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.

(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 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........

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