Texas As Primarily Kentucky

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

A long-shot Republican US Senate seat in a traditionally red state possibly in play this November, the Democratic primary front-runner, a white military veteran woman pilot who has a big out-of-state cash lead and growing national attention to her campaign suddenly finds herself facing a real fight on her hands from a Black state lawmaker from the state's largest city as he is peaking at the right time thanks to Black Lives Matter protests and his career as a criminal justice reformer, but the pilot may have banked enough of a mail-in ballot lead to win as the runoff primary was delayed due to COVID-19.

While Charles Booker came up short against Amy McGrath in Kentucky last month, the story also applies to Texas this month, where last night Air Force veteran helicopter pilot MJ Hegar faced off against state Sen. Royce West for the right to take on Republican US Senator John Cornyn.  As with McGrath, Hegar counted her chickens before they hatched and ran almost exclusively against Cornyn, while West ran on the protests of the last six weeks.

But the results were the same as Hegar survived with a 52%-48% win.

Air Force veteran Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar will officially face Sen. John Cornyn in November after winning out against state Sen. Royce West in Texas’s Democratic primary runoff on Tuesday. 

Hegar secured the endorsement not just from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee but also from major national groups including EMILY’s List, Everytown for Gun Safety, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. She has long been the anointed candidate to take on Cornyn, and she was the top vote-getter in Texas’s Super Tuesday primary in March. 

On Tuesday, she again defeated West, a progressive fixture of Democratic politics in Texas. In the lead-up to the runoff, Hegar and her allies spent heavily to make sure they put the race away: According to the Texas Tribune, she, along with the DSCC and EMILY’s List, poured at least $2 million into ads in the Houston area over the last week of the race, outspending West 85 to 1.

That kind of spending might well have been necessary. According to Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University, West had been gaining traction in the race, though Tuesday’s result shows it didn’t happen quite fast enough to get him over the line.
In particular, Jones said, the national movement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis gave West a lift. “African American officeholders and political elites in the state,” he said, began to “really rally behind West in a way that they hadn’t in the original primary in March.” 

Hegar was always the favorite, however, and now she heads into the general election against Cornyn with about $1.6 million in the bank and a steep climb ahead of her. The Cook Political Report rates the Texas Senate race as “Likely R,” and Jones said he believes that’s “still pretty safe.” 

Texas is becoming less of a sure thing for Republicans: FiveThirtyEight’s polling average shows President Donald Trump in a dead-heat tie with Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the state, and one-time presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke came within a few points of unseating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. 

But Cornyn looks to be somewhat more popular in the state than his colleague in the Senate, never mind the president, and he’s running anywhere from 8 to 13 points ahead of Hegar in recent polling, so she’ll have her work cut out for her.

All of this sounds terribly familiar to me, and both Hegar and McGrath will probably end up losing by double digits.

Or maybe not.  Maybe not this year.  Even Mitch McConnell is spooked.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been crisscrossing Kentucky and delivering a sober analysis of the country's struggle with the coronavirus pandemic, imploring Americans to wear masks and warning in blunt terms that it's unclear how long the virus will continue to wreak havoc on the country. 

"Well regretfully, my friends, it's not over," McConnell said Monday at a hospital in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky. "We're seeing a surge in Florida and Texas and Arizona and yes, here in Kentucky." 

It's a far different message than what's being espoused by President Donald Trump, who boasts about the country's response, demands the economy reopen, rarely urges Americans to wear a mask and dismisses the virus' surge across the Sun Belt and the rise in cases in 37 states.

"It's going to take a while to get a vaccine," McConnell said back home this week, less than a week after Trump promised a vaccine "very, very soon" and in "record time."

McConnell, on the other hand, urges caution. 

"Remember once we get one or more vaccines we're going to need a massive number of doses, not just for our country, but for the whole world," he said, standing outside a hospital this week, holding his disposal facemask in his left hand. "For the whole world. A massive number of doses." 

On Tuesday, McConnell added in Henderson, Kentucky: "The earliest I've heard anybody suggest one could be available would be later this year, and that would be extremely optimistic."

Mitch is running from Trump on COVID-19.  He wants a Senate package and while his top priority is lawsuit immunity from COVID-19 lawsuits, he's moving forward on something I didn't think he would. Of course, he has thousands of Kentuckians and millions of Americans facing the end of COVID-19 unemployment benefits as convenient hostages for his demands, so who knows what will happen next week.

Maybe this is where Mitch and John Cornyn both lose to Democratic military veteran women pilots in November.