It’s Not The System …

The results were similar but even more dramatically skewed than 2012, when Dewhurst got almost 45% in initial primary ballot & Cruz barely cleared 34%.
But Cruz grew his vote total quite a bit in runoff while Dewhurst lost 150k votes. pic.twitter.com/yoCibVMb0W

— Paul Kane (@pkcapitol) May 27, 2026

It's the voters.

Turn out in the runoff was very small compared to any year, much less yesterday

— Oats'Willie (@OatsWillie) May 27, 2026

Well, you could argue a primary vote in March, with a runoff 2 months later, is a system problem. But Talarico won the Democratic nomination with 1.2 million votes. Neither Paxton nor Cornyn cracked 1 million in the primaries or the runoff. GOP voters just didn’t turn out; and primaries are always about the most motivated voters. In Texas, though nobody outside Texas has noticed, that included lots of ads (even Cornyn did it) about how the candidate would never allow elephants 🐘  Sharia law to plague Texas. A lot of those candidates won nominations for state offices last night.

Honestly, I’m starting to be nostalgic for the smoke filled rooms. A lot of the “reformer” energy that led to 50 primaries/caucuses, came from the left starting in the ‘60’s. Mostly because the “old men” were running everything, keeping the war alive and blocking the Civil Rights movement. (LBJ died aged 65. He was an “old man” in 1973. What a difference 53 years makes.)  The simple fact is, we’d have never had Trump under the party system that gave us LBJ or Nixon. (It was the GOP that pushed Nixon out two years after the greatest landslide victory in American history.) But the pressure for reform from the GOP side, angry with the trouncing of Goldwater, worked hard to get us precisely here.

Plenty of blame about the “system” to go around.