Jonah Goldberg: Does either party want to win Senate race in Texas?

About the writer: Conservative D.C.-based commentator Jonah Goldberg serves as editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, hosts The Remnant podcast, authors a weekly Los Angeles Times column, holds a chair with the American Enterprise Institute and serves as a commentator with NPR and CNN. Previously, he spent 21 years as an editor at The National Review and 10 as a commentator at Fox News. He’s the author of three New York Times best sellers.

One of the worst features of the primary system in our polarized “Red vs. Blue” time is the tendency of primary voters to flock to the candidate they most want to see “destroy” the other party, not the candidate best positioned to do so.

Let’s say a zombie is scratching at your door. You’ve got a shotgun, a handgun and your favorite frying pan.

The shotgun has the greatest chance of success. If one is careful and skilled, the handgun has a solid chance of working. And the frying pan?

It probably won’t dispatch the threat, but, come on, how cool would it be to take out a zombie with a frying pan? So, you go with that.

In this extended metaphor, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett is the Democrats’ version of the frying pan and Attorney General Ken Paxton is the Republicans’ version.
Given trends in media coverage, you’re probably more familiar with examples of this phenomenon from the GOP.

Remember Christine O’Donnell, the sketchy 2010 Delaware Senate candidate who had to run an ad assuring voters, “I’m not a witch.” Or Todd Akin, the 2012 Missouri Senate candidate who got into trouble for insisting women don’t get pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape.”

More recently, there was Mark Robinson, the 2024 North Carolina lieutenant governor who dabbled in Holocaust denial and mocked school-shooting survivors as “spoiled little bastards.” Only after he got the nomination was it revealed that he described himself as a “black NAZI” on a porn site.

Democrats have a similar, if less colorful, problem.

In a bunch of races, Democratic primary voters preferred the candidate who was more ideologically pure, more pugnacious, or — in the President Trump era — the most committed to “resistance.” Once nominated, they were ill-suited to appeal to swing voters in a general election.

Here are just a few examples of Democratic candidates who excited the base but not mainstream voters: Mandela Barnes, the very progressive Wisconsin Senate candidate in 2022; Kara Eastman, the preferred candidate of “Justice Democrats” in Nebraska’s second district House race in 2018; Stacey Abrams, the election-denying two-time candidate for Georgia governor; and Andrew Gillum, the Florida progressive underdog who beat out more centrist candidates to get the Democrats’ nomination for governor, only to lose narrowly to Ron DeSantis in 2018.

Some of these races were indeed close. But the populist left and populist right take the wrong lesson from the narrowness.

Like the ugly Americans who think foreigners will understand English if they just shout louder, each side convinces itself if it had only fought harder and spent a little more money it could’ve won.

To be fair, sometimes they’re right. But even in those cases, they’re merely making a downpayment on bigger losses to come. Because by electing bomb throwers and crackpots, they hurt the brand of their party for the next election.

That brings me back to Texas.

The Senate primary is heating up. On the GOP side it’s a three-way race among solid, reliable, moderately boring conservative incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, two-term Congressman Wesley Hunt and rabble-rousing, wildly corrupt (sorry, “ethically challenged”) populist demagogue and hard-core MAGA loyalist Ken Paxton.

Although nothing is assured, given what might be a Democratic wave year, Cornyn would probably beat Crockett. Most analysts, including Democrats when speaking anonymously, think she couldn’t win against anybody except maybe Paxton, but could soak up an enormous amount of money and attention.

Crockett is very smart, but she is in many ways a Democratic version of Republican bomb throwers and social media phenoms Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Indeed, Crockett has already trademarked her insult for Greene, saying she has a “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body”).

Crockett has also said that 80% of the “most violent crimes” are committed by “white supremacists,” Black people can’t be Republicans because Republicans are racist, Latinos have a “slave mentality” and police shouldn’t work to prevent crime, only to solve it. This stuff may work in a safe congressional district, but it’s not the stuff of a successful statewide race in Texas.

When Crockett announced she was running, Rep. Colin Allred, a more moderate candidate who had been positioning himself to be a safe alternative for Republican voters, announced he was no longer pursuing a bid.

And so here we are. Two parties, once again, are poised to nominate candidates so flawed they have a chance of losing to the other.

This is what happens in a polarized age when parties outsource their nominating process to the angriest voters in their coalition. They’d rather take a shot with their favorite frying pan than shoot that boring shotgun.