Good morning, everyone!
The relentless Texas heat has finally slackened with the onset of fall. While I was born in Florida and resided in Virginia prior to joining The Texan, technically making me a southerner, I spent the better part of my life in Connecticut. I don’t know how you Texans make it through the summers here, because I nearly didn’t!
With the 2026 midterms drawing ever closer, there’s much in the way of election news. Let’s dive in!
The Senior Senator
One way or another, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is going to be Texas’ senior senator come January 2027. And while he declined to back a candidate in the Republican Senate primary between U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, he’s displaying no such neutrality as the general election between Paxton and state Rep. James Talarico (D-Austin) draws nearer.
Politico is out with an article examining Cruz’s extensive campaign to rally support for Paxton. According to them, Cruz has been a “part-time adviser, part-time bundler, full-time believer that Paxton will pull out a win and keep [him] from representing Texas alongside a Democrat.”
Cruz told Politico, “It is absolutely critical that Texas stay red, that Republicans keep a majority in the U.S. Senate and the House, and that we elect Ken Paxton instead of James Talarico, and so I am all in.”
Cruz’s support has been extensive. In addition to advising and campaigning with Paxton, he’s been pitching deep-pocketed donors, many of whom were longtime supporters of Cornyn, to get on board.
“The case I’ve been making to donors who previously supported John Cornyn is, at this point, it’s a binary choice, and I think the choice is very clear … Many, if not most, of the longtime Cornyn donors are supporters of mine, as well. And so I do think I’m able to bridge those two worlds.”
The effort seems to have borne fruit: Paxton raised $18 million in the last quarter, double his haul in the previous one.
The senior-senator-to-be has also lent his own political operation to Paxton’s benefit. A Cruz-connected super PAC, Truth and Courage, has dropped $2 million in ads bolstering Paxton.
Cruz has also attacked Talarico in blistering terms. “I worry about the voter that turns on the TV, and they look at Talarico, and they say, ‘Oh, he seems like a nice young man,’” Cruz said in one representative statement several months ago, adding, “this man’s views are fundamentally terrifying and would do irreparable damage to our state and our country.”
Another common refrain from Cruz is that while Talarico’s views might be in step with California, they’re out of the mainstream in Texas.
There are risks — and potential benefits — to Cruz’s stand with Paxton. Compared to the less-enthusiastic Cornyn, to put it mildly, Cruz is acting like a team player. Should Paxton lose, his supporters will have no cause to blame Cruz. And if Paxton does win, Cruz will be able to claim no small part of the credit and flex his political muscles ahead of a likely 2028 presidential campaign.
Politico also reported that “The political orbits of Cruz and Paxton have significant overlap. Axiom Strategies — the GOP firm run by Jeff Roe, who led Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign — has long worked with both men.”
The risk, of course, is that Paxton might lose anyway, despite Cruz’s help. A Paxton defeat, Politico wrote, “could be a black eye” for the senator. To continue the metaphor, in weightlifting there’s a concept called ego lifting, where you try to take on more weight than you can safely handle. When flexing muscles, political or otherwise, you need to be careful that the weight doesn’t crush you.
Bipartisan Bromades
It leads one to consider how Cruz and Talarico might work together if the latter prevails in November. After all, Cruz’s term in office will last until 2030. Should Talarico win, the two of them will be stuck with each other for quite a while.
There are currently just two states that have one U.S. Senator from each party. Neither is likely to indicate what will happen if Texas splits the proverbial baby in November, however.
U.S. Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Dave McCormick (R-PA) of Pennsylvania have developed a more than close working relationship. Although Fetterman still mostly votes with his party, a wooing campaign from McCormick and other Republicans has drawn him steadily closer, rhetorically at least, toward the GOP camp. The two are fundraising together, Republicans have been actively courting him to switch parties, and Fetterman even recorded a video that was played at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.
The other example, of U.S. Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) of Wisconsin, is the complete opposite. The two are on the more ideological ends of their respective parties and reportedly aren’t even on speaking terms.
The potential Cruz-Talarico relationship would probably fall somewhere between those two extremes. Cruz has a reputation as being a hardline ideological conservative and Trump ally, but also for working collaboratively with Democrats on legislation. These include the Protect College Sports Act, which Cruz introduced with U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and several AI safety bills with U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
As for Talarico, he’s expressed a desire to build a relationship with Cruz.
“The first thing I would do after winning this seat is schedule a meeting with Sen. Ted Cruz,” he told the Austin-American Statesman in an interview this week. “He would be the senior senator from Texas, and I would hope to learn from him. I would hope to build a relationship with him, and I would hope to work with him to deliver for the people of our state,” though he noted that he expected “significant disagreements” between them.
At the same time, just months prior Cruz and Talarico were trading barbs about which of them was a real man. This is Texas, after all.
Trump’s San Antonio Swing
President Donald Trump held a rally yesterday in San Antonio with Paxton and congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz. (I’m writing this before I head out to this rally, so follow me on X here for the live updates.) It’s not hard to understand why. Beyond statewide races, the San Antonio metro is home to two competitive U.S. House districts Republicans are trying to hold.
The San Antonio metro area swung 8.7 percentage points towards Trump in the 2024 presidential election. While all the major metros in the Texas Triangle swung toward Trump that year, San Antonio’s movement was the largest. That’s likely because of the area’s large Hispanic population, which disproportionately swung towardthe now-president that year.
When Republicans redrew congressional maps in advance of the 2026 midterms, they did so with those numbers in mind. Now, with Hispanics looking set to swing hard against the GOP, some of those seats don’t seem as certain as they used to.
Congressional District (CD) 23, a massive district that sprawls from San Antonio to El Paso, is solidly red. It changed only marginally in redistricting, with both the new and old iterations backing Trump in the 2024 presidential election by about 15 percentage points. But the prior incumbent, then-U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX-23), resigned in scandal, and election handicappers view the contest between Republican gun rights activist and YouTuber Brandon Herrera and Democratic candidate Katy Padilla Stout as at least somewhat competitive, though most agree Herrera is favored.
CD 35, which includes southeast San Antonio and stretches further in that direction, is even more competitive. De La Cruz, the brother of U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX-15), is facing off against Bexar County Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Garcia. The district would have voted for Trump by about 11 percentage points in the 2024 election, but notably, in the 2024 U.S. Senate election, Cruz would have prevailed among these same voters by just 4 percentage points.
Had the current iteration of CD 23 existed in 2018, then-U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke would have come within 3 percentage points of winning it. In the new CD 35, Cruz would have prevailed that year by just 1 percentage point, compared to his statewide margin of about 2.5 percentage points. If Talarico prevails statewide or comes closer to doing so than O’Rourke, he’s likely to carry one or both of these districts.
How many San Antonians will split their tickets between Talarico for Senate and Herrera and De La Cruz for the House? The answer is uncertain, but it’s a question Republicans would rather not be asking.