Electability FTW

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

 

Certain people (ahem) will tell you that Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate depended on the results in last night’s Texas primaries.

 

But that’s only mostly true.

 

To control the Senate, Chuck Schumer’s party will need to hold all of its seats this fall while flipping four that are currently held by Republicans. That means ousting Susan Collins in Maine, of course. It means replacing the retiring Thom Tillis with ex-Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina. And it means incumbent Dan Sullivan getting upset in Alaska by former Rep. Mary Peltola, who won two statewide elections to the House there and narrowly missed winning a third.

 

Not easy, but doable in this environment. The last pick-up would be a heavier lift—Ohio, which the president won by 8 points in 2016 and 2020 and by double digits in 2024 after adding native son J.D. Vance to the ticket. Tough stuff, but Democrats maximized their chances of flipping it by convincing three-term former Sen. Sherrod Brown to make a comeback after losing his seat by less than 4 points to Republican Bernie Moreno two years ago.

 

Brown is a household name, has class-warrior credibility that will suit this cycle’s cost-of-living focus, and is outraising incumbent Jon Husted. A big national Democratic wave in November could plausibly sweep him back into office, securing the party’s new majority in the upper chamber. At least until John Fetterman blows it up by becoming a Republican.

 

So Texas doesn’t actually need to turn blue for the Senate to turn blue. But it sure would make the task easier.

 

Last night’s Senate primaries in that state were mirror images, pitting a safe, electable choice against a populist loose cannon. Republicans had to choose between establishment dinosaur John Cornyn, who’s seeking his fifth term, and MAGA-pandering state Attorney General Ken Paxton, perhaps the most amoral politician in America. (Besides you-know-who.) Democrats were left to decide between babyfaced state lawmaker James Talarico, a smooth-talking Christian progressive, and pugnacious Rep. Jasmine Crockett, well-known for her ability to antagonize a president who won her state by, uh, 13 points.

 

In each case, one candidate was clearly more electable than the other. And in each case, that candidate prevailed. Talarico defeated Crockett outright while Cornyn beat expectations, finishing slightly ahead of Paxton after a campaign that saw the latter ahead in most polls. The two Republicans will face each other in a runoff in late May.

 

Those results strike me as something like a worst-case scenario for Democrats. Their party is almost certainly going to lose this election in November, and now they’re going to spend a ton of money to do so.

 

Talarico vs. Crockett.

 

Let me give Talarico his due. I’m sufficiently impressed by him that I think he could make Republicans sweat—a little—this fall, even if Cornyn emerges from the runoff as the GOP nominee.

 

This ad was served to me repeatedly on YouTube over the past few weeks and each time I watched I came away sensing something uncanny in his stagecraft and self-assuredness, particularly for a 36-year-old.

 

He’s also capable on the trail despite his tender age and relatively brief political career. His organization ran circles around Crockett’s—which wasn’t hard, admittedly, as she didn’t have much of one. (No joke: She had no campaign manager.) Per NOTUS, his campaign spent three times as much on advertising as hers did while his super PAC spent 16 times(!) as much as its counterpart. His operation held 130 events in 40 cities over the final four days of the primary with help from 30,000 volunteers. He even showed up in counties where Trump won to ask for locals’ votes.

 

As a newbie state legislator in 2019, Talarico took a 25-mile walk around his district to meet his constituents. When he loses this fall, it won’t be because he got outworked.

 

He’s also on-message, which—insofar as she had a message beyond “fighting”—Crockett emphatically was not. The other ad that YouTube fed to me was this one of him yadda-yadda-ing about billionaires, standard fare for a progressive but a smart line of attack if the midterms become, as expected, a referendum on affordability.

 

Talarico sounds more eager to press that case against Cornyn than Paxton, in fact. “I think both of them are extraordinarily weak,” he told Politico in an interview. “Paxton was guilty of illegal corruption. That’s why my colleagues and I impeached him in the Texas House. But Cornyn is guilty of legalized corruption. He was the deciding vote on the Big, Ugly Bill, which kicked millions of Texans off their health care, took food out of the mouths of hungry Texas kids, all to give tax breaks to his donors.” That message might not win him a Senate seat, but it’s the optimal one to maximize his chances.

 

There’s also this: He cleaned up with Hispanics in Texas last night.

 

With Crockett expected to consolidate the African American vote, most of the suspense in the primary had to do with whether her opponent’s outreach to Hispanics would pay off. It did. “Across counties where the population is 60 percent or more Latino, Talarico outperformed Crockett roughly 62 percent to 35 percent, according to the Associated Press,” the Wall Street Journal noted. If that carries over to this fall, cutting into the gains with Hispanics that the GOP has made under Trump, Republicans will need an answer.

 

And as we collectively embark on a sixth consecutive year of having an elderly president who’s declining in plain sight, Talarico’s age is probably also a minor but meaningful asset. At 74, Cornyn is more than twice as old.

 

Wait a second, you say. Isn’t this guy just Beto 2.0?

 

Yes and no. There are, for sure, distinct Beto O’Rourke “vibes” emanating from the new Democratic nominee. O’Rourke was also a tireless campaigner when he challenged Ted Cruz for the Senate in Texas in 2018, was popular with Hispanics, raised boatloads of money, had lots of admirers in national liberal circles, and was regarded as the sort of inoffensively charismatic white leftist to whom right-leaning Texas suburbanites might plausibly take a shine.

 

But there are differences. Talarico isn’t a child of privilege; he was born to a single mother and taught middle school via Teach for America, as he often reminds audiences. He also lacks the unctuous political “rock star” persona that made O’Rourke a sensation to the left and anathema to the right in 2018. Talarico is more boy-next-door, is vocal about his Christian faith, and has managed the neat trick of seeming not very partisan despite being very ideological to a degree that even Beto didn’t quite manage, as I recall.

 

Oh, and in case you forgot: O’Rourke lost to Cruz, an incumbent with oodles of right-wing cred, by just 3 points. How do you suppose he would have done against an opponent as ethically compromised as Ken Paxton or as repugnant to the populist right-wing base as John Cornyn—especially if those two spent a 12-week runoff campaign tearing each other to pieces?

 

Democrats would have had no chance in November had they nominated Crockett. They do have a chance after nominating Talarico. It’s just that, because of the result in the Republican primary, it’s more like a 20-to-1 chance instead of 3-to-1.

 

Cornyn vs. Paxton.

 

The somewhat surprising result of the GOP primary is an answer to this question: How much of a scumbag must a Republican candidate be for right-wing populists to waver on him?

 

A Ken-Paxton-sized scumbag, apparently. In a party that was willing to nominate Roy Moore for Senate in Alabama despite Donald Trump’s recommendation to the contrary, Texas’ attorney general managed to make himself so off-putting to Republican voters that he slipped behind old-guard conservative John Cornyn in the final results last night. That’s an achievement.

 

In saying that, I don’t mean to exaggerate Cornyn’s victory. Despite serving four terms in the Senate (and six years as conference whip), dropping an atomic bomb of campaign spending on Paxton, and enjoying a preposterously huge “electability” gap with his opponent, he failed to avoid a runoff and finished just 1.2 points ahead. If not for Rep. Wesley Hunt entering the race as a dark-horse candidate and taking 13.5 percent of the vote—most of which likely came from anti-establishment, i.e. anti-Cornyn, Republicans—Paxton might have won after all.

 

He may yet win when the runoff is held on May 26. But I doubt it: Between Talarico’s victory in the Democratic primary and Paxton’s underperformance in the GOP contest, the stars have now aligned for the president to finally ride to John Cornyn’s rescue.

 

“Trump has privately intimated that he will soon get involved in the Texas Senate race after rebuffing endorsement pleas from both candidates for months,” one GOP strategist told Politico in a piece published this morning. The president confirmed it in a post on Truth Social this afternoon, teasing an endorsement soon—and urging the candidate he doesn’t endorse to drop out immediately.

 

He’s famously averse to supporting “losers,” and so whoever ended up smelling more like a loser after last night’s Republican primary was likely to end up being cold-shouldered. That would be Paxton. Party cronies have been whispering in Trump’s ear for months, no doubt, that although any Republican could beat Crockett, Paxton would be too weak to beat Talarico. That theory now has hard evidence to support it: As it turns out, he was too weak to even beat Cornyn.

 

Trump would surely prefer to endorse the attorney general, the epitome of the type of populist crook who’s willing to lick his boots in exchange for power. Paxton has toadied to him in every conceivable way to earn it too, most infamously by challenging the results of the 2020 election in court. But the president desperately wants to prevent the Senate from flipping, knowing how that would complicate future confirmation battles for nominees. So he’s going to end up endorsing Cornyn, almost certainly, and that will in turn almost certainly send Cornyn to victory in the runoff.

 

Emphasis on “almost.”

 

One never knows with this rotten, insane party. As I said, the president’s support for incumbent Luther Strange wasn’t enough to prevent Alabama Republicans from nominating Moore in 2017, a saga that ended with that state’s Senate seat (briefly) in Democratic hands. A Republican district in Texas just sent Rep. Dan Crenshaw into early retirement for the crime of being too pro-war during the very week that the party is tossing bouquets at Trump for launching the largest unauthorized war in American history. Adherents of the modern right aren’t serious civic actors. Ken Paxton wouldn’t have made it this far if they were.

 

And so I wouldn’t bet my immortal soul that Hunt’s voters won’t smile politely when the president endorses Cornyn, knowing that the polling already shows Paxton struggling against Talarico, and decide to support Paxton anyway. Republicans cherish transgressive ruthlessness in their political leaders, and nothing demonstrates that like a track record of full-spectrum corruption. A movement that fantasizes about watching “the system” burn is powerfully drawn to Joker types, and there’ll be one on the ballot on May 26.

 

Still, I’d be surprised if a Trump-endorsed Cornyn lost the runoff—assuming Paxton dares to ignore the president’s ultimatum to quit the race before then. The right’s cultish loyalty to its leader usually wins out over its other malign impulses, and I suspect Hunt will amplify the endorsement by throwing his own support to Cornyn. He’s just 44 years old and would be gambling his future in the party if he cross-pressured his supporters in a key runoff by contradicting Trump. So he won’t.

 

If all else fails, the hype over Talarico might end up scaring Republican undecideds straight about this race by the time the runoff is held. Cornyn may well have overperformed last night because many GOP voters already fear that nominating Paxton would put Texas in play for Democrats, in fact. That fear will only grow by May, when the Talarico general election campaign will be in full swing.

 

Cornyn vs. Talarico.

 

Which brings us back to the hot take I dropped on you earlier. With Talarico as nominee, how can this possibly be a worst-case scenario for Democrats?

 

Think about it. Obviously they would have preferred a Paxton-Talarico contest, as that’s the one matchup they’d stand a strong chance of winning. But, failing that, there’s a case to be made that Paxton-Crockett and Cornyn-Crockett were their next best options. They’d assuredly lose in either case, but the certainty of defeat would mean they needn’t bother wasting big money to contest it. They could divert their cash instead to Maine, North Carolina, Alaska, and Ohio. Maybe even throw a few bucks at Iowa and Nebraska, just to see what happens.

 

Cornyn vs. Talarico is the worst of both worlds. Talarico is a heavy underdog but he’s also destined to get Democrats across the country hyped up about turning Texas blue, causing donations that should be going to more winnable races to pour into his campaign instead. Sure, Republicans will need to spend a little too in order to help Cornyn hold him off—but not nearly as much as they would have with Paxton as their nominee.

 

Trump’s shrewd ploy to try to avert a runoff will further reduce Talarico’s chances of winning, assuming that ploy succeeds. The two Republican candidates are poised to go scorched-earth on each other, with Team Cornyn particularly seeming to relish the chance to brutalize its nemesis. “I refuse to allow a flawed, self-centered and shameless candidate like Ken Paxton risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years,” the incumbent told his supporters last night. “Judgment Day is coming for Ken Paxton.”

 

A nasty runoff campaign in which the loser’s base ends up furious at the winner, resolving not to turn out for him in the general election, is how Talarico pulls an upset. So the president is working to prevent it, no doubt quietly dangling some sort of perk at Paxton behind the scenes to convince him to drop out after the Cornyn endorsement happens. If you liked him as Texas attorney general, you’ll love him when he’s running the Justice Department.

 

For hopefully obvious reasons, Cornyn is also far better positioned than Paxton to make hay of Talarico’s deviations from Christian orthodoxy. The Democratic nominee is prone to saying things like “God is nonbinary” and treating his faith as merely one of several possible paths to divine truth, and Republicans will make sure Texas Christians know it. Leftists seem to believe Talarico’s devotion is a major asset in the race, a way to claw back some of the right’s cultural “ownership” of Christianity, with one campaign adviser attributing his success with Hispanics to his message of “faith and family and jobs and bringing people together.”

 

But I suspect they’ve fallen into what we might call the “Tim Walz trap” in believing that. Walz, supposedly, was going to connect with rural voters as his party’s vice presidential nominee by dint of his small-town working-class background. That’s not what happened in the 2024 campaign, though; his left-wing ideological preferences made his cultural bona fides suspect, even ridiculous, to “real America.” Talarico faces being exposed in the same way on faith—by Cornyn, perhaps. By the amoral Paxton? Not so much.

 

And so I would summarize last night’s results this way: Paxton-Talarico is a race that Democrats could win today, with things exactly as they are in America, while Cornyn-Talarico is a race that Democrats can’t win without world events further eroding the president’s support. The Iran war becomes a fiasco; oil prices rise and inflation reignites; ICE kills a few more Americans; Trump renovates the Lincoln Memorial by replacing its namesake’s visage with his own.

 

All possible! Maybe even likely. But that’s what it’ll take to make real trouble for Cornyn, I suspect. To borrow the old line about Brazil: Texas is the blue state of the future, and it always will be.