Paxton, Trump, and GOP Strategy To Keep Texas RED

In this episode of Seeing Red in Texas Politics, Garrett Fulce delves into the recent political dynamics in Texas, exploring the outcomes of the Senate race where Ken Paxton emerged as a notable figure against John Cornyn. Fulce provides a thorough analysis of Paxton's political journey, including the implications of his past controversies and how they might influence his credibility going forward. The discussion extends to analyze the factors that will shape the upcoming elections, focusing on voter behavior and strategic moves by the Republican Party. As Paxton navigates a landscape littered with past grievances, Fulce breaks down the electoral mechanisms at play, offering a roadmap for what the party needs to retain voter allegiance.

Timestamp Summary
0:00 Ken Paxton's Political Journey and Republican Implications
1:57 Republican Strategies to Win Over Disenchanted Voters
5:39 Paxton and Talarico's Political Race Dynamics and Challenges
9:45 The Challenges of Campaigning in Competitive Texas Regions
11:46 Revamping Show Format for Enhanced Engagement and Quality

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Talk about the how Paxton got here. We're going to talk about his weaknesses and his strengths. We're going to talk about Talarico's weaknesses and strengths. And we're going to talk about the rest of the Republican ticket and what that means for Republicans, not just in Texas, but across the country. We're also going to talk about what's how the show is going to be changing over the next few weeks and then into the rest of the year. Thank you for joining with me. I'm Garrett Fultz. I'm your host. This is seeing Reddit Texas Politics Podcast. And thanks for being here. All right. Last night, John Cornyn got trounced by Ken Paxton. This show has gone in in depth, probably more than so than any other show on T on anywhere, onto the corruption allegations and investigations into Ken Paxton. This show, if you go back to when it was audio only, spent several weeks covering in depth every little bit of the Paxton impeachment trial. So it came on after the articles of impeachment were voted on and before the trial started, it covered the trial and went through it. There's a lot out there. There's a lot of stuff that didn't really come out in the trial that's just floating out there, information that's still pretty damaging to Paxton. There was stuff that happened that happened before he was attorney general and wasn't within the scope of the impeachment trial, but people have forgotten about so much has happened since then. These things are gonna come up. And those things are going to weaken Paxton's credibility. It's a lot likely, like you got to look at the election a couple different ways. There are gonna be people who want to Republicans who are gonna always vote for the Republican, Democrats who are going to always vote for the Democrat. But there are gonna be some people who are Republicans or diehard conservatives or whatever, but can get turned off from voting for Paxton. It doesn't mean they're gonna vote for Talo Rico or for third party. It just means they're going to undervote that race. They'll vote for all the other Republicans, but they won't vote for that race. And the same thing can happen on the Democrat side. And typically these things are wedge issues. It's kind of the classic wedge issue, is how you kind of wedge off parts of the other person's coalition to turn them off from voting. And so what Paxton's gonna have to do is figure out a way to win the voters that are just the diehard corn voters. Now, one of the things I want to point out, President Trump's endorsed candidates, including Paxton, performed extraordinarily well. They nearly universally won with margins of around, not margins, with vote totals somewhere between 60 and 70% in these competitive runoff races, like across the board. And what that tells me is that there is a large segment across congressional districts and across the state of people of about 30% of people who will not vote for the president's endorsed candidates and are very upset with Trump. And I point that, not 30% of the total electorate, of a very of a die of the diehard base, of the always voting base. And I take a look at what happened in SD9 in January, where a Democrat won Kelly Hancock's seat. Taylor Remett won Kelly Hancock's seat. The overall the partisan voting history of the people who voted in that one was overwhelmingly Republican. And the Democrat won that seat. That tells me against those Trump and Corps person. And the difference between that race and the Republican primary was that that was just an open race because it was a special election. So you had people voting for the Republican and the you know the kind of same amount of Republicans as voters in this, plus the people who just were pissed off, plus the Democrats in that district. Plus, he was a unique candidate. There is that element to it. But that's something to look at going forward in these races is that there is this element, and what the Republicans are going to have to do is they're going to have to make sure that they are, if they're turning out those voters, that they're turning them out for them, like for the Republican ticket. So figuring out a way to identify who those voters are, and then either working to persuade them back onto the Republican ticket or to just dissuade them from turning out at all is going to be important. And Paxton's going to need to do some winking and nudging towards those people to bring them back on. I have my own advice that I would give him. He wouldn't take it, so I'm just going to leave that to in my own head. But something to the effect of acknowledging that he's not perfect and offering something resembling some atonement for those, for the the the for the things that at least on the personal side, on the marriage side, that would go a long way to for a lot of folks who are going to be turned off by Paxton. Now on the Taler Rico side, you know, we keep seeing these polls. And there were polls coming out that showed Taller Rico with slim leads or slightly larger leads over never like over Paxan and Corning. Never always doing better against Paxson and Corning. Those numbers are soft as hell. And the consultant class is pissed off about it because we know those numbers are soft as hell and they're not helping down ballot. And so we're trying to figure out like just a number of different things with those numbers, but like we need to have a better idea of what the number the landscape actually looks like. My my prediction right now is that Paxton has about a three-point edge over Talo Rico by kind of the kickoff of football season. So through the summer, kind of mid-August, September, I think we'll start seeing Paxton living around plus three. And I think the race will largely stay there outside of unforeseen things happening in the race. And that's largely because Talo Rico didn't have a ton of negative, didn't have the same level of negatives driven against him against with a general election audience during the primary. And he didn't have it for sustained for nearly as long. Paxton's been under like TV like ad attacks for about nine months. His negatives are in the toilet, just everybody, because that's just how it's gonna, that's how those negative ads work. Taller Rico hasn't doesn't have that yet. I'm seeing some outside money coming in. We'll see how Paxton fundraises, but he's gonna have to start working very, very hard and diligently to get those Talo Rico negatives up. Now, if he fails at that, and we see Talo Rico plus three around the kick startup football season, it's gonna be a real race, and Paxton's gonna be in real trouble. It's gonna be real hard to make up that difference now. He has some time here to go up, go big, and go negative right now on Talo Rico, and it's really important that he does that. He also has to prove that he can fundraise. He didn't fundraise super well, but he was running against an incumbent. He's gonna have to go in and go to to talk to people, the people who are gonna have to fund this to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars, and have a certain level of confidence and cockiness, and then also some, you know, raise money. Now he's raised money okay in Texas in the past, but Texas is a different animal. And so we're gonna have to see early how well he raised fundraises. That's not talked about too much yet, but we're gonna have to see it with the federal parameters, see it play out. My expectation is that Paxson will win, and I think he'll probably win with close to five percent of the vote at this point. But what that means down ballot is where is he gonna have to pull those votes from? You know, we're seeing we're the the Latino vote has shifted Republican and with when Trump's on the ballot. It shifts back to Democrat when he's not. We're gonna have to see how well that Latino vote tracks in this next election. We just don't know until we're gonna see it on the ground. So that is a that's a big unknown, a big question mark if you're sitting over this race. The other big question mark is how well is Taller Rico and the negatives they're gonna run on the on his comments on non-bare gods of the non-binary and six six sexes. Those are issues that play well or are going to drive up negatives in suburban white women and suburbs generally, and that's an area where Calarico is expected to do well. So those are gonna be really, really important because those are also where the those are the two areas, the suburbs and the valley, and just the border region in general, are the two really competitive regions in the state when we're looking at state house seats. There's a lot of state house seats that are going to be in trouble, and we're gonna have to see a lot of people who haven't campaigned really in a general election in a while or ever, because there's a lot of new freshmen who kind of went into fairly safe seats in the last election cycle. We're gonna have to see them put some you know shoe leather on the ground and actually campaign. Or they're gonna wake up like the Dallas and DFW reps did in 2018 without a job on election day. And so that's going to be really, really important that we're building out infrastructure in those places. So those are the kind of the big takeaways I have from this young race. There's gonna be a lot of work to do. There should always be a lot of work to do in a campaign. You want to be the minds and hearts and minds of all the people. Paxton is a weak candidate, and the money he's gonna have to pull in order to hold Texas comfortably or the way we're gonna need to do it is going to pull from pickup opportunities that Texas needs to go after, and other states we're gonna we're gonna be having to hold at the national level. So it's going to be, but at the same token, the Democrats have to spend money in Texas to induce that spending as well. And so what we're gonna see is an expanded map, and I don't know how much that benefits Republicans. In a midterm election of a president's second term, it's always historically been down for the incumbent party, and or at least in modern history, and so having a broader map seems as if it would be bad for the incumbent party because we're having to defend more, and there's more likelihood of a wave if you're in playing in more races. But who knows? Nothing with over the past 10 years has seemed to follow traditional like norms and different things. So we'll see what happens. A lot of we'll see, but we're gonna talk about it a lot here on this show, and that's why I want to talk to about y'all, just talk to y'all real quick. The show's gonna be changing up a little bit. I did a lot of work over the last year of trying to get people on and get people on to over the Substack to see the longer episodes and trying to go more in depth over there. You know, we're gonna try and do some of that stuff more in depth, have longer conversations and stuff, but we're gonna break up the show a little bit. What we're gonna do is we're gonna do one big release each week, and then I'm gonna segment out this the different parts of the show for different videos throughout the week on YouTube. We're gonna be gonna be a lot more active on social media under my account, under brand accounts, etc. Uh, and we're gonna be upping up our production values. Right now, I'm on my old system. I've been looking into it. I'm going to go to the bank later. We're gonna get some new equipment. We're gonna up the production values so that we have a higher quality video, higher quality editing system, etc. And we're going to do we're going to do a lot more me talking to you, talking a little bit more in depth on different topics instead of just monologuing, gonna spend some more time my time in there in the editing room, editing stuff so that it's just a little bit more polished. You're not hearing my ums as much, you're not hearing me like hold and think for a few seconds between stuff, things like that. Gonna get a second camera angle. Those just the kind of the things that people have grown accustomed to on higher quality video podcasts and video shows. I'm gonna be moving in that direction. And with that, I'll still be interviewing people, and that will still be in kind of the similar format you're seeing right now. But it won't be the whole show, and we'll, you know, I'll try to interview people each week, and I'll probably do some additional kind of short form clips for sure from the show, but also I'll just pop in to do a quick one-minute video occasionally of things I'm seeing so that I'm a little bit more reactionary to what's happening on the on the on the quick stuff. And so, you know, I some of you follow me. No, I do a lot of writing. I'm gonna be turning up my output for getting op-eds placed and outlets across the state and across the country. Gonna be turning up all sorts of stuff. I'm just gonna be amping up the creative the the creative output to to 11, as they say. And I'm really, really excited about this. And so I hope you'll you'll join me. I hope you'll follow me on all the accounts. If you're on here, you know, liking, subscribing on YouTube, on Substack, following me on X at GWFulse, you know, those things are really, really important. You know, always liking and commenting on the videos uh so that you can't so that to build engagement and talking about a little bit about what I'm saying, or disagreeing, agreeing, whatever the case may be, that engagement does a lot to put this front and center. And so think and for those of you this is the first time you're seeing this video, if you've made it this long, fantastic. Most likely if you've made it this long, you're somebody who's been following for a long time, and thank you so much for the support you've given over the years. I really appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to seeing how this show grows over the next few months and if in if and for following the plan I've laid out over the next year. I think this show could be something pretty special. So thank y'all for for being around and thank y'all for coming along for the journey. And with that, I'll see you next week. Okay, bye guys.