Texas Primary Results Could Be Indiana Preview

Let's talk about real quick the Texas election results last night. I'm going to apply them to Indiana. To me, they were fascinating. I think there's a couple things you can get out of them. Texas had their primary last night. First of all, let me start with this. The idea of these runoff elections to me is ridiculous. It's a total waste of taxpayer money. I'm against primaries being funded by the public anyway, but especially when you've got to do a second primary. What I'm talking about is in the state of Texas, if you don't get a majority, not a plurality, but a majority, so that's 50% plus one, it goes to a second primary election for the top two vote getters. If you and one of the elections are about to talk about, you don't get 50%, you're not the winner. You've got to go run again. A lot of times the guy who "wins" will win the second election, but not always. I think that may happen in Texas here. We'll talk about that in a second. There were a couple of big elections. They had their Congress elections, all the normal elections that you think of, Attorney General, etc. The big one nationally that people were paying attention to was the U.S. Senate primaries. Democrats and Republicans had contested Senate primaries to go against each other in the fall. On the Democrat side, it was James Talarico. He is this guy who was in the national news recently. He's a state, I think he's a state senator in Texas. He was in the national news because he was going to be on Colbert. CBS didn't allow him to be on Colbert because they were worried about the equal time clause, which says if you interview a political candidate and the other candidate requests it within a certain window of an election, if you're on a terrestrial TV or radio station, then you have to grant that equal time. They were worried they weren't going to be able to abide by that with his opponent, so they forced him to be on YouTube. And then what happened was, because he was on YouTube, he got all this national attention because it was like CBS is forcing this guy off the air became the narrative. He got millions of views on this YouTube feed with Colbert and a whole bunch of money came in. Talarico, who sort of seemed like as the more moderate of the two, I'm not saying he is, but the perception is he's sort of a more mainstream Democrat. He was running against Jasmine Crockett. How many of you know Jasmine Crockett is a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She is, well, she's wild. She's interesting and she's very, very liberal. And she's very, very outspoken about her hatred and her dislike for President Trump. And in fact, wasn't one of her TV ads, Trump saying mean things about her and her responding to them. And so the question was going to kind of be, where are the Democrats in Texas going to go? This far left woman who is very liked by their base, who is very outspoken, who is very combative, who is very combative, or this kind of much more mild mannered Talarico, who is liberal. I mean, it's not like he's, you know, it's not Ronald Reagan we're talking about here, but he's certainly not seen as combative. Or seeking conflict or seen as more moderate. Which way are the Democrats going to go? And the polling was all over the map. There's a poll that showed Crockett up. There's a show that pulled it show Talarico up. And so nobody had any idea which way this race was going to go. And last night, Talarico beat the brakes off of Jasmine Crockett. And he got the over the, by beat the brakes, I mean, he got over the 50% threshold. He is the winner. He does not have to go through a runoff. And so I'm watching this and I'm thinking, wow, the Democrats might be getting their act together. I mean, in the past, the Democrats, because their base is so far left, would have just gone, "Ah, we're going, we're going with the ideologue." There's no ground for moderation here. And it appears maybe the Democrats want to start winning. Bring that back home to Indiana. Look at what the choice is in front of the Democrats here. On their Secretary of State side, you've got Beau Bayh who has seen as that sort of middle of the road. He's already come out and said things like voter ID or the law of the land should stand. He's mainstream. He looks the part. He's got the name. He's raising tons of money. But he's got a left challenger. He's got a challenger from his left. Blythe Potter, I think is her name. And she's gotten some donations and has seen as a somewhat serious threat to him. And so you do wonder, will the Democrats here in Indiana, who have repeatedly nominated, bad candidates for the offices that they're running for, will the Democrats finally say we'd rather win than sit in our own ridiculous moral superiority and sit with 10 members in the state Senate and a supermajority in the House as well, 10 out of 50 in the Senate and I, what, 30? I think it's 70, 30 or something like that in the House. Would we rather sit in this fake moral high horse stuff and have no power or would we finally start liking, like finally start nominating people who would like to win guys like Fetterman who are maneuvering down the middle. Guys who can win in swing States, which Texas is, guys who can potentially win in red States, which Texas kind of is. I mean, people say, well, Rob, Texas is red. Yeah. I mean, it votes red, but it's, it's trended more purple. It certainly Democrats could win in Texas. They have won in the past. So when I say it's a swing state, I don't mean it's not Pennsylvania, but I certainly also don't think it's, I don't think it's Mississippi. Democrats in Texas said we would rather have a chance to win than just have somebody who wants to say ridiculous things and fight and things that appease us. Do you want to be successful or do you want to be, do you want to have fake happiness because then you'll be miserable for six years when, when Crockett gets smoked by the Republican and it appears in Texas, they've said we'd like to win. Good on them. Good on the Democrats. Hopefully Indiana's Democrats do the same thing. You say, well, how could you say that? Hopefully, because I want the Democrats to be competitive. The reason the Republicans are so bad in the state behave the way they do with the tax increase in the state, the way they do with the tax increases, the growing of government, all of this stuff that we talk about all the time, they don't fear the Democrats. The Republicans know I get through my primary. I'm in, doesn't matter. I mean, there's a handful of districts in our state that that's not true, but everything else, easy cheesy. I want the Democrats to be competitive because I want the Democrats, the Democrats who make the Republicans fear losing. Fear the idea that if we don't, if we don't put the citizens first, if we, if we don't put the citizens ahead of the corporate interest, the donors, the lobbyists, that we could have ramifications. Look, I'm, I'm cheering for the Democrats to get their act together this year. Now, my question is, since I always vote in Republican primaries and I was an elected Republican and I espouse Republican ideals every day, the actual things they write down, but I just said I'm cheering for the Democrats to be competitive. Does that make me a Republican in bad standing? Would my candidacy be challenged? Can you imagine that? We're challenging the candidacy of Rob Kendall, who has voted in every single Republican primary since 2010, every single one, municipal and, and the regular elections. We're also challenging Rob Kendall, who espouses the written down Republican ideals every single day. And he is mean to us because we don't adhere to those ideals. I would love to see, I may just run for public office because I know somebody would challenge it. I might just do that someday just to see what the challenge would actually be. That would be, we would get so much media attention out of that. That'd be great. Then on the Republican side in Texas, something interesting happened over there. So there were three people running. There was Ken Paxson, who is the attorney general, John Cornyn, who is the longtime incumbent Senator, and a guy by the name of Wesley Hunt, who I believe he was a US representative. And so in a three way race, Paxson was seen as the conservative, firebrand, lot of baggage with him though, lot of baggage. Cornyn, the establishment candidate, but not liked by the right, the Trump people don't really care for him. And then this Wesley Hunt guy who he was, he was a somewhat distant third. It really, and that's the way the election sort of bore out. He didn't do embarrassing. Like he didn't get, you know, 1% of the vote, but he was never seen as getting enough traction to be a viable competitor. And so ultimately neither Paxson or Cornyn got the 50%. So now this heads to a runoff. So now the taxpayers have to pay for another runoff. Now, I did not see the final, final vote tally as I went to bed late last night. Um, Cornyn still had a lead over Paxson. Now that doesn't matter. Once they run again, everybody starts at zero and it's really where those Wesley Hunt voters are going to go. They're going to determine the election. But the point is sort of like with the Democrats, no, not to the same extent, but the Republicans looked at this and said, look, okay, so we have this one guy in Paxson who we, if we're conservative, I probably agree with him more than Cornyn. Cornyn's been there forever, kind of like, you know, go home type of guy. It's run its course, but he's probably got a better chance of winning a general election in a purple tilting state. He's probably got a better chance of winning the election than Paxson does because of all the baggage Paxson brings with him. And so I just found that fascinating. And because we have our own Republican primaries here this year, right? All of these challengers to the Greg Goode, Spencer Deery, all of those people that voted against redistricting, the turning point USA people, they found candidates, they're running candidates. Will they be able to beat the establishment? Where will the voters go? How will they decide? Will they be like Texas to say, well, you know, at least for now, we kind of would rather win. Both Republicans and Democrats said we'd rather win than have our ideologies appeased. And so I thought that was, I thought that was fascinating.