Republicans need unity after primary. Talarico will help them find it | Opinion

For the interminable stretch between the original March 3 Republican primary and the now-settled runoff, I knew that a healing mission lay ahead afterward, focused on whichever side lost the year-long battle between Sen. John Cornyn and challenger Ken Paxton.

I wondered which would be the longer bridge to cross: getting a disillusioned Paxton base to go along with six more underwhelming years of Cornyn or peeling Cornyn voters away from his daily assertions that Paxton is simply a horrible human being?

I thought the Paxton base might be a harder pitch for the unity train if they had lost. While Cornyn’s voters had their objections to Paxton, most of them had also voted for him for attorney general over the last three election cycles. If Cornyn lost, I envisioned this as an argument to lure the wounded into the light for the cause of November success.

As events would have it, there is another factor that may be in play: inevitability. There will be no festering frustrations over a tight battle narrowly lost, no hand-wringing over what might have been, with just a few more dollars spent, a few more blocks walked.

This was a trouncing for the ages.

Polls had swelled from an average of about 4 to 6 points in Paxton’s favor to an eye-opener featuring double digits in early May, peaking with one survey pointing to a roughly 20-point win.

“Please,” I told a radio audience on Election Day. “Ken will win, but it won’t be by 20 points.” And it wasn’t. It was closer to 30.

How did this happen? Cornyn is not like the other notable incumbent casualties of late. He is not a contrarian grandstander like Rep. Thomas Massie or a not-so-well-concealed anti-Trumper like Sen. Bill Cassidy. Cornyn properly pointed to a cooperative track record in President Donald Trump’s second term that he thought would outweigh memories of past differences with the president.

Rep. Chip Roy probably thought the same in his race for attorney general — he even went to bat in the House for the SAVE America Act, election-integrity legislation that many think was part of Cornyn’s undoing as it languished in the Senate. But state Sen. Mayes Middleton made masterful use of past Roy quotes to brand him as a “backstabbing RINO” even as Roy ran ads featuring an endorsement from Sen. Ted Cruz and praise from Trump himself.

But in his 10-point runoff win, Middleton enjoyed the same benefit that lofted Paxton to success: an unblemished MAGA-flavored track record. Voters were in no mood to gamble whether past rogue attitudes would recur. Roy and Cornyn did appreciable jobs of making the case of recent trustworthiness to voters in the Trump base. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough.

Voters may have seen the anti-Trump hostilities of the outgoing Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and concluded that they were not interested in wondering if Cornyn’s Trump support would wobble once he won or, even more notably, once Trump left the White House in just two years. Paxton’s decade of fervent Trump loyalty was an irresistible alternative.

As for Trump’s endorsement, his late nod to Paxton now looks like a safe exclamation point rather than a timely difference-maker. And my friend Patrick Svitek, a longtime Texas reporter now at CNN, shared a sound theory with me Wednesday morning. Trump affected the race, he said, not with his endorsement of Paxton late in the game but with his non-endorsement of Cornyn over an entire year.

A president supposedly so well-served by a storied incumbent is a glaring omission if he stays on the sidelines. This, plus the inexplicable candidacy of Rep. Wesley Hunt, made a runoff inevitable, and the moment it went to a runoff, Cornyn’s fate was sealed.

Paxton’s election night victory speech in Plano contained welcome words of graciousness for the man he had branded as an unfit warrior along every stretch of the campaign trail.

“I want to thank John Cornyn for his service to this state,” Paxton said, reflecting the goodwill that usually follows months of primary election savagery. “John has dedicated much of his life to serving Texans. He’s worked diligently for years to help Texas, and for that spirit of service to the Lone Star State and our nation, I’m very grateful.”

So should we all be. And while Cornyn may not float any more highways to be named after Trump or post any more photos of himself perusing the pages of “The Art of the Deal,” nor is he likely to stain his final chapter with the performative bitterness of some of his departing congressional colleagues.

Even if the shock of an election beating mitigates some of the bad blood that always accompanies loss, stragglers in the Cornyn voter base have until November to recover and regain focus. More unifying language from Paxton will help, and it will be joined by harmonious direction from every major voice in Texas Republican politics.

But one voice may be the most valuable of all. It is that of Democratic nominee James Talarico, who has declared his belief that there are several biological genders, his enthusiasm for abortion and the stunning fiction that the Bible endorses both. Add to these scriptural offenses the usual Democratic snack plate of soft borders and climate extremism, topped off with a spoonful of self-loathing over his whiteness and masculinity, and the Paxton ads for the next five months nearly write themselves.

It was never true that Paxton’s candidacy would require some herculean effort to drag him across the finish line. Republican enthusiasm will be a powerful engine, with a turbo boost from an opponent supplying multiple gifts along the way.

Mark Davis hosts a morning radio show in Dallas-Fort Worth on 660-AM and at 660amtheanswer.com. Follow him on X: @markdavis.