Gohmert entry scrambles crowded AG race
The attorney general's race was shaken up this week when state Rep. Matt Krause abruptly dropped out and U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert joined the fray.
Gohmert, a nine-term Republican congressman from Tyler and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, could potentially siphon votes away from the legally entangled Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's been endorsed by President Donald Trump.
That could be easier said than done given Paxton's unwavering support from the right wing of the party, political experts said Tuesday.
Also vying to replace Paxton are Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman.
Krause announced Monday that he would instead seek to become Tarrant County district attorney in his hometown; the incumbent, Sharen Wilson, announced this month she was retiring. He told Hearst Newspapers that another motivating factor was that he and Gohmert occupy the same political lane by appealing to hardliners; he'll be tossing his support to the arch-conservative congressman.
In Gohmert's announcement video, he slammed Paxton for filing a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election, saying that while he supported the premise, Paxton had undermined the case by being from a state where county election officials changed election rules because of COVID-19.
Harris County, for example, introduced drive-thru voting for the first time and allowed drop boxes for mail ballots. The suit had claimed that other states that took similar actions created an opportunity for voter fraud and therefore their results should have been thrown out.
“I think this is a good example of the hairs that are trying to be split in trying to portray oneself as the most conservative conservative in a race of conservative politicians,” Blank said.
An October poll by the University of Texas/texas Tribune shows Paxton ahead with the support of 48 percent of registered voters who said they planned to vote in the March GOP primary. Bush polled the next-highest but still only came out with 16 percent. Three percent supported Krause and 2 percent supported Guzman.
The same poll found that while Krause and Guzman were relatively unknown to voters — 66 and 57 percent respectively did not have an opinion of them — most people knew of Bush but had mixed views. Thirty-eight percent had an unfavorable opinion of the grandson of the late President George H.W. Bush, compared to 23 percent favorable.
Some believe Gohmert's entry could benefit Bush or Guzman by keeping Paxton below 50 percent, forcing a runoff.
“The main advantage that (Gohmert) has is he already has a certain presence in the Republican Party and especially in the Republican Party of the state,” said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project, which conducted the poll. “He may enter the race in a better position because he's more well-known than any of the other candidates, without the baggage that Bush seems to carry.”
However similar Paxton and Gohmert are on paper ideologically, Gohmert will have to contend with the incumbent's loyal base.
“The difficulty here is Paxton is relatively strong” with the “farright, activist wing of the primary electorate,” Blank said. “Both in the Legislature and as attorney general, Paxton has really made many efforts, mostly effective, to align himself with the activated constituencies. The idea of either someone like a Krause or a Gohmert challenging Paxton from his right is on the one hand slightly farfetched, but on the other hand, it's a very narrow path.”
Gohmert, like Paxton's other challengers, has zeroed in on the attorney general's looming legal troubles as the reason why voters should shift their support.
Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on felony securities fraud charges and is facing an FBI investigation after being accused last October of corruption by his top aides.
He has maintained his innocence in both cases.
In 2018, Paxton won by the slimmest margin of any Republican statewide candidate — 4 percentage points — in defeating Democrat Justin Nelson, who was relatively unknown before the election and who focused his campaign on raising voter awareness of Paxton's indictment.
Three Democrats are also seeking to unseat Paxton. They are Dallas-area civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski and former ACLU lawyer Rochelle Garza.
Of Republican voters in the UT/ Texas Tribune poll, Paxton had a 65 percent approval rating, and of those who consider themselves “extremely conservative,” that number rose by 10 points.
"The sort of feedback mechanism that I think we used to get from the electorate when the electorate was not as polarized just isn't there anymore," Blank said. "It's pretty hard to think of situations where a Democrat does something so bad or a Republican does something so bad that their own partisans will en masse turn on them."