From Ken Paxton to 'The AK Guy' – The wild state of Texas explained

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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the Texan two-step of US politics podcast,

not really sure what that means, but it sounded good. I'm Chris Jones and I'm Nikki McCandromitas.

Over the last two weeks, we've spoken a lot about Texas and James Talleriko's victory in the

state's Democratic Senate primary, but it's not just the victory that's significant.

Is it Chris? No, it's not Nikki. The turnout for the Senate primary was massive,

beating the 2000s average by well over one million votes.

Meanwhile, the Republican party is still undecided on a candidate to face Talleriko.

So what does the say about the upcoming midterms and just how important is Texas for US politics?

Christopher Hooks is a real-life Texan and journalist whose work has appeared in publications

like Texas Monthly, The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, and Politico.

Hi Chris, second Chris. Hey all, thank you to be here.

Hey Chris, and that's going to be weird throughout the recording because it's going to feel

like I'm talking to myself, but let's get into all of this, all of this Texan politics because

it's really kicking off. It's quite hot at the moment, isn't it? Just before we get into what's

happening now, let's set the scene for our listeners in terms of Texas and its politics.

A few decades now, it has what is voted Republican in the presidential elections.

But why is that? What makes Texas so I guess Republican at the moment?

Well, that's a good question. When the Texas Democrats have been trying to figure out for a long time,

I think the strange thing about Texas is that on paper, it looks more democratic or more

left-wing than a lot of American states which regularly elect Democrats all the time.

So next door, Louisiana in some ways is like a more socially conservative state.

It's poor. It's more like the deep south and yet they elect Democrats from time to time.

Texas Democrats have been stuck in this trap for 20 years where they will try every couple of years

with a new shiny candidate and with a lot of money and they just seem unable to get over the hill.

I think it's a combination of factors. One, Texas is like a very expensive state to campaign and

maybe the second most expensive after California. The other is that Texas has been even when it was

a democratic state. It was very conservative. It belonged to conservative Democrats for the 120

or so years after the Civil War. There is a history of Texas liberalism, but it's a history of

powerlessness mostly. They elected candidates from time to time in that 120 years. But yeah,

since 2003, when Texas Republicans took control of the Texas House, there's been no Democratic

State White candidate elected and they got close once to getting control. One of the branches of

the Texas legislature, but that was as close as they could get.

Just on the structure of the Texas government, because it's slightly different from other states,

isn't it? Could you talk us through that a little bit and also how these structures

help Republicans to keep power, really?

Yeah, I think Texas does have a little bit of an unusual state government. The lieutenant

governor is more powerful than the governor. Theoretically, that kind of dates back to the time

when Texas was an independent country and the governor was a president who handled foreign policy

and the military and stuff like that. These days, the main thing that helps Republicans keep

control is money. It's how expensive the state is to run campaigns and then the Republicans took

control decades ago because of the kind of the business faction of the Republican Party, a

businessman in places like Houston and Dallas, who rebelled against the conservative

Democratic majority. We're able to take advantage of the prodigious funds that they had access to

to challenge the existing political order. Since then, that business faction of the Republican

Party has been weakening and they've been in a fight with more conservative branch of the

Republican Party, but they still have the easy majority that they need to keep control of the state.

In that vein of sort of a changing Republican Party, I'm also curious how the changing

demographics of the state are shaping politics, particularly within the last 10 years. Texas is

obviously becoming sort of the Silicon Valley of the Southwest with Tesla setting up an Austin,

major tech company setting up bureaus there. It looks like it's in the middle of a population boom,

it might pick up four to five seats in the next congressional apportionment. So I'm curious how

those changing demographics will play into sort of the next 10 years of politics.

I think a decade or two ago, there was a lot of excitement from Texas Democrats about these

changing demographics. The state was getting a lot more racially and ethically diverse,

and it was bringing in a lot of Americans from California and New York and places like that that

Democrats suspected they would have an easier time winning over. I think the reality has been

more complicated. A lot of times folks that are moving from California are moving because they

want some place with a more conservative political bent. In 2018, when Beto Rork ran against Ted

Cruz and almost won the Senate seat here, which was kind of a political shock. There's one exaple

that said that Beto Rork had won native born Texans. Ted Cruz won transplants here by like five

points and something like that. I think there's also 10 or 20 years ago, there was a kind of a fast

aisle idea among Texas Democrats that the racial diversification of Texas was something that was

going to naturally make the state a more sympathetic place to them. But as you've covered Nicky,

and as a lot of people have written about now, the category of whiteness in Texas and who fits

in the majority camp and the minority camp is something that is fluid and changing. Republicans

have done a better job here improving their margin with Texas Hispanic voters, Latino voters,

and as long as they can run up a big majority of white votes and a, you know, a reasonable

minority of Latino votes and Asian votes, other immigrant communities here, they're going to be

able to retain their majority pretty easily. You touched on it, but I want to just dig in very

briefly on sort of the loser's bracket of Texas politics, notable past Democratic attempts to

win a statewide race. What's fucking them up? Why is it a little bit different this year? And then

we'll like launch into the primaries in the midterms. So the last 20 years since 2003, 23 years

has been them trying to put together a coalition that is able to launch a competitive bid for

something. And typically the form that's taken is every couple of years there will be a new kind

of shiny candidate that they get excited about. And in 2014, it was Wendy Davis who was the

state senator here who was very famous for pro-choice filibuster. That worked really poorly. She ran

against Greg Abbott in 2014. And then a few years later, the better work ran against Ted Cruz,

and he came within a few points, which was disappointing to many of his supporters, but it was

shocking to a lot of us that have been following this for a long time. And indicated that maybe

Texas Democrats could do something in the future to launch a better bid. But Texas Democrats do

best when there's an unpopular Republican in the White House or unpopular national Republicans

in power. So they did really well at the end of the W Bush administration when he was very

unpopular. They did very well in the first Trump term. In 2020, something horrible happened

for Texas Democrats, which is the Democrat took over the White House. And they were in the wilderness

again for a few years. Now the Trump is in office and he's by some measures more unpopular than he

was in the first Trump term. There's a possibility that a Texas Democrat could do something surprising

and close that gap of a couple of points from 2018. I think the difficulty here is

Tariqo's in some ways a worse candidate than Beto Iraq was in 2018. He has some real weaknesses.

But the Republican position is even worse. Like what's happening in their party right now is a

disaster. And so it makes even kind of the most bitter of us long time observers think, well maybe

something weird could happen here. Chris, you brought us on nicely to the next question. And that's

about talking about now what's going on right now in Texas politics. And you mentioned James

Tariqo, obviously won the Democratic Senate primary. We've talked a lot about that over the past

couple of weeks on American friction. But a bit of time has passed now. What's been the reaction

from the state parties who are in politics right now? How are people reacting to what they've

seen with Tariqo? This was a very bitter primary, which I know you guys have talked about.

But I think there was a lot of desire from kind of official Democrats that the divide get patched

up immediately. And everyone focused on November. And I think that has happened to some extent.

There is a lingering anger and disappointment from Jasmine Crockett supporters that has surprised

me a little bit. A lot of the rhetoric, the most heated rhetoric is being offered by Jasmine Crockett

supporters in other states. And so sometimes it's hard to tell how much of it is helped by Texas

voters. But I think that is a problem for Tariqo to address in the future. The big issue for

Democrats is just what's happening on the Republican side. And when Tariqo won immediately,

there was sort of a brief abortive push from Donald Trump to sort of consolidate the Republican

runoff or prevent the Republican runoff from happening entirely. And that would have been very

bad for Texas Democrats. They think it would be bad. But a week on from that, it hasn't happened.

And it sort of seems like Trump is backing off, which I think is something that Democrats think

is good for them. So in Texas, I think one of the things here, like you said, they got a shiny

new candidate. And they start sort of start overstating the possibility of flipping the state of

victory at the same time. You're hearing a lot of really hopeful rhetoric. But the actual

national Democratic party is still really hesitant to throw money at Tariqo to throw money into

this race. Texas for a while now has been seen as sort of like a sunk cost. Is Texas the kind

of state that Democrats can sort of afford to hand over like that is this the beginning of actual

sort of structural building out of party systems within the state? I'm curious how they hope to win

this if they don't actually build up structures that need to exist within the state to make Democratic

candidates viable in the long term. It's a good question. I mean, when the new shiny candidate comes

up in Texas, there's two sources of hype. One is like the national media and all of a sudden you

get a bunch of profiles and magazines and whatever of like the Democrat who could change Texas.

And the other is from the actual Texas Democratic party and they kind of need to hype these

guys up because they need like they need money. They need, you know, national donors to give $50

$100 million to this candidate and to help build up the party. And so it's sort of in their

interest to say like, oh, this guy, this guy could do it. He could change everything.

The building up the party thing, I mean, I've heard Texas Democrats talking about it for 12 years.

It's a chicken and egg problem. You need a strong party organization. Then you need a

party that's strong everywhere around the state and a lot of these things in order to win

the campaign. But it's hard to build them without actually having one of many campaign. Texas

because it's so expensive to campaign and then so big and it has five of the 20 largest cities

in the country. A lot of people don't realize that. If you're a Democratic donor, there are a lot

of better places that you could give money to, including in Texas. I mean, the Democratic complaint

here for a long time is that there's a lot of rich Democrats in Texas, but they're more likely

to give to us and a campaign in Maine or whatever this cycle than to really invest in the party.

So the Texas Democratic party sort of gets these rich patrons that come through for a while,

it was a guy named Steve Moss and committed suicide a few years ago. And it's this really bleak

position where they kind of have to beg for money to build the party and then

they lose elections. The party doesn't get built and they keep kind of powering through.

And it's more than a money thing like a lot of Texas produces a lot of good Democratic

consultants here who could run campaigns and candidates even. And the consultants leave the state

because they feel like they can do better elsewhere and a lot of the candidates will serve a few

years in the legislature and quit because they see that there's no other place for them to go.

It sort of takes this special kind of person to stick around.

I think the best case scenario for them is that they keep having incremental progress that builds

the party and then they get more than the incremental progress. And I think that's sort of why you see

the shiny new candidate approach is they need somebody to come along and to prove that there's

actually something that you can do here. When National Democrats talk about Texas turning blue,

a lot of the time what they're talking about is like it turns blue into presidential election,

which I could imagine, or it sort of like develops a viable second party, which makes Texas

a two party state. And I think we're still very much stuck in the period where they need a

a test candidate, a test bed to do well. I think we're pretty far away from a state where there's

a viable second party. Democrats probably have a very low chance of getting enough power that

they're able to exercise influence over the next round of redistricting in 2030. It's probably

more realistic to plan for 2040, which is a long time for now, obviously. Bleak. Yeah.

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We haven't talked a ton about the Republicans Senate primary on this podcast,

mostly because we have a shiny new candidate on the Democratic side.

But in a lot of ways, I do think the GOP primary is maybe the more interesting race.

It is sort of a battle between two models of Republicanism, one very much formed in the image of

Trump, the other formed in the image of sort of those historic Texas Republicans.

What the fuck is going on on the Republican side? And why is it so contentious?

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. It's fascinating even though I've been writing about

Ken Paxson, this end corn and two, but Ken Paxson for at this point, like 10 or 12 years.

And I feel it, I sort of feel like I've run out of things to say about him, but he's a great

character. So the Republican, on the Republican side, John Kornin has been the senior senator

from the state of Texas for 20 years. And the way it works in Texas is that we sort of have one

serious senator and one crazy senator. And for a while, the crazy senator has been Ted Cruz.

If Kornin is knocked off, Ted Cruz will become this serious senator and that's just sort of how it

works. But John Kornin is not particularly beloved by the state's conservatives and has been

for a long time. I've seen him speak at a couple of state conventions where he's been booed,

which is a strange thing. He just doesn't have any kind of natural connection to what Republicans

demand now, which is like a lot of red meat action on red meat issues and a lot of kind of crazy

posturing for the culture war, which is not to say he's liberal. He's very conservative. He's

just conservative of kind of an older generation. And he's being challenged by Ken Paxson, the attorney

general of the state of Texas, who among other things, hid for 10 years from a felony securities

fraud indictment by getting postponements of his trials. He was accused of impropriety as a

probate lawyer who deals with wills in the states. He has had multiple documented affairs. He's

currently divorcing his wife who is a state senator on biblical grounds, filed for a divorce on

biblical grounds, which is code for he's a cheating ass. And I don't know. There's just like a

hundred minor and major scandals with this guy. My favorite is this a probate lawyer in McKinney.

He was walking through security and he looked down and he saw another lawyer's like $1,000 pen on

blank. And without having a second thought, he picked it up and put it in this pocket. It was

probably monogrammed. And he was only caught a couple weeks later when this lawyer went to the

security footage to find his anniversary present from his wife and saw Ken Paxson like committing

grant that. But that's just kind of the guy he is. He's like a he's a striver from a boom town north

of Dallas. And there's no amount of money too small for him to try to steal. And he's been the top

law enforcement officer of the state of Texas for 12 years, I think of a fact which has caused a

lot of people some confusion. And he hates Sean Corden and not for any policy reason, but because

when Ken Paxson faced an impeachment process in the Texas legislature, John Corden sort of said

that the legislature should get rid of this guy that he was an embarrassment to the party.

And Ken Paxson despite not demonstrating inequalities which deserve loyalty, demands loyalty

from everyone. And so he sort of decided he would primary John Corden and then and he's had a

very good run of it. Because Ken Paxson has been opposed by so many rhinos and weak Republicans

conservatives think that he's the sort of indispensable man and they're going to back into the

hilt. And that's what happened here. John Corden placed first in a three way first round of the

primary, knocked out a third place candidate. A lot of people, including me, were surprised that

John Corden placed first just by points or two. But he has a reasonable chance of making the run off.

Also, he spent a shit ton of money. He spent a tremendous amount of money. And the problem now for

Republicans is that they're a little bit worried about the race in November. But in order to get

John Corden through the primary, which they still want, they're going to have to spend a tremendous

amount of money more and might not work. So can you talk us through just because a lot of

our listeners aren't in America and don't necessarily know the complete political process?

Could you talk us through what happens now in terms of that GOP race? Because it goes into a run

off in May, right? So what can we expect to see from now until then?

So the first round of the primary happened on March 3rd. And the runoff will happen on May 27th.

So they get basically three or four months to bash each other, which they will do.

The only folks you can vote in the runoff are folks who voted in the first round already.

And normally it takes some convincing to get voters back to the second round. So the expectation is

that like the people who vote in the second round are the most fired up group of the people

who voted in the first round. And historically that has meant that the more conservative candidate

or the more firebrand candidate gets through in the second round. I think in Pakistan could easily

win a general election because he's won three statewide elections in Texas. And there are for whatever

reason, there are a lot of people here that love them. But I think there's good empirical evidence

that Cornyn is a better general election candidate. And so in this year where national

Republicans are desperately trying to retain control of the Senate to prevent the glorious leader

from facing impeachment in a year, they are faced with the prospect of spending maybe $50-100

million in the runoff to protect John Cornyn and then spending another $100 million or more

in November to protect the Republican candidate. They really don't want to do that.

Unfortunately, like Donald Trump has tried to consolidate the runoff

hinted that he would like compacts it out of the race and all of compacts and supporters here

have rallied to him to, you know, try to get your leader not to do that. And the candidate has

to drop out, I believe, by March 17th. It seems unlikely that that will happen. It's coming up soon.

That was going to be one of my questions was that, you know, officially I hadn't seen the

Trump had endorsed either of these candidates as of yet. Even if he did, do you think that that would

be an asset to either of them of the current situation or as Texas, you know, there's so many

fans of Trump there that actually if he didn't endorse one of them, it would provide a huge

favor to the one he does endorse. I think it would help whoever he endorsed certainly.

Um, there was a pull out yesterday that said that it still would not get cornered across

the finished line. And I don't know how much faith to put in that. I think one thing that you

might expect if you hear that there's sort of a war between moderates and conservatives far

right people in Texas is that the far right people must love Trump, but that's actually not the case.

He's sort of more affiliated with the moderate Republicans in Texas. And then conservatives here,

you know, they love this, they'll say they love Trump, but they're smart enough to recognize

that Trump doesn't have any actual opinions of his own and he's not like a movement conservative.

And a lot of them backed Ron DeSantis in the last Republican primary and they would back Ted

Cruz if he had Ron, probably will back Ted Cruz in the future. And so there's a lot of people

that are sort of warning, you know, Donald Trump, bizarre, like don't listen to your bad advisors,

like stay with, stay with compacts and stay with us. And if Donald Trump does do it, I think

probably they will say that well, Donald made a mistake, but we're standing by him and compacts

them. I don't know if he has the power to end the runoff. And I think on some level, we're getting

some reporting that maybe he recognizes this and that he's like backing off from this idea.

Having followed Texas conservatives for a long time, this is sort of one of the, it's still very

quiet, but it's sort of one of the most prominent cases I can think of in the last 10 years where

they're sort of standing up just a little bit to Donald Trump's political project, which is maybe

an indicator of the future.

Before we move into some of the other insane races in Texas, which we want to touch upon briefly,

you kind of teased it earlier, but Tallarigo does have some significant weaknesses.

I'd love to hear what you think they are and how they would potentially fare in matchups

against Cornyn and Paxton.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think Betcher Rook was able to get close in 2018 against Ted Cruz.

He was able to paper over some of the weaknesses of the Texas Democratic Coalition, I think,

just by being very charismatic. You know, he was able to be a little bit ambiguous about who he

was and what he actually believed is he was so super charismatic. And so for a lot of people,

he read as kind of like moderate and authentic and truth-telling and to other people, he read as

very progressive and that helped him. Tallarigo, whatever his other assets, I think, does not

struggles with that kind of like natural charisma and campaigning ability. And he's left to

me. He's very left to me. He comes by that honestly. He kind of grew up in this social justice

preaching tradition, which is very long-rooted in the United States, but to a lot of

Texans who will read us like weird. And that's mostly what Republicans have hit him on so far,

saying stuff like, God is non-binary. And you know, he went through a period like a lot of

Democratic politicians did in like 2020 where he got really woke and then he kind of run,

it kind of ran away from that. Woke one. Woke one. They woke to return some day. We all live in

weight. But you know, I think, you know, I mentioned Louisiana earlier, who elects Democrats

not infrequently. And I think a question that I asked Texas Democrats sometimes is about John

Bell Edwards. He was the governor there some years ago. And what Texas Democrats have never really

done is like actually run a kind of a conservative or right-wing candidate. And I wonder how that would

go. It might not work here. John Bell Edwards in Louisiana was he won, he was a Democrat. He won

the governor's office. And because he won, he was able to expand Medicaid and do a lot of good

things in Louisiana. He made people's lives better. But he was also very conservative for a Democrat.

And he was pro-life. He was a Catholic Democrat. And he was a veteran. And he kind of scanned

as somebody who was very conservative. Texas Democrats for a variety of reasons have never,

well, would never run a guy like that. The candidates that they run from Beto-Rark to or who

do run invariably are pretty left-wing. It's just party voters making the decision. There's nobody

in charge. But I do wonder, you know, if the last 10 years had been different if

Texas Democratic Party was willing to get a little more conservative.

So Chris, we're speaking a lot about the senatorial race in Texas. There is one more race,

congressional race really that I want to get into a little bit because the candidate just

seems crazy to me. And this is in the 23rd congressional district. I think it was the seat was

held by Tony Gonzalez, a Republican, but has dropped out of his re-election bid for it.

Well, let's say a fairly morbid reason, which people can Google or you can go into if you want to.

But the person that seems to have, I guess, had his race paved now for him by Gonzalez

dropping out is this guy called the AK guy. What the hell? Who is this guy?

Before other Chris jumps into his answer, I just want to point out that you say that this person

seems insane to you. This to me reads as like the average mega candidate these days.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, wow, both things are true in a way that freaks me out a little bit.

I mean, Brandon Herrera, yeah, the AK guy, he's like an influencer. He's an entertainer who

makes YouTube videos about guns and it for a long time. And he's all, yeah, I believe he's 30,

so you'd be one of the younger people in Congress. That man's my age. Yeah. I'm sorry.

I hate that. You know, looking at him, you do have this kind of vertiginous sense that like

this is the future of young conservatism in America is like, I mean, as a gun guy, I'm sure he

reads as a freak too a lot of your British listeners. But in Texas, of course, that's pretty common.

I think some weirder things are that he's like, you know, there's a lot of clips of him surfacing

kind of doing like Weirmacht roleplay. You know, he did a video about the MP40, the German submachine gun

where he plays the Weirmacht's marching song and goes around the costume and fires. And there's

a clip of him talking about being given a rare 1939 English edition of Mein Kampf.

He also like recreated the MLK assassination. Yeah. So he's, yeah, yeah. So he's like, you know,

he's part of this yogurt generation of kind of edgelord influencers. And you know,

the kind of the dark joke is that maybe the future Republican moderate is somebody who does

Weirmacht's roleplay, but does not, as James Fishback did in Florida talk about Goyslop, like

maybe a little bit of a little bit of Weirmacht admiration without like over too much overt

anti-Semitism is like the future of the young Republicans. But yeah, I mean, he's a really

weird guy. I think Tony Gonzalez, the guy he's running against, had some personal problems

which involved like a former mistress and staffer setting herself on fire committing suicide.

And then months and months of speculation about what was actually going on there. He failed to

address it. He behaved weird to this process. Republicans did not abandon him as quickly as they

might have. And part because they needed his vote in this closely divided Congress, but also

because they were a little bit wary of Brandon Herrera. This is a district. It's the size of

West Virginia. The 23rd. It stretches all the way from El Paso to San Antonio. It's massive.

It's poor. It's heavily Hispanic. I don't know how much Brandon Herrera's particular kind of

weird is like a problem there. I think people are focused probably on other things than like

their candidates. We're Mox roleplay. But it's at least possible that if there was a really big

swing in the Latino vote this year and people kind of rebelled against Trump that you could see it

being put in play for a Democrat. Although I don't think right now it's at especially top priority

for national Democrats. So finally, just like put a button on it. Could Texas end up becoming a

bell weather state? And if Matthew McConaughey ran, could he beat Greg Abbott?

You know, I think because we have nothing else to talk about, we have speculated about

Matthew McConaughey's in Texas. We have speculated about Matthew McConaughey's political

orientation for a long time. And I kind of kind of he kind of might be a Republican. I don't know.

Really? Do tell. No, tell me more. I don't know. I shouldn't say that.

I kind of coded him as a little more moderate after Oval day.

Yeah, I didn't know where he landed, but that seemed to me that he would be willing to piss off

a lot of Texas. No, that's for sure. He's maybe more of an independent. And yes, he should run.

Yeah, Texas, they were going to try to get celebrities to run for a long time. They were at

one point they were trying to get timelyly Jones to win a Senate seat. Maybe Bobby Povito is

the next governor of Texas. I do think there's like, there's a small chance this year that they

could win the Senate seat. I think as a Texan, the frustrating thing is I think the state would be

a lot better if it was an actual two-party state. And I think we're still a long way away from that.

But yeah, I think I think Taleriko has a has a small chance. What Texas Democrats really need

to do well here is an unpopular Republican president. And so I think they should maneuver to

try to get Donald Trump a third turn and then a fourth and just keep it going for as long as

possible. Because eventually people will will rebel, I think. Until we get one Senate seat.

Maybe a secede. I think that would help too. Yeah, things are pretty bleak in Texas. But you know,

there's always hope. Is there, I don't know, maybe. Well, let's leave it there before we get too

sad and depressed. Chris, that was really interesting. Thanks so much for joining us on American

president. Thanks for having me, guys. This one. And thank you, listeners, without you, this podcast

wouldn't be too stepping to any tune. But if you want this podcast rodeo to keep on booking,

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to this episode on. I'm Chris Jones. She's Nicky McCann Ramirez. And this is American Friction.