The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: conservatives
Ken Paxton

Lone Star Stress: Why Republicans Are Desperate To Hold Onto Texas

Things are undoubtedly rough for Republicans as they face the prospect of deep losses in the U.S. Senate. The map is shocking given that the Democratic Party’s path to the majority runs through states like Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio—deep red states that shouldn’t, under any normal circumstances, be competitive.

It’s particularly crazy since even redder states like Nebraska and South Carolina are also in play come Election Day.

But there is one state that looms largest among all the Senate battlegrounds: Texas. And the amount of money Republicans are sinking into this expensive state despite this massively expanded battleground map is remarkable.

“From the start of September through Election Day, Republican-aligned groups are planning to spend $166 million to boost the embattled Texas attorney general – more than they’re set to spend than on competitive Senate campaigns in Michigan, $83 million, and Maine, $61 million, combined,” reported CNN.

And that’s just part of the GOP’s Texas election bill, which CNN says “is expected to exceed $300 million.”

I have been skeptical and remain skeptical about the massive amounts spent on TV ads that no one watches, and no one is swayed by. President Donald Trump was dramatically outspent on the airwaves by both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024, for all the good it did them.

And while candidates in lower-ballot races can benefit from a boost to their name recognition, how much value is GOP Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton really getting from seeing his ad on Judge Judy 258 times in September alone, per CNN? That’s nearly 12 times per episode, assuming the show ran every weekday that month.

Paxton’s poll numbers certainly aren’t looking better as a result of the tens of millions spent saturating the airwaves, nor are Democratic nominee James Talarico’s as a result of his own massive spending. (And Democratic spending is far more efficient since our candidates don’t depend on billionaire-funded super PACs, which pay far higher ad rates.)

Those stubborn poll numbers led data maven Lakshya Jain, director of political data at The Argument and co-founder of the election forecasting site Split Ticket, to make a sensible point.

“If I was the GOP, I would just cut Texas and start focusing on Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, Alaska, Michigan, and Minnesota,” he posted on X. “They’re demographically friendlier and Texas is as expensive as all of them combined, with no evident ROI on Paxton’s slim airtime edge.”

Pollster Adam Carlston responded, “This is analytically correct, but it’s also missing how important — from a psychological perspective — holding Texas is to Republicans, including many GOP donors.”

He concluded: “Texas is the heart of 21st Century conservatism, and even one statewide loss would be a symbolic disaster for them.”

And that’s really it.

That Texas Senate seat counts just as much as the Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, or Alaska one. There is no quantitative advantage to winning the Lone Star State over any other. And in fact, if the GOP manages to squeeze out the Texas victory but narrowly loses Kansas, Iowa, South Carolina, or others, it could very well end up materially worse off.

But there’s a very real chance Republicans would make that trade in a heartbeat—a deeper minority while holding that Texas Senate seat, rather than a narrower one without it.

Imagine Democrats on the verge of losing a California Senate seat. It’s that same energy—and it’s perhaps even worse.

There’s a sense that any Democratic victory in states like Kansas, Nebraska, or South Carolina could be a six-year rental, kind of like when Alabama Democrat Doug Jones won a 2017 Senate special election against a deeply flawed Republican opponent. Jones served three years and then Alabama voters snapped right back to conservative form.

Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. That’s more than three decades of total Republican control despite countless predictions that the state was on the verge of turning purple.

So electing Democrat Talarico wouldn’t just cost Republicans one Senate seat: It would breach the wall. It would prove that a Democrat can actually win statewide in modern Texas.

And that could have consequences that reach far beyond a single Senate term.

Texas’ demographics should give us a more competitive state than actual election results have delivered. Republicans have survived thanks to chronically weak turnout among younger and urban voters, while making enough gains with Latinos to offset Democratic growth in the state’s booming metropolitan areas.

If any of those dynamics change—and the Latino vote is certainly swinging hard against the GOP this cycle—the implications get much bigger than the Senate.

Texas would be different.

Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. That’s more than three decades of total Republican control despite countless predictions that the state was on the verge of turning purple.

So electing Democrat Talarico wouldn’t just cost Republicans one Senate seat: It would breach the wall. It would prove that a Democrat can actually win statewide in modern Texas.

And that could have consequences that reach far beyond a single Senate term.

Texas’ demographics should give us a more competitive state than actual election results have delivered. Republicans have survived thanks to chronically weak turnout among younger and urban voters, while making enough gains with Latinos to offset Democratic growth in the state’s booming metropolitan areas.

If any of those dynamics change—and the Latino vote is certainly swinging hard against the GOP this cycle—the implications get much bigger than the Senate.

Texas has 40 electoral votes. Alaska has three. Iowa and Kansas have six each.

Republicans can lose any of those smaller states and find another path to the White House. Losing Texas would blow a crater in their presidential map.

And Republicans don’t even have to actually lose Texas for that nightmare to begin. They just have to lose the luxury of assuming they’ll win it.

And we’re seeing the cost of that right now.

Republicans are on track to spend more than $300 million defending a single Senate seat in Texas while simultaneously fighting fires in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota. Every dollar they dump into Texas is a dollar they can’t spend protecting a Senate seat somewhere else.

Now imagine that becoming the norm.

A reliably Republican Texas allows the GOP to pour its presidential election coffers (with much of that money originating from Texas itself) into Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and wherever else the battleground happens to be. A genuinely competitive Texas forces Republicans to spend enormous sums defending 40 electoral votes that previously cost them virtually nothing to secure.

This year’s Senate race is a preview of what could be. Texas has become a funding black hole, sucking Republican money away from an extraordinarily broad Senate battlefield. Even if Paxton ultimately wins, Republicans will have paid an enormous opportunity cost just to preserve something they once could simply assume was theirs.

That’s why the Republican Party’s ultimate nightmare isn’t simply losing Texas this November.

It’s having to fight for Texas every November.

Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Best-Selling, Liberal-Bashing 'Abundance' Is Abundantly Clueless

Best-Selling, Liberal-Bashing 'Abundance' Is Abundantly Clueless

The hot-selling book Abundance is written by liberals who bash liberals, or more precisely, try to make them feel guilty. Sure, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson shed some blame on conservatives for why America doesn't build as easily as it used to. But it's those liberals in expensive cities, the authors insist, who are callously driving less-than-rich families to move elsewhere.

Klein and Thompson argue that Democrat-run "superstar" cities have failed to provide enough affordable housing because of all their building rules and regulations and pesky zoning ordinances that make it harder to build. The chief culprits are San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and, as always, New York City. The comparisons made against them are ludicrous.

A sample complaint: "The Austin metro area led the nation in housing permits in 2022, permitting 18 new homes for every thousand residents. Los Angeles's and San Francisco's metro areas permitted only 2.5 units per thousand residents."

Where do we start? Let's start with the not-insignificant matter of buildable land. The population density of San Francisco is five times that of Austin. Even sprawling Los Angeles has nearly three times as many people per square mile as Austin does.

Another sampling: Houston "is not facing the crises of homelessness and housing affordability seen in the superstar cities of many blue states." Why? In 2023, the Boston metro area issued 10,500 new housing permits, while Houston issued almost 70,000.

Boston has nearly four times the number of people per square mile as Houston. And Boston Harbor borders a big, blue-gray body of water. The land to its east is Portugal. Of course, buying and building in Boston is harder to do — and more expensive.

Really, all the so-called superstar cities getting roasted in Abundance — San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles — are bounded by water whereas Austin and Houston can easily expand into open country. The authors speak a lot about "bottlenecks" impeding progress. I'd say that the Pacific Ocean is a significant bottleneck to Los Angeles building out. Wouldn't you?

Houston has no zoning laws, so you can put almost anything anywhere. That's the Houston way. (This dynamic metropolis might rightly bristle being left out of the list of superstar cities.) Urban Texas has some fine old neighborhoods that locals treasure, but there's a lot more history to protect in the older cities.

Let Houston be Houston, Boston be Boston and LA be unlike either.

This is a big country. The four ultra-costly superstar cities combined take up a minuscule 0.025% of the total U.S. landmass. Let's not insult the thousands of smaller cities and towns by portraying the glitzy coastal metros as the only places where opportunity beckons. Fortunes can be made anywhere. Silicon Valley was almost all fruit orchards into the 1950s.

A needed update: Austin's heralded building boom is over for now. Austin's growth, fueled by the pandemic, now limps along with sky-high office and apartment vacancy rates.

Klein and Thompson speak in that confident wonky voice, arms outstretched with futurama visions of shared prosperity. If only Americans, Democrats especially, would get out of the way.

"Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families while presiding over the parts of the country they are leaving." They predictably single out liberal California, noting "California's most populous cities are run by Democrats."

As it happens, Democrats also preside over Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.

Abundance operates on the assumption that liberals can be shamed for wanting to preserve landmarks, intimate Main Streets and tenements with old shops at the bottom. Pass the guilt by. Liberals, joined by their conservative neighbors, have every right to slow down the bulldozers.

Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Trump rally, Tulsa

Suddenly, MAGA Is Feeling Doubt About Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill'

With House Republicans narrowly passing President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which is designed to blow up the national debt, cut taxes for the rich, and partially pay for that by gutting programs for the poor and working class—you’d think MAGA conservatives would be cheering. But many of them aren’t.

Let’s back up.

Trump defied historic voting patterns in 2024 by winning voters making under $50,000 a year, 50 percent to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ 48 percent. He tied her among voters making over $50,000, at 49 percent. And when the threshold was raised to $100,000, the income divide got starker: Trump won the under-$100K crowd, 51 to 47 percent, while Harris won the over-$100K vote, 51 to 47 percent.

That flipped the old partisan narrative. In general, Republicans were the party of the working class, and Democrats the party of those with more money.

While culture-war hysteria around transgender people and immigrants drove much of Trump’s support, his promise to lower prices “on Day 1” clearly resonated with economically desperate voters. Exit polls back this up. He won 76 percent of those who had faced “severe hardship” from inflation in the previous year, and 52 percent of those who’d faced “moderate hardship.” Meanwhile, Harris dominated among those who said they’d faced “no hardship,” winning 78 percent of them.

As former Daily Kos reporter Kerry Eleveld once said in our old podcast, “Democrats are the party of voters who don’t have to look at prices when grocery shopping.”

That’s why we see so many variations of “this isn’t what we voted for” in all these “Leopards Ate Faces” stories. Yes, we could scream, “IT WAS ALL THERE IN PROJECT 2025!” But let’s be honest: Most voters aren’t policy wonks. For those doing price math in the grocery aisle, politics isn’t a priority. Trump’s promise may have been absurd, but it was simple and seductive.

But falling for those lies has a cost. On the economic front, Trump and the Republican Party are governing like they always have—for the ultrawealthy, connected, and powerful, at the direct expense of their own voters. As I’ve written repeatedly, it’s like Trump is trying to hurt his base.

Early Thursday morning, House Republicans voted to gut Medicaid, which disproportionately helps rural Americans. Their tax cuts for billionaires effectively raise taxes on low-income voters—i.e., their core voters in last year’s election. MarketWatch, reporting on a University of Pennsylvania analysis of a close-to-final draft of the GOP tax bill, noted:

  • The top 0.1 percent of households would rake in over $390,000 in after-tax income.
  • The top 1 percent would gain $44,190.
  • Households making $51,000 to $92,999 a year would get an additional $815.
  • The lowest-income households, though, will see their after-tax income shrink by $940.

Yes, that voter making under $50,000, they get to deal with Trump’s price-raising tariffs and a tax hike.

On Reddit’s r/conservative subreddit, the reactions to the House passing the bill were surprisingly muted.

Some echoed traditional deficit concerns, such as the commenter who noted, “Conservatives are supposed to want less government spending and less debt. This bill will add trillions of dollars of debt over the next 10 years. We're not even kind of moving in the right direction.”

But a surprising number took umbrage at the gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

One top commenter the subreddit—i.e., not a troll—wrote, “I'm all for cutting waste fraud and abuse on Medicaid and SNAP, but … I think if the medicaid/SNAP changes go through as is, GOP will get mauled in the mid-terms.”

Another top commenter noted, “[I]t's not that I like high taxes, it's that I think high taxes on the lower, middle, and upper-middle-class are much more damaging than high taxes on the ultra-rich. It's both about keeping taxes low on most people, and about preventing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people. It's also frustrating because Trump has repeatedly spoken out in favor of such tax hikes on the richest taxpayers as a way of making budgets and tax breaks work.”

This commenter also called the Medicaid provisions “cruel,” and on SNAP, they said, “[I]t's going to deny benefits to some people we would probably prefer have them. for example the people who are going to be hit hardest are the people who live in areas where jobs are scarce, who have difficult lives with a lot of barriers to getting anything done, and who have other life responsibilities like caring for family members or doing something else important in their community that they don't get paid for.”

If only there was a party that worked to protect such people …

All over social media, Trump voters are realizing they’re the ones being labeled as “fraud and waste.” Like this gem on Threads:

Again, we can point to Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a second Trump administration—and note how it promised to gut SNAP and Medicaid. Yes, we warned them. But pointing fingers now isn’t useful.

What is useful? Turning this betrayal into motivation.

No, we won’t win over all Trump voters. Many are too far gone. It’s a cult.

But we don’t need all of them. We don’t even need most. We just need a small shift.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won last year by 120,266 votes. In Michigan, it was 80,103. And in Wisconsin, 29,397. Altogether, that makes for just 229,766 votes in an election where 155,512,532 were cast—or just 0.15 percent of all ballots. That’s how small of a shift we’re talking about, though obviously, the bigger the better.

I can’t recall ever seeing a party so eagerly swing a baseball bat at its own voters—many of them new to the Republican coalition.

The pain is real. And yes, most of us are impacted in some way. But if we can turn that pain into political clarity for even a slice of those voters, we can begin to reverse the damage—and take back our future.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

The Cowardice Of Conservative And Business Elites Led Straight To This Disaster

The Cowardice Of Conservative And Business Elites Led Straight To This Disaster

A Wall Street Journal editorial described President Donald Trump's tariffs as the "dumbest trade war in history." It's important not to overrate intelligence, even in leaders. Judgment and maturity may be more crucial. But Trump is no ordinary dunce. He displays a stubborn stupidity that threatens to plunge the world into chaos and potentially into depression.

It should go without saying that our constitutional system was never meant to be so vulnerable to the whims and fantasies of one man. Nothing as critical as the entire world trading system or the maintenance of the NATO alliance should be decided by which side of the bed the emperor woke up on today, but due to the cowardice and cupidity of the GOP and others, we've gradually lost our antibodies to strongman rule and find ourselves bowing before a power-drunk man/child.

His peculiar blind spots and obsessions now threaten everyone. All of those supposedly worldly-wise Wall Street types who either supported or did not oppose Trump's return to power deserve some of the blame today. One thinks of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has a long history opposing tariffs but was becalmed to the point where he told a Davos audience in January that tariffs are a good "economic weapon" and that critics should "get over it."

This kind of insouciance in the face of a severe economic threat is breathtaking. Even if Wall Street executives and others who chose to believe that Trump was preferable to Kamala Harris were indifferent to the civil liberties implications of a Trump second term and uninterested in public health and the administration of justice, you'd think they'd be interested in their own bottom lines. You would think they might have noticed that one of Trump's only long-term convictions was that America had been victimized by world trade and that tariffs would solve all of our problems.

Trump has an obsession with trade. He always has, and his views are wrong historically, economically and even morally. At his Rose Garden declaration of "Liberation Day" he repeated his oft-stated view that the U.S. has been "looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far" for 50 years and more. Long-term trade deficits, he declared, are a "national emergency" that "threaten our way of life."

In vain did a procession of first-term advisers attempt to disabuse Trump of his absurd views about trade. They patiently explained that it is Americans, not foreigners, who pay tariffs. He was deaf to this. They noted that trade deficits are not a measure of wealth, far less who is "winning" or "losing." If we buy coffee from Costa Rica and they buy nothing from us (which isn't true, but just as an illustration), in no sense has Costa Rica taken advantage of, far less "raped," America. We gave them dollars and they gave us coffee in return.

That is called commerce, and nearly every exchange between a willing buyer and willing seller yields two winners, not one. Besides, as those first-term Trump advisers also tried to convey, those Costa Rican businessmen then take those dollars and buy American assets.

The global trading system the United States shepherded into existence in the post-World War II era has been a boon to people around the globe, and no one has benefitted more than the people of the United States. We've run trade deficits with many nations for many reasons. Sometimes that's a reflection of savings versus investment rates in other countries (think Germany). Sometimes it's a reflection of relative wealth (Vietnamese consumers can't afford to purchase as many American products as Americans can afford to purchase of Vietnamese products).

But in any case, it doesn't really matter because countries that run big trade deficits can be super wealthy. The United States has run trade deficits since the late 1970s and has also been the richest nation on the globe during those years. In fact, even during Trump's first term, which he has widely proclaimed to have been the greatest economy in the history of the universe, we ran consistent trade deficits. In fact, the trade deficit increased during the first Trump administration from $481 billion in 2016 to $679 billion in 2020.

In a saner world, Trump's delusions would not guide U.S. policy. They'd be checked by his own advisers, the Congress and the public. But here we are.

This is not the first time in history that a leader's misconceptions have been implemented on a broad scale, but you have to reach into the history of dictatorial regimes to find parallels. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the ideas of agronomist Trofim Lysenko gained acceptance not because they were true but because Stalin wanted them to be true. Lysenko promised a new golden age with dramatically improved crop yields that would transform even Siberia into a paradise of orchards and gardens. This was touted by Stalin as the "new biology" and ruthlessly enforced. Naysayers were arrested and executed. The result was repeated famines in the USSR and in China, where Mao also embraced the fallacy. Millions of men, women and children starved to death because a leader was able to impose his fantasies on a whole society.

Global trade is an engine of prosperity, and one man's stupidity now threatens billions.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Shop our Store

Constitution Cork Coaster

Constitution Cork Coaster

Democracy Mug

Democracy Mug

Make America Think Again Hat

Make America Think Again Hat

Constitution Rocks Glass

Constitution Rocks Glass

Headlines

Kiev on fire

Backing War Criminal Putin, The Traitor In Chief Betrays Ukraine -- And America

Trump's 'Beef Tax' Promotes Health And Environmental Progress (By Accident)

Trump's 'Beef Tax' Promotes Health And Environmental Progress (By Accident)

As Republicans Devastate Healthcare, Industry Keeps Financing GOP

As Republicans Devastate Healthcare, Industry Keeps Financing GOP

Uh Oh! Inflation Hits Trump Merch As MAGA Hat Price Rises 120 Percent

Uh Oh! Inflation Hits Trump Merch As MAGA Hat Price Rises 120 Percent

Editor's Blog

Rove Is Innocent! Why Republicans Can't Play Trump's Blame Game

As Kennedy's MAHA Ruptures Over His Corrupt Betrayals, Will Democrats Respond?

Corruption Emerging As A Top Election Issue, Thanks To Donald Trump

Trending

Backing War Criminal Putin, The Traitor In Chief Betrays Ukraine -- And America

Trump's 'Beef Tax' Promotes Health And Environmental Progress (By Accident)

As Republicans Devastate Healthcare, Industry Keeps Financing GOP

World

Bipartisan Outrage Over Envoy Witkoff's Praise Of 'Humanitarian' Putin

With His Authority Waning, Trump Can't Make 'Super Intelligence' Happen

'Fox & Friends' Keeps Pushing Trump To Expand Iran war To Yemen

Right-Wing Media Mock AI Concerns By Citing Climate 'Alarmism' And COVID 'Hysteria'

The World's Most Powerful Man, Still Stuck In America's Most Stupid War

Trump's Most Humiliating Lie In Election Speech Wasn't About U.S. Elections