Republican voters biggest wild card
Although the pundits are still poring over the results and although some contests are heading toward runoffs, the results from the Texas primaries give us the first glimpse of what the 2014 elections could look like, because whatever happens in Texas seems to percolate to the rest of the nation.
No one narrative dominates, except an important differentiation that Texas voters seemed to have made with the Tuesday primaries that could hold on for years to come: Different offices require different kinds of leaders.
The tea party experienced the greatest amount of success in the state Legislature. A number of Texas House Republicans went down to defeat at the hands of tea party insurgents. Perhaps the most surprising result of the night was the poor showing of the lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, who famously lost to Ted Cruz in the Republican primary in 2012; though the final chapter for his reelection effort has not yet been written, the few sentences written from Tuesday’s primaries are not ones that he would enjoy reading.
For the offices that require the deftest political touch and require the greatest political skills, Republican voters couldn’t have chosen candidates that better represent the Republican establishment. Headlining the Texas Republican ticket in November will be current Attorney General Greg Abbott running for governor and current Sen. John Cornyn seeking a third term in the U.S. Senate. That they won on Tuesday night is not a great surprise. What is a surprise is that the tea party could not field competitive candidates in either race. Although challengers entered these contests with great fanfare, they quickly receded from the spotlight, and Abbott and Cornyn rode to easy victories.
Cornyn’s race, in particular, could have proved tricky. As second-ranking Republican in the Senate, Cornyn has cast votes that have separated him from Cruz. More importantly for the culture of the Senate, Cornyn interacts with his Senate colleagues in a different manner. While Cruz aims to put them on the record where their vulnerabilities can be exploited by future opponents, Cornyn recognizes that it takes teamwork to employ a strategy or to pass legislation.
Most political pundits think that the Republicans have better than even odds of taking over the U.S. Senate. In a state lineup that looks like a Republican wish list, the biggest wild card is the Republican voters. The easiest thing to help Democrats retain their majority is for Republican voters to make the same mistakes that they made in the past. Currently, five Democrats are sitting in the Senate who most assuredly would have lost to Republican establishment candidates in 2010 (Colorado, Nevada and Delaware) and 2012 (Indiana and Missouri).
Perhaps that’s why the Texas Republican voters wouldn’t even flirt with rallying behind an alternative to Cornyn. Or, perhaps, it is because the Texas Republican voters think that one Ted Cruz in the Senate is probably enough.
I believe that as the spotlight shifts to other states, it is important for the voters — especially Republican voters — to recognize that it takes 51 votes to form a majority (so long as Vice President Joe Biden casts the Senate’s tie-breaking vote) and 60 votes to get things done. Even in the minority, Cornyn is much more likely to assemble a team to even address, let alone solve, a problem, though he will likely be criticized the entire time by Cruz. Theriault, an associate professor of government in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, is an expert in party polarization in the U.S. Congress and the differences between elected officials’ goals, ideas and attitudes and those of their constituencies.