Trump Endorsing CORNYN, Texas Is Going BLUE ft. Tony Ortiz
Tony Ortiz analyzes Texas's political shift, noting Donald Trump's endorsement of John Cornyn over Ken Paxton to secure legislative votes despite Trump's history of opposing his own allies. Ortiz highlights alarming demographics where Democrats outnumbered Republicans in statewide primaries by 100,000, driven by native-born Texans voting Democrat while out-of-state transplants favor Republicans. With Hispanic children now outnumbering white children in schools and aggressive ICE deportations eroding support, the GOP risks losing Texas unless they abandon influencer reliance for essential grassroots field work to improve turnout. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I had to bring you in because this story, well, it's not just, it's many stories nested within one story.
It's obviously all the election drama in Texas.
And obviously, this is going to be your ballpark.
I wanted to lead with the big one.
Obviously, this is the one that everyone's talking about is the Cornyn versus Paxton race.
There's a lot of moving parts here.
The interesting thing I think everyone's pointing out is Trump has had this problem for the longest time in which he seems to not look into who he's endorsing or he just endorses just obviously guys that hate him.
I think there's really no other way to put it.
And this seems like to be another case where Paxton obviously seems to be the MAGA favorite.
Obviously, the base is behind him.
He's great on policies, a Trump loyalist, I would say.
And then Cornyn gets the nod over him.
Could you maybe give us some of the inside baseball into why this is happening and maybe specifically from the Texan point of view, why Cornyn has such an unfavorable view among Texans?
Yeah, there's probably two reasons that you can speculate on.
One is the biggest one, which is Democrats also view Paxton as the least likely to win against Tallarico.
Tallarico, James Tallarico is the nominee for Texas Senate for the Democrats, right?
And polling has consistently shown, and this is all polling, has consistently shown that when it's a Paxton, Ken Paxton versus James Tallarico matchup, Ken Paxton performs the worst versus compared to like a John Cornyn, right?
So not only are like conservatives and like right-wing people supporting Ken Paxton, but Democrats want Ken Paxton to win, right?
They view him as the weaker one.
So maybe Trump sees maybe the long-term game on this, right?
And the risk associated with that race.
And then additionally, you know, Cornyn is currently the nominee.
He's the incumbent.
And it could be a situation where the votes are really tight right now.
We don't have enough of a majority to get what we want done in Congress and in the Senate.
And Trump really needs that Cornyn support to get certain things passed.
I mean, because Trump, obviously, I think in his, he hasn't endorsed, full-blown endorsed Cornyn yet, if I'm correct, but he basically says something along the lines of like, I endorse people with a winning record.
And he's basically saying he's going to endorse the incumbent.
I mean, for lack of a better word, you could read between the lines a little bit.
And I imagine that endorsement would be coming soon.
To your point, I mean, that's a bit alarming, I would say, for the Texas GOP that they're actually having to make calculations on who they run because the state's gotten that tight electorally.
And I remember during the beto run, conservative media was mocking them routinely, but a lot of the Texan politicos were saying like, hey, I don't think you realize the demographics in this state have changed, right?
And things here, this isn't, you know, deep ruby red like it used to be.
Obviously, you know, Beto got beat pretty considerably, but it's getting tighter and tighter.
And that is to me a bit sad that we can't just run a Ken Paxton and know that he's going to be a shoe-in.
And when you were on the show, I think it was the show I was hosting, actually, you were on.
I made this point, and this like always triggers people in the audience because they don't like to hear it, but it's just the reality on the situation is because the narrative, not just among Texans, but among like red state people in general, people that reside in red states is, well, you know, the natives of this state are great and super conservative.
It's these out-of-state transplants are the ones that are like really, you know, screwing things up for us politically.
But that's just never reflected in data.
And there's a handful of states where that might be true.
Like I think North Carolina, that probably is true.
But if you look at Texas, if you look at Florida, it's the people out of state that are actually voting Republican.
It's the natives, specifically in Texas, the natives.
And this data point I always cite, and you might have some other data, is from the Cruz Beto race and the exit polling.
And it indicated, not just an exit polling in follow-up polls, that those who said I was not born in Texas voted 55-45 for Cruz.
And then those that say I'm a native-born Texan voted 55-45 for Beto.
So obviously that would indicate that, no, someone that's leaving California, making the decision to leave California is leaving because they're a conservative.
They're not like leaving just to ruin another state.
Like that's the narrative.
And I'm sure there are people that operate like that, specifically the ones moving to Austin.
But the vast majority of these guys are just like, yeah, you know, I left California for a reason.
So I'm going to vote for the leadership that's made this state viable for me to move my family to.
So yeah, you've seen that across the board as whereas Texas natives are voting Democrat.
And a lot of people forget Texan, Texas as a state has only been a red state for, I think, like 30, 40 years, not very long in the grand scheme of things.
So it just recently became a Republican state.
But yeah, you have a lot of Texas immigrants to Texas, right?
People from California, New York, Illinois, coming, and they're realizing why they left.
And they are voting red.
So that's good, right?
But the Texas natives are voting Democrat.
And so, yeah, we have a huge problem.
Additionally, the state just redrew its districts, which was a huge deal.
And a lot of that redrawing was based off the previous fact that Hispanics had kind of started to lean right.
Unfortunately, the Hispanics leaned right in the earlier elections, and now they're going back left.
And that redrawing was based off of the Hispanics.
So now it's looking like, man, this maybe was not a good idea.
Like Hispanics, blacks, whatever it is, are very tribal, right?
So it's all about protecting their own tribe to say.
So like the, so yeah, to your point, like the support for Trump was huge for Hispanics.
They like the machismo attitude.
They like the aggressiveness.
They like that.
And Hispanics generally are generally pro-life.
They don't like the gay trans stuff.
And so that was the support for Trump.
But, you know, they have that asterisk where, well, I'm right-wing, except when it comes to like maybe deporting, you know, relatives or something like that.
And so, you know, these ICE lockdowns, which are phenomenal, by the way, these ICE raids and these deportations, which are really good and the country needs more of actually, Hispanics that were maybe slightly leaning towards Trump are now like, well, hey, you're deporting my cousin or you're supporting the friend of a friend, right?
And they don't like that.
You've seen a lot of this drama happening, especially in the RGV, the borderline, the southern borderline of Texas, where the Hispanics that were previously for Trump, they're seeing all these deportations happen.
And they're like, well, maybe I'll vote for the Democrat this time around.
Well, and as I understand it, I went to high school in the San Antonio area.
So I am like slightly familiar with sort of the dynamics, especially in the RGV because so many people from the RGV moved to San Antonio.
And something that I was told, I don't know if this is still the case.
This maybe sounds like it was more of a 20th century thing, but I don't know.
Maybe you could enlighten me here.
Is that they said that they kind of had like a Klannish way of voting in the sense of there would be like one or two people in a family that would really like kind of be the negotiators with the local politicians and then they would make the decision for the family on who they were going to vote for.
It was almost like a micro version of block voting where you would see like Brownsville rapidly swing from Democrat to Republican just based off of like what a few of the you know grandfathers, you know, like what their relationship was like with the local councilmen or something like that.
Yeah, it's funny you bring that up because that is the case, even in the Republican party, the Republican Party down there, where you have members of a family that run the local GOP clubs or GOP groups or parties down there.
And so you'll have like the husband, the wife, the cousin, the in-laws, they're all part of this group, right?
And then their uncle is also in office.
And so like everybody kind of coalesced around supporting a certain person and they're all business owners.
So like you almost have to vote for them because you have business dealings with such and such.
So yeah, a lot of these decisions are made, like you said, like clans or like group voting.
And you can argue that's good or bad.
I'm not a big fan of it, but that's just kind of the mindset with the Hispanics down there for sure.
So this is what's interesting, kind of to your point, with the demographic shift that we're seeing in Texas, certainly on the voting edge.
I think this explains, you know, people, I think maybe they think when they think Texas, and we're saying on the show, like, hey, Texas natives are voting Democrat, they're voting blue.
And a lot of people react negatively to that because their perception of what a Texan is or what Texas's look like is frozen from like 1980.
And the reality is that's just not the case anymore.
I mean, the overwhelming majority of births in Texas are not white.
I think like only like 25, 30% of native born or if you took a birth in 2026, you know, 25%, I think it's 25 to 30% of those are going to be white.
So, you know, your demographic that's most likely to vote Republican is now a fraction of the population.
That explains why Texas natives increasingly so are voting blue.
Because, I mean, you did point out that it shifted to a red state fairly recently, but correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of those former Democrat voters are just Dixiecrat voters.
And that's why you saw Arkansas was voting blue until the 90s or why West Virginia was voting blue until the 2000s.
Not saying they're necessarily Dixiecrats up there, but you kind of had the white working class, so to speak, voting for the Democrat Party, where now this new, you know, the new coalition, the Obama coalition, is made up the majority of Texas Texans.
I mean, that's just like reality on the situation, reality on the ground, rather.
And to your point, like the data has shown that Hispanic children enrollment in public schools has now outpaced white children enrolling, right?
Which says that Hispanics are not only having more children, but there's probably more Hispanics just coming to Texas, either legally or legally anyway.
So you've got your first situation now where you've got a state where the majority of children that are enrolling in public schools are Hispanic.
So that leaves whites as a minority group, right?
Which a longer, maybe different discussion is, well, do whites now benefit from minority benefits and programs and stuff?
But yeah, and you can argue it is every way you want, but it's a problem.
It's a problem.
You've seen education decrease in Texas.
You've seen reading rates and math rates and all of that has gone down year over year.
And it's not getting any better.
And, you know, we just passed school choice, which is a whole different other argument about whether or not that's actually going to help the problem in Texas.
But the demographics are changing and it's not a good outlook for the state of Texas.
And with Democrats now voting in more primaries than Republicans, either Republicans need to wake up and figure out how to run the party better.
You know, we've got a Republican Party chair.
It's an Indian guy, wasn't born in America, who's running the Republican Party of Texas.
And he's been outvoted in his primary.
So is the party being run well?
I don't think so.
And I think a lot of people don't feel that way either.
You could probably enlighten me a little bit on this situation.
But just being an outsider watching this Herrera Gonzalez race and I'm like this Gonzalez guy has such a track record that it's like absurd.
He's like a supervillain and he's running for the house.
I'm like what?
If you're the state GOP, why are you not reeling this guy in or shepherd, soaking him or something and throwing someone else out there?
And Herrera is great and I am glad he won.
You know he seems like a really nice guy and everything, but you know he's not ordinarily winning that race unless he is running against someone that's such a train wreck like Gonzalez.
You're 100% right and you know he ran against Gonzalez last cycle.
He only lost, I think, by less than 200 votes, so he got pretty close.
You know this scandal happened um, you know we broke it back in September about Gonzalez having an affair with his former staffer, married staffer and and then her killing herself.
You know if, if that hadn't happened, you got to wonder would would Herrera have been able to really pull it off as well as he did, right?
And they were still heading to a runoff?
The only reason they're not heading to a runoff anymore is because Gonzalez decided not to run for reelection.
But he hasn't resigned, he's still in office.
But yeah, you've got to wonder if the party is doing enough to actually get people to turn out.
And they're hitting the, the politicians that are not actually good conservatives.
I don't know.
I don't know what they're doing with their time down there in Austin.
It's, it's bizarre I've pointed this out in the show where it seems like the deeper red the state is, the worse the state GOP is now.
Texas obviously is, to your point, kind of swung, you know, swinging bluer and bluer, but you know this is still the GOP that operates like it's a plus 15 plus 20 Republican state.
And the fact that the senators are John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, it's like what are we?
You know, because Texas is the most important state for the Republican Party.
I mean I guess you could say Florida now, but you know Texas is, you know you get out of the George Bush and that's where a lot of these apparatuses are built.
Dallas, Fort Worth is, you know, a hub for conservatism and the best we can, you know, throw out, because look at the Democrats, the offerings they have out of California.
It's like some of the most radical senators in the country and then this is what we have coming out and that just really exemplifies, I think, like cowardice for lack of a better word that kind of runs throughout the leadership of the Texas GOP, because the base in Texas I think Texas Republicans generally are some of the more hardline conservative voters in the whole country, like they're not soft on a lot of issues, I guess because they're on the forefront of a lot of them.
Yeah it's, it's interesting, right there there's a lot of them like that.
Um, but you know, we just had our primary race between Cornyn and Paxton and Wesley Hunt, and of those in that race you even I was anticipating that Paxton was just going to destroy Cornyn.
In fact Cornyn, Paxon himself thought that he was going to destroy Cornyn.
He even He was recorded on video saying in an interview, um, there was data potentially showing that Paxton could win outright.
He wouldn't even trigger a runoff.
Yeah, but come election day, the numbers show Cornyn actually outwon Paxton.
More people voted for John Cornyn than Paxton.
And so it's like, is this, you know, Paxton for as great as he is, you got to ask yourself, why are dem, why do, why do Democrats want Ken Paxton to win?
Why?
Like, that's like a red flag, whether you love Ken Paxton or not, that is a red flag.
And a lot of the, you know, we, we, we, you and I and many others, we live in this bubble where we're surrounded by people who consume politics, whether recreationally or for profession.
And so we, we surround ourselves more with people who agree with us and believe in us and are far right, you know, like us.
But the fact of the matter is, a normie, maybe Fox News listener that just listens to news every day on TV, they maybe find problems with Ken Paxton's affairs and scandals enough that they're going to vote for John Cornyn.
And so I think the party needs to do a better job of outreach and getting better messaging out.
I mean, with Cornyn, I guess Tallarico is considered such a potentially dangerous figure that it is worth, you know, just, and I think someone made the point they're kind of gaming out why Trump would endorse Cornyn.
I personally think it's just because he's bad at endorsements.
You know, I don't think there's any extra like game going on here, but some people are saying, well, you know, at the Paxton fiasco where he said, like, hey, I'll drop out if we get the Save Act passed.
Like, I respect that.
I think that's noble.
I like that a lot.
And so people are speculating, well, maybe that's why Trump endorsed Cornyn is to get the Save Act across the finish line.
And again, he knows that Cornyn's probably more of a shoe-in in the general election.
Do you think there's anything to that?
Or do you think it's with my kind of initial assessment?
I think he's just kind of bad at endorsements.
And Cornyn's probably just nice to him when they see him, see each other.
So a lot of Trump's endorsements actually lost versus Governor Greg Abbott's endorsements.
So yeah, you're seeing this change in how Trump's endorsements are perceived.
And yeah, I think it's a combination of Trump's bad at endorsements and also, you know, calculating who can win against Tallarico.
Tallarico is a far left Democrat, like super, super far left.
But he's perceived by normies as a moderate Democrat.
He talks very slow, very gentle.
He is a Christian.
He's a pastor.
He like all this stuff.
And to normies who just view him as his interviews, and he was even on the Joe Rogan show podcast.
To normies that see that, they're like, okay, this is a guy who's moderate.
He's a Democrat, but he's not as far right as Trump.
I might consider voting for him.
But to people that actually know a little bit about him, like you and I and your listeners, we know that this guy's a far left Democrat.
And so the party itself and others need to do a better job of bringing out that far left rhetoric that Tallarico has said in the past to let people know who he actually is.
I mean, because it's not hard to see someone like him slipping through because again, everyone in Georgia, that Georgia Senate race a few years ago, and everyone was thinking the same thing, like, well, you know, okay, it's still a red state, you know, just because the Democrats are ascendant, it's still a red state.
You know, what are you going to do?
It's Georgia.
Then Osif and Warnock, your two senators.
So it's like not hard to see a situation in Texas where just Corner Paxton, like to your point, I mean, if Paxton gets in, you know, a few hit pieces, Tallarico gets a few more slam dunk interviews.
We're looking at a Tallarico senator, you know, senator from Texas, James Tallarico.
I anticipate if Ken Paxton wins this runoff and it's a Paxton versus Tallarico race that the Democrats are going to hit Paxton incredibly hard on affairs and scandals and money issues and staffing issues.
And, you know, normies don't like that stuff.
They, you know, we, we, people like us, we can, we can look past maybe the affairs.
Me personally, I can't, but we can look past the multiple affairs to justify voting for somebody who's going to vote a certain way that we need.
But a normie may view it as like a character issue.
They're like, well, you know, I really can't get behind this.
You know, I can't support this.
And they may end up flipping for Tallarico.
And so this is a very serious problem.
And unfortunately, the turnout also has massive ramifications for the down ballot.
Democrats voting just because there's a Senate race, they're going to turn out and vote Democrat for the entire ballot, down ballot.
And so those have big ramifications for Texas all across the state.
I guess this is kind of old news in a way, but I'm just curious what your thoughts were.
Because again, you would have the inside scoop here with the whole Colbert Tallarico situation.
We didn't know what happened.
Like Tim Cast, we covered it extensively.
I mean, Timped like an hour on it.
It was pretty crazy.
But my question would be, do you think that that was the Texas Democrats like terrified of their internal polling was saying Jasmine Crockett is like toxic?
Let's keep her off the ballot.
Or do you think that was just, you know, Tallarico and Colbert are boys?
Like, what do you think specifically was the motivation?
Because it does seem like it was an electoral play in that primary and obviously it worked.
And the Republicans are going the other direction.
Like Virginia, everyone's so pissed about Spanberger as they should be.
And it's like, well, you ran a diversity candidate.
I mean, win some serious.
She's from Jamaica, right?
Like, what are we doing here?
And it's all because she just had like a photo shoot with a gun.
And they're like, oh, wow, this is like a finally a black woman that gets it.
Like, what are we doing?
Meanwhile, you know, that's Junkin's secret is Junkin just was like reflective of the largest group in America, which is white men.
What group, also, what group votes?
The majority of voters for the record are white people and white men.
Just run people that like look like them and you might actually like win decisively.
And the Democrats like finally figured it out.
Granted, I think it's because they ran Kamala.
There was that tweet after Kamala lost where it was the picture of all the frat bros in a line and they're like, here's every Democrat candidate going forward.
And so, yeah, you've got a problem where like maybe the Democrats have figured out we've got to run decent looking normal, normal people to run.
And the Republican Party's like, well, you know, we'll win over all these minority votes by getting in all these strange people and strange outliers to run.
Like, let's just go down to Costco and like pluck people out at random and then we'll run them for office.
It's like, what are we doing here?
Because like Trump ran up the numbers with Hispanic and did very well with black voters.
I'm not saying that should be the objective, but it's like, great, if they're going to vote for us, that's sick.
What did Trump do?
He didn't really do anything.
He kind of just like plowed forward.
If anything, 2024 was his campaign where he pandered the least.
And that's ran up the numbers with them.
So it's like, you don't even need to do that.
The Democrats realize this.
They're like, look, whether it's Crockett or Tallerico, like these groups are client, like client voters.
They're going to vote for us no matter what.
And then they can, I guess, ballot harvest to make up the difference if they're going to fall short.
So they realize that, but the Republicans are like, let's maybe if we run a trans black guy, but he has a gun, then, you know, maybe they'll finally vote for us.
And I think I think a lot of, I think it's keeping a lot of people home.
I mean, I do think that the majority of Texans would probably be like, of course I want Paxon over Cornyn.
But a lot of those people are just disengaged.
They're kind of demoralized to an extent.
They're really just fixated on what's happening in the White House and they're just not particularly interested in, you know, what a senator could possibly offer for them or certainly what their local candidates could possibly offer.
I mean, that's why I think people like you, your work's so essential because it's putting it on their doorstep.
Like, actually, this directly affects you.
What's happening in the White House, you may see it at the pump, and that's about it.
But the guy who's the mayor of your city or the people on your school board have a huge effect on your taxes as a business owner or a homeowner or even a renter in the city you live in.
So yeah, a lot of people aren't paying attention to these local stuff, this local stuff.
And maybe that's why they're not turning out to vote.
And, you know, the Republican Party as a whole needs to do better about getting that messaging out so that Republicans turn out not to just, don't just turn out every once in a while in an election to vote in a very popular Senate race, but they actually turn out to vote in their municipal elections or their school board elections and things like that.
We've got Steve Toth in there and Toth is a phenomenal, a former state house rep and now he's going to be in office there.
Sid Miller, love the guy, funny, cool, stereotypical Texas looking guy, but he wasn't doing a great job.
The ag commissioner, which controls for a lot of people that don't, the ag commissioner controls like the farming, the livestock, everything that's really, really important in Texas.
And we got Nate Sheets in there.
Nate Sheets is a phenomenal candidate, former business owner who is incredibly intelligent.
He's going to do a lot for the state of Texas and the economy.
So we've got those races.
Don Huffines won for Texas Comptroller.
So Texans, the Comptroller positions is a really, really big deal here in the state.
And you've got Don Huffines in there.
And so he's going to do a really great job.
So yeah, we've got a lot of good wins in here.
People are paying attention to specific races.
But I think what really the party needs to focus on is turnout, getting actual other Republicans that don't normally vote actually out from their homes and to the ballot box to vote.
Yeah, because that was so interesting to me that you said there was the Democrats at the edge and primary voting because I did look under the hood and the Republican registered, I mean, there's far more Republicans registered than Democrats.
I mean, obviously, the gap's probably tightening up, I would imagine.
But if we just had the same apparatus that they had, I'm not even saying like we need to do the middle-of-the-night mail with the drop boxes or whatever, but like if we just had an apparatus where we could go to these suburbs and just knock on a few doors and say, I don't know, like, are you take, are you going to go vote?
No, okay, do you want me to do it for you?
Like, why are we not doing it?
We could be running up the numbers in Texas and only doing whatever we wanted.
Door knocking, hitting doors is so incredibly important.
A lot of people, Republicans especially, love to just sit on Facebook or Twitter or X and just talk about politics all day.
But average normie voter isn't.
The average normie voter is still working a nine to five in a cubicle and gets a lot of their news either from talk radio on the way to work or from Fox News in the break room at the office, right?
Or at home.
They don't get it from X.
They don't get it from Facebook.
They don't get it from these influencers or Instagram or TikTok.
And so, yeah, you've got to get to get to these people and talk to them about these races because otherwise they just continue to vote whenever they feel like a major election is happening.
And so, yeah, in a non-presidential year when Trump is not on the ballot, they're staying home.
The biggest thing that's been at least affecting Texans a lot is these paid influencers.
You have a lot of these political celebrities that are getting paid to promote or shill certain candidates.
And they're putting out these narratives that, you know, when it comes election day, they completely crumble and it's just not the case.
And, you know, I would warn, especially, you know, Republicans and your viewers probably already know, but like a lot of these influencers you see online that are promoting specific candidates, they are possibly getting paid to promote these candidates.