Fifty-Two Percent Isn't a Victory Lap
John Cornyn won last night. Let's be clear about that. He won the Republican primary for the United States Senate seat in Texas — a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1993 — and he will almost certainly win the general election. By November, most of Tuesday's drama will be a footnote. The story will be "Republican holds Texas seat." That's the obvious read. The less obvious read — the one worth actually thinking about — is that Cornyn nearly lost to a man under active indictment. Four points. In Texas. After holding statewide office since 2002, chairing the Senate Republican Conference, and serving three terms with a reliably conservative voting record, John Cornyn won his own party's primary by four points. That number deserves some sustained attention.
The Trump endorsement did what Trump endorsements do: it moved a substantial chunk of the base. Preliminary results suggest Paxton captured somewhere in the vicinity of 85% of voters who identified as "strong Trump supporters" in exit polling [2]. That's not nothing. That's a formidable bloc. The problem for Paxton — and the lesson for every future challenger running this playbook — is that the bloc was not large enough to overcome the Republican electorate that exists outside it. Cornyn won non-Trump-aligned GOP voters by roughly 68 to 32. He won the suburbs decisively. He won voters who said electability mattered to them by a margin that wasn't close [1].
There is also the curious matter of Dan Crenshaw. The Houston congressman, stripped of his committee assignments by House leadership after crossing the administration one too many times, ran an informal write-in campaign in the final weeks of the race. He received approximately 4,000 votes by early returns. That number, by most analysts' calculations, was close to — or possibly in excess of — Cornyn's margin of victory. Whatever else one thinks of Crenshaw's recent trajectory, those 4,000 Republicans were making a specific statement: they wanted an alternative to both Cornyn and Paxton, and when none was available, they voted for a man not on the ballot. That is the kind of quiet rage that wins primaries two cycles from now.
