Air Power veteran Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar will formally face Sen. John Cornyn in November after profitable out towards state Sen. Royce West in
Air Power veteran Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar will formally face Sen. John Cornyn in November after profitable out towards state Sen. Royce West in Texas’s Democratic main runoff on Tuesday.
Hegar secured the endorsement not simply from the Democratic Senatorial Marketing campaign Committee but additionally from main nationwide teams together with EMILY’s Record, Everytown for Gun Security, and the Deliberate Parenthood Motion Fund. She has lengthy been the anointed candidate to tackle Cornyn, and he or she was the highest vote-getter in Texas’s Tremendous Tuesday main in March.
On Tuesday, she once more defeated West, a progressive fixture of Democratic politics in Texas. Within the lead-up to the runoff, Hegar and her allies spent closely to verify they put the race away: In keeping with the Texas Tribune, she, together with the DSCC and EMILY’s Record, poured at the very least $2 million into advertisements within the Houston space over the past week of the race, outspending West 85 to 1.
That sort of spending would possibly properly have been mandatory. In keeping with Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice College, West had been gaining traction within the race, although Tuesday’s consequence reveals it didn’t occur fairly quick sufficient to get him over the road.
Particularly, Jones mentioned, the nationwide motion following the loss of life of George Floyd in Minneapolis gave West a carry. “African American officeholders and political elites within the state,” he mentioned, started to “actually rally behind West in a manner that they hadn’t within the authentic main in March.”
Hegar was at all times the favourite, nonetheless, and now she heads into the final election towards Cornyn with about $1.6 million within the financial institution and a steep climb forward of her. The Prepare dinner Political Report charges the Texas Senate race as “Possible R,” and Jones mentioned he believes that’s “nonetheless fairly secure.”
Texas is turning into much less of a certain factor for Republicans: FiveThirtyEight’s polling common reveals President Donald Trump in a dead-heat tie with Democratic nominee Joe Biden within the state, and one-time presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke got here inside a number of factors of unseating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018.
However Cornyn seems to be to be considerably extra in style within the state than his colleague within the Senate, by no means thoughts the president, and he’s working wherever from eight to 13 factors forward of Hegar in current polling, so she’ll have her work reduce out for her.
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