Paxton whines that Cornyn wants him to lose to teach GOP a lesson

Another day, another damaging leak for Texas Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton.

In the latest installment of things Paxton told GOP donors at a closed-door fundraiser, Paxton said Sen. John Cornyn—the longtime incumbent whom Paxton defeated in a primary runoff in May—wants Paxton to lose and thus is not helping his campaign.

In the audio, leaked to CNN by a donor who doesn’t support Paxton’s candidacy, Paxton says one of his unnamed friends ran into Cornyn at a restaurant. When the friend thanked Cornyn for “supporting the ticket,” the friend told Paxton that Cornyn got angry.

“Cornyn’s face went red. He backed off,” Paxton told donors of what his friend told him. “He said, ‘Paxton’s gonna lose. We need to teach those Republicans a lesson. It’s going to be hard to learn, but they need to know that their decisions have consequences.’”

Cornyn’s staff denied the encounter.

However, Cornyn has said publicly that Republican voters’ decision to back Paxton was a mistake.

“If we nominate flawed candidates in November, we risk losing, and we haven’t elected a Democrat statewide in Texas since before 1994,” Cornyn told CNN’s Manu Raju in September. “And this is the way that majority parties become minority parties, by nominating candidates that are less than appealing to a general election electorate.”

That sure sounds like Cornyn telling Republican voters that they need to learn the hard way that their poor choices have consequences.

Of course, one has to be delusional to think GOP voters will learn from their mistakes.

Since 2010—when the far-right tea party movement was born—Republican voters have been nominating freakazoid candidates that have lost what should have been eminently winnable races for their party.

In 2010, Republicans selected gaffe-machine Sharron Angle to face off with the late Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada. Angle’s conspiratorial beliefs and offensive comments caused her to lose handily to Reid in a year Republicans elsewhere on the map romped to victory.

And who can forget Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, who cost Republicans a possible Senate pick-up in Delaware in 2010.

Or Todd “legitimate rape” Akin, who cost Republicans a Senate seat in Missouri in 2012. Same with Richard Mourdock that same year in Indiana, who went on to lose after he made equally crass and idiotic comments about rape victims who are impregnated by their attackers.

The list goes on.

How about Alabama Republicans nominating accused pedophile Roy Moore in 2017, costing Republicans a Senate seat in the otherwise dark red state.

We also highlighted the five Senate seats Democrats hold because President Donald Trump helped boost lunatics to become the GOP nominees.

It’s not just Senate contests Republicans have blown because they nominate whack jobs.

Republicans lost North Carolina’s gubernatorial election in 2024 because they selected bigoted perv Mark Robinson, who called himself a “black Nazi” and wrote about peeping on women in showers in public, among other sick things.

This cycle in Colorado, Republicans nominated Victor Marx, a snake oil salesman who claims to perform exorcisms and says he has killed a man in his past.

Ultimately, if Republicans lose Texas’ Senate race, GOP voters will find all sorts of ways to blame everyone but themselves for the predicament they put themselves in.

Many will scream fraud—their favorite excuse when an election doesn’t go their way. Others will blame Cornyn. But they won’t look in the mirror.

Ultimately, this problem will continue as long as Republicans keep catering to their base’s worst instincts.

We’ll get straight to the point: The financial hardships that Daily Kos is facing this year are tough.

We continue to be paywall-free. We continue to be supported by our readers, not billionaires or corporations. But we need to bring in more revenue. We are leaning on our community more than ever to help make ends meet.

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