The Paxton-Platner connection
Did their respective parties nominate the wrong guys?
The downside of taking a week off from column writing is the need to catch up. Since we last corresponded on May 18, Texas Republicans held their Senate runoff election, with controversial, baggage-laden state Attorney General Ken Paxton defeating four-term incumbent John Cornyn by almost 28 percentage points, 63.8 to 36.2 percent, and the already intriguing Maine Senate race has become even more interesting.
Democrats are excited about their nominee in Texas, state Rep. James Talarico, some going so far as to predict that the political strengths of the 37-year-old state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian will “turn Texas blue” amid a Democratic wave. An alternative way of looking at the Texas Senate race is that last week’s outcome sets up the largest political science experiment ever conducted, testing the thesis that no matter how flawed and politically unpalatable a Republican can be, a GOP candidate will always win a U.S. Senate general election in Texas. Keep in mind that incumbent Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 was the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Texas; the last time a Democrat won any Texas statewide office was in 1994, when four incumbents earned reelection.
Democrats’ arguments ignore several inconvenient truths. First, while a Talarico-Paxton race will surely be very competitive, few would argue that the Democrat would have had any chance against Cornyn. The determinative factor in this political equation is Paxton, not Talarico.
How weak of a candidate is Paxton? Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini made the point last week in his newsletter The Intersection that “Ken Paxton is somewhere between Herschel Walker and Roy Moore in candidate quality—and a lot hinges on where he lands on that spectrum.” Ruffini’s comparisons sent me looking at exit polls in Walker’s unsuccessful 2020 race in Georgia as well as Moore’s 2017 flop in Alabama. Moore, who was buffeted by charges of inappropriate behavior with underage girls, still won 91 percent of the vote among Republicans (to 8 percent for Democrat Doug Jones) that year. Walker, who had little business running for the Senate, still took 95 percent of Republicans (to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s 4 percent), a sign of how few partisans defect these days in even the worst of circumstances.
My guess is that, due to the state’s sheer partisanship, Paxton remains an ever-so-slight favorite, but if a Republican could possibly lose, it would be Paxton. For that matter, any randomly selected Republican in the state’s congressional delegation would probably run stronger than Paxton; the GOP base vote would be sufficient for victory. As Ruffini went on to note: “The campaign to polarize the conservative electorate against James Talarico—with comments heavy on veganism and gender ideology—has only begun. And in a state like Texas, polarization is usually enough.” At the very least, with Paxton as the GOP nominee, the state’s price tag for Republicans will be a couple hundred million dollars higher, money that would have been useful elsewhere.
The second truth is that a state is hardly turning blue if Democrats have virtually no chance of winning at least five, if not all six of the constitutional statewide offices on the Texas ballot. The GOP nominees for governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, and the land, railroad, and agriculture commissioners are locks to win. Democrats have a remote chance of winning the attorney general’s post.
Third, both the state Senate and House look to stay safely in GOP hands; 16 of the 31 Senate districts are up this year, and it’s pretty unlikely that the GOP’s 18-to-12 majority will flip (there is one vacancy). In the House, all 150 seats are up; Republicans have 88, Democrats 62. Finally, thanks to a very aggressive and appalling gerrymander, Republicans will almost certainly in the next Congress have more than the 24 U.S. House seats in Texas that they currently hold. This is hardly a state turning blue, even if Democrats manage to pick up a Senate seat.
Down East or down the drain?
Bombshell stories Saturday in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on Graham Platner’s marital indiscretions rocked the candidacy of the 41-year-old presumptive Democratic opponent of Sen. Susan Collins. Platner, an oyster farmer and veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, had already been plagued by a nonstop litany of stories about inappropriate social media posts over the years and a now-altered chest tattoo that was said to be a Nazi emblem.
A year ago, the question in Maine was whether Democratic Gov. Janet Mills would challenge Collins. Mills held off, indicating that she would wait until mid-October. But in August, Platner jumped the line, tapping into a desire among Democrats for fresher faces and political outsiders. He caught on fast, raising an enormous amount of money from the national Democratic donor community.
This column in March raised the question of whether Platner’s nomination represented an unnecessary risk for Democrats, given the importance of winning the Maine seat if they were to have any chance of capturing a Senate majority this year, or arguably even in 2028. A Collins-Mills race would have been more about Collins’s frequent but not unfailing support for President Trump’s policies and nominees, while a Collins-Platner contest would more likely be about Platner.
There is reason to believe that Mills’s campaign expected outside groups to step in and go negative on Platner, but no cavalry arrived, and Mills’s campaign had to do the wet work themselves. They did, though certainly not as robustly as Republicans will. Mills suspended her campaign—though, importantly, she did not drop out; her name will be on the June 9 ballot with Platner and a lesser-known third candidate.
The new allegations from this past weekend were sufficiently serious that Platner bailed on a previously scheduled live MS NOW cable interview and instead headed to D.C. on Tuesday to meet with Democratic senators in what appears to be a damage-control mission. Under Maine law, if a Senate nominee drops out of the race by July 13, party officials could designate a replacement.
This is a story that is fast developing and impossible to predict. The Democratic base has its own ideas about electability, and it seemed largely unconcerned about Platner’s past—at least until the last few days.