Texas is changing politically. Our time in the political trenches showed how.
It was a long month for us here on the Editorial Board. Over the past few weeks, you’ve seen our recommendations roll out in more than 40 races from district court judges all the way to governor and the U.
S. Senate. This process is important to us and, we hope, to you, because too many candidates nowadays do all they can to avoid meeting with anyone who might ask a tough question or have them sit down beside an opponent they have been lambasting in the false comfort of social media.Each election season, we learn something about Texas politics, and we take this space to tell you some of our important takeaways. So, after inviting more than 120 candidates to visit with us and sitting down with more than 70, here they are.You already know that leading GOP candidates are running on how close they are to President Donald Trump. But you might not know that MAGA-conservative or Trump-conservative bears little to no resemblance to small government principles. Often the opposite. Plenty of far-right Texas conservative candidates today want the state government to intervene on multiple levels. There is advocacy for pushing out locally elected prosecutors, for putting Christian faith more directly into public schools, for expanding private school vouchers, for centralizing election operations under the power of the state. Nowadays, the scariest words in politics aren’t “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” They are: “I’m a Texas lawmaker, and I’m here to take control.” We were appreciative of what one conservative candidate, Gordon Heslop, said running for House District 32: “Make America Normal Again.”We were wholly convinced that the border was in crisis under the Biden administration and something had to be done. Now that the border is quiet, with credit to the Trump administration, conservative candidates have been twisting for another issue to wake up the base. They have settled on Shariah as the target. Candidate after candidate raised fears that Islamic law is taking root in Texas. But none named a specific instance of Shariah being applied in the state.Democratic candidates had already gotten away from leaning into identity politics in the last round. But with the exception of asurprise victory in a special election for state Senate in conservative Tarrant County cemented most Democrats’ messaging — economic populism. Democrats see a lot of space in Texas to win over voters who feel like the economy has left them behind. But they are careful to steer away from calling for tax increases or bigger government. Instead, many talk vaguely about billionaires and corruption.Republicans made big inroads with border voters in the last cycle, with President Trump carrying border counties and upending the longstanding Democratic belief that demographics are destiny. But Democrats think that excesses of immigration enforcement have frustrated voters in border communities. Voting results will tell whether that’s true, but our read is that the frustration is real and not just along the border, and Republicans will see that now and in November.Democrats may be right about border voters flipping. But they’ve done some flipping of their own. When Joe Biden was president, it was hard to get Democrats to acknowledge the border was an issue. Now, they all acknowledge it was in crisis. But it’s fixed, so nothing to see here.As politics becomes more polarized and gerrymandering locks in incumbents, the overall quality of political candidates continues to decline. We’ve watched this trend over many cycles. Yes, well-qualified people still stand for public office, but voters have little serious choice in races for state and congressional representatives. Increasingly, there are batches of candidates with no discernible qualifications for public office and many disqualifying characteristics. Even front-runners and incumbents are people who, a few cycles back, would have been considered unprepared or unfit for office. We had one candidate who pulled out his phone before he could answer basic questions about budgets and foreign policy and others whose platforms sounded like AI-generated bullet points.The Texas GOP pushed out almost all moderate conservatives a few cycles ago. Now, many of the people who ran as “true conservatives” arefrom supposedly even more conservative candidates. It’s a race to who is more MAGA. But more than a few challengers are people with dangerous ideas about imposing Christian nationalist views on voters. Because the playbook is not to debate ideas but to shout slogans, even ultra-conservative incumbents have little defense against these challenges.Dallas Morning News editorials are written by the paper's Editorial Board and serve as the voice and view of the paper. The board considers a broad range of topics and is overseen by the Editorial Page Editor.U.S. Secret Service shot and killed armed man who entered secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago
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