Both Talarico and Paxton Have Problems With Their Primary Opponents

Casting ballots across party lines used to be pretty common in Texas: It was a behavior folks had to unlearn. It wasn’t until fairly recently in American life that there was a left-wing party and a right-wing party and voting patterns calcified. In 1952, Texas Republicans knew any gubernatorial candidate they put forward would lose to the conservative Democratic candidate and decided to give him their nomination too, so that the final result on Election Day was Allan Shivers versus Allan Shivers, 73 to 25. A decade later, in 1961, the first Republican to win statewide in Texas since Reconstruction, John Tower, won his Senate seat partly with the help of liberals, who hated his conservative Democratic opponent. This produced a couple of decades in…

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