President Donald Trump hasn’t lost interest in the midterm elections. On the contrary, he’ll likely be furious if the GOP loses the House, not to mention the Senate. Yet the president seems totally committed to winning the midterms on his own terms—not the terms set by American voters, the people who decide elections.
His recent actions suggest that he’d prefer to see Republicans fall than sacrifice a single one of his personal interests. Nowhere is that clearer than in Texas. Ken Paxton’s blowout victory in the state’s GOP Senate primary on Tuesday is the latest consequence of Trump’s my-way-or-the-highway approach to November. Just over a week before the primary election, the president sealed the result by endorsing the state’s attorney general over his opponent, sitting senator John Cornyn. Paxton said as much in his victory speech Tuesday. “President Trump is the leader of our party, and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics.”
Trump preferred Paxton because he believes he’ll lend himself to the president’s plan to remake the Senate, along with election rules across the country. “Ken is a Strong Supporter of TERMINATING THE FILIBUSTER and, very importantly, THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump said on Truth Social last week. He wants allies in the Senate who will eliminate the barrier to simple majority rule and push through the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and mail-voting rules on all 50 states.
The Free Press Community Sale Is Here!
Limited-time offer: New subscribers to The Free Press get 20 percent off their first year.
Think for yourself, not by yourself.
Yet Trump won’t get either wish if Paxton loses his race in November, which the polls suggest is fairly likely. He trails Democratic nominee James Talarico by 1.5 percent in the Real Clear Politics poll average, and the largest poll, released in late April, showed Paxton down by 8 points.
That may be because he’s covered in more than a decade of serious scandals. Former members of his own staff claim he used his connections to the Trump Justice Department to help out a donor under federal investigation, to take one example. Cornyn’s record is clean, in contrast, and the final polling average showed him modestly but consistently outperforming Paxton in the general election.
