The state GOP’s creeping extremism may prove too much for middle voters.
By Dallas Morning News
Editorial Dallas Morning News
https://www.dallasnews.com/
Stephen Spillman / AP
It’s probably too much to suggest there is a silver lining for Democrats in what just happened to Texas’ congressional maps. After all, you can make lemonade out of lemons, but you can’t make chicken salad out of, well, you know the rest.
Any serious analysis of the new districts indicates that Republicans will expand their majority of Texas congressional seats. Whether it’s the five seats they hope to gain is uncertain, but they should deliver on additional GOP members in the U.S. House of Representatives.
It’s probably too much to suggest there is a silver lining for Democrats in what just happened to Texas’ congressional maps. After all, you can make lemonade out of lemons, but you can’t make chicken salad out of, well, you know the rest.
Any serious analysis of the new districts indicates that Republicans will expand their majority of Texas congressional seats. Whether it’s the five seats they hope to gain is uncertain, but they should deliver on additional GOP members in the U.S. House of Representatives.
That analysis is solid based on past results in multiple elections. But the past isn’t always predictive, and we don’t yet know what sort of ticket either the GOP or Democrats will present come 2026.
What we do know is that the Texas Republican Party continues to become more extreme in ways that we believe are narrowing its appeal among the electorate. Sen. John Cornyn, once the stalwart of a dignified small-government conservatism, is now pilloried as a RINO and will face a strong challenge from Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton is the most ethically compromised politician in office in Texas today. And that’s saying something. Voters know who Paxton is. They know his record. They know his character. Conservatives of conscience will struggle to vote for him.
Meanwhile, the race for the GOP’s attorney general nominee is already promising to draw some of the most far-right members of the party to the ticket. There is no reason to believe that the candidate who makes the most narrow statements to the conservative base won’t win.
Will any of this impact congressional races? Hard to say. Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, is skeptical and with good reason. Voters are adept at picking their candidates up and down the ticket, he said.
We saw this happen in 2018, when Paxton narrowly held his office as attorney general by 3.6 points but Gov. Greg Abbott trounced former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez by more than 13 points. Plenty of Abbott voters couldn’t press the stylus for Paxton. And that was before his impeachment trial.
That was the year that Beto O’Rourke gave Sen. Ted Cruz his most serious challenge yet. And it was a year when many voters were exhausted with the first two years of the Trump presidency.
In 2026, we will see some similar dynamics at play. Voters will be two years into another Trump administration that has seen the vast expansion of executive powers over immigration, business, trade and the federal government, among others.
Trump’s success in 2024 with Latino voters on the border has helped fuel the idea that Republicans can maximize their congressional reach this year. A lot of Hispanic voters, too often taken for granted by Democrats, share many conservative values. They believed the economy would be stronger under Trump, and plenty were also worried about loose border policies that disrupted their cities.
But it’s an open question whether those same voters will reward Republicans in the coming election cycle. Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has gone far beyond securing the border. Many Hispanic men and women all over the country now fear they will be questioned or even arrested based on little more than how they look and where they happen to be.
And the economic uncertainty that drove many voters on the border to Trump is still a concern.
Meanwhile, across Texas, top GOP officials seem to be ever more comfortable with open expressions of bigotry, from Tarrant County GOP chair Bo French’s anti-Islamic and antisemitic statements to state Sen. Mayes Middleton’s attack on Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu’s Chinese heritage. (Middleton is expected to be a strong candidate in the GOP primary for attorney general.)
We don’t know which Republicans will seek seats in newly drawn districts. It’s safe to say that in just about any Texas GOP primary, moderation is treated as poison. Even well-established and conservative state representatives like Morgan Meyer, Matt Shaheen and Jeff Leach have to be on constant watch that they will be slurred as RINOs for somehow falling short of the endless and shifting ideological tests now imposed across the party.
Given all of that, is there a sliver of hope for Democrats? We believe there is, as voters become more fed up with the maximal rhetoric and legislation emerging from the right.
The problem, as ever, will be the Democratic establishment, which is well practiced at snuffing out opportunities by embracing the far left. In 2022, with Paxton the weakest Republican running for statewide office, Democrats managed to nominate Rochelle Garza, the most progressive person on their ticket, to run against him. Paxton cruised to a plus-9 point victory.
We have warned the GOP against continuing to press its partisan advantage even as it becomes more extreme. The party’s leaders and the money behind them have no interest in listening to us or any other voice that isn’t part of the echo chamber.
Perhaps Democrats will, and they will be more thoughtful in their own primaries, seeking candidates who can draw Texans from the broad middle back into their tent.
Only then can they hope to compete, and that hope, we must admit, is small.
By Dallas Morning News Editorial
Dallas Morning News editorials are written by the paper’s Editorial Board and serve as the voice and view of the paper. The board considers a broad range of topics and is overseen by the Editorial Page Editor.
This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas.
