat. But some Cornyn voters aren’t ready to move on — or look past Paxton’s history of scandals.
State Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, wasted no time courting those voters after Paxton won the May 26 GOP runoff. The next day, the Austin lawmaker hit the road for a five-city bus tour that he spent attacking the attorney general over allegations of corruption and extramarital affairs, punctuated by his new refrain, “I have a legislative record. Ken Paxton has a criminal record.”
Whether that message will prove effective in peeling off right-leaning moderates may help decide the election. Now that the dust has settled on the primary, recent polling has found most Republican voters have moved on and plan to vote for Paxton, with a clear shift from earlier surveys conducted in the heat of the bruising primary. Still, Talarico has held on to a chunk of support from moderate Republicans.
In interviews with The Texas Tribune in the weeks after the runoff, a handful of primary voters who backed Cornyn described a range of emotions, with varying plans for how they would vote. Some have decided they are supporting Talarico. Others said they would skip the top of the ticket or are still unsure what to do. Others still are embracing Paxton out of party loyalty.
Todd Shade, a 62-year-old who moved to the Austin area in 1995 after growing up in South Dakota, said he has been “very happy” with Cornyn. The self-described traditional conservative said he favors letting the free market flourish with minimal business regulations, yet is opposed to some of the socially conservative priorities that have dominated the Texas GOP as insurgents like Paxton rose to lead it.
Shade also believes at least some of the accusations against Paxton are true, including the charge from his former deputies that he abused his office to help a friend and campaign donor. Paxton has denied wrongdoing in these matters, which were the subject of his impeachment — he was acquitted by the GOP-controlled Texas Senate — and a federal investigation that fizzled when the Department of Justice declined to prosecute him.
Still, Shade said he plans to vote for Talarico.
“I think Ken Paxton is probably guilty of the things that he’s accused of,” Shade said. “It’s more of an anti-Paxton vote.”
[…]
The Tribune spoke to nine Cornyn voters, who provided a sample that, while not statistically significant, offers a window into how the senator’s diverse array of supporters — spanning self-described moderates to more Trump-aligned Republicans — are thinking about November. Here are their stories.
You should read the rest, some of these people will take you on a heck of a journey. For grins, I tallied up the individual totals from this entirely anecdotal article. Counting Todd Shade up front, we get:
Voting for Paxton = 3
Voting for Talarico = 3
Voting Libertarian = 1
Not voting in the Senate race = 1
Undecided = 1
Gotta say, that’s pretty good for Talarico, even if the undecided voter eventually picks Paxton. No one would claim this is representative, but we know these people are out there. In addition, two of the non-Paxton voters, one Talarico supporter and the one Libertarian voters (Sarah Stogner, who is probably going to get quoted a lot in stories like these) also mentioned voting for at least one other Democrat. That Talarico voter is also going for Nathan Johnson and Jon Rosenthal, while Stogner is also a Rosenthal supporter. I’ll take what I can get.
I’m sure there’s room for plenty more research on this topic. And we should all check in with the non-Democrats in our life, to see how open they are to trying something different this year. That includes the disengaged folks and the haters, because they’re a key demographic this year.