By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Ken Paxton has defeated incumbent John Cornyn for the GOP
nomination in the Texas Senate race, and of course the real tragedy is
personal: My many written thoughts about the matter, both here and on Twitter/X,
have made me intensely unpopular on all sides. (Special thanks to Jon
Favreau and all the boys over on Bluesky.) Since it’s been relatively light
sledding so far, let me offer you a few more thoughts, and we’ll see how
far I can push my luck.
Pity John Cornyn
(There — I’ve already alienated a significant portion of
my audience.) In retrospect it becomes clear that Cornyn never could have won
this race, even if he had chosen to run it as recklessly as possible. Texas
Republicans were transparently tired of him as an old “insider” and saw their
opening for change — that impulse overrode any other consideration. Did he
bring it on himself by being an uncertain champion of MAGA? Perhaps so, in the
sense that Cornyn has always been an institutionalist, and we live in an era
when the most ardent activists on both sides express unleavened contempt toward
political institutions and would not mind seeing them torn down — so long as
the “good team” won. (The worst on both sides are vocally eager to get at the
demolition work.)
In many ways Cornyn’s doom was determined by structural
factors: A primary is low turnout enough as it is; runoffs are but a fraction
of that and thus confined mostly to motivated partisans. Guess which section of
the base was far more motivated to turn out in a runoff? The sweepingly
large margin of victory is less surprising when you consider what kind of voter
was voting. Cornyn clearly lost those people long ago, and if ever given a
second-chance bite at the apple, they were always going to swamp him.
And Cornyn was caught in a pincer: The national issue
Paxton leveraged the most during the campaign was the “SAVE Act,” Trump’s
“election federalizing” bill that was nowhere near having enough votes to break
a filibuster. The one election-focused move he might have made was to throw his
lot early and loudly in with the passage of the SAVE Act. It wouldn’t have
gotten it passed at all — a Senate in clear danger of heading into minority
status after 2026 wasn’t about to destroy the balance of the republic as well
as its own future leverage by nuking the filibuster for Trump’s dubious and
likely unconstitutional fantasy legislation.
But it might have made the margin closer. Yet even though
Cornyn publicly backed “filibuster reform,” it was clear enough that his heart
was not in it. He understood the stakes, and he wasn’t going to destroy the
Senate’s reason for existence over a fantasy. Cornyn is an immensely popular
senator among his colleagues — again, the sort of thing that no doubt
instinctively makes populist types dislike him more — and is going to be missed
as one of GOP conference’s strongest fundraisers.
Last night, following his concession to Paxton, Senator
Cornyn tweeted out a single line from the Second Epistle to Timothy — a Pauline
letter widely believed to be the last work Saint Paul wrote before he died: “I
have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
That he has.
I Don’t Have to Like James Talarico Nearly as Much as
You Seem to Think I Do
A kiss-off to end, because the headline more or less
speaks for itself. But since I’m currently being denounced by all the
better-thinking people in the American commentariat (sometimes in truly
remarkable, creative ways), I will emphasize: Just because I find Ken Paxton to
be a truly sleazy and disreputable man does
not mean that I have to like James Talarico any better. I don’t like either
candidate, and I don’t have to pretend that James Talarico is now a haloed
angel because his “superior virtue” somehow obviates his repulsive politics. I
in fact believe them both to be equally deficient in different ways, I’m glad
I’ll never have to vote for either of them, and what’s more, I already explained all of this to readers of National
Review at extended length months ago:
Mind you, I have no problem
damning Ken Paxton’s moral character, having done so enthusiastically several
times here at NR. (The man both morally and personally resembles Jabba the Hutt
in cowboy boots. Vote Cornyn.) But speaking as a Christian myself, I see
nothing particularly praiseworthy about James Talarico’s moral character at
all, and in fact much that suggests either intellectual cowardice or
dishonesty: a failure to accept the demands that Christ places on man and
society. In fact, I see a strange kinship he has with Ken Paxton: Both are, in
their own way, politicians who found the simple rigors of Christianity inimical
to their politics and appetites, and they therefore decided to sacrifice the
demands of Christ for the desires of man.
Christianity is not merely a
system of manners; it’s a system of divinely commanded morals. Those morals are
not socially negotiated among activists. As an unrelated aside, it’s worth
remembering that Jesus warned against false prophets.
The fact that Paxton is an obvious sinner does not make
Talarico a saint, and anybody who thinks that the sorts of progressive evils he
represents are immaterial (“he’s just a meek-sounding dweeb!” I hear people
say) simply doesn’t understand the worldview I come from — no matter how many
times I explain it.
You might be impressed by Talarico’s predictably
fashionable ultra-progressivism. You might be impressed with his
cynically instrumental deployment of his faith — which veers into the heretical
in any serious Christian sense — always and only to bolster his political
views. You might be erotically stirred by the idea of Turning Texas
Blue. I am not interested in any of these things. I don’t have to shill for Ken
Paxton, but I’ll be good and goddamned if I cut James Talarico even an inch of
slack on his miserable progressive politics.
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