One of the worst features of the election primary system in our polarized “Red vs. Blue” time is the tendency of primary voters to flock to the candidate they most want to “destroy” the other party, not the candidate best positioned to do so.
Let’s say a zombie is scratching at your door. You’ve got a shotgun, a handgun and your favorite frying pan. The shotgun has the greatest chance of success, the handgun — if one is careful and skilled — has a solid chance of working, and the frying pan? It probably won’t dispatch the threat but, come on, how cool would it be to take out a zombie with a frying pan? So, you go with that.
In this extended metaphor, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett is the Democrats’ frying pan and Attorney General Ken Paxton is the Republican one.
Given trends in media coverage, you’re probably more familiar with examples of this phenomenon from the GOP. Remember Christine O’Donnell, the sketchy Delaware Senate candidate who had to run an ad in 2010 assuring voters, “I’m not a witch.” Or Todd Akin, the 2012 Missouri senate candidate who got into trouble for insisting that women don’t get pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape.” More recently, there was Mark Robinson, the 2024 North Carolina lieutenant governor who dabbled in Holocaust denial and mocked school-shooting survivors as “spoiled little bastards.” Only after he got the nomination was it revealed that he described himself as a “black NAZI” on a porn site.
Democrats have a similar, if less colorful, problem. In a bunch of races, Democrat primary voters preferred the candidate who was more ideologically pure, more pugnacious, or — in the President Trump era — the most committed to “resistance.” Once nominated, they were ill-suited to appeal to swing voters in a general election.
Just a few examples of Democratic candidates who excited the base but not mainstream voters: Mandela Barnes, the very progressive Wisconsin Senate candidate in 2022; Kara Eastman, the preferred candidate of “Justice Democrats” in Nebraska’s second district House race in 2018; Stacey Abrams, the election-denying two-time candidate for Georgia governor; and Andrew Gillum, the Florida progressive underdog who beat out more centrist candidates to get the Democrats’ nomination for governor, only to lose narrowly to Ron DeSantis in 2018.
Some of these races were indeed close. But the populist left and populist right take the wrong lesson from the narrowness of their defeats. Like the ugly Americans who think foreigners will understand English if they just shout louder, each side convinces themselves that if they only fought harder, wasted a little more money, they could’ve won.
To be fair, sometimes they’re right. But even in those cases, they’re merely making a down payment on bigger losses to come. Because by electing bomb throwers and crackpots they hurt the brand of their party for the next election.
Which brings me back to Texas. The Senate primary is heating up. On the GOP side it’s a three-way race among solid, reliable, moderately boring conservative incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, Republican two-term Congressman Wesley Hunt and the rabble-rousing, wildly corrupt (sorry, “ethically challenged”) populist demagogue and hard-core MAGA loyalist Ken Paxton.
Although nothing is assured given what might be a Democratic wave year, Cornyn would probably beat Crockett, who most analysts and Democrats (when speaking anonymously) think cannot win against anybody except maybe Paxton. But she can soak up an enormous amount of money and attention.
Crockett is very smart, but she is in many ways a Democratic version of Republican bomb throwers and social media phenoms Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. Indeed, Crockett has already trademarked her insult for Greene (whom she said has a “bleach-blonde bad-built butch body”). Crockett has also said that 80% of the “most violent crimes” are committed by “white supremacists,” Black people can’t be Republicans because Republicans are racist, Latinos have a “slave mentality” and that police shouldn’t prevent crime, they can only solve it, etc.
This stuff may work in a safe congressional district, but it’s not the stuff of a successful statewide race in Texas.
When Crockett announced she was running, Rep. Colin Allred, a more moderate candidate who was positioning himself to be a safe alternative to the Republicans, announced he was no longer pursuing a Senate bid.
And so here we are. Two parties, once again, are poised to nominate candidates so flawed they have a chance of losing to the other.
This is what happens in a polarized age when parties outsource their nominating process to the angriest voters in their coalition. They’d rather take a shot with their favorite frying pan, than shoot that boring shotgun.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
President Donald Trump speaks with the media after signing a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 3, 2026.
Will Trump’s moves ever awaken conservatives?
Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency in ways that could change America forever, and not for the better.
His naked self-dealing, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political foes, turning on our allies, the casino-fication of the White House — none of it bodes well for the future of our democracy, setting precedents that other presidents on both sides of the aisle could very well continue.
But one of the most obvious things Trump has changed in politics is its concern with ideology and principle. The long-held philosophy that used to bind the Republican Party together is gone, because he simply didn’t have a use for it.
For conservatives, that’s been especially disorienting and troubling. It began with Trump’s disregard for the debt and deficit, and carried through to this term’s embrace of tariffs, or protectionism. His personal disinterest in what the Christian right used to call “family values” dismantled the evangelical base of the party. And his courting of white nationalists and antisemites changed the face of the party.
None of that has been enough, however, to move conservative lawmakers to significantly break with Trump or even call him out. They happily co-signed his tariffs, watched as he exploded the debt and the deficit, turned the other way at his criminality and immorality, and defended police-attacking insurrectionists at the Capitol. He even managed to tick off the Second Amendment crowd with his crackdown on guns at protests and in Washington.
None of this is conservative. But so long as they kept winning, cowardly Republicans not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger didn’t seem to care.
But now, with a new idea hatched, will Republicans finally remember their conservative roots?
On Monday, Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting.” It was a startling suggestion for a party that’s always concerned itself with state’s rights and federalism.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said.
The call is in service of his election lie, of course, an answer to the non-existent scourge of voter fraud that rigged just the 2020 election and somehow not the 2016 or 2024 elections.
Except Trump is the one attempting the rigging. He’s tried to end mail ballots and voting machines, sued two dozen blue states for their voter rolls, embarked on a rare mid-decade redistricting campaign, dismantled the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and pardoned dozens of people who signed false election certifications for him in 2020.
It’s tempting to dismiss the idea as merely a self-soothing ramble, the nonsensical blurting of an old man still fixated on an imaginary injustice. But it should offend and worry everyone, not least of all Republicans.
Elections are held locally for good reason — it’s harder to rig them that way. The Constitution says states shall determine the times, places and manner of elections, for the explicit purpose of decentralizing and protecting their integrity. It’s the backbone of federalism.
But for House Speaker Mike Johnson it’s nothing to get worked up about. “What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections.”
But Democrats are rightly concerned, and preparing for potential “federal government intrusion” in the midterms. “This is now a legitimate planning category,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “It’s extraordinarily sad, but it would be irresponsible for us to disregard the possibility.”
Extraordinarily sad, indeed. But will it revive the dormant conservatism in the Republican Party? Will lawmakers remember their principles and patriotism? Or will they continue to sleep through Trump’s total remaking of America’s political system?
Maybe this will be the thing that finally wakes them up.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.