A former Texas Republican leader says she believes Ken Paxton (shown above) will ultimately be successful in a Senate primary challenge against incumbent John Cornyn (shown right).
During a recent appearance on the Laura Ingraham show on the Fox News Channel Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made the announcement.
“I'm announcing that I'm running for U.S. Senate against John Cornyn, who apparently is running again for his fifth term, which would put him in there 3 decades,” Paxton said.
Primary dates vary by state with the earliest being California on June 2 of next year.
Cathie Adams is a former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. She says Paxton will be a more reliable conservative voter than Cornyn.
“Cornyn is a pain in the neck. He's always been. He's not a true-blue conservative. He's just not. Do I think that Paxton will vote right? Yeah. I think that he'll work very well with Ted Cruz."
Conservative show host Jesse Kelly loudly opposed Cornyn’s ascension to Senate majority leader.
“John Cornyn would be every bit as bad as Mitch McConnell if not worse. Any legislation that did the tiniest amount of tangible good, he would castrate. He would routinely get Leftist bills passed. Any Republican who supports John Cornyn should be shunned. Any of them,” Kelly wrote last September. “I cannot put into words how disastrous this would be. If you could get in a lab and build the worst person to be the next GOP senate leader, you’d build @JohnCornyn.”
An uninformed conservative electorate has led to leadership that isn’t really committed to conservative causes, Kelly said.
“Complacency and life being good makes us soft. It’s one of the things humanity struggles with. This is what’s happened with red state Republicans. There’s nobody more at fault for the condition of this country than red state GOP voters,” Kelly told Tucker Carlson.
He singled out Senators Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), John Thune (South Dakota) and Thom Tillis (North Carolina) in addition to Cornyn.
You can add “every dork from Louisiana,” Kelly said. “The reddest states in this country give us the most putrid Republicans at the federal level.”
The comfortable GOP voter
Why does that happen?
“Because the GOP primary voter in red states lives in a relatively normal place. He lives in comfort. He thinks he’s got a red legislature, so he doesn’t vote in primaries, that’s usually the case, or worse, he goes and votes for Senator Dork who he sees on Fox News.”
A poll conducted by Fabrizio, Lee and Associates between Jan. 28 and Feb. 2 had a small sample size – just 600 likely Republican voters in Texas – but results showed Paxton far ahead of Cornyn.
The poll posed the question in two ways: First with no background information at all on the two candidates, Paxton (left) had 53% of the vote to Cornyn’s 28%.
After the questioner provided some context and background, Paxton picked up 70% of the vote to Cornyn’s 14%.
More recent internal polling from the Paxton campaign has their candidate ahead by 25 points.
Adams thinks the polling is on the mark.
“I think that people will go to Paxton over Cornyn. I think that people will be looking at who can they depend on to vote with the Trump agenda more than they are going to be looking at the past and all of this confusion. And (Paxton’s) wife will stand right next to him."
