I mostly agree with this.
MJ Hegar
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s re-election campaign should be his race to lose.
The coronavirus outbreak, by most measures, has given Cornyn an even bigger advantage as he runs for a fourth term. The Texas Republican is sitting on $12 million with ads already on TV as his challengers campaign online against each other in a runoff election that was delayed six weeks by the pandemic.
Democrats MJ Hegar and Royce West are competing for attention with the biggest public health crisis in a century as they prepare for the July 14 election. The winner will get less than four months of head-to-head campaigning against Cornyn.
The Democrats had hoped to ride the momentum from Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz two years ago.
Sen. Royce West
Instead, “Sen. Cornyn is outpacing the Democrats on name identification, fundraising, and base support,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist. “Democrats are in a holding pattern, stalling their momentum when it was needed to ramp up support. Given where things are, it would take Beto-level enthusiasm to capture Texans’ attention, which is on anything but politics for the moment.”
But Cornyn’s opponents see an opening.
They are now doing all they can to tie Cornyn to the Trump administration’s slow response to the outbreak and to hammer him over health care, which their party believes is a winning issue for Democrats nationally — but especially against the Texas Republican, who played a crucial role in efforts to scrap the Affordable Care Act.
They say Cornyn has helped them make their case by tweeting pictures of Corona beer, saying it will be a “piece of cake” to beat the virus and blaming Chinese culture for COVID-19.
“I think we have more opportunity to show people the contrast of the type of leadership they can see from John Cornyn in a crisis, which is tweeting out pictures of beer in rocks glasses,” said MJ Hegar, a former Air Force pilot vying to challenge Cornyn. “Now more than ever, we’re seeing the importance that everyone have access to health care. We’re seeing how painful a health care model tied to your employment is when we have record unemployment numbers.”
Cornyn has the big advantages in fundraising and name ID as noted, and now is a lousy time for the two Dems remaining in the race to try to catch up on them. I mean, just look back at what I’ve been writing about for the past three or four weeks. There’s nothing to be said about most 2020 races right now, in part because everyone is focused on the pandemic, and in part because there’s not much the candidates themselves can do to make news, at least in a good way. The main potential for an equalizer is of course Donald Trump. His numbers have not been great in Texas, and if he slips into negative territory here – not just in approval ratings, but in actual head-to-head polling numbers – that will be a boost for the Dem and a drag on Cornyn. It’s too early to say what might happen, and at this point we have no idea how the 2020 election will be conducted and how that might affect things. Cornyn was always the favorite and he remains the favorite. The biggest risk to him is the one thing he cannot control, the virus and the President’s handling of it. We’ll see where we stand when things get back to something resembling normal.
The race is not about money in November, it is about Trump. A vote against Trump is also a vote for the Democrat running for Senate. I expect Trump to lose Texas.
I don’t think we will ever know who got the most votes, in Texas or anywhere else. But I expect the electoral votes to go to Trump and the Senate seat to go to Cornyn.