I want to comment on John Cornyn losing his primary because I go to DC parties where I meet establishment guys and I know how they think.
Senate Republicans think they are the reason Republicans won in 2024. They think they’re the GOP’s secret sauce.
You think the GOP rode Trump’s coattails. They think Trump road their coattails.
In this world, Republicans won because Democrats went too far. Woke was too crazy. Republicans were moderate and sensible. Now, they have to keep the party that way or Republicans will make the same mistake the Democrats made.
They think in very outdated terms. Republicans will lose in 2026 because the incumbent party always loses. This is a political “rule”. They are 100% certain Republicans will lose. Therefore, anything Trump does to try to win the midterms is actually cope. You’re talking crazy. Crazy is bad.
SAVE? Deportations? That’s crazy. Crazy is bad.
“But if you redistrict and pass voter ID Republicans will win!”
Senate Republicans are not thinking like that. They’re thinking you’re nuts.
Passing bills, making law? They think that whatever mandate they had was squandered by Trump over controversies like Minneapolis and posting too many memes on Twitter. The GOP looks too crazy now. Well try again next time.
They’re actually doing us a favor. By doing nothing they’re protecting us from our own excesses. They’re helping us not look crazy. We had better thank them.
When you think of MAGA, you think of Donald Trump and reindustrialization and deporting illegal immigrants.
When they think of MAGA, they think of Marjorie Taylor Greene. They think of Roy Moore losing Alabama in 2018. They think of “grab them by the pussy”. They think of “they’re eating the dogs”. They think of Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz and Alex Jones. They think of crazy people doing stupid things.
So, in every election since 2016, and maybe even before that, it’s Establishment Republicans who have saved the ticket from the worst excesses of Donald Trump and the Republican base.
That is what Senate Republicans mean when they say they want to “govern”. They want to pass budgets and workshop foreign policy.
That is why they still won’t implement Trump’s agenda. They think it is deeply unpopular, or will become unpopular even if it temporarily polls well. They think Trump only won because they saved his bacon.
So, John Cornyn.
John Cornyn lost because the base is deeply unhappy with Senate Republican leadership. Republican voters would probably replace a majority of Senate Republicans if you simply took a straw poll.
Senate Republicans know this, but think that Republicans voters almost always “come to their senses” because we all know Republicans can’t afford to be crazy. Democrats lose when they’re crazy. Republicans will lose the same way.
Sometimes the base has to be coerced or told what to do. That’s why they have to spend $100M propping up Cornyn.
Cornyn’s loss is shocking to them because it doesn’t make sense:
* Trump has “no reason” for endorsing Paxton over Cornyn. It’s crazy for Trump to do this. Senate Republicans save Trump again and again and this is how he repays them.
* The voters are out of control. The base is “supposed to” vote for Republicans anyways, so they should know we have to support moderates who can win. The fact that the voters don’t know this is more proof that Senate Republicans are the smartest people in the room.
MARC ANDREESSEN: "We had meetings with the Biden admin where they told us to not even start AI companies because there's no way they'll let them succeed."
JOE ROGAN: "What do you do after a meeting like that?"
MARC ANDREESSEN: "You go endorse Donald Trump."
LMAO
@dmdou812@ScottPresler@LeaderJohnThune He and the other RINOs think we're just a very loud minority in fringe internet spaces and will just go away if they ignore us long enough
The people losing their minds over this postal rule are doing more to make the case for it than the rule itself ever could.
You’ve got Chuck Schumer calling basic envelope tracking “voter suppression, plain and simple.” You’ve got Senator Padilla claiming tens of millions of legal voters will suddenly be blocked. And you’ve got Marc Elias ... the guy who’s spent his entire career in court trying to stop every verification rule anyone ever proposed ... treating barcodes on ballot envelopes like an existential threat.
That level of alarm over something this straightforward is the tell.
The rule doesn’t decide who gets to vote. It doesn’t touch state voter rolls. It just says that if a state wants to use the federal mail system to deliver and collect federal ballots, the envelopes need to carry the same kind of tracking information the Postal Service already uses for everything else. The technology isn’t new ... plenty of blue states and progressive election officials have been using intelligent mail barcodes for years. The Brennan Center even acknowledged it’s already common practice in many places.
So why the sudden panic when it becomes a uniform, enforceable standard?
Because once you can actually reconcile how many ballots went out against how many came back, you remove the ability to pretend the system is airtight when it isn’t. The people most furious about adding a basic paper trail are the ones who benefited most from not having one. Their reaction isn’t about protecting voters. It’s about protecting the current lack of accountability.
When the same voices that spent years expanding mail voting now treat simple tracking like an attack on democracy, they’re not hiding their concerns. They’re advertising them.
(article below)