Now There Are Five

I don’t play in prediction markets, but there’s certainly now a non-negligible chance that the Democrats could win control not just of the House but the Senate as well in November’s midterm elections. The overwhelming victory of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s Republican primary saddles the party with its most morally, legally, and characterologically despicable (if you prefer a standard journalistic euphemism, make that “compromised”) nominee since—oh, I don’t know—Donald Trump?

Tuesday’s primary also reinforces Trump’s status as the sharpest two-edged sword American politics has seen in a very long time. His endorsement of Paxton over Cornyn, who came before voters with a decades-long record of right-wing politics, as well as his endorsement of Trump-ophile Mayes Middleton over Rep. Chip Roy, a leader of the far right in the U.S. House, propelled both endorsees to victory. Texas thus joins other states that have held Republican primaries this year where Trump-endorsed primary challengers have knocked off previously popular pols.

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But Trump’s sword not only impales any Republicans who have deviated even just infinitesimally from his every wish and want. It also looks to be impaling the party’s prospects in the upcoming midterms. While the MAGA base takes Trump’s endorsements to be mandates dictating how they vote, to the rest of the nation, Trump’s support has become a seal of bad housekeeping. Not only does his approval rating continue to spiral downward, along with the public’s assessment of his economic stewardship. There was even a CBS News/YouGov poll out this month that showed Trump underwater with white working-class voters, 54 percent of whom disapproved of his performance as president while just 46 percent said they approved.

That doesn’t mean that picking up the five Senate seats in play in November (North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Alaska, and now Texas), while defending their own seats in Michigan and Georgia, will be anything other than an uphill climb for the Democrats. (And they really do need to pick up five to win a reliable majority in the Senate. If they pick up four, going from the current 47 to 51, they’ll be at the mercy of the not very reliable John Fetterman, who, should he vote with the Republicans on a measure, could leave the Senate in a 50-50 tie that Vice President Vance would break.)

The Republicans’ support for Paxton, as well as the overall decline of the Republican brand that Trump has engineered (however blindly or indifferently), would not in themselves have put Texas in play this November. The third key element is state Rep. James Talarico’s victory over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democrats’ Senate primary. While the policy differences between the two Democrats were both few and small, the real differences between the two were tonal (Crockett’s flamboyance, Talarico’s seminarian Christianity), demographic (Crockett’s race and gender likely being more of a turnoff to some number of Texas voters than Talarico’s), and—as a consequence of those tonal and demographic differences—electability. Similar issues may also play a role in the Democrats’ ability to retain the open seat in Michigan’s Senate election. The August Democratic primary there pits one right-of-center Democrat (Rep. Haley Stevens) against liberal state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and progressive physician Abdul El-Sayed, whose Muslim faith and Arab ethnicity may handicap his ability to win some share of swing voters.

For now, Paxton has become an albatross to the national Republican Party. Electing him in November will prove an unexpectedly uphill climb, compelling the party to overcome his own miserable record as a human being, Trump’s mismanagement of the economy, Trump’s increasing indifference to the state of the economy (save only the stock indices), and Trump’s war on immigrants, which has imperiled the state’s long-standing Latino communities. Republicans will now have to spend at least $100 million on a Senate race they had thought was in the bag, and correspondingly less on other competitive Senate races.

The larger issue that Tuesday’s primary reveals is the persistence of the epistemic closure that sets apart the MAGA faithful from their fellow Americans. Trump is tanking in public support due to issues that are visible to all who are willing to see: his apparently unendable war of choice, his failure to arrest (in fact, his causation of) the rising cost of living, his obsession with building monuments to himself even as economic necessities become increasingly unaffordable. (See: Nero fiddling while Rome burns.) That MAGA still clings to his every word and supports his every whim is a testament both to the Trump idolatry that defines this mega-cult, and to the blinkers screening out reality that are provided 24/7 by Fox News, right-wing social media, and their Goebbels-esque ilk.