Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate primary runoff Tuesday night by sixteen points, a Texas-sized message to Washington, as he put it, that the establishment wing of his party no longer commands the votes it once did. The celebration lasted about an hour. The hard math began at sunrise.

Paxton's general election opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, raised more than $27 million in the first three months of 2026. Paxton raised $2.2 million in the same window. Talarico already leads Paxton by seven to eight points in head-to-head polling conducted by the University of Texas and the Texas Politics Project. Among Black voters, Talarico's margin against Paxton sits at 56 points. Among Latino voters, 27. Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, but for the first time in three decades, the party believes the door is cracked open.

The race will not be decided by Paxton's record, which is formidable, or by the impeachment circus of 2023, which Texans already rejected. It will be decided by whether Paxton can fill in the blanks on his opponent before Talarico's donor army does it for him.

Most Texans have not met James Talarico yet. They will meet him on television in July, August, September, and October, on someone's terms. Paxton's only job between now and Labor Day is to make sure the Talarico voters see is the real one.

Read More: https://conservativeplaylist.com/the-paxton-playbook-how-to-beat-a-counterfeit-christian-before-27-million-buys-his-halo/

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The polls in Texas have not yet closed, but the story of John Cornyn's political demise has already been written. It was written over the course of two months by a Senate Republican leadership team that had every opportunity to save him and chose, instead, to save the filibuster.

Cornyn did not lose to Ken Paxton because Texas Republicans suddenly developed an allergy to the establishment. They have tolerated, even rewarded, the establishment for three decades. He lost because Senate Majority Leader John Thune refused to fight for the one piece of legislation that would have triggered a Trump endorsement, ended the runoff before it began, and handed Cornyn his fifth term on a silver platter.

Read More: https://conservativeplaylist.com/john-cornyn-lost-when-the-republican-establishment-abandoned-the-save-america-act/

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The most fortunate thing that ever happened to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was the catastrophic Palisades fire of January 2025. That sentence sounds cruel until you study how her political survival actually works. The fire — with its dead, its incinerated neighborhoods, its iconic image of a stone-faced mayor refusing to answer questions on a tarmac after returning from Ghana — is so visually overwhelming and emotionally charged that it absorbs nearly every ounce of public anger directed at her administration. Critics keep relitigating the trip to Accra. They should be relitigating everything else.

Because behind the smoke, Bass is presiding over one of the most quietly disastrous mayoralties in modern American urban history. A federal judge is breathing down her neck over billions in unaccounted homeless spending. The city ran a billion-dollar deficit two years into her tenure. The Department of Justice has sued her city. The National Guard and U.S. Marines had to be deployed because she would not deploy her own police. And her response to nearly all of it has been to hide — from auditors, from forums, from voters.

Read More: https://jdrucker.com/the-best-thing-karen-bass-did-was-botch-the-palisades-fire-and-it-goes-downhill-from-there/

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