Primary Recap, Burning-Hot Runoffs, and Terror in Austin - Episode 19

The guys discuss Tuesday's primary and the fallout since, along with the shooting at an Austin bar last weekend.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

You know, quite possi we don't we'll we'll never know, but uh very possibly people might have gone out and voted specifically to force you.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

I know I know of a couple people that did do that. So I might have been the author of my own destruction here. Brilliant. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Well that's what happens when you trust when you trust the electorate.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

You know what? That means Pete Chambers should be thanking me for apparently driving up his his turnout vote.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Yeah. I mean, honestly, maybe you'll get a little card or something.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Good morning, everybody. This is Brad Johnson, co-founder and reporter at Texas Bullpen, and I'm joined, of course, as usual, by Jonathan Richie. Richie, how's the week been?

SPEAKER_02 0:48

The week has been a month, I think we could say. Uh it has been action-packed, drama-drenched, and just a wild whirlwind of shattered dreams and hopes and stories and elections and wins and losses and the whole shebang. I mean, it has been such a perfect little capsule of Texas politics this week.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

This is the first election for you back as a reporter after a couple year hiatus.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

You enjoy getting back in the mix of it?

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Uh, you know, it's fun not having all of your uh hopes and dreams ready on an election. You can just enjoy it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Well, I had some hopes and dreams dashed this week uh because I made a foolish bet that has since become come home to roost talked about across town. Um and yes, my chickens have come home to roost. I am going to have to do the Waffle House challenge because I made a silly prediction that Doc Chambers would not get 10%. And he got 11%.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

I think 11.2 last night.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Oh man, that was that was rough. It was fun watching all the results come in, the election, and there was that that I kept looking at the corner of my eye, and it just my heart kept sinking.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

And it's definitely become probably the biggest story from election night in in Austin. I mean, people are really excited. Uh the buy-in on this is huge. And uh, you know, quite possible we'll never know, but uh very possibly people might have gone out and voted specifically to force you.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

I know I know of a couple people that did do that. So I might have been the author of my own destruction here. Brilliant. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Well that's what happens when you trust when you trust the electorate.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

You know what? That means Pete Chambers should be thanking me for apparently driving up his his turnout vote.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Yeah. I mean, honestly, maybe you'll get a little card or something.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Maybe. Maybe I'll get a tour of his mobile home.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Maybe he can come and join you at the Waffle House. Oh, that would be interesting. I think we're gonna be facilitating some fun guests to come in and we've already had a few people that have asked to come join me for a stint in the Waffle House.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

So uh we'll try and make this a bit of a spectacle.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

And this is where, you know, maybe we should go double or nothing on this. Um god. And see, you know, this is the problem. You started making bets with a guy from from East Texas with a long line of a certain degenerate gambling. Yeah, degenerate energy, you know. Um You uh said the other day that you thought you could only eat seven waffles over the course of twenty four hours, which only reduces your time by seven hours, which means you still have like uh a lot of waffle time in in the you know, you're gonna turn that waffle house into a waffle home by the time you leave. Uh I was shocked that your number was so low. Because I feel like How many do you think you could eat? I do I think I could put away like 1415. I think I would crush that because I just want to get out of there, you know, so I just lock in and put my mind to it.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Um You're just built different?

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Yeah, I will when I when I am built different. That's true. Okay, that's true. Many people will that's what people say about me. Um and I just I just think you will eat more than 10 waffles over the course of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Okay. I'm not betting on this. I've I'm already in way too deep. I am cutting my losses. Um I've never been a gambler, uh, and maybe there's some wisdom in here in Texas uh uh preventing the legalization of casino gambling to save me from myself because clearly I do not have a good track record. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

There's that that old song, you know, you gotta know when to hold them and know when to fold them, and you just screwed the poo like out the gate. I mean, like the first time you just step in it. Oh, like the Waffle House Challenge, that's a serious thing. Oh yeah, like that's that's it's business. So we're looking forward to that. We'll get that set up and scheduled uh probably before the runoff, definitely before the runoff, because I want you to make another bet going into the runoff.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Oh god. No, no, your turn. It's your turn this next time.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yeah, I know. Everybody was was really giving you grief, not only because you lost your bet, but the fact that you didn't make me have a side of it. You know, it was all one-sided, and that's why I took the deal.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

I was in a fit of rage and I wasn't thinking clearly.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

And clearly haven't read Art of the Deal.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

No, no, clearly not. So um we are gonna talk about the rest of the election, and we'll get to our takeaways and just run through some of the results. Then there were some surprising results. You know, another part of this is that uh our predictions from there were a lot of our predictions that were off because various reasons, including polling being way off in a lot of races. So we'll get to that. Uh, but first we want to touch on uh the tragic Austin shooting that occurred um here in town. When was that uh Sunday? Sun early Sunday morning. Um run run us through what happened and what we've learned since.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Yeah, so obviously a very horrible tragedy, and our you know, prayers and condolences obviously go out to everybody that was affected. Uh so far there have been three victims who have passed away, uh, and then obviously the shooter is dead as well. But uh from what has been released, uh and you know, the investigation is still ongoing, but there was a a Nigerian man who was a naturalized citizen, drove up to Buford's on uh 6th Street um and uh rolled down his window, started firing into the crowd. And Buford's very popular college bar. I mean, it was very much packed, and this is probably right around closing time. Uh so started firing shots into the crowd, then drove around the corner, parked his car, got out with a uh rifle, and was walking towards uh Buford's to, you know, presumably continue uh the shooting. And uh Austin police responded in less than a minute, shot, took him down, killed him, uh, prevented any further um uh tragedy. And I think 14 people were uh wounded. Um and then uh obviously this ignited a massive discussion nationally uh over it, and you know, we're gonna continue to have debates and things on that nature, but I think you know, some people are still in the hospital. I think Buford's is actually reopening today.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

And all of the proceeds and things through the weekend are going to like a uh a charitable fund, I think, for for people that were affected by it. Um and so just a just a horrible tragedy. I mean, you know, Buford's a place we've gone. Almost anybody in Austin's gone before. Uh I live like a block and a half away from there. Um wasn't wasn't home at the time, but uh just uh just a horrible, horrible scene.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

And it does seem the FBI is investigating this, it does seem to be uh terrorism. Yeah. And um he was wearing uh I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Property of Allah sweatshirt and then a t-shirt underneath it with uh kind of an Iranian symbol. Uh isn't the flag, I agree.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

It was kind of the flag, it was like a stylized design of the flag, I think it looked like um clearly a response to the US um actions in Iran and killing the leadership uh of the Iranian Republic. I use that in air quotes. Um but we haven't seen anything else since, which thank God. Um but they're gonna continue investigating this, and like you said, our thoughts and prayers go out to the the victims, their families. Uh there was one uh member of the Capitol community whose whose brother was killed. Uh awful, awful situation. So I guess we'll find out where the investigation goes and what all they found find with this and how deep it goes, or if this was just one guy that decided to uh take up arms be in response to uh some in the police foreign policy action.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Uh body cam footage, I think yesterday. And I mean, again, just the police officers responded so quickly, so efficiently, so professionally, and I mean definitely stopped uh worse massacre from happening.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Well, and I guess we'll just uh add one thing on the impressive mark marksmanship by the police. Um, you know, they had pistols and they were shooting at a guy who was holding a rifle. And that is not exactly a great matchup there. Now the other side of this is we're lucky that guy was not a better shot.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Um, because uh d do we know how many rounds he fired total?

SPEAKER_02 10:08

You know, I haven't seen a a total number on that.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Okay. Um you know, uh obviously a lot of people got hit. Only three people died. Um, but when you're firing into a bar like that, it's it's almost amazing that more people didn't get hurt, right? So um thank God for the the police who responded so fast and took him out. So um with that, we will move on to the main topic of the podcast elections.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Um there are elections that happened this week.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

There might have been. There might have been.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Um which will only be maybe our 50th time to discuss the election results since since it's happened.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

And then we can put it behind us until the runoff.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Yeah. Well, and of course you have programs later today too where we have to go do the song and dance again.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yeah, we've uh we've talked about it about four or five times.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Which means we should be really good at it now. Yeah, right. We should have our lines set um and and know where to go. But you know, obviously the top thing was the thing that's really captivated the nation is the U.S. Senate race on both sides, you know, and going into it, we were very much on the like, oh, we think Crockett's gonna take the Dem nomination, and we were wrong on that. Taler Rico did it, and and we're not surprised by that. I think we were both. He clearly had momentum and momentum, the organization, and the spending. And this is something that we discussed in our our newsletter following election day, is you know, to maybe nobody's surprise, the biggest winner of election day was money. Yeah, you know, it's one of those obvious well-funded and well-spent campaigns won.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

It's one of those obvious um observations that kind of gotta relearn every every cycle because there are times where the bigger spender doesn't win.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

It does happen.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Um we can we can call into question maybe some of the efficacy of uh how the money was spent, because you know, now that we have the final votes and you know the final numbers on spending, you can calculate cost per vote. And like on the Republican side of things, John Cornyn spent way, way, way more than Paxton's I think the number SO was like sixty.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah, sixty million dollars. Sixty sixty dollars. Oh, I thought it was more than that. More than that, was it? A little more. Well, I know Paxton's was like four dollars.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

Yeah, four or five dollars uh per vote compared to, you know, exponentially higher per vote for Cornyn. And while obviously the narrative coming out of election days that Cornyn overperformed, and he did basically relative to our expectations. Relative to our expectations, but he also paid a pretty penny for it. Um because really Paxton and Cornyn came out, you know, within what was it, 20,000 votes of each other or something. I mean, it was pretty close. Yeah. Um but Pax Paxton spent like five million dollars in the course of the primary versus, you know, between Cornyn and Corning affiliate groups, you know, closer to 80 million or something like that. Um and so, you know, on the Democrats, and you know, Wesley Hunt, I think, was somewhere in between there. He spent maybe like uh He's probably spent like 15 million, I think uh Between I think him and his affiliate groups, maybe 'cause they're all they're lumping it all in together.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Um so yeah, I mean it's it's clearly uh Cornyn benefited from the money spent, uh obviously. And a lot of that was uh to boost his name ID, but also to f repair his uh well attack, but also repair his image among Republican primary voters, because that was really bad. And when Paxton jumped in the race, he was up like 20, 30 points on Cornyn uh in this matchup, head-to-head matchup. Well now we're gonna have the actual matchup, probably, for all the marbles in the runoff.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Um and so now you know the rubber will meet the road on that and how effective these campaigns are at painting the other one as untenable.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Yeah. And you gotta wonder just how much money is left in reserve for for Corny, you know, coming down the stretch, assuming it does get to that, and we'll talk about I guess should we talk about that now?

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah, let's talk about that now.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

So, since after the election, President Trump sent out a social media, a true social, uh, as they call it, um, saying that he was going to make an endorsement soon, and he expected the person he didn't endorse to drop out of the race. Immediately, everybody said this meant that he was going to endorse Cornyn, and there were leaks from uh the kind of the White House circle through uh some of Cornyn's campaign staff to legacy media where they said the president is going to endorse John Cornyn. Um obviously this sent off massive ripple effects. Uh Paxton went on TV and said he wasn't going to drop out even if Trump endorsed. But then the next day he issues uh kind of kind of a uh a deal, a gambit. And he says if the Senate nukes the filibuster and passes the Save America Act, which is this kind of comprehensive voter ID registration uh type of law, he would consider bowing out of the race. Which obviously puts the ball in John Cornyn's court and Senate Majority Leader John Thune's court because they have up to this point uh push back on Trump's calls to end the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act. Um and it was a really clever play, I thought.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Yeah, so we saw a lot of hot takes about it that were clearly way off on judgment about why this was done. Yeah. You I thought had the best observation. So can you spell that out?

SPEAKER_02 16:23

Oh, you're gonna make me blush. Yeah. Yeah, you're gonna- That's the nicest thing maybe you've ever said to me. Um so yeah, some of the takes were like, oh, this is the walls closing in on Paxton and things like that. But we forget Paxton kind of does his best work when it's kind of all over. You know, we go back to impeachment and things like that. Uh but it was really a win-win scenario for Paxton throwing down this deal because if St. Majority Leadership and Cornyn like call him on this bet, he's responsible for passing the Save Act, which is one of Trump's biggest legislative priorities.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Um more than just Trump's, it's all people all across the board in the Republican Party, like Paxton's nemesis, Chip Roy. Yeah, he has been uh going to the mat on this policy.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

And so if Paxton in making this deal gets the Save Act pack, he gets to ride off as a hero. You know, he'd be the most influential senator who's not even a senator, right? He got the Senate to actually, you know, do what the president has been really trying to force them to do for months. Uh on the flip side, if Cornyn and Senate leadership don't pass it, uh then this gives him a reason to continue in the runoff, even if Trump does endorse Cornyn. Then Pakistans can say Cornyn is, you know, XYZ, the ads write themselves. And Cornyn's response to Paxton uh was kind of circumtuitous. He was just like, I will say what I've always said. I support this, you know, bill and urge my colleagues to pass it. It's like, all right, well, that you didn't say like you would nuke the filibuster or anything like that. So um it's interesting to see there are rumblings out of DC in the rumor mill that leadership uh are you know is considering sacrificing Cornyn and not making the play. And and then Trump came out today, or was it last night? I think it was this morning, his morning, and said, you know, while I said that the endorsement was coming soon, I'm not gonna do it until the Save Act is passed.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

He's walking back, what he was saying.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Walking back. Um but also it seems like the gambit worked. You know, uh Paxon was able to push uh in delay the imminent endorsement and now gave Trump a leverage tool and tied his endorsement and or an endorsement in the race to the SAVE Act, which has been an uphill climb in the Senate. So hi to everyone. We'd like to thank the sponsor of today's podcast, the Lowy Law Firm. For over twenty years, Adam Lowy has helped injured Texans recover and heal. From car accidents to dog bites, Adam Lowy is there to help and gets results. Go to LowyLawfirm.com to find out more and get a free consultation. Adam, of course, is very well known on Twitter for his commentary and observations on Texas politics, so be sure to give him a follow as well. Thanks to our sponsor, the Lowy Law Firm.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Um of course the reason that we're having this conversation is that James Talarico won. Mm-hmm. And he is was the one of the two candidates that Republicans feared being top top of the ticket for Democrats in Texas. And the game theory is that uh John Cornyn is a significantly better, uh is such a significantly better candidate, November candidate, for Republicans to top the ticket, that they then would not have to spend a hundred million dollars to keep the Texas Senate seat and could spend that in other battleground seats. Um now Paxson contends differently, and he says that he would be just as fine, if not better, of a general election candidate. But that is not the observation being made by a lot of Republicans here in Texas, but also the machine in Washington. Yeah. And so they're trying to figure out ways to mitigate the damage in this runoff, both in the Senate race, but also a lot of these other contested uh house races. Um we saw what happened with Tony Gonzalez, and we'll we'll mention that, talk about that at the tail end of the show. But there's a lot of activity in the White House in DC right now to try and reduce the number of expensive competitive Republican runoffs so they can at least to the extent they can even do this, unite and get ready for November. Because everybody knows this is for Republicans going to be a bad cycle. The question is how bad. And uh the reason Trump came out after the election and said what he said about uh endorsing one and asking the other to sta step out is because um they do view Cornyn as the better November candidate, but also um Cornyn outperformed what the expectations were. You know, if Cornyn loses by eight, nine, ten points, but makes a runoff against Paxton, I don't think this happens. No. Um it was the fact that Cornyn rebounded so well again compared to what we thought he was going to do, that it Paxton looked weaker as a candidate. Coming out of the primary. Because the expectation was, oh, he's a comfortable first and he did not even finish first. Pip Corny finished in first place by one percent. So um a lot of changing calculus here by the White House and by uh the rest of the figures in DC that's causing a lot of uh haphazard uh you know changing constantly decisions as we Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:33

And on on both sides of the political aisle, I mean, you know, I was reading a report uh that said, you know, Senate Democrat leadership uh is slow to back money behind Tal Rico because if Cornyn is the nominee, then you know, they don't want to spend all that money in Texas just to lose again. And so maybe the Washington money bags won't come in for Tal Rico if it's Cornyn and stuff. So, you know, for every for every one action, there's like a million different sliding scales that happen. And of course, I think both parties going into November, however things work out, are gonna have to do a lot of work to repair their coalition. You know, because uh with Taller Rico winning over Crockett, there were a lot of hurt feelings in that primary, and then also with kind of the uh uh mix-up of the Dallas polling locations where people were going to the wrong precincts because of the shift to, you know, paper ballots and stuff by the Republicans in the county. Um there were, you know, and again, like if we look at the demographics on voting, like it was a very divided Democrat voter base, and they're gonna have to, and this is something Talarico has acknowledged, kind of try to repair that uh coalition if they're gonna have any shot in November, and that's gonna take a lot of money, uh, for just the campaigning purposes, and then on the flip side, the Republicans will as well. Um, and if Trump comes in and tries to force Paxton out of the race, uh ultimately, you know, that's going to hurt a lot of feelings in the Republican Party as well.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

That's the other thing I don't think they're people are considering enough is the deep-seated wounds that the avid Paxton base would have if that happens, if Paxton is actually forced out. Yeah. And it's a fair question to ask, do they show up? Even if this is, you know, democracy on the line with James Tallerico um as a surging Democrat in the state. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 24:52

Because if even five, three percent of Republicans decide to to just walk away from the polls in November because, you know, they're mad about whatever happened or who the nominee is, like that would be real bad.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Well, and I either way for them, one Senate seat is not really the gambit here. In the grand scheme of things, one Senate seat is probably not gonna matter a bunch. It's there's the signal, of course, that Texas is becoming more competitive that it would send. But practically speaking, the more tangible result, if three to five percent of the Republican electorate does not turn out, is the effect down ballot in the Texas House mainly, uh, but also the U.S. House. I mean, you probably it is possible if things are really bad for Republicans, that they lose, they have a net loss of two U.S. House seats. Nobody would have projected that. Especially after redistricting. After redistricting. And I'm getting to that number by um uh the let's say everyone has said that the uh the 32, Texas 32 is gonna go Republican, and I think that's probably the case. Um for some reason they're not lumping C D nine into that and Houston. But let's, for the sake of argument, say that that one's in play as well, then you have to assume that Republicans lose the other three house seats, 28, 34, both in South Texas, and then 35 on the outskirts of Bear County. But then if that is that much in play, you as a Republican risk losing Texas 15 and you risk losing uh CD-23, which is the Gonzalez seat now that Brandon Herrera is the the nominee there. Um I guess that's uh net loss of one, but still, like who would have thought that it's even remotely in realm of possibility that Republicans walk away in Texas with fewer congressional seats after the mid-decade redistricting? I don't I would not bet on it. Um clearly I'm a horrible gambler anyway, but it's in the realm of the still is possible. If things are that bad for Republicans, and if you have if the the theory about Paxton v. Talarico it just accentuates the um the troubles for Republicans, then if that's correct, then you have a lot more seats that are either impossible to get or lost entirely for the majority party in the state. So um I think we do we want to touch on more on the the Democratic contest, or we beat that horse to death.

SPEAKER_02 27:51

Uh I think we can slide on down.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Okay. Let's go to other statewides. Two uh shocks that happened in these races, I thought, were Mays Middleton performing as well as he did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:06

And again, AG race just coming out hot.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Yes. Um Middleton placing first, I think, still, right? Oh, yeah. They were really close, yeah. Oh no, no, I mean he's he's up. It was comfortable seven, seven, eight points. Oh, okay. It was close for B. But it's 49, 41%. Oh wow. He got 49.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

No, no, no. I'm wait, I don't know. We should have looked this up. Let me look at it.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah, look it up and I'll I'll add lib here. Um, you know, this one proves, again, the big winner. Uh one of the big winners in this election was money. And particularly here, self-funding money. And, you know, there was a lot of talk about uh, you know, the the validity of May's spending and whatnot, but it all spends the same.

SPEAKER_02 28:53

That's right, 39 to 31.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Okay. Okay. So it was a big gap, just not in the 40s. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

Um yeah, it was 39.2, 31.7, um, and then Huffman 14.9, and Wright's 14.2.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

So we got the matchup we all expected in a runoff. Just flipped.

SPEAKER_02 29:18

This script was. I mean, if you go and look at, you know, like our our cattle call where we asked, you know, a couple dozen experts, um political watchers and knowers and ball knowers, uh, everybody, vast majority had their money on chip. Um and May's just, you know, hashtag flip the script. We could say. And and it'll be interesting to see how this kind of continues to develop into uh the runoff territory, you know, because again, uh so much of how things go is how much do you meet expectations? I mean, yeah, Congressman Roy was saying that he was confident he might you know do this without a runoff. And here he is in a pretty, you know, uh not distant second, but an obvious second, you know. Um and what does that do to potential backers who were thinking about helping him fund his race down the stretch? You know, does this make money disappear? And of course, what we've seen since is Middleton has just rolled out a daily slate of new endorsements from state lawmakers.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

His Senate colleagues now that now that Joan Huffman's not in the race, Senate colleagues are more of them are endorsing him. Um he's he's leaned heavily on the endorsement stuff from the beginning. From the beginning, and he has the vast majority of the Republican lawmakers in the legislature backing him. Um he has a ton of local grassroots conservative organizations, and that was a deliberate strategy. Um and it it's worked. And on top of that, you dump$15 million into uh the TV campaign, and voila, here we are. Um, you know, there's there's another thing that I want to highlight uh that relates to it's part of this overall money picture. Slate cards were another big winner in this election. And the most notable slate card is the link letter. Candidates who are on the link letter, and the reason the link letter and other similar slate cards are important is that uh voters can, because they're not paid for by campaigns, at least directly, voters can take them into the voting booth with them and use it as a cheat sheet. So the candidates that were on the link letter, John Cornyn, Maze Middleton, Don Huffines, Nate Sheets, Bo French, every single one of them either won outright in Huffein's case, or overperformed expectations.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

They definitely outkick their coverage, you know, in a positive way. Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

I don't think that's how that phrase works. No, it's because anytime you outkick your coverage is a bad thing.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

They got out of over their skis, but positively.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

Done work, sorry, bud.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

They took a long walk on a short pier, but in a good way.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

You want to keep going?

SPEAKER_02 32:28

No, I think that's the last one I had. Which I mean that was that was a substantial number. No, it was it. I mean, that was like four people like you know, we're big we're big words guys. We love reading, we love writing, no arithmetic.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

You got them all wrong.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Yeah, but that's just because you love them doesn't mean it's like they love you back. Okay. You should know something about that.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

Okay. Anyway, back to the slate cards.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

So um slate cards, great, great play, Anna.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

Well, you know how take the the um the link letter. The amount of money that was spent on this.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Which I'll say this year was the first time I ever actually received the link letter in my mailbox.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Yeah, yeah. Um I'm glad you told informed me of that and sent me a photo of it or brought it in for me to look at.

SPEAKER_02 33:24

I kind of just assumed if I was getting one, you were getting one.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

Well, yes. My house did actually did get one.

SPEAKER_02 33:30

Then why are you giving me a hard time over this?

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Because you didn't know if I would have or not.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

That's true, I guess. Apparently we don't talk enough. Yeah. We actually don't communicate. This is just a communication session, and everybody is like listening and following along as we work with. This is when we do our brainstorming really. We work through our problems.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

Yes. Um the way it works is I think we might have mentioned this on a previous podcast, but the way it works is Terry Lowry, who runs the Link Letter, goes to approaches the campaign and says, Hey, you've been endorsed by the Link Letter. Do you want to buy an ad slot? The campaign says, obviously yes, and they pay the money, and then the ads run as an endorsement in the the pamphlet. It's not in not directly pay-to-play, but it is very much indirectly pay-to-play. Pay to be around. Yeah. Uh so it's And that's not the only slate card.

SPEAKER_02 34:27

There are a bunch of others. They're very much kind of uh at least used to be a much more regional thing where you have one up in you know a DFD. And there's nothing illegal about this. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, we saw, you know, more development in kind of the slate card game earlier through some of these other packs and stuff like that, which we've talked about.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Well, and if if we did see the the finance reports uh for those packs, and you see the same names over and over again. Uh Huffeins, I think Middleton on some, uh Nate Sheets, and BeauFrench. So this that strategy worked very well. Um and Terry Lowry's checkbook is gonna be very happy down the road uh in future cycles because of how well this worked out in terms of the results.

SPEAKER_02 35:20

So but the AG race was far from the oh, and we'll we'll say on the Democrat side, uh that's going to run off as well.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

Nathan Johnson again is Joe Jaworski.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Johnson nearly hit 50, but didn't quite and that's been finalized because Tony Box was right up there with Jaworski.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

From what I saw yesterday, yes, uh Box was about one and a half, two points below Jaworski. Yeah. Um still very close.

SPEAKER_02 35:43

Yeah, another guy who out who outperformed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Um outperformed the polling.

SPEAKER_02 35:48

Yeah, and we'll say a moment, you know, the polling, and you know, I'm so happy we're not pollsters because it sounds like when it's a most difficult job of all time. And no matter what you do and how hard you try, it's always gonna be, you know, not wrong, or people are gonna be upset about it. But it was all over the place in this race. And like, I mean, one of the final polls going in uh to the election was you know, had Jaworski up at almost 50%.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

Yeah, you know, in release. The the UT poll that's the one you're talking about there.

SPEAKER_02 36:26

The irony here is it was uh it the numbers were pretty close, just with the wrong name behind them.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

Yeah. Uh yes, but on the other side, on the Republican side, they were the ones that actually had Middleton performing the best. I think he was still in that one, two points behind Roy.

SPEAKER_02 36:43

But it was the first one where they were like, oh, yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

So and that's that's one of the things. Even if the poll like gets one of them totally right, like it's a different set of people, different set of respondents. Like it being a pollster's gotta be one of the toughest things.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Oh, absolutely. Um, you know, I was talking to a consultant yesterday, he was telling me, first of all, it's getting really hard to figure out what a likely voter is. Um, especially as you have a bunch of new voters coming in. You don't it's hard to know who that is. We saw this problem in 2016 play out. Trump expanded the electorate, one of the few people who've been able to do that. So you had a bunch of people who uh you have no idea what their profile is, uh they have no voter history to base modeling on. Uh and so you're making wild guesses about what these people in uh parts of the country that previously had voted Democratic for decades, the Rust Belt comes to mind with this, who then go pull the lever enthusiastically for the Republican. It's just there's that shift. But the other thing is the more logistical, technological one is it is harder to reach people because we all have cell phones and that's all almost all we use right now.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

But landlines Ironically, right? Like it's harder to reach people now that we're so reachable.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Yes. Well, because people don't answer the phone if they don't recognize the number. And um with landlines, uh at least for a long time, you couldn't you couldn't tell, or you just ex expected um uh you expected numbers that you didn't know or numbers that didn't have a caller ID on it.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

In a landline. Let's explain that for some of our younger viewers.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

Oh, do I need to explain this to you? Are you that young?

SPEAKER_02 38:27

No, we had a land. We had a landline.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

But I know, you know, let's say there's a so there is a there is a picture Alexander Grambell. Yeah. Yeah. And if you don't know who that is, he's the guy that invented the telephone. Well done. Yes. Yeah.

unknown 38:45

Whew.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

So imagine like a s a phone, but it's like plugged into the wall, and you can't unplug it. It has to be plugged into the wall, and you have to sit down, it's in your home, and the lines go through the land, hence landline. And wow. You just can't move it anywhere. Oh, there's some who have never seen this before.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

You nailed it. Thank you. You know, in college, I was uh I was roommates with three football players. Two of them were perfectly wonderful people, the other one was not.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

But sorry, this happened to you.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Yeah, one of the the guys who was pleasant, uh, he had never worked a dishwasher before. He had no idea how to work a dishwasher. And I remember standing there in the kitchen as he's saying that, trying to load this thing and figure out how to work it, just draw on the floor. What intarnation. Uh, and he was from a wealthy family. It wasn't that they didn't have a dishwasher. Oh, okay. It was that he his mom always did it and he never had to. Um but wild.

SPEAKER_02 40:02

Yeah, wild. I mean, we got rid of our landline when I was like in middle school or something, so you know, there's a whole generation of people who have no idea what we're talking about right now.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Yeah. Well, anyway, now to get back after your detour here, it's a detour y day for me. It is, it is the reason of for a lot of this variance, the main one is there uh it's just a lot tougher to reach people. And if you can't reach people, how do you know how do you get an accurate gauge on how they're gonna vote? You can't. So um that has been a big problem that the polling industry is gonna have to figure out uh figure out how to fix and get around. So um TBD on that. But we'll have um two runoffs in that race for the AAG. Another one um that was I wouldn't call this a total shock, um, especially but because of the percentage that he won by. But Don Huffines won outright the Republican nomination for Comptroller. And I think that shows that the Trump endorsement didn't really matter in that race, because that came down on Friday.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Well, and and this is something that we'll talk about, and really the post-mortem on all of this, especially after the runoffs, is gonna be fascinating because you had really, I think maybe for the first time, like a lot of the major players, both nationally and in Texas politics, endorsing against each other, backing different horses in the race. You know, because you have in the AG race, you had Ted Cruz endorse Chip, and Chip fell short of May's. But Ted Cruz endorsed Huff Heinz in the Comptroller race, and Huffines ran away with it. Also, you had and and then you know Abbott endorsed uh Kelly Hancock, who while he surged towards the end there and managed to get second, uh, which all the polls had him coming in third throughout the course of kind of the lead up to early voting and in election day, uh, you know, Hancock didn't make a runoff. But then in the AG race, you have Abbott endorsed Sheets have this uh maybe the most surprising result of political unseating of long-term incumbent Sid Miller, who did have a Trump endorsement, but one that came very late at the same time that the Huff Eins endorsement came in. So, you know, you can't say that the Trump endorsement carried Huffeins across the line or the uh Cruz endorsement did, you know, it was the campaign Huffeines ran. Obviously, those endorsements do something and they do help, but it wasn't enough to carry Chip in the first and in the AG, and it wasn't enough to save uh Miller in the ad commissioner.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

The other thing on the Miller endorsement versus the Huff Heinz endorsement, as soon as that truth social post came through, the Huff Heinz camp started running their ads, first on digital, because you can get that up quicker, but also on TV, uh touting the Trump endorsement. They had it ready. And yes, they had the money to do it, whereas the whereas the Miller campaign did not. They were not prepared, then they also didn't have the resources to run a long statewide ad campaign.

SPEAKER_02 43:28

And um, you know, how especially in the expensive money markets, because if you look at that ag race, uh which again, you know, and we'll keep getting into it, um, you know, Sheets won uh most of the major urban areas, while rur uh rural voters stayed with Miller.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

But they didn't stay with Miller to the extent they have in the past. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And so that is w a big reason why Miller not just lost by law but lost by such a large margin.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Yeah. Um it was what, maybe six points? It's like fifty-two to forty-seven-ish.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

I thought it was like fifty-three, fifty-four. I don't know. Um but it wasn't it wasn't razor thin. Yeah, it wasn't super duper tight. Um so yeah, undoubtedly, undoubtedly, that was the biggest shock of the night. I don't think anybody projected that.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

Yeah, well, I mean, if you looked at all the polling, again, going back to the polling not being uh something that you can just hang your hat on, uh it all had Miller not just leading sheets, but demolishing sheets. Um, and if you talk to anybody who was involved in politics, the vast majority of them were like, yeah, Miller's gonna Miller's gonna win. And, you know, he's faced stiff challengers before, um, and always run away with it, and it finally caught up with him, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

This this kind of just hit me, but Sheets and Talarico were very similar. And both those races were very similar in terms of Tal Rico and Sheets ran well-funded um professional campaigns, whereas their opponents, Crockett and uh Miller, d did not have the operation, did not have the presence that those two did. Um and a big reason is that Tal Rico and Sheets had more money to spend. And so Sheets was able to get on all these slate cards. Tal Rico was able to run TV ads constantly. Crockett did not have that kind of money. It never came in for her. She had some money and she did run some ads, but uh the the ratio was was like four to one. It was very lopsided. So um those two seem not exactly the same, but pretty similar case studies and how to view and how to judge this election cycle.

SPEAKER_02 46:14

Yeah, and I think it's it's maybe a little bit of a corrective because you know, obviously as technology advances and new methods of communication and we kind of had the social media boom and stuff like that. I think everybody was very much thinking that the way that campaigns worked, successful campaigns, was going to change pretty substantially. And they certainly have changed in in major ways. Uh, but I think I think you know Tuesday really showed that the fundamentals are still very important.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

Absolutely. You know, another observation uh was made to me. I didn't come up with this, but it it was a really good one. The difference between Don Huffein's 2026 campaign and his 22 campaign was Huffein's himself was not really made, his personality was not made the centerpiece this time around. It was a highly, highly name ID campaign. Um and he had the money to do it. Uh Alan Blake Moore was running the the operation this time. And first of all, Huff Heinz was not going up against Greg Abbott. So that is a significant difference. At least he was not going up against him head to head. He was going up against his endorsed candidates. So that is that is different, stipulated. But um the Huff Heinz campaign was more measured in how they presented him, um, and they stuck to uh slogans that worked very well. Um and I don't recall ads that had him talking, other than to say paid for by or approved for by. Uh there might have been some here or there, but not to the extent we saw in 22 that I recall. So a bit of a adjusted campaign strategy focused on the Huff Find's name versus the Huff Find's man. Yeah. Um but these things are these things matter, you know, these tactical changes, a slight tweak here and there matters. It really does.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Focusing on the fundamentals and then playing to your candidate's strengths and not, you know, giving room to their possible weaknesses, you know. Um it's just so fun. It's been really fun talking to a lot of the different consultants since and everybody kind of swapping uh notes on on how it goes. It it really is, you know, such a s the gainmanship is very, very interesting and all the strategies and tactics and adjustments and how they're sliding the scales and things and making the adjustments, you know. Uh we both very much like sports and it's in a lot of ways is is very sportsman-like. Oh, absolutely. Yes. And uh it's it's fun to watch and analyze.

SPEAKER_00 49:02

And there's a lot of stuff to take away, and no race, no one race is just like the other, and there's different dynamics in everything. Um another one that was really fascinating was the primary for SD3. And that was for a long time really close, and particularly because the the spending was not exactly the same. I think Ashby still outspent Ward by a decent chunk, but Ward, Rhonda Ward could spend enough to be competitive, and she was, and she was hitting him hard on the um the the Ramadan resolutions that were uh either passed or considered filed in the House in Ashby's committee, even though they did not advance past Ashby's committee in this last session. But they were still getting he was still getting hit on, like other candidates were across the state, for pass votes on these resolutions in previous sessions. So um it was working. And the Ashby camp was not feeling great for a while. And all of a sudden things changed. Something flipped. And Ashby's camp was doing tracking polling, which is, as it's been explained to us, very expensive, which is why it's not done much. But basically, you can see day to day how your actions as a campaign affect the electorate you're trying to reach and see your numbers move. And we saw the chart yesterday. Um Ashby is in in front, but Ward is pretty close. And as soon as they start running this ad on uh secession or Wards signing the Texit pledge, um you can see that the numbers just depart and Ashby goes way up, and it remains way up for the rest of the cycle, the primary through election night. And that's why Ashby won by such a margin. Um, you know, the the way they packaged that message was uh she Rhonda Ward wants to take away veterans' benefits or Social Security, she wants to take away Social Security benefits. Of course, she's never said that, but the implication is that uh by Texas seceding from the Union, if that were to ever happen, you would get detached from those programs that people have paid into. So it worked. Whether it's a fair hit or not, different debate, but it worked. And it worked to a massive effect. Um and now Ashby's gonna be a state senator. So um that was an interesting race there.

SPEAKER_02 51:45

Um statewides that you thought or you know, railroad commissioners getting through a runoff, and we mentioned you know, Bo French outperformed expectations and less. Quite a lot. He finished first. Uh I think didn't I think Wright snuck past him and he just kept coming in. Um but regardless, very close, and and Bo was, I think, not necessarily expected to even make a runoff.

SPEAKER_00 52:10

He was pulling it like eight percent.

SPEAKER_02 52:11

Um and you know, again, was on the slate cards, and obviously, you know, whatever strategy they had, it worked out. Um so that's gonna go to a runoff as well. Just wanted to note that one. Um, and then, you know. Uh definitely.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

That's gonna be that one, I'll add one more thing on that. There's gonna be a very interesting dynamic where you have the entire oil and gas, or not the entire, uh most of the oil and gas industry funding Jim Wright's campaign because they very much do not want BeauFrench on the Railroad Commission. Um the exception to that is uh Tim Dunn and similar allies, because well, Dunn, that's how he made his money, is oil and gas. Um but we've already seen a lot of the you know standard industry, the the more legacy type industry, finance Jim Wright's campaign, and now they're gonna do that even more. I'm sure, I mean, um they care about that that race a lot. Um, as does Dunn. You know, that's why he's putting so much money into French. So um the railroad commission races are always super weird, and this one is an example of that, but um there will be a lot more money spent through this runoff for sure.

SPEAKER_02 53:30

It's definitely one to watch. Uh Democrat Lieutenant Governor going to a runoff.

SPEAKER_00 53:35

That was interesting. Uh, you know, one thing I did notice over the weekend when I was looking through finance reports, there was actually a sizable independent expenditure made uh for Marcos Velez, who's the second place. Now he finished a distance second. Vicky Goodwin, state rep. She uh nearly hit 50, but did not, similar to Johnson. And Velez is a um little-known candidate. He had gotten a lot of flack for um in a newspaper endorsement interview. He did not know his state rep or his state senator. He also didn't know that redistricting only occurred with the U.S. House member House districts, not the state legislative districts. So just a a knowledge gap there on just basic political stuff, and he got hit for it a lot. Um on the other hand, though, he is a uh a union guy, blue-collar union guy, and I believe he got endorsed by uh one of the big unions. Uh that or they didn't endorse, they stayed out of it, I think. No, they stayed out of the Senate race. They endorsed him over Goodwin. Um, I think it was the the public workers union. And that was interesting. And now the table resets, the chessboard clears for the runoff. But if Goodwin wins, you're gonna have a very Austin-centric Democratic ticket.

SPEAKER_02 55:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:09

Um you'll have Talarico at the top, Gina Hinahosa for governor, uh, Goodwin for Lieutenant Governor, Sarah Eckhart for Comptroller. Um basically the only others are um A.G. either Johnson or Jaworski, and then the uh the candidate for ag commissioner, uh Clayton Tucker. So I don't think we've seen that before. Such an awesome such a yeah one geographical centric ticket. But who knows?

SPEAKER_02 55:45

Who knows? Who knows? Um fun to watch.

SPEAKER_00 55:49

Yeah, I can tell we're losing steam here. Um, but I'll touch briefly on the U.S. House or the State House because those were big elections.

SPEAKER_02 55:58

A couple of upside on both sides of the aisle.

SPEAKER_00 56:01

Yeah, so um one that we talked about a lot, Ken King, he won by 10 points over John Browning. Turns out the flood of money that came in for him worked. Shocker, right? Who would have thought? Yeah, more at five. Money works. Um and then you had two incumbent Republicans, three incumbents, two Republicans, one Democrat, lose. Uh Cecil Bell in Montgomery County, Stan Kitsman in Fort Bend and outside Fort Bend County. Uh both of the two Republicans that lost. And we knew going in that it would things were dicey for them. Um, you know, Bell, his name ID was so bad, especially for being a 10-year incumbent. He was down in from what I heard in the teens, uh, which is wild. Compare that to Mark Lahood, who is a freshman lawmaker seeking his second term, and his name ID in his district was 90% going into this race, and he won 75-25. So obviously a different different set of contexts and a different district, but still your name ID should be bigger than that if you're a 10-year incumbent. Uh then you had probably the one of the other bigger shocks of the night, Chris Turner losing to junior Ozonu, I think that's how you pronounce his name, who's a local city councilman in Grand Prairie there. Um a young black man. He was also uh temperamentally significantly more progressive than Turner. Um I don't know where they Chris Turner is not a moderate, but he's also not as super far left. And this guy at least was coming off as more the far-left candidate, and he benefited significantly from Crockett. The turnout in Dallas, in the Dallas area, uh particularly among black voters for Crockett, and from what I heard, he was handing out pamphlets that had uh his that had Crockett holding his campaign side. And when you have that swell of turnout specifically for Crockett, and you have that tied together so much, of course it's gonna pay dividends, and it worked. Yeah. Um the other factor of this is this is an example, and it would take a lot more uh to s to see this in full respect than just one example here. But this is kind of a mirror image of the right flank of the caucus and the Republican Party primary more moderate members or establishment members of of the caucus. And similar themes were were made in both. If you looked at Zonu's uh one TV ad that he ran, he was talking about how we need a fighter who's going to stand up to the status quo. Well, how many times how many campaign ads have you seen that general sentiment conveyed against Republican incumbents in the Texas House? It is almost a mirror image of that.

SPEAKER_02 59:17

So Well, and there's there was definitely a number of you know, Democrat incumbents who got unseated even outside of like the House races. Like one of the things that uh maybe the second most surprising one to me from election day results out of, you know, aside from the ag commissioner race, was uh Dallas County District Attorney, John Cruzot, who's been in there for a while, was a you know targeted by Republicans for years.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

And also not a moderate.

SPEAKER_02 59:45

Not a moderate. He was one of the ones targeted not only by Texas Democrats, but by national democrats for being like a George Soros-backed You mean by Republicans. Yeah, yeah, Republicans, um uh for being a Soros-backed guy. So like not at all a moderate, like one of the leading DAs on like progressive criminal justice reform and things of that nature. He got beat in a primary by a Dallas uh district judge, Amber Givens. Um, and I think the the Barrett County judge also got beat um as well in the primary. Uh, and so it's very just interesting to see some of these same almost narrative cycles, narrative themes playing out on both sides of the party, um, that uh is maybe leading to more uh and again temperamentally perhaps progressive candidates and temperamentally uh conservative candidates winning in the primaries. Uh and we say that because, you know, like like at the U.S. Senate race on the Democrats, like Mm Talarico was not a moderate. Uh some of the national people kept calling him a moderate, but that's because temperamentally compared to kind of the bombastic nature of Jasmine Crockett, he came off much more kind of mild-mannered. But policy-wise, I think there's a very good argument to make that Talerico's to the left of Crockett um and things of that nature.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:13

And so But then down ballot, it was reversed, where you had the more bombastic candidate upsetting, the more uh pragmatic candidate. Yeah. With a longer history. And that's another thing, too. This is that was an anti-incumbent um, at least to some degree, factor there because Turner had been in office for a while. Um so he had a record that this guy that the other candidate could run against. Uh whereas Tal Rico and Crockett, they neither of them were the incumbents here. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:45

Um and again, there's every single race is totally different. Um and it but it it is interesting to see some of these kind of narrative plot lines come together. Another incumbent that uh is no longer going to be there. Well, if we move up to the US congressional delegation, you had Steve Toth at uh toth rather uh state rep beating Dan Crenshaw um handedly.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:12

Yeah. Um my read on that one is it was a highly localized result. Absolutely. You had some, you of course had some uh, you know, the right winger taking out the establishment guy. Uh but the thing similar to to Taylor Remett winning winning in SD9, this hyper-localized factor, the one the localized factor there is different than the one here, but the one here is that Crenshaw pissed a lot of people off in the district. He's he's an abrasive figure, he just is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:47

I mean, the event that I went to down there, the Montgomery County, Montgomery Montgomery County, good lord, um Trump Reagan dinner, you know, toath spoke and it was a very, you know, normal thing. We've got to, you know, save the country, blah, blah, blah. Cried up there and he was very feisty and just kind of attacked people. Not necessarily the people in the room, but he went after some national figures and things of that nature and was very prickly, very, you know, kind of porcupine, like, don't touch me, I'm squared up and stuff. And you could see like he stayed around for the rest of the event, but like people really didn't come up and talk to him. He was very kind of standoffish, a little aloof. Um, well, and from people in the district and stuff, because like uh uh they're very much like, yeah, that guy is just kind of a jerk, and they were very happy to see him go.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43

The there's some national reporting on uh Ted Cruz and why Ted got in for Toath and ran an ad for Toath specifically. Um there was uh uh apparently a con confrontation in an airport between Cruz and Crenshaw, and Crenshaw accused Cruz of working against him in his primary. And uh Cruz said, uh, if I was working against you, you'd know it. And then like two days later, the ad goes up for Cruz backing Toath. And um, you know, Cruz can can put that feather in his cap too. Like that's uh he had something to do with ousting Dan Crenshaw, and we'll never know exactly the impact, but it had to be significant to some degree. Um so there were two other runoffs that um that we should probably mention f congressional congressionally CD 9, Alex Mueller against Briscoe Kane, John Lujan in C D 35 against Carlos de la Cruz, um both Lujan and Kane uh endorsed by Abbott, state lawmakers, up against candidates who have a Trump endorsement. They both outperformed what we thought going in. Now I think Lujan finished first in that primary. Mueller finished first in CD9, but Kane was only seven points behind her, and some of the polling we saw going in was looked worse, significantly worse. But it's an example of them having a basis, an electoral basis already, foundation. Um so those will be interesting primaries or for runoffs to watch.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:34

And of course, the big one that was going to run off and isn't going to run off anymore is US rep Tony Gonzalez versus Brandon Herrera. And that's, you know, obviously become one of the biggest stories uh nationally because of the scandals surrounding Tony Gonzalez and the uh uh affair he had with a married staffer who then went on to commit suicide uh by lighting herself on fire. Um It was allegations that had uh dogged him, and of course the story first broken by our friend Tony Ortiz at Current Revolt. Um the allegations had dogged him for a long time. He had denied it, he had refused to address it, and then the staffer's husband came out and started releasing texts uh between Gonzalez and the staffer, texts uh that his uh former wife had sent admitting to the affair and things of that nature, and it just really blew up. Uh and uh eventually house leadership called on Gonzalez to drop out of the race. Uh and Gonzalez also went on uh an interview and admitted to the affair. Um and uh he late last night announced that he was officially withdrawing from the race, which makes Brandon Hir Herrera, the Republican nominee, uh, going into that race. So it's just been an absolute uh just ongoing drama. It's been a mess. It's been a mess.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:08

And since that happened, we've already seen Democrats rolling out their APO file on Herrera. Uh that seat is an R57 seat, so the percent advantage from 50 that Republicans have is seven points. Um that is an advantage, but not a massive one. And in a bad year for Republicans, that seat is very much competitive. Yeah. Doesn't mean that Republicans will lose it. Uh there are others that would be tougher to keep, but Herrera is a uh a controversial figure for different reasons than Gonzalez's. Gonzalez is now controversial because of his personal foibles. Herrera is a famous YouTube guy.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:54

Online gun guy, has a ton of videos out there.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:57

Which means he has a lot of things that he said on camera, especially as kind of a shock jock nature. Um in de the the Democratic apparatus is already running Appo against him, just like Republicans are already dumping their Appo file on James Talarico at the top of the ticket.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:12

In a different way, Talarico has a lot of videos of him saying things on camera.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:15

Yes. So it's gonna be a long rest of the year with a lot, a lot of campaign ads run. Um and this is for not just the U.S. House where that has significant implications for what will get done or won't get done in the last two years of Trump's um presidency. But then here in Texas, we've got a U a Texas House that it's a what is it, uh 16 seats advantage for Republicans. Um the line to gain is is 76. And Democrats can really cut into this, and Republicans are very much worried about losing a ton of seats in the House. I heard somebody say third up to 30 seats. I don't think it's that extensive, but um, you know, if Republicans lose 10 seats, it's a huge difference.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:15

Totally huge change.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

Huge difference, and then you have a different dynamic for speaker. Uh that doesn't mean that Dustin Burroughs, the current speaker, cannot maneuver his way through that. But it just the numbers game changes things massively. And this is gonna be you already have a um you already have a Democratic caucus that is increasingly angry at the speaker over how things went last year, particularly with redistricting, but a whole host of other things as well. You have someone like Chris Turner, who was probably going to be another vote for Burroughs, as opposed to um a potential other Republican candidate that runs. I don't think that'll happen, but things can change by the day, of course. But you had at least one candidate who had voted for Burroughs last year for speaker lose to a candidate who is almost assuredly not going to vote for Burroughs or whoever the Republican is. So things are shifting, and they will shift significantly more if Democrats flip a bunch of seats in the Texas House in November. Um there's a lot at stake here and a lot left to go. We um we've had a long week, but it was fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:38

Oh yeah. So are they all long and fun weeks. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:42

Can we get a short and fun week? I don't think that'll happen anytime soon.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:47

I don't know. Uh we'll have to we'll have to wait and find out. But yeah, just another action-packed week in Texas politics. And it's just not stopping.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:57

Yeah. And you know, reminder to subscribe, and so that way you can get our uh newsletters every morning. Um we appreciate you listening and give us like and review. Uh if it's good, if it's bad, then just refrain. Just move on, go to go to a different podcast. Um, but we appreciate you listening, and we'll catch you next week.