Texas Republican Ken Paxton has often worn the black hat in his scandal-plagued extremist political career. But as I explained at New York, he may have picked the wrong cause at the worst possible time.

As any college-football fan can tell you, the sport is in the midst of all sorts of revolutionary changes. Federal courts have steadily eroded the old system treating college athletes as amateurs bound to one school and governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Players in all the major college sports are being openly paid (some of them so much that they are delaying entry into the professional leagues) and have won virtually unlimited transfer rights. Football, by far the biggest revenue generator for college athletics, is now governed less by the NCAA than by teams and the sprawling conferences to which they belong and the media networks paying for the whole show.

But in this time of college-football iconoclasm, there are a few things still considered holy. Chief among them are norms deemed essential to “the integrity of the game,” which is code for the fair competition between teams that is supposed to go on no matter how much off-field chaos surrounds it. And that’s why, for all the mockery the NCAA draws these days as a toothless tiger in a dangerous jungle, people in the sport totally lined up behind its decision to ban participation in the 2026 season by Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who got caught doing some pretty heavy sports gambling, including the biggest no-no of all: gambling on his own team’s games (actually a couple of transfers earlier, when Sorsby was at Indiana). There was a general sense that if the NCAA couldn’t enforce that norm, the sport would collapse from a general loss of faith in the central myth of young athletes giving their very best in fair competition.

And so when a state judge in Texas intervened to slap a temporary injunction on NCAA sanctions against Sorsby, which effectively guaranteed he’d get to play for Texas Tech in 2026 while his case was litigated (earning, according to most reports, several million dollars), the reaction was intense, as ESPN reported:

“The reaction around college sports was nearly unanimous, with the idea of Sorsby playing in 2026 after admitting to thousands of bets on sports — including 40 on his own team — representing the latest crossroads for an industry that has faced a dizzying number of them in recent years.

“ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told ESPN the ruling represents a ‘horrendous pattern’ that is ‘eroding the integrity of our process.’ A Big 12 athletic director told ESPN that they are ‘disgusted’ and added: ‘We officially lost our soul.’ TCU coach Sonny Dykes told ESPN: ‘How is anyone ever going to trust the outcome of a game again?’”

Texas Tech, expected to be a National Championship contender this year (in no small part because of heavy spending on players financed by billionaire donor Cody Campbell), chose to play the outlaw in the unfolding drama. The school argued that Sorsby was an addict undergoing treatment for his gambling habit and pointed out that he had never, so far as anyone knew, gambled on a game in which he was playing. It also offered to bench him for two early games as a slap on the wrist.

As Texas Tech’s own Big 12 conference discussed sanctions on the player and the program, the school suddenly drew one ferocious ally: Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who is also the Republican nominee in a red-hot U.S. Senate race. Paxton jumped into the fray with spurs flashing, as Bloomberg Law explains:

“The Big 12 Conference and its schools were threatened with $200 million in damages by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) if they move to sanction Texas Tech over the participation of star quarterback Brendan Sorsby this season.

“Any sanction against Texas Tech for acting consistent with a court’s injunction that reinstated Sorsby’s eligibility on June 8 would violate state and federal antitrust laws, Paxton said in a letter to Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and board of directors chair Douglas Girod.

“Additionally, any sanction that results in a change to Texas Tech’s scheduled games through cancellations would constitute a breach of the Big 12’s contract with the school, Paxton said. Such an action could also unlawfully interfere with the school’s sponsorship arrangements, ticket sale commitments, alumni contributions, and other commercial relationships, the letter said.”

You can argue that Paxton felt some responsibility to defend a Texas judge’s order against out-of-state interlopers. But still, he could have easily stayed out of it until some actual sanction was imposed instead of threatening Tech’s critics preemptively.

Legal arguments aside, the political risk looks formidable. Sure, the Red Raider fan base (which probably overlaps with Paxton’s ultra-MAGA following to some extent) will be thrilled. But as FootballScoop observed, some of the Big 12 programs Paxton is threatening are also located in the very football-mad state: “Tech now has the state’s chief law enforcement officer on its side in [its] presumptive fight; one must wonder how that’s going over on the campuses of Baylor, Houston and TCU, whom Paxton also represents.”

You also have to wonder if Paxton is troubled by the borderline-woke arguments Texas Tech is making about Sorsby needing to be left alone with his millions so that he can get along with his gambling-addiction treatment.

All in all, it’s quite the gamble Paxton is taking at a time when he’s in a very tough contest with squeaky-clean Democrat James Talarico. Maybe the scandal-plagued Paxton is happy to wear the black hat consistently as the scourge of hypocritical rules-observing elites in politics and now sports. Perhaps he expects a very nice thank-you check to his cash-strapped campaign from Cody Campbell, a heavy contributor to other Texas Republicans. But as the Sorsby saga unfolds in the fall not long before Election Day, he may discover he’s bet on the wrong bettor.

After watching campaigns in California the last few months, I became convinced the hype around Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt was feeding a grand illusion. The results confirmed that judgment, as I explained at New York:

In retrospect, there was no real world in which Spencer Pratt was going to be elected mayor of Los Angeles. Polls consistently showed him finishing second or third in last week’s nonpartisan top-two primary. If he had finished second and made the general election, polls suggested he would have been crushed by whichever Democrat he was matched against (incumbent Karen Bass or progressive challenger Nithya Raman). Why? Because Pratt, the reality-TV villain, was a Republican running a MAGA-style campaign in a profoundly Democratic city, where his most prominent supporter, Donald Trump, is widely loathed.

Pratt was able to dramatize a lot of general unhappiness with the city’s many problems under the Bass administration, in part because his own home was consumed by the Palisades fire that erupted while the incumbent mayor was at a highly optional diplomatic event overseas (breaking one of her own campaign promises). But the broad brush his viral campaign ads applied to L.A.’s problems was never confined to Bass or local Democrats. Instead, they focused on various Democratic targets in Sacramento and Washington. The most famous Pratt ad shows him as an AI action figure battling not just Bass but an aggressively evil Gavin Newsom and a vodka-swilling Kamala Harris. These are politicians who won over 70 percent of the vote in the city of Los Angeles in the 2022 gubernatorial and 2024 presidential elections, respectively. Pratt was pretty clearly appealing to a conservative audience far outside the jurisdiction he was running to represent. As journalist Benjy Sarlin put it on X:

“I don’t pretend to have had some prediction on LA results. But I did notice many of my favorite smart conservatives outside LA raving over Pratt AI videos that were entirely political porn for national conservatives.”

And thus, a wildly unrealistic sense of Pratt’s electoral strength spread in the chattering classes, as reflected in this op-ed that appeared in the Hill in mid-May:

“There is a recent and instructive precedent for an outsider campaign combining savvy social media use and a populist message centered on arguing ‘my opponent is out of touch.’”

“In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani leveraged social media and a populist message to upset former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, despite having just 7 percent odds on the Polymarket gambling website six months before the election. In comparison, Pratt’s odds are at 28 percent, considerably higher.”

On primary night, when the initial (almost always Republican-leaning) results showed Pratt as a solid second in the mayoral race, all sorts of premature celebrations broke out. Pratt had become a meme as much as a candidate, as reflected in this reaction to the early returns by RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree:

“What set Pratt apart from other political outsiders was his willingness to weaponize artificial intelligence as a campaign tool — and his instinct for where voter anger was running hottest …

“In a city where voters had grown tired of polished talking points and incremental promises, Pratt’s unfiltered approach found a receptive audience. His social media following swelled, his rallies grew louder, and what had once seemed like a publicity stunt began to look like a legitimate political movement.”

Or maybe not. Pratt did well where you would expect: in the wealthier, whiter, and more conservative parts of the city, areas where Republican turned Democrat Rick Caruso performed even better in his unsuccessful 2022 race against Bass. As votes from the rest of L.A. began to come in, it became increasingly clear that Pratt would, at best, wind up with about the same percentage of the vote that Trump won in 2024. His early showing on the evening of the primary was the classic “red mirage” — much like Trump’s national “victory” on Election Night in 2020 — based on partisan voting and reporting trends favoring Republicans early and Democrats later (a phenomenon made even more predictable than usual this year because Democrats in California were withholding mail ballots until the last minute as the convoluted gubernatorial contest took shape).

Thanks to all the advance hype, however, Pratt’s excited national constituency could only see his steady demise as the votes rolled in as a conspiracy, an interpretation that, of course, his chief supporter in the White House was eager to feed. Trump wrote on Truth Social:

“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT”

Trump’s claims ignore the inconvenient fact that Republican Steve Hilton is almost certainly going to make the gubernatorial general election, but the president is never inclined to let logic get in the way of his election-denial fables.

The Associated Press called the mayoral primary for Bass and Raman on Monday afternoon, June 8. With an estimated 92 percent of the ballots counted, Pratt trailed Raman by 2.7 percent of the vote, almost precisely where the final Berkeley IGS–L.A. Times poll had him. In the end, the only real surprise is that so many people bought into Pratt’s hype and thought he had a serious chance to win. Mayor Pratt was ultimately as close to reality as The Hills.

It’s like clockwork: whenever California votes, Republicans start circulating conspiracy theories about fraud, so I did some explaining at New York:

Now we know why so many leading California Democratic elected officials — notably Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta — made such a big deal out of the need for Golden State voters to fill out and send in their mail ballots as early as possible this year. Sure enough, on Thursday, as overwhelmed California election officials were still working to tabulate California primary ballots, the president of the United States raised his familiar cry of “vote fraud!” in two posts on Truth Social:

“The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”

And:

“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT”

Since Trump has been demagoguing California voting procedures for many years, you have to suspect that he knows the answer to his questions. There are “massive numbers” of mail ballots because this is the principal way that voters in California — and also in Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia — vote. There is vote-counting “DELAY” because it takes longer to process and count mail ballots, which have to be opened, signature-verified, examined for improper marking, then scanned. The very measures necessary to avoid “fraud” slow down the process.

Many “votes are all tied up” because of a phenomenon known as “the pig in the python,” as the San Francisco Chronicle explained at about the same time Trump was disingenuously freaking out:

“[T]he pig is the quarter of voters who hang onto their mail-in ballots until the very end, dropping their sealed and signed envelope off to election offices or drop boxes on, or just before, Election Day. … The election workers, who only have so much time, space and hands, are the snake. They swallow the surge in ballots whole, creating an immediate chokepoint.

“Mail-in ballots are more work to count thanks to a mix of logistical steps and state law. Workers verify signatures, separate ballots from envelopes, and if stray marks or other odd hand-filled ballots prompt an adjudication, that process is run by a jury of two people to determine a voter’s intent. The tasks stack up fast.”

To hear some Republicans, the big problem is California’s practice (along with 13 other states and the District of Columbia) of allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if received later (up until June 9 in this case). Indeed, the RNC has sued to ban this procedure in a case that is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. But according to the Public Policy Institute of California, only about 5 percent of the ballots cast in 2024 were received after Election Day; this grace period simply expands the size of the python in the pig.

So why do Trump and other Republicans so often allege fraud in California without a shred of specific evidence? It’s simple, and simple-minded: Because the full count takes days and even weeks, it can change who’s ahead or behind over time. And because of a much-noted “blue shift” phenomenon in states with long periods for voting by mail, Republicans tend to do better in early returns and then lose ground later on. There’s no reason to assume anything sinister is going on; it’s mostly a matter of younger voters who skew Democratic often being the last to turn in their ballots, which are then the last counted. This year in California the “blue shift” was definitely accentuated by Democratic voters who held on to their mail ballots for strategic reasons because they feared the large and diffuse Democratic gubernatorial field might produce a GOP lockout (i.e., Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco finishing first and second and excluding Democrats from the general election).

Nobody should be surprised, then, at the relatively strong performances in early vote counting by Republican candidates like Hilton and Los Angeles mayoral aspirant Spencer Pratt or by the gradual erosion of their numbers as later-cast ballots are counted. It’s just logical.

But now, CNN reports, allegedly suspicious prosecutors are looking into this inexplicable fading away of the enormous GOP election night victory:

“The Justice Department sent one of its attorneys to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles Friday morning, the county’s elections office told CNN, after President Donald Trump claimed earlier this week the US Attorney’s office there was investigating the vote counting. …

“’The individual arrived this morning, was provided an overview of the public observation program, and participated in a walkthrough of the ballot processing operations,’ the spokesperson, Mike Sanchez said in an email, noting that ballot processing in the county is open to public observation.”

There’s no mystery involved in the process, other than why these claims of voter fraud pop up every time Republicans lose an election in California, which is every time there’s an election. If wily Democratic election officials wanted to rob Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt of a victory, surely they would steal votes from them on Primary Night instead of waiting around for prosecutors to show up to catch them in the act!

This sort of calumny has become regular for Republicans who somehow believe Election Night counts are sacrosanct; it was the foundation, in fact, of Trump’s fateful challenge to his defeat in 2020 after he “won” the election in early vote counting. So GOP voices will be uninhibited in alleging fraud, particularly if Hilton and Pratt fail to finish first and second and don’t make the general-election ballot (unlikely, but not impossible).

Is there something California (and other all-mail-ballot states) can do in the future to accelerate vote counting and put the lie to all the conspiracy theories? It could, of course, spend a lot more money on election-office staffing at the state and local effort to basically build a bigger python that the pig of late mail ballots cannot choke. Part of the problem now is that county personnel who are processing incoming mail ballots can’t be deployed to count the ones already received, which requires a “pause” in ballot counting the very day after the election. So campaign operatives and political junkies with their tongues lolling out for quick and definitive results are sitting on the sidelines frustrated as vote totals stay frozen awaiting “updates” from the counties and the state. To outsiders, it looks like election officials are taking hours and whole days off when it’s really anything but that. A lot more staff could help solve the problem and keep conspiracy theorists at bay.

California could also make it less of a priority to give last-minute voters a ton of options (putting ballots in the mail, placing them in drop boxes, or going to a voting center to have them scanned) and lots of time to “cure” inadvertent errors like stray marks on ballots. But “convenience voting” and measures to promote ballot security (allegedly a big concern of Republican critics) aren’t entirely compatible with a fast count.

What is very clear is that the president himself will be satisfied only with a system that guarantees that he and his party’s candidates never lose. Any victory by “Dumocrats” has to be the product of fraud or disinformation from the “radical left” media. Unfortunately, that means slow vote counts will be grist for the mill of his incessant innuendos and slurs. Jurisdictions controlled by Democrats should probably make speeding up these counts an urgent priority, lest MAGA folk convince themselves and others that voting itself is an unnecessary scam that should just be discarded.

The June 4 primary in Iowa showed that Donald Trump’s endorsement magic doesn’t always work, as I noted at New York:

Donald Trump has been a powerhouse in 2026 midterm primaries, purging alleged RINOs like Bill Cassidy in Louisiana and stubborn rebels like Thomas Massie in Kentucky. But the president’s late intervention in Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial primary in Iowa didn’t work. Trump’s endorsed candidate was the long-time front-runner, U.S. representative Randy Feenstra. He managed to get over the 35 percent needed to avoid a nominating convention in Iowa. But unfortunately for Feenstra and the White House, his hard-core right-wing rival Zach Lahn won slightly more. Lahn had 37.8 percent of the vote to Feenstra’s 37 percent, with 99 percent reporting, per NBC News.

Lahn appealed to a very grumpy Iowa-primary electorate by running as an abrasive outsider hostile to elites in both parties, much as Trump did in 2016. Like a lot of conservative extremists running for state offices this year, Lahn wants to abolish property taxes (which would, of course, demolish local governments and public schools). He also shrewdly came out for banning foreign ownership of Iowa farmland. He’s hardly hostile to Trump, but ran as more MAGA than the official MAGA candidate (he was endorsed by the PAC MAHA Action, probably because he’s a serious anti-vaxxer).

Feenstra ran an overcautious campaign; he dodged debates and didn’t secure Trump’s backing until very late in the day. And who knows, there may have been some lingering right-wing resentment of him for giving racist congressman Steve King the heave-ho in a 2020 primary.

In any event, Lahn’s victory could be good news for Democratic gubernatorial nominee (and state auditor) Rob Sand. Aside from his extremist views, the new GOP nominee’s habit of hopping between residences and careers in both Iowa and Kansas could be an issue for proud Iowans. And in general, Iowa Democrats are feeling their oats this year after a dreadful stretch of election losses dating back to 2014. It’s notable that despite the red-hot GOP gubernatorial contest nearly as many Democrats as Republicans participated in the primary (notably lifting Josh Turek to a comfortable win over Zach Wahls for the U.S. Senate nomination).

Trump won Iowa by 13 percent in 2024, his third and largest victory in the state. But his tariff policies and inability to get a grip on living costs has battered his popularity in Iowa and other heartland locales. As Feenstra’s demise illustrates, Republicans aren’t off to a good start in the Hawkeye State heading toward the November midterms.

When California’s nonpartisan top-two primary concludes on June 2, there will be a lot of national media interest in how well reality star Spencer Pratt does in his over-the-top challenge to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. At New York, I explain why Pratt’s candidacy isn’t that serious:

In its initial phases, the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral contest was as low-key (bordering on boring) as the parallel California gubernatorial race. Mayor Karen Bass has had persistently low job-approval numbers, dating back to her shaky handling of the Palisades Fire early last year. But several potential big-dog rivals (including her wealthy 2022 opponent, mall developer Rick Caruso) gave the race a pass. It seemed L.A. would give the incumbent a second term, as it’s done many times in the past.

But then two significant challenges to Bass emerged. In January, exactly one year after his Pacific Palisades home burned down, reality TV star Spencer Pratt announced a mayoral run during a “They Let Us Burn” rally, in which protesters expressed frustration at the slow pace of rebuilding in the afflicted area. A month later, L.A. councilmember Nithya Raman, a progressive ally of the mayor’s, surprised observers by jumping into the race.

Now, with voting due to conclude on June 2 (all registered voters have been sent mail ballots, but some may elect to turn them in at drop boxes or Election Day polling centers), polls have increasingly confirmed that this is a three-way race, with two tickets to the November election up for grabs. The latest, from UC Berkeley–L.A. Times, shows Bass with 26 percent, Raman with 25 percent, and Pratt with 22 percent among likely voters. That’s consistent with earlier polls showing the incumbent treading water and her two opponents — one running to her left, one to her right — gradually gaining strength.

It’s Pratt whose campaign appears to have gone viral nationally as well as locally. A notorious heel on the 2000s reality show The Hills with a big social-media following, Pratt embodied Palisades Fire victimhood (he is still more or less living in an Airstream trailer on his burned-out lot). But his campaign has quickly morphed into a populist-outsider attack on the city’s problems and their mismanagement by the powers that be. He’s raised a surprising amount of money, and his over-the-top ads are a constant topic of discussion. His most famous ad deployed AI to depict himself as Batman and Bass as the Joker, surrounded by various famous Democrats.

The ad shows Pratt’s appeal as a bomb thrower in a city suffering from chronic problems and poor morale, but also his limitations. It’s a very MAGA-coded message that focuses as much on mocking Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris (both of whom racked up huge vote margins in Los Angeles in recent elections) as in demonizing Karen Bass. Since Pratt is a Republican and has received an enthusiastic shout-out from President Trump (a profoundly unpopular person in Los Angeles), it’s likely his rise in the polls represents a consolidation of the small but very real conservative minority in the city (Trump himself won 26 percent of the vote there in 2024). So there’s likely a pretty firm ceiling on Pratt’s vote that’s well south of a majority.

Meanwhile, Nithya Raman is seeking to undermine progressive support for the incumbent. Her ethnicity (she was born in India and was the first South Asian American member of the Los Angeles City Council) and past backing from the Democratic Socialists of America has led to some comparisons with Zohran Mamdani. She’s tried to moderate her message during the current contest and could benefit from concerns among Democrats generally about how well Bass has handled her reelection campaign. But she has to worry about a rival to her own left in tenant-rights advocate Rae Chen Huang, who had 9 percent in the UC Berkeley–LAT poll.

The same poll included general-election trial heats that showed Bass leading Pratt by 47 percent to his 29 percent, but Raman leading Bass by 32 percent to 28 percent (it’s a less likely scenario, but Raman leads Pratt by 45 percent to 28 percent). Both Bass and Pratt have personal unfavorability ratings of 57 percent in this poll, showing that Pratt’s abrasive ads and attention-grabbing campaign have probably offended as many voters as they have attracted.

The irony, then, is that Spencer Pratt’s candidacy may be the best thing that could have happened to Karen Bass. If he edges out Raman for a general-election spot, and even if he thrills conservatives everywhere by running first, he’s almost certainly toast against a Democrat in a general election (much like Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton). A Bass-versus-Raman general-election contest would, for obvious reasons, be quite different in tone and the outcome far less clear. But there’s no question backers of the incumbent may privately cheer if it’s the former reality star posing in front of his trailer on primary night boasting of a ticket to November.

I’m old enough to remember when Texas was a Democratic state, and am happy to report that the extremism of the Lone Star GOP could make it highly competitive this November, as I explained at New York:

For people of a certain vintage, or students of history, the idea of Texas being an absolute wasteland for Democrats seems a bit strange. From Reconstruction until the 1950s, the Lone Star State was part of the Solid Democratic South. The state gave us all sorts of colorful Democratic political icons such as Ma and Pa Ferguson (Ma was elected governor of Texas after Pa was impeached and removed from office); W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour huckster; and the man O’Daniel beat in a red-hot 1941 U.S. Senate race, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Gradually, the civil-rights movement, the ideological polarization of the major parties, urbanization and suburbanization, and the politics of the oil business broke the Democratic hegemony over Texas and then reversed it. The last Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Twelve years later, Lloyd Bentsen, who had defeated future president George H.W. Bush in a 1970 Senate race, reached the national ticket as Michael Dukakis’s running mate; the two men then lost Texas in a landslide to Bush. The last time any Democrat won a statewide race in Texas was in 1994, the same year Poppy Bush’s son, George W. Bush, defeated incumbent Democratic governor Ann Richards and began his own climb to the White House.

Despite the long GOP winning streak in Texas, Democrats have been showing signs of revival, partly thanks to demographic changes in this rapidly growing state (which surpassed New York to become the nation’s second-largest population-wise in 1994) and partly due to growing Republican extremism. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Texas’s urban areas were a source of GOP strength; now most of them are trending strongly Democratic. Texas Latino voters, especially in the Rio Grande Valley, trended sharply Republican in 2024, but that hugely important shift is now looking to be temporary. And now Texas Republicans have given their opponents the inestimable gift of defenestrating their four-term champion-fundraising senior U.S. senator John Cornyn in favor of state attorney general Ken Paxton, a MAGA extremist with tons of ethics baggage. Might Democratic nominee James Talarico have a real shot of winning in November?

In both good and bad ways, Talarico, a state legislator and (in his spare time) seminary student, is reminding a lot of Democrats of their onetime Great White Hope, Beto O’Rourke. In 2018, the fresh-faced El Paso congressman threw a scare into Cornyn’s colleague Ted Cruz, at the time a symbol of GOP extremism. He drew huge crowds. He raised unfathomable amounts of money, much of it national grassroots dollars. And he benefited from a midterm pro-Democratic “wave” election. To be sure, Cruz still won, but only by 2.6 percent of the vote.

At the time, Beto O’Rourke’s future looked very bright, as did that of the Texas Democratic Party. But the dream of his Lone Star apotheosis turned out to be an illusion. After a desultory presidential run in 2020 that oozed hubris, O’Rourke challenged two-term Republican governor Greg Abbott in 2022 and, to be blunt about it, got his ass handed to him. He lost by over ten points, which, technically speaking, made it a landslide. And it was a token of how far Democrats had fallen that O’Rourke’s performance was the best Democratic Party gubernatorial showing since the losing Richards campaign 28 years earlier.

So like Charlie Brown with the football, Texas Democrats are torn between hope and experience in looking forward to November with Talarico heading up their ticket. Like O’Rourke eight years ago, he’s got money, charisma, a united party, and a vulnerable opponent in what should be a good year for his party. But is he the candidate to break the losing streak? And if not, can anybody do it?

It’s definitely going to be a grueling, nasty campaign. Republicans are semi-open about their inability (or unwillingness) to raise enough money to make Ken Paxton a palatable, voter-friendly candidate to anyone other than those already in the MAGA base. So the Paxton campaign is going to be 99 percent negative and aimed at convincing both conventional Republicans with low regard for their candidate and swing voters that Talarico is a fake Texan, a fake Christian, and a fake moderate. Even before Paxton became the official GOP nominee, Paxton’s PAC started running ads cherry-picking “weird” quotes from Talarico.

Religious slurs aimed at the Democrat are based on the bet that Talarico’s brand of liberal, mainline Protestant Christianity will seem alien to the conservative Evangelicals who dominate the Sunday landscape of much of Texas, along with non-churchgoing cultural conservatives who just assume Jesus is a symbol of “family values” and patriotism. However much time persuadable voters spend wondering about exactly how “weird” James Talarico is time they won’t spend dwelling on Paxton’s dubious marital history and his many bouts with fraud and corruption allegations — or, for that matter, his ultra-MAGA ideology, which makes Ted Cruz look like a RINO. I recall a pundit summing up a close election in another state as “stupid versus mean, and nine times out of ten, stupid beats mean.” Does “weird” beat “cruel and corrupt”? Early Paxton-Talarico polls show a very close race, and after Paxton’s nomination, the authoritative Cook Political Report moved its ever-cautious rating from Likely Republican to Lean Republican. The national breeze is going to matter regardless of how stormy this contest becomes.

In the end, this Senate race may just come down to which party Texans want to support in Congress in 2027 and what sort of message they choose to send to Washington. Paxton’s buddy and benefactor Donald Trump won Texas by 13 points in 2024, but some polls show Texans giving his current job performance as president a net negative assessment. In particular, Trump’s striking loss of support from the Latino voters who swung toward him two years ago puts Texas in reach for Democrats.

If Talarico wins, his party has a good chance of flipping control of the Senate. But more than that, it will indicate that the complexion of deep-red Texas truly is changing, and Republicans can’t just assume they can run any old lunatic and still win.

Like a lot of Democrats, my ears perked up when I heard the DNC had reversed field and released a version of its earlier-suppressed 2024 “autopsy report,” but as I noted at New York, it should have either been completed or deleted:

Complaints among Democratic activists and influencers over the DNC’s decision to abort its 2024 “autopsy report” was based on a craving for two things: (1) a clear “who done it” assessment of blame for Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump, and (2) a clear path forward for the party, in terms of its left-or-center ideological direction and its message to voters.

Now DNC chairman Ken Martin has released an extremely unfinished draft of the “autopsy” report, and those who wanted this to happen are going to be very disappointed — or perhaps even horrified. While the draft written by consultant Paul Rivera offers many granular observations about what went wrong in 2024 and what Democrats need to do going forward, there is neither an assessment nor a prescription that rises to the level of offering clarity to anguished Democratic Party members. Instead, the message that comes through is that Democrats are still processing what happened and what to do about it, but you’ll have to get back to them later for anything the least bit definitive. “Democrats really are in disarray” is the unmistakable takeaway.

To begin, the 192-page draft is literally incomplete, with an executive summary and a conclusion that might have somewhat tied it together entirely missing. Just as important, the released version includes marginal notes from DNC staff that constantly call into question a vast number of the author’s arguments and data points. In case you miss the effort to distance the party from the document, every page carries this disclaimer: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.” In other words: Believe this crap at your own risk! Rely on it at your peril!

That’s not to say there’s no value in slogging through the document’s snail’s-eye-view of what happened in 2024; its analysis of Democratic and Republican media strategies, organizational tactics, and fundraising all include some gems, assuming you ignore the DNC disclaimer and trust the data. There are also some broader insights about the Biden White House’s failure to prepare Kamala Harris for the role she was forced to play, the fateful campaign decision against going medieval on Donald Trump’s history, and the success or failure of down-ballot candidates whose strategy and message differed from Harris’s. But it requires an effort to distill real lessons from all the detail.

The decision to release the report in this undressed form is as mystifying as any of our questions about 2024.

Perhaps the most valuable insight in this deeply flawed document is a reminder that Democrats should not take solace in close losses or minimize the long-term challenge they face:

“To grow, we must admit and accept some hard truths about our Party. Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide, when he received nearly 10 million more votes than John McCain, the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. In doing so, we have lost the confidence we once received from everyday Americans — and election results show it.

“In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government. These losses are the direct result of missed opportunities to invest in our states, counties, and local parties and candidates”.

The report also notes that Democrats were in a similar long-term slough before Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. But it’s worth remembering that the party had calamitous losses immediately after both the Clinton and Obama breakthroughs, before recovering to reelect both of them. A true autopsy report would provide a long-term narrative of Democratic wins and losses and how they compare to today’s situation. It’s probably more than Rivera was asked to produce, but it’s nonetheless essential.

The good news for Democrats is that they really don’t need a 2024 autopsy to have a successful 2026 midterm election. All the bad consequences of a Trump return to power that they failed to explain in 2024 are now becoming manifest to a majority of Americans, with or without the opposition party’s efforts to point them out or offer alternatives. Yes, the mechanics Rivera’s report dwells on will matter at the margins, but midterms are inherently a referendum on presidential job performance, and no president has more forcefully made politics all about himself than Donald Trump.

A true 2024 autopsy will be most valuable after the midterms, when the 2028 election cycle gets underway. But even then, it’s the Democratic presidential candidate who will have to bring the party out of its current disarray and provide ideological, strategic, and tactical direction, just as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did in 1992 and 2008. The next true Democratic Party leader won’t be Ken Martin or his successors or Democratic congressional leaders, but the person who succeeds Kamala Harris (or perhaps Harris herself). Getting that choice right will mean more to the party’s future than any report, finished or half-finished, that anyone can devise. As autopsy contributor Rob Flaherty told New York’s Ben Hart recently, Democrats have a very basic “brand” problem. There’s still time for a rebranding, but it needs to begin this November.

One of Donald Trump’s most oddly timed candidate endorsement makes you wonder again if he really wants to win the midterms, as I discussed at New York:

Two days into early voting in the Texas runoff that ends May 26 and after months of teasing his choice, Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s primary challenge to four-term incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn on Truth Social. The post is mind-bogglingly long but makes it clear Trump deemed Paxton more loyal than Cornyn:

“John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough and, despite having the Most Successful Economy in the History of our Country during my First Term and, with all of the many other things that I accomplished (Secure Border, Military Dominance, Space Force, All Time High Stock Markets and 401(k)s, Record Job and Economic Growth, and so many other things that would be impossible to readily list!), which are considered by many to be legendary, John was very late in backing me in what turned out to be a Historic Run for the Republican Nomination, and then, the Presidency, itself, both of which were Landslide Victories and, more importantly, gave us the Country that we have today — THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA.”

Translation: Cornyn was neutral in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest until Trump essentially nailed it down with a victory in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Paxton is MAGA to the max:

“Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN. Our Country needs Fighters, and also Loyalty to the Cause of Greatness.”

This is a presidential allusion to the incredibly long list of allegations against Paxton’s character — involving charges of financial corruption and serial adultery — that have been the centerpiece of Cornyn’s wildly expensive battle to save his Senate seat. Trump’s message is that all this alleged misconduct is washed away by Paxton’s loyalty to the president himself.

Trump’s endorsement also likely washes away the vast resources Cornyn and his friends in the Republican Senate Conference and the Texas Republican establishment have devoted to this race. According to the Texas Tribune, Cornyn’s campaign and allied PACs have spent nearly $100 million on ads alone in the primary and runoff, dwarfing Team Paxton’s estimated $9 million. Despite that cascade of advertising, much of it aimed at painting Paxton as a despicable scoundrel, Paxton was running even with or ahead of Cornyn in most recent runoff polls. Trump’s endorsement is likely to clinch the nomination for the challenger.

This is a bitter blow not just to Cornyn, but to the many Washington- and Texas-based Republican strategists who have viewed Paxton as a uniquely vulnerable nominee in a general election race with squeaky-clean Democrat James Talarico. For months, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his associates begged Trump to endorse the incumbent to solidify the GOP’s odds of maintaining control of the chamber instead of offering up another target in a state where Democrats are overdue for a breakthrough. The very day after the March primary, in which Cornyn narrowly led Paxton, Trump indicated he would be endorsing a candidate “soon,” and most D.C. insiders thought that meant he’d come to Cornyn’s rescue. But to their great chagrin, the nod never arrived. And now the president is essentially administering a coup de grâce to the incumbent, whose main positive talking point was his 99 percent pro-Trump voting record in the Senate.

It’s unclear exactly why Trump waited so long to intervene in this contest. He could have saved a lot of people a lot of money had he put down Cornyn earlier and easier. Perhaps he wanted to see if the mountains of mud the two candidates threw at each other would stick to one more than the other. As it is, other than the endorsee, the main beneficiaries of this delayed endorsement are Talarico and the Democrats running for the Senate in other battleground states, where all that money wasted on Cornyn could have done the GOP a lot of good. Meanwhile, Cornyn’s Republican friends will have to go to the mats and dig deep into their pockets to lift to the Senate a pol most of them have regarded as an ethical and political disaster.

 

The messy and unpredictable California gubernatorial primary is causing renewed heartburn among Democrats about non-partisan “jungle” primaries like that state’s top-two system, as I explain at New York.

For decades, many Democratic and Republican centrists (along with good-government types) have blamed partisan primaries for a lot of our political system’s ills. In 2009, one Republican centrist from California, Abel Maldonado, had a chance to do something about it, as CalMatters recently explained:

“In a top-two system, labeled a ‘jungle primary’ by its opponents, all candidates for an office are listed on the same ballot and the two top finishers, regardless of party, then duel in the November general election.

“It came about because in 2009, Democratic leaders of the state Senate desperately needed one more vote to pass a controversial budget and turned to moderate Republican Sen. Abel Maldonado to provide it. However, Maldonado — with the support of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — insisted that his vote hinged on placing the top-two primary before voters.

“Democrats eventually agreed and Proposition 14, creating the top-two system, appeared on the June 2010 primary ballot with Maldonado and Schwarzenegger contending that it would give moderates and pragmatists in both parties better chances of winning legislative and congressional seats. The leaders of every political party opposed the measure but voters passed it handily.”

Implemented in the 2012 elections, the top-two system has consistently been a source of confusion for California voters. They have struggled to get used to primary ballots with vast numbers of candidates from all sorts of parties along with self-identified “no party preference” independents. These nonpartisan primaries have produced one Democratic and one Republican general-election candidate in most competitive elections. But there have been periodic “lockouts,” in which candidates from one party win first and second place in the primary, then face each other in the general election. This possibility can lead to gamesmanship and strategic voting when it matters a great deal whether a lockout occurs, notably in a 2024 U.S. Senate race in which Democratic front-runner Adam Schiff spent a lot of money boosting the visibility of Republican Steve Garvey so Garvey would win a spot in the general election. This allowed Schiff to easily trounce the Republican in November, rather than run against fellow Democrat Katie Porter.

But this year, a large gubernatorial field with no front-runner has led to chronic and near-existential fears among the state’s now-dominant Democrats that the top-two system could place two MAGA Republicans in the general election despite a pro-Democratic national wave. We won’t know whether that nightmare scenario will actually unfold until after June 3, when voting in California’s all-mail-ballot contest ends. It’s also possible a Democratic lockout will occur, which would generate its own set of strange incentives for candidates and voters. In any event, the situation has revived long-standing grievances against top-two in both political parties — and now a potential ballot initiative to get rid of the whole damn thing, as the New York Times reports:

“Democratic strategist [Steven Maviglio] is launching a campaign to repeal the California primary system, an effort that is likely to attract serious backing not only from labor unions, but also from some Republicans and third-party organizations.

“The new proposal, filed Friday with state elections officials, would end the nonpartisan top-two primary and revert to a traditional primary in which one candidate from each party advances to the general election.

“It would have to be approved by voters, and backers are hoping to place it on the 2028 ballot. If approved, it would have its first widespread use in 2030 elections, including the governor’s race …

“Though his initiative, ‘Undo the Top Two,’ was inspired by Democrats’ angst, Mr. Maviglio has assembled supporters from across the political spectrum. The emerging coalition includes Democrats, Republicans and leaders of the state’s Green and Libertarian parties, which have been locked out of most general elections in California since voters passed the top-two system in 2010.”

Without question, minor parties in California really hate top-two since it abolished their guaranteed general-election ballot lines. But even though the system may benefit Republicans in this particular gubernatorial race, the GOP’s dominant conservatives tend to hate it because it offers a path to election for the centrist Republicans they regard as RINOs.

California isn’t the only state with nonpartisan primaries. For many years, Louisiana has deployed a nonpartisan jungle primary in which candidates from both parties compete in November; if no one wins a majority, the two candidates proceed to a post-November runoff. But the state returned to partisan primaries for U.S. Senate and U.S. House contests this year. Washington had adopted the top-two system earlier, in 2004, and though party professionals continue to hate it, it seems to have become part of the state’s political identity to a much greater extent than in California. Nebraska uses top-two for legislative primaries, but that makes some sense because its legislature is officially nonpartisan (and unicameral).

Alaska, a state with an unusually large number of independent voters and quite a few notable centrist politicians in both parties, adopted a similar top-four system by ballot initiative in 2020. Its wrinkle is that the general election features ranked-choice voting to resolve the outcome. Alaska’s system produced a fascinating result in 2022, when centrist Democrat Mary Peltola defeated former governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in general-election ranked-choice voting, and centrist Republican Lisa Murkowski headed off a conservative MAGA challenge the same year. Indeed, the two women endorsed each other across party lines. Subsequently, Alaska conservatives tried to repeal top-four in a 2024 ballot initiative, but the bid narrowly failed.

While the nonpartisan primaries in Alaska seem to have served the intended purpose of strengthening centrists in both parties and encouraging a degree of bipartisanship, it’s not so clear it worked in California. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger retired as governor (and with him, his second-term lieutenant governor, Maldonado), hardcore conservatives have reasserted control of the GOP and progressives remain very strong in the Democratic Party. The most notable effect of top-two has been to significantly lower turnout in the primary, since no party nomination is on the line, and sometimes in the general election because lockouts discourage the locked-out party’s voters from participating at all.

But a lot of voters don’t like either political party or political parties generally, so top-two could remain to bedevil politicians and voters alike for the foreseeable future.

Watching with horror the Supreme Court-enabled assault on majority-Black districts made me tremble with fear for the 2026 midterms, but also tremble with fury at the GOP, as I explained at New York:

Republicans from Donald Trump on down are excited that the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has invited a wave of partisan gerrymanders in states they control. This could save GOP control of the House in November’s elections, and lead to even bigger gains over the next few election cycles. The Virginia Supreme Court’s shock decision on Friday invalidating a voter-approved retaliatory pro-Democratic gerrymander in that state has added to their excitement. But Republicans would be wise to take a beat to think about what the gerrymandering frenzy is likely to do to their efforts to shed their reputation as a lily-white party hostile to minority voters.

As recently as 2024, there was a lot of talk about the Donald Trump-led GOP bringing back a “big tent” appeal to nonwhite voters, despite the boss’s alleged lapses into racism. And indeed, Trump achieved a higher share of the Black vote (15 percent) than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 — nearly doubling his percentage from four years earlier — despite facing a Black Democratic opponent. His percentage reached 21 percent among Black men, according to Pew’s authoritative validated voter study. It looked to some GOP optimists like the beginning of a realignment. Perhaps Democrats would no longer be able to count on Black voters as a key element of the party base, with particularly importance in battleground states ranging from Michigan and Pennsylvania to Georgia and North Carolina.

This narrative has already taken a beating thanks to Trump’s second-term record. A May 4 Economist-YouGov survey showed that just nine percent of Black Americans approve of the president’s job performance, while 8o percent disapprove (and 70 percent disapprove strongly). But the Trump-blessed state GOP assault on Black representation in Congress (and soon enough, state legislatures) that Callais has now unleashed is almost certainly going to blight the GOP brand for a long time among Black voters already deeply unhappy with the direction of the country under Republican management.

Already, with the White House urging them on, southern Republicans are taking aim at immediate extinction of majority-Black congressional districts in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and (possibly) Mississippi. The potential target list includes long-serving, venerable figures like South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn and Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson, whose careers date back to the civil rights movement. And other majority-Black districts will almost certainly be targeted by Republicans in 2028, 2030, and 2032 in states that couldn’t (mostly because they were too far along in the 2026 election calendar) take a hammer to them this year. The New York Times estimates that ten majority-Black congressional districts could be eliminated by gerrymanders just in the South, while one Black voting rights advocacy group claims 25 Black members of Congress (plus 191 Black state legislators) are at extreme risk once Callais has been fully implemented.

After decades of slow progress, the percentage of Black representatives in Congress and state legislatures is now roughly equivalent to the Black percentage of the population. Numbers aside, the psychological blow of reversing that progress overnight could be immense, much like the boulder rolling back down the hill in the ancient myth of Sisyphus. It would be one thing if the realignment simply replaced Black Democrats with Black Republicans. But at present, there are only five Black Republicans in Congress, as compared to 62 Black Democrats. Thanks to retirements and decisions to run for other offices, the number of Black GOP members of Congress will probably drop to one (South Carolina Senator Tim Scott) after the 2026 midterms. So decimating Black Democrats — particularly in the South — will feel to many Black Americans like a slide back towards Jim Crow. It’s especially perverse to see the Supreme Court use the 14th and 15th Amendments — Amendments enacted to give ex-slaves equal rights — to justify the bleaching of legislative bodies in a sort of counter-Reconstruction re-enthroning the South’s traditional conservative white oligarchs.

It’s no wonder the first wave in the current tide of Republican gerrymanders, in Tennessee, drew civil rights protesters to Nashville. Black voting rights protests have also broken out in Alabama and Louisiana as legislators mull new partisan gerrymanders.

It’s a scene Republicans had better get used to if they persist in their current course. Their “big tent” is in tatters.