The Paxton proof

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 27th of May. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

First up on The World and Everything in It: Washington Wednesday.

Well, the dust is beginning to settle this morning after one of the biggest Republican primary upsets in years.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton crushed four-term Senator John Cornyn in last night’s Senate runoff. He won by a margin so large that the race was effectively over almost as soon as the polls closed.

MAST: Yeah, Cornyn had the backing of Senate Republicans, enormous fundraising support, and a voting record closely aligned with President Trump. None of it mattered. Republican voters overwhelmingly sided with Paxton—the scandal-scarred but combative attorney general whom Trump endorsed just days before the election.

EICHER: Joining us now is political scientist Hunter Baker. 

Good morning, Hunter.

BAKER: Good morning. 

EICHER: Well now we’ve had a little bit of time to absorb this and think about it, what does this result actually say about the Republican Party? I mean, this was not a squeaker, it was not a protest vote. Republican primary voters in Texas made a very emphatic choice, did they not? 

HUNTER BAKER: We know that before the runoff in the original primary, that the two were basically neck and neck, with Cornyn having a very slight edge. And then, post-Trump endorsement, we have Paxton absolutely blowing Cornyn away. And that’s with John Cornyn having been completely unbeaten in the past, easily winning Texas on, on his previous campaigns.

So you can only conclude: yes, it is Trump’s party. Republican voters, at least, are listening to Trump. You know, there was no assertion of independence—“We like our senator, we like our guy.” No. They listened to what Donald Trump said, and they did it.

And, you know, the important thing to say here is that, historically, and I looked into this question: I thought to myself, has any sitting American president actively campaigned against a senator of his own party in American history? And the answer is basically no, all the way back to FDR. 

FDR campaigned against some conservative of the Democratic senators who were opposed to the New Deal. And generally speaking, he was unsuccessful in unseating any of them. Trump, on the other hand, has done that. 

But that gives you a sense, right? I mean, FDR was the guy who thought that he was so popular and so strong that he could campaign against his own sitting senators. And now we’ve had Trump do it, and he’s taken out two of those senators—Cassidy and now Cornyn.

So that tells you something. Yes, it’s Trump’s party. 

Now what my question is: what's the value in making it Trump’s party when he’s in his second term and approaching the midpoint of the second term? I’m not sure how that cashes out. Where you’re the king, and you’re nearly 80 years old.

MAST: Well speaking of cash, Cornyn’s closing argument was essentially electability—that Paxton could actually put a Texas Senate seat into play against Democrat James Talarico. Obviously that doesn’t carry much weight, but from a national standpoint, the money it’s going to cost to win a seat that would be a cakewalk draws GOP resources from elsewhere. 

Assuming Paxton holds the seat for the GOP and they lose elsewhere, does the finger pointing go to Texas?

BAKER: It’ll be part of the postmortem. 

Now I just don’t know what happens. I mean, yes, I think that Cornyn would have won easily, because Cornyn gets the standard Republican voter, right? Paxton maybe loses some of those folks. Paxton loses some of those anti-Trump Republicans, and so yes, that makes the task harder.

But then again, here’s the other thing: I mean, the Republicans didn’t do very well in the midterm during Trump’s first term. And I think the logic there was that he’s not on the ballot, and Republicans don’t turn out as well if he’s not on the ballot.

Well, in this case, in Texas, Trump is not on the ballot, but he has done the next best thing, right? He has put his hand on Paxton and said, “This is my guy.” So maybe he gets better turnout.

It’s all about that kind of: do you want the broadest electorate, or do you want the intensity of the electorate? And, you know, Trump is putting his bet on intensity.

EICHER: So, Paxton’s supporters seem almost immunized against scandal. We have indictments, impeachment, allegations of infidelity—it all appears priced in. 

What does say about how Republican voters are evaluating candidates?

BAKER: I think there's two different things going on.

First of all, American politics is binary. And I’ve always thought that it was unfair the degree to which some people judge Americans based on their voting. You know, to say that they’re hypocritical for voting for a Democrat who's badly behaved or a Republican who's badly behaved.

Well what’s their choice?

Their choice is to vote for somebody from the other party with whom they totally to not agree. And so that’s the situation, we have a binary political system. We’re not like Germany, where you have five or six choices and the top two or three parties can make a coalition government. 

So you just have to go with A or B. And that’s why we get these kinds of results in U.S. politics.

MAST: I want to talk about Jame Talarico. He's fascinating because Democrats are trying to present him not as a secular progressive firebrand, but as a religiously fluent, culturally moderate figure. 

Is that a winning message for Democrats in red states?

BAKER: Of course, I mean, that’s the way you have to go with it, right? I mean, a Democrat has not won in the state for a very long time.

It was the period before George W. Bush began his dominance in Texas when you had Democrats who could regularly get elected statewide; that time is over.

But the idea is always that you can find the right year—you know, probably not a presidential year, probably a midterm year—where you can pick off the state and change the balance in the Senate. 

And you know, the other thing is that maybe you can help on some of those down-ticket races. 

For example, when Beto O'Rourke came within probably less than two points of beating Ted Cruz in 2018, he lost, the Texas Senate seats remained firmly in Republican hands, but he probably shifted the balance in some of those down-ballot races in favor of the Democrats.

So even if Tallerico weren't to win, if they can position him to the point where he comes anywhere close, he may be able to help the Democrats in some of those other races.

EICHER: Hunter, moving on past Texas, even though that's a huge story, three voting-rights and redistricting fights erupted across the South yesterday, just weeks after the Supreme Court sharply limited the use of race in congressional mapmaking—and the reaction from the lower courts and state officials has been anything but uniform.

So, after the Supreme Court appeared to say pretty clearly that race-based redistricting has constitutional limits, why do we still see lower courts—and in some cases political systems themselves—acting as though the old Voting Rights Act framework is still largely in place?

BAKER: I think that a lot of people took those old rules as sort of the permanent state of affairs for the American republic—you know, that the Southern states would henceforth be supervised and managed in this fashion, where sort of the remedy or correction for past misdeeds, which were substantial, we all know, has been to carve out these special majority-Black districts.

And we should be clear: we’re talking about majority-Black districts. We don’t carve out majority-Hispanic districts, we don’t carve out majority-Asian districts, or majority-Jewish districts. It’s this particular thing, and it’s a response to sort of the Jim Crow era in the South.

But the question is: does that go on forever? Does it even make sense?

You’re talking about African Americans who constitute 13-14 percent of the American population. I think a lot of people don’t realize that. I think a lot of people think that that number is much larger—13 to 14 percent. Now—a larger percentage in the South—but it just doesn’t make sense that you’re going to do that forever.

And let me give you a very good reason why: South Carolina.

South Carolina was the Southern state that was perhaps most eager to go to war with the North back in the 19th century. South Carolina was the state that had Strom Thurmond as a dominant politician, and who was the Dixiecrat candidate for president at one time. 

That same state now has  Senator Tim Scott, African American, elected statewide, and in zero danger of being knocked out of office.

So I’m not sure you need to draw special districts in that case.

EICHER: Right. And just very quickly, before we leave this issue I would ask, do you think this is really a fight over race at this point, or increasingly a fight over partisan power that both sides now frame in racial terms? Real quickly. 

BAKER: I do think it is mainly about power. I don’t think that what we’re really fighting about is race here.

The Democrats recognize that they have had an advantage in the South for this reason. We know that in Democrat-dominated states there are a number of states that have zero Republican congressmen. 

And this is an attempt by the Democrats to make sure they hold on to those one or two seats they have in some of those Southern states.

MAST: Well, Hunter Baker is a WORLD Opinions contributor, our regular Washington Wednesday guest, and provost at North Greenville University. 

Hunter, thank you you so much. 

BAKER: Thank you.

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