Senate race pits irreverent, incumbent
Hegar is confident in run facing Cornyn’s ‘obvious advantages’
WASHINGTON — For the last year, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn sat back while Democrats duked it out in a bitter fight for their party’s nomination.
The three-term Republican incumbent raked in cash as he played up the Democrats’ intraparty feud in campaign ads and on Twitter.
Now, the battle is coming to Cornyn. Democrats have settled on their challenger: MJ Hegar, a decorated Air Force combat veteran and suburban mother who they hope will have crossover appeal. And she has wasted no time going on the offensive.
“When somebody who has been in statewide elected office for nearly four decades meddles in a Democratic primary for the first time in his career, I think it shows he knows what we know,
which is: He is vulnerable, Texans are done and they are looking for something better,” Hegar told Hearst Newspapers on Wednesday.
Democrats insist that the momentum is finally in their favor: Voter registration is soaring in Texas, and President Donald Trump’s poll numbers are flagging. Still, Cornyn has much to be confident about as he heads into what many expect to be his most difficult reelection battle yet.
Polls show the senator leading by as many as 13 points, and he just posted what his campaign says is his strongest fundraising quarter yet, yielding more than $14 million with which to shape voter sentiments. His campaign embarked on that effort Wednesday, releasing a video that called Hegar “Elizabeth Warren on a motorcycle.”
Hegar, who spent heavily during the last leg of the Democratic primary runoff, had less than $1 million on hand by the end of June.
“The closing weeks proved to be very damaging to MJ Hegar and her allies,” Cornyn’s campaign manager, John Jackson, wrote in a memo about the race. “A fractured party and lack of financial support from grassroots voters are ominous signs for any candidate, much less one who also needs to overcome structural challenges.”
“Senator Cornyn and the Republican Party of Texas haven’t taken anything for granted since 2018, producing 100,000 new GOP voters over the past year alone,” the memo said. “With thousands of volunteers, field organizers around the state and a sophisticated voter contact program, Republicans in Texas remain on the offensive and Democrats remain ideologically out of touch.”
Democrats are confident they can overcome all that. In Hegar, they have a candidate with potential crossover appeal, especially in the suburbs, where voters began to move away from Trump in 2018 and where the party hopes to gain more ground in November.
Hegar brushed aside the notion that Democrats emerged divided from the tense final weeks of the long primary, when her opponent, state Sen. Royce West, accused Hegar of being a secret Republican. Hegar called West a part of a “broken system,” a politician who had become rich in office and had legislated in his own best interests.
The Cornyn campaign on Wednesday called Texas Democrats “fractured.”
“If that was true, they wouldn’t have to say it,” Hegar said in response. “They are trying to wish something into existence in a lastditch hope they can save Cornyn.”
Texas has added nearly 600,000 new voters since 2018 — nearly 150,000 of whom have registered since March. Nearly 1 million Democrats cast ballots in the Senate primary, far more than is typical for a summer runoff and more than twice the number of ballots cast in the party’s last statewide runoff in 2018.
“Any Republican in Texas should be nervous right now,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There’s a changing tide in the state, and the energy in the Democratic Party, combined with dislike of Donald Trump, makes every seat potentially in play.”
Still, Rottinghaus said, Cornyn is “in a better position than a lot of Republicans.”
“He’s seen these changes from a long horizon and has been planning for this for a lot of years,” Rottinghaus said. “He’s got obvious advantages. He’s got more money, he’s got better name recognition and he’s got the capacity to define Hegar before things take off for real.”
Jackson’s memo paints Hegar as a candidate who “is really good at sharing her bio, but not policy specifics,” and who needed support from the Democratic establishment in Washington and national progressive groups to make it out of the runoff.
Hegar is backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as groups such as EMILY’s List, both of which paid for pro-Hegar advertising in the runoff campaign.
The memo ties Hegar to Warren, who endorsed Hegar in the runoff. It notes that Warren, as a Democratic presidential candidate, campaigned on the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and a ban on fracking — “issues that are anathema to the majority of Texans.”
“Most days, Hegar sounds a lot like a practiced politician when it comes to avoiding direct answers and delivering talking points,” the memo said.
Hegar disagreed. “I’ve always been very transparent and clear about what I’m fighting for,” she said.
Her campaign released a video on Wednesday saying she’s building a “grassroots army across Texas” and touting the millions of dollars she has raised from 56,000 donors.
“I think that they are very uncomfortable with the fact that I am connecting so well with regular working Texans, because I am one,” she said. “It just does not compute for them … They just believe the wealthy, powerful special interests are going to be enough to carry them through, but those wealthy powerful special interests are not stronger than the will of the Texas voters.”
Despite the professed confidence of the Cornyn campaign, the senator would rather have faced West, who after nearly three decades in the Texas legislature is a known commodity with an extensive voting record.
Hegar, by contrast, is a self-described “badass” motorcyclist whose only previous experience in elective politics was a 2018 congressional run.
She grew up outside Austin and lives in Round Rock. As an Air National Guard pilot, Hegar served three tours in Afghanistan on rescue missions. She was wounded in 2009 when her helicopter was shot down by the Taliban. She returned fire while riding on the helicopter’s skids. She was awarded a Purple Heart and became the second woman awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with valor.
“I definitely think that West would have been the preferred candidate for us,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist who ran Cornyn’s 2014 campaign but who is not affiliated with the senator’s current reelection effort. He said the race will be competitive, though he thinks Cornyn will win.
“You’re going to have, I think, two candidates who won’t have a problem with their base, who can compete for the independent and swing voters and who have a history of appealing to those segments of the population that are up for grabs,” he said. “So I think it’s going to be very interesting.”