Non-Coordination Coordination in Texas

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Shane Dolmacher at NYT:

“Running out of money,” read the post on the social media platform X, “less than $400 remains in my pocket.” It landed on Nov. 13, from an obscure account called @pie0myWesley with just three followers. Anyone else stumbling upon it might have assumed it was a random musing from someone who had seen better days.

The account instead appears to be connected to the Republican Senate campaign of Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas. And one of its followers is @TxGopFighter, with seeming connections to an outside group helping Mr. Hunt’s candidacy. The two anonymous accounts have spent months sharing strategic information, private polling, messaging advice and media-buying data in what may be an effort to skirt federal law.

That law prohibits candidates from coordinating in private with independent groups such as super PACs. The Hunt campaign and those allies, however, are doing so with a pair of social media accounts in plain sight for those who know where to look.

...

Dozens of candidates use so-called red boxes on their websites to make suggestions for how super PACs should spend money to support them. They include both top Democratic candidates in the Texas Senate race: James Talarico, a state legislator, and Representative Jasmine Crockett.

“Spanish speaking voters need to hear radio ads in the RGV, San Antonio and El Paso that there is no Democrat who Donald Trump fears more than Jasmine Crockett,” read the instructions on Ms. Crockett’s website.


The 2022 Senate campaign of JD Vance in Ohio pushed past a previous boundary, when an allied super PAC with more cash than the campaign committee posted reams of private data to a Medium account. In 2023, a super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his presidential bid posted research, polling and messaging advice.

Usually, such communication goes in one direction. The Hunt accounts are distinctive in that they appear to include communications by people on both sides of the supposed firewall. At least two times, the accounts replied to each other on X.

War With Iran

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

The United States has gone to war against Iran. America has only one ally—Israel—in this operation (the Arab states of the Gulf, which fear the Iranian regime, are targets of Iran, but so far are not participating in the attack), and both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about “imminent” threats that require “preemptive” strikes. But we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel. Even President Trump, in a recorded address, didn’t bother overly much with such excuses; instead he presented a farrago of charges and accusations going back a half century that included everything from killing American troops in Iraq to terrorism. These indictments are all grounded in truth, but none presents a rationale for immediate attack. Trump ended by calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government.

Shibley Telhami, University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll:

As the Trump administration mobilizes U.S. military forces in the Middle East and President Donald Trump threatens possible military actions against Iran if it does not reach a negotiated deal with the United States, Americans have to contend with the possibility of being at war in the Middle East once again. Our latest University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll finds 21% of Americans favor the United States initiating an attack on Iran, 49% oppose, and 30% say they don’t know.

The latest poll was carried out by SSRS, February 5th – 9th, among a sample of 1,004 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

 

The Akin Ploy in the Texas Senate Race

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.

Republicans are doing it in Texas.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

Republicans in Texas, and nationwide, are looking to boost Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) in the closing days of the state’s Democratic Senate primary.

GOP spending on the race, which includes television ads and text messaging mobilization, underscores Republicans’ hope that Crockett, a congresswoman from Dallas, defeats Texas state Rep. James Talarico in the primary Tuesday. Some Republican operatives and leaders believe Crockett would be easier to defeat in November.

“I think Talarico is dangerous,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is locked in a high-stakes Senate primary of his own against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, said last month. “He’ll probably beat Jasmine Crockett, and he’s capable of raising a lot of money. And if you look at the head-to-head with Paxton, it’s tied.”

A group with ties to longtime Republican operatives has been sending text messages to voters in recent days that tout Crockett’s opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an issue that polling shows motivates the Democratic base. One Texan who regularly votes in Democratic primaries received the text messages, according to operatives working on the Texas races.

The GOP's Nazi Problem

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

.Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

Lies in the SOTU

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments.  Also, predictable ones, such as Trump's lies.

CNN:

President Donald Trump made numerous false or misleading claims in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

Many of them were long-debunked falsehoods familiar from his rallies, interviews and social media posts. These include various lies disparaging the fairness of US elections, his false claim that he ended wars that were never actually wars or never actually ended, and his fictional “$18 trillion” figure for supposed investment in the US over the past year.

The subject on which he was most frequently inaccurate was the economy. Among other things, Trump overstated the performance of the economy during this presidential term to date, overstated the inflation he inherited from the Biden administration, used highly misleading figures when discussing gasoline prices, and wrongly asserted, twice, that foreign countries are paying the tariffs that are actually being paid by US importers.

 

Click here for fact check of some of Trump’s remarks:

Americans Are Noticing Trump's Erratic Behavior

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  In 2024, Trump was already showing signs of cognitive decline. It's getting worse.

Voters are noticing.

Jason Lange at Reuters:

Six in ten Americans, including a significant slice of Republicans, think President Donald Trump has become erratic as he ages, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The six-day poll concluded on Monday, the day before the 79-year-old president gives his annual State of the Union address to Congress following a month of angry reprimands of lawmakers and judges.

Overall, 61% of respondents in the poll said they would describe Trump as having "become erratic with age." Some 89% of Democrats, 30% of Republicans and 64% of independents described him this way.

 

The Electoral Fate of Senior Senators

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Since the passage of the 17th amendment it appears that 25 senators who served at least four terms were unsuccessful in seeking another term. Two Senators could join this list this year - Susan Collins (five terms) and John Cornyn (four terms). pic.twitter.com/XjBjwysfKD

— Drew Savicki (@DrewSav) February 20, 2026

Erratum:  McKellar was from Tennessee.  h/t Jim Pinkerton.

This table updates and confirms a 1983 article: Tuckel, Peter. “Length of Incumbency and the Reelection Chances of U. S. Senators.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1983): 283–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/439434 . Abstract:

This note examines the relationship between the number of terms U.S. senators had served and their reelection chances during two time periods—1920-1958 and 1960-1980. The results of the study show strikingly different patterns of winning reelection during these two time periods. During the years 1920-1958, senators who had served one or two terms were more vulnerable to defeat than were those who had served three or more terms. In the years 1960-1980, the opposite pattern holds: first- and second-term senators did considerably better at the polls than their more senior colleagues. It is hypothesized that two factors explain why the electoral position of junior senators has improved in the modern period: the greater diffusion of power within the post-1950s Senate and the entry of television into the domain of electoral politics. This second factor, coupled with the greater age of more senior senators, is also used to explain why the electoral position of senators who had served three or more terms declined during the last two decades.

Tuckel concluded the article: In the television era, age might be a greater political liability than hitherto. Because it is a visual medium and highlights the physical appearance of candidates, television may decrease the reelection chances of veteran senators."