Midterms 2026
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Thursday, September 3, 2026 06:48
VIEWED: 15554
PAGE 39 of 46
Unherd: Dan Crenshaw lost MAGA voters a long time ago
https://unherd.com/newsroom/dan-crenshaw-lost-maga-voters-a-long-time-
ago/?edition=us
Quote:
Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s decisive defeat in Texas on Tuesday is already being spun by the media as proof that the GOP is just a bloodthirsty Trump cult. This is an unhelpful narrative because what voters rejected in Crenshaw went much deeper.
A Daily Beast headline on Wednesday blared, “GOP Star Kicked Out of Congress Due to MAGA’s Desperate Midterm Push”. MAGA, for its part, was happy to take credit for the loss, with pundits noting on X that Crenshaw was the only House GOP incumbent without a primary endorsement from Trump this cycle.
In Texas’s second congressional district, just north of Houston, Crenshaw got pummeled by Steve Toth, who ran to his Right. With most of the votes counted, Toth appears to have upset Crenshaw by a gargantuan and unexpected 15-point margin. After a decorated career as a Navy SEAL, voters first elected the congressman in 2018 — and he immediately became recognized as a rising star in the party.
As a candidate, Crenshaw responded to Saturday Night Live mockery of his eye patch, covering up a battle wound that left him partially blind, by joining the “Weekend Update” desk with Pete Davidson to smooth things over. An MSNOW story accurately recalled, “The question at the time wasn’t whether he’d climb the ranks in GOP politics, but rather how high he’d go.” So sky-high were the congressman’s ambitions that he actually started hosting “Crenshaw Youth Summits”.
Now he’s gone, unable even to clear a primary hurdle. So what changed? As a New York Times analysis reported, Crenshaw “has voted in lockstep with President Trump’s second-term agenda”. But his demise is not just about Trump. It’s about the congressman’s open hostility to voters’ anti-establishment bent. Unlike establishment Sen. John Cornyn, who overperformed expectations in his Texas primary on Tuesday, Crenshaw’s breaks with the base became extremely personal. And frankly, a bit odd.
Crenshaw memorably threatened to “fucking kill” Tucker Carlson on a GB News hot mic last year. And in recent months, the congressman has been engaged in a nasty feud with his fellow Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan, whose podcast is enormously popular on the Right. Crenshaw threatened to sue Ryan and posted their private communications.
Ryan took issue with Crenshaw’s defense of congressional stock trading, which is widely disliked by voters on both sides of the aisle. Defending himself, Crenshaw once dismissed $20,000 as a minor amount of money and griped about his pay check. He also accused anti-interventionist Republicans of “wanting Russia to win” the war against Ukraine, and called popular MAGA lawmakers “grifters”.
Crenshaw’s voting record suggests he isn’t merely out of step with Trump. He is out of step with Trump’s voters. Many Republican voters are willing to give the president latitude on foreign policy negotiations and bouts of intra-party drama. They see those as part of the job. What they are less willing to tolerate are repeated defections from other figures in the party. In that sense, Crenshaw’s problem is not opposition to Trump so much as a pattern of breaks that voters instinctively distrust.
Political Science professor Brandon Rottinghaus at the University of Houston put it this way, “The foreign policy stuff definitely is the biggest crack, but the beginning of that crack was because Crenshaw didn’t significantly support Trump in the election fight.” It’s true that after the 2020 election, Crenshaw described claims of a “stolen” election as “a lie meant to rile people up.” It’s also true that this likely soured some voters on him.
But Crenshaw’s problems weren’t just about foreign policy and the 2020 election. They were about his desire to seem pro-Trump while refusing to stop insulting Trump voters. That doesn’t make for a clean-cut narrative about fealty to Trump, but it’s a more accurate picture of what actually happened.
Aside from the headline itself, this
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Trump promises to endorse a Texas Senate candidate 'soon'
It leaked it is going to be Cornin.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Trump promises to endorse a Texas Senate candidate 'soon'
It leaked it is going to be Cornin.
T
Yup. He's going to endorse Cornin.
He's also likely going to replace Supreme Court Justice Alito or Thomas with Ted Cruz. I'm sure you're going to scream a ton about that when it happens.
Then he's going to tell Cornin to keep his spot, and give Ted Cruz's vacancy to Ken Paxton.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Hey Jaynez.
Why don't you put that one in the predictions thread?
I don't see anybody online connecting all of those dots together. The only thing I've seen is back in January there were a few articles talking about how Trump was floating the possibility of getting Cruz on the Supreme Court.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
And this was 3 months ago, and it has only gotten worse.
WHOOPIEE!!
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'This is staggering': Joe on stunning new midterm poll giving Dems wide advantage
POLITICO: Dems aren’t sure whether to actually spend big to flip Texas
I wouldn't recommend it.
Besides... we already know the Democratic Party is out of money. Most of their money laundering schemes have been obliterated by the Trump administration as well, and they no longer have any control over the printing presses.
So where the hell were they going to get that money in the first place???
Quote:
It didn’t take long for Democrats’ hopes of flipping Texas to dim.
Gee... You don't say....
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Enthusiasm remains high for the party’s Senate nominee, James Talarico, but national Democrats aren’t sure how far they should go to support him — particularly if Sen. John Cornyn emerges from the GOP runoff in May. Interviews with nearly a dozen high-dollar donor advisers and strategists poured cold water on the likelihood that the party would fully commit to the staggering price tag it’d take to finally flip Texas.
“No one’s taking Texas seriously,” said a Democratic bundler who, like most others, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about intra-party dynamics.
Among their concerns is that Cornyn did better than expected in the GOP primary against Attorney General Ken Paxton, and with President Donald Trump’s potential endorsement would be able to ease his runoff victory. Democrats planning for Talarico to compete against Paxton, a scandal-ridden MAGA darling, are instead facing the prospect of trying to oust a 24-year moderate incumbent in a state that hasn’t voted for a Senate Democrat in nearly four decades.
There are also competing priorities for national spending — just Wednesday evening, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) dropped his re-election bid in a state Senate Democrats held as recently as 2018 — potentially elevating it as a target for spending.
Underlying it all, Democrats said, is the reality that contesting Texas would require a massive injection of cash — while there are other, cheaper options on the Senate landscape.
“We have to be practical about how we use our resources,” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic donor adviser. “You need a perfect storm to kill a white whale, and if it’s going to be Cornyn [in the general election], then it’s not a perfect storm.”
Democrats have long dreamed of turning Texas blue. But the idea of flipping the state — much less retaking the Senate overall — appeared laughable last year, when the party hit new lows in its public polling and sustained sweeping losses in 2024. But a string of overperformances in off-year and special election races, combined with Trump’s own stubbornly low approval rating, have Democrats increasingly bullish about their chances.
“If I’m being super honest, Texas would not be within the reach of our boat here, as fishermen of the white whale, but for the wave moment we're in,” said Tory Gavito, a Democratic donor who leads the progressive donor network Way To Win.
Tuesday’s results gave them another boost when Talarico, a social media star and prolific grassroots fundraiser, easily dispatched Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). He now has a head start on Republicans, who after already dropping $70 million to lift Cornyn, must continue battling it out for another two and a half months through a runoff — which some are predicting could cost upwards of $100 million.
Texas Democrats see this as the moment to strike. Gavito said Democrats have built to this moment, cycle after cycle. Back in 2014, when President Barack Obama won with a young, multi-racial coalition, Democrats believed it was just a matter of time before they’d eventually flip Texas, a youthful, diverse state.
But Trump, both in 2016 andNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
From the Predictions 2.0 thread yesterday:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats will rue the day that James Talarico beat Jasmine Crockett in the primary.
Holy shit...
I thought Jasmine Crockett was a terrible candidate. Talarico might just be the worst Democratic Party candidate on any level that there ever was.
Not only is he going to be destroyed in the general election...
Not only is he going to bring down the rest of the party with him on election day...
But he's also going to ruin the careers and silence any person in Hollywood or the Legacy Media who endorsed him or had anything nice to say about him at all once America sees who he really is.
RIP Ezra Klein's career. Hope wifey can get a big promotion to cover your losses because we all know you've been bitching and whining that you both can hardly subsist on your dual-income salary and you're going to be pushing carts at Costco by 2027 if they'll even have you.
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Saint James Talarico (he/him)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/saint-james-talarico-he-him/ar-
AA1XGjjb
Quote:
James Talarico, the newest Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas, speaks with the moral authority of a 1980s televangelist and the intellectual depth of a freshman gender studies major at Oberlin.
Sure, enlightened leftists have long mocked believers of the Sky God as both irrational and anti-science. In truth, they’ve only been frustrated by the inability to appropriate Christianity to spread their distinctly secular morality. For decades, candidates come and go promising to “reclaim” Christianity for the Left.
Now, I’m not a Christian myself, but I’m not fond of frauds, either. And even I can see that the problem with Talerico’s pious rhetoric is that his faith doesn’t inform his political values, but rather, the reverse. It justifies his progressivism.
Talarico, for instance, infamously argued that God is “nonbinary.” I strongly suspect that most devout Christians would take issue with applying goofy neologisms to their Lord and Savior. Even now, Talarico insists that “most” people in Texas understand that God is “beyond” gender. Just ask the Apostle Paul who allegedly made the case in his letters to the Galatians!
If I could speak to Apostle Paul, who refers to God as the “Father” in Galatians while using masculine pronouns, I’d probably be more curious to know which of the six different sexes he was going to choose, the number the Texas representative came up with while opposing a bill prohibiting trans boys from playing in girls’ high school sports.
Talarico doesn’t prove modern progressivism is compatible with traditional notions of faith but rather that modern progressivism is more prone to embrace social science quackery than the average social conservative.
In Talarico’s worldview, gender is highly malleable in both nature and faith, but skin color is an immutable characteristic that predetermines not only a person’s thoughts and actions but his innocence and guilt — a view that undercuts the entire notion of free will and basic science.
“White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus,” Talarico once tweeted. “But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious.”
Did the saintly Talarico suggest to his constituents that the way to shake off the depravity of racism and embrace love was to find salvation in Jesus Christ? No. Talarico didn’t even bother lifting any snippets from Paul’s letters to Thessalonians to argue that white people are inherently racist. He told them the way to stop being a racist was “proclaiming loudly and unequivocally that #BlackLivesMatter.”
The Texan deserves some credit for embracing racial predeterminism even before the death of George Floyd drove the country into a spasm of lunacy and violence. Most of the time, though, he’s nothinNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I told you Gilligan. My independents are shutting Trump down come November.
T
Enten breaks down Trump’s dismal ratings as gas prices skyrocket
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tick tock...
T
Trump FREAKS OUT after SHOCK ELECTION Results
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Uh huh...
We'll see.
Don't forget that SCOTUS will be changing the entire way that elections are done in America come June.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrats-flip-republican-seat
-in-new-hampshire-special-election/vi-AA1YlNLw?
Democrats flip Republican seat in New Hampshire special election
Democrat Bobbi Boudman defeats Republican Dale Fincher in a New Hampshire special election, marking the tenth straight seat Democrats have flipped during Trump’s second term
Trump won by +9 and the republican lost by -4. That's a 13 point swing. Tenth straight for the dems. Don't believe the polls, fine. But what the dems are doing in these special elections can't be denied.
T
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