Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Sawyer Hackett: Great to be with you, Greg.
Hackett: Yeah, I would say the best summary I could give would be he’s a progressive preacher who can throw a punch. He’s somebody who can level a blistering attack against Trump and Republicans in the Trump era while not shutting the door on voters who may disagree with him on a lot of issues.
Sargent: Obviously it’s going to be tough because it’s Texas, but we’ll get to that. Meanwhile on the GOP side, Texas Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton both fell short of 50 percent due to a spoiler. They’re advancing to a runoff. Trump exploded on Truth Social over this. He said the GOP primary “MUST STOP NOW”—all caps, you know, when he’s angry he uses all caps. He added that Republicans have to totally focus on beating Talarico.
Hackett: Yeah, it’s funny because you hear a lot, I think, on the Democratic side that the Democratic Party’s got its thumb on the scale—that it’s helping certain candidates and hurting other candidates. And here you have Trump essentially saying, I’m going to pick the nominee and the other candidate’s going to drop out before we even get to a runoff.
Sargent: Yeah, I would think so. And Republicans are clearly worried about the race. Two of the most hard-boiled GOP operatives, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio—both Trump advisers—are working for Cornyn. Paxton has a trail of scandal. He’s been impeached by the GOP-controlled Texas House. His wife divorced him for biblical causes, on and on.
Hackett: I think definitely it’s easier against Paxton—just in terms of the kind of person he is, the kind of character he has. You see on the Republican side, frankly, a party that is deeply divided and unhappy. The sitting Republican senator, John Cornyn, who has served four six-year terms in the Senate for Texas, is now headed for a runoff with a far-right, criminally indicted, Republican-impeached fraudster and adulterer who has a toxic political agenda. I think the Talarico camp is kind of hoping and praying that he ends up on the top of that ticket, because I think every Democrat in the country would be excited about that matchup.
Sargent: Well, do you expect Paxton to drop out if Trump does endorse Cornyn, which could come as early as when people are listening to this?
But yeah, it’s just kind of incredible to see how Republicans can point the finger at Democrats for putting their finger on the scale of these primaries, and then you just have Trump dictating: this is going to be our nominee, this is who we’re running, this is our message.
Hackett: Yeah, I mean, I think the headline coming out of this primary cycle—beyond Talarico’s victory, beyond Paxton and Cornyn headed to this runoff—is kind of the winning Democratic coalition being reassembled, in part thanks to Trump pushing voters toward Democrats, whether that’s Latino voters who showed up big time yesterday for James Talarico, or Black voters who turned out strongly for Crockett in a lot of these key areas across Texas.
I mean, we saw in this primary, in the early vote, that there were 400,000 new voters who had never cast a ballot in a Democratic primary. I think that’s in large part a reaction to the Trump presidency—a kind of protest vote against what people are seeing on their TVs and their phones every single day. Talarico has to channel all of that energy, and building and assembling and keeping that coalition is the important work of every nominee. But I think in Texas it’s the most important job. And I think Talarico, based on his message and his appeal, has shown that he has the ability to do it. It’s just dependent, I think, on a lot of events happening within the next eight months or so before this race shakes out.
Hackett: Republicans have done a fantastic job of suppressing the vote in Texas, of keeping voters at home, of making it extremely difficult to vote in the state. And that’s why Texas, I think, today has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country. Texas also has a lot of unaffiliated independent voters out there who have tended over the years to vote Republican. Those voters, I think, in large part make up areas in the suburbs outside of the major cities and in parts of rural Texas. Texas has a lot of counties, and Democrats have to compete in all of those counties if they want to win.
Sargent: These 15 percent of unaffiliated voters are basically Republican-leaning voters, and that’s one of the big hurdles here?
Sargent: Yeah. And so one big thing that has to happen here is a major turnout surge for Democrats. And there’s something important that happened in the primaries. The total number of votes for Democrats in the primary was over 2.3 million. The total votes for Republicans in the primary was 2.16 million. Democrats got more than 150,000 more votes than Republicans did. That’s unusual in Texas, right? What do you take from that?
I think that’s in large part due to Trump. I think a lot of voters who cast ballots yesterday did so in protest against what they’re seeing on their phones and on their computers from Donald Trump.
I think James Talarico knows that he’s going to need Jasmine Crockett’s voters to win. So I think the road ahead is going to be James working with Jasmine Crockett, working with Democrats across the state to maximize turnout among Black voters, among young voters, among Latino voters, while also driving a wedge between Republican voters—which is already a deeply divided and unhappy party right now.
Hackett: We don’t have a ton of exit polls from these primary races—I don’t think the news outlets conduct a lot of exit polls. But when we look at the county data, what you saw is that in the predominantly Latino counties of Texas, turnout was both high and strongly in favor of James Talarico.
Sargent: Well, these rural Texas Latinos are sort of their own demographic, right? Can you talk about who those people are?
These are communities that have tended to go Democratic by pretty wide margins over the years. Specifically, I’m thinking about the Rio Grande Valley—counties like Starr County, Cameron County, Hidalgo County. These are communities that when Democrats have lost big, they’ve lost big in those counties, as we saw in 2024. When we had that major attrition of Latino voters in Texas, it was predominantly along those communities on the border and up and down the I-35 corridor.
I think he’s going to have to maximize those numbers big time in a general election. A primary is different than a general, we know that. But I think the level of enthusiasm we’re seeing in terms of the turnout and in terms of the support for Talarico across those counties shows that he has the ability to do that.
Hackett: Yeah, I think you outlined it pretty well. We have to run up the numbers in these big cities—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin. We have to have very wide margins in the general election in those communities. We have to run up the numbers in the predominantly Latino counties along the Rio Grande Valley and I-35 corridor. We have to compete in West Texas, in the panhandle, in the rural counties. We can’t just forgo those counties to Republicans.
And then you also have to win in the suburbs. I mean, these suburbs have been the target of the Democratic Party in these statewide races cycle after cycle. Sometimes I think we’ve tended to over-focus on the cities and ignore the suburbs. But I think those suburbs are really turning against Trump.
Sargent: And what can go wrong? What’s the nightmare scenario?
And I think if Talarico or the Democratic Party fails to make inroads with Latino voters, fails to solidify that support that he’s shown he has in this primary—if we’re not able to solidify that in the general, we cannot win in Texas. And I think there’s always just the X factor: something happening in the Supreme Court, something happening with the economy, something happening with these wars that Trump is waging around the globe. There are just a lot of X factors going into a general election.
Sargent: Man, it’s going to be fascinating. Sawyer Hackett, thanks so much for that download. We really appreciate it, man. Appreciate the candor.
Hackett: Yeah, great to join you, Greg.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump erupts in wild panic as tex senate race rattles gop was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Erupts in Wild Panic as Tex. Senate Race Rattles GOP )
Also on site :