THE FUTURE LEADER OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS KEN PAXTON, OR AT LEAST SOMEONE LIKE HIM

Yesterday I tried to answer a question raised by Jamelle Bouie in a video essay:

And so what does the Republican Party do when Trump is gone, when there is now a vacuum? I don't really have an answer to that. I'm mostly curious to see. But that, I think, is the dilemma the Republican Party will face. It doesn't have an identity outside of Trump, and it won't be in a position to even find one until Trump is gone.

I said that the party will organize itself around cultural (specifically, culture war) issues. But who'll lead the party?

For all we know, it could be Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general who's likely to become the GOP's Senate nominee now that he's secured Donald Trump's endorsement. It's likely to be someone who's very much like Paxton, though probably less enmeshed in scandal.

I've just read Elaine Godfrey's new story about Paxton in The Atlantic. Godfrey finds it baffling that Paxton has survived as long as he has in Texas politics, and finds it baffling that Trump would endorse him over the quite conservative incumbent, John Cornyn. Paxton has a closet full of skeletons -- mortgage fraud, securities fraud, multiple infidelities. He was impeached and nearly convicted in a Republican-dominated Texas legislature.

And surely he'll be much easier for the Democratic Senate candidate, James Talarico, to beat, right? All the smart people seem to think so, Godfrey tells us.

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988.

Godfrey thinks Paxton's supporters are delusional.

At least for now, [Paxton supporters] seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns.... “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me ... when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity.... [Supporters] don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

There's just one problem with this: the polls tell us that these "alternate reality" voters are right. Paxton's past doesn't seem to be a handicap in Texas -- in fact, his numbers and Cornyn's are nearly identical in head-to-head matchups with Talarico.

Why wouldn't years of scandals be hurting Paxton in Texas? Because he never stops trying to own the libs. Godfrey writes:

As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms....

Culture war. Always culture war.

Godfrey doesn't really seem to understand this. She writes:

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me.

But the "dynamics of his party" aren't changing -- owning the libs is always in favor. Paxton hasn't "ignored electability as a concern." Boastfully attacking the libs is the source of electability.

This seems like a good place to bring up a 2017 quote from Thomas Massie, the GOP congressman from Kentucky who just lost his primary after challenging Trump on a few issues. Massie regards himself as a libertarian in the mold of Ron and Rand Paul, and recognizes that Trump is not a libertarian. In 2017, after Trump had been sworn in as president, Massie said this to the Washington Examiner:

"I went to Iowa twice and came back with [Ron Paul]. I was with him at every event for the last three days in Iowa," Massie said. "From what I observed, not just in Iowa but also in Kentucky, up close with individuals, was that the people that voted for me in Kentucky, and the people who had voted for [Ron] Paul in Iowa several years before, were now voting for Trump. In fact, the people that voted for Rand in a primary in Kentucky were preferring Trump."

"All this time," Massie explained, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

Ken Paxton survives scandals because he's always the craziest son of a bitch in the race. "Craziest," in his case, means least self-examining and most lib-owning.

I don't believe every Republican voter prefers the craziest son of a bitch in every instance -- Cornyn did, after all, poll slightly ahead of Paxton in the March 3 primary, though not decisively enough to avoid a runoff. And we know from national politics that many pollsters divide GOP voters into "MAGA" and "non-MAGA." Trump's support among non-MAGA voters is eroding.

But in a typical red-state election, zealots pick the craziest son of a bitch in the race and then less extreme Republican voters rally around that candidate because, gosh, you can't expect them to vote for a Democrat, can you? In red states -- including Texas until maybe, just maybe, this year -- that's all a Republican candidate has needed in recent years: supporters of the crazy SOB plus anyone-but-the-Democrat voters. In purple states, and also nationally, you need more, which is why Trump had to add a few non-white men and young bros to his coalition in 2024.

If the Democratic Party has a future, it will come from persuading some of the moderate-ish voters who don't prefer the crazy SOB that the Republican Party is bad and they should at least consider the Democrat once in a while. But I fear that Democrats will never grasp the need to do this, so the GOP will continue to be the party of crazy SOBs, who'll fire up the base and win the less-crazy GOP leaners, and maybe flip just enough swing voters to win nationwide.