Trump, Paxton and Talarico Make Final Push in Texas Senate Race

A generation of Republican dominance has produced an ugly confidence in Texas: the belief that the state can survive any nominee, any feud, and any October scare and still keep its Senate seat. Democrats have not won statewide here since 1994. An October poll with Ken Paxton and James Talarico tied at 49 percent is what that confidence looks like when it runs out.

President Trump was in Lubbock because the arithmetic finally outshouted the brand management. This is one of a handful of races that can decide who runs the Senate. Paxton either drags a battered coalition over the line or becomes the Republican who handed Democrats a Texas seat in a midterm. There is no third result in which the base sulks its way to a more tasteful nominee. That nominee is already on the ballot.

The sulking is not baseless. Paxton is a burden his party built and refused to put down. The Texas House impeached him; the Senate acquitted him; the old securities case ended without a conviction. None of that clears the spectacle — his own senior deputies turned accusers, a knife fight with the Austin Republican establishment, years of headlines that did not win a single general-election vote. Voters tired of it are not fools. Some of the mess was political revenge. Some of it was Paxton. A tie is the late fee for failing to settle that before the primary.

It is not a case for James Talarico. He is the sharpest version of a strategy, not a break with one. Young, quick, and able to talk about faith without the wince that has become a Democratic habit — that is a real skill, and Republicans who sneer at it will keep losing people who want politics to sound moral. A skill is not a vote in Washington. Senator Talarico would not join a caucus of Texas free agents. He would join the Democratic caucus as it actually votes: on immigration enforcement, on how hard the federal government makes it to produce energy in a state that still lives on producing it, and on whose view of the law fills the federal courts. The manners are the pitch. The pitch is required because the agenda is a harder sell in Lubbock than in a campaign video.

A senator's power is not his best afternoon on the trail. It is whether a president gets his judges, whether a majority can move a budget, and whether chairs spend two years legislating or two years issuing subpoenas. As attorney general, Paxton left a record of taking federal overreach to court rather than accommodating it. Dislike him and still read the record. There is nothing in this race that amounts to a promise Talarico will break with his party on the day it counts. Democratic politics does not reward the Democrat who tries.

The Republican planning to sit out in the name of standards should name what the boycott buys. Not a cleaner choice. A Democratic senator from Texas, in a chamber close enough that one seat decides the gavel, delivered with Republican assistance. Principle would have been ending the Paxton fight in the primary, in public, without the circus. Principle now is refusing to let the circus become the alibi.

Trump beside Paxton will irritate exactly the voters Talarico is built to comfort, and it will reach a larger group that still remembers why this state stopped electing Democrats statewide. Campaigns at 49 percent do not get to approve every reaction they cause. Texas has not changed because a poll is tied and a Democrat can speak church. It changes in Washington if Republicans decide that being tired is a decision.

The harder lesson is for the Right. A party that needs a presidential visit to save a Senate race in Texas has spent too long fighting itself and not long enough producing nominees who do not need a rescue. Take the help. Hold the seat. Then stop confusing a rescue with a healthy party.