There's plenty to talk about regarding tonight's election results in Texas. We won't have "Big John" Cornyn to push around for much longer, as he was smashed by hyper-corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. This maybe gives Democrats a shot at the Texas seat -- Paxton is generally viewed as a weaker candidate against Democratic nominee James Talarico -- but regardless I shed no tears over Cornyn's defeat. He was a far-right Republican for his entire career, and a leopard ate his face. And even though Paxton is (somehow) objectively "worse" than Cornyn in every respect, it also scarcely matters in the Senate -- either man would be a lockstep vote for the GOP agenda. Cornyn reaped what he sowed, and he career ended without dignity. He deserved nothing better.
On the whole, this is good news. No margin is wide enough not to be a little disconcerting when it comes to a candidate who proposed creating "castration centers" for "American Zionists" and ranted about Jewish/Israeli/Zionist control of the world, but approaching a 2:1 margin (which has been widening over the course of the evening) is pretty emphatic for a candidate who won a plurality in the opening round and at least initially carried the endorsement of the other two runners-up. And one doesn't know how much of even Galindo's residual support came from people who still hadn't heard much about antisemitic views or assumed it was the usual contretemps over Israel. Galindo is orders of magnitude worse than Graham Platner, Nazi tattoo and all. But most of Galindo's most offensive remarks didn't really come to public attention until after the initial round of voting, and as much as coverage seemed ubiquitous to someone like me with my media diet, I cannot stress how much of an outlier I and every single person reading this blog is when it comes to the amount of attention we're paying to this race. That Garcia's margins have climbed over the course of the evening suggests that later-deciding voters -- who had more time to hear about what Galindo was about -- broke against her.
Overall, given the end results it seems clear that Galindo benefited from being seen as "the progressive fighter" in a context where many Democrats want that over all else (even as that presentation was aided by GOP money). Once people started learning about who this woman was with more specificity, a lot of that support melted -- and that's a good thing, since a big fear many of us have is if Democratic voters follow in the GOP footsteps of just voting for whatever avatar best is perceived as channeling incandescent "anti-establishment" rage. Where that sort of outlook drives voting behavior, antisemitism becomes not a burden but a boon -- further proof that one is sticking it to Power (where Jews are inherently associated with capital-P Power). The resounding rejection of Galindo suggests that is not where we are as a party, and that's a very good thing.
Credit also should go to the progressive elected establishment for being absolutely clear they'd have no truck with the likes of Galindo. The rapid mobilization against her from more moderate Jewish Democrats like Jared Moskowitz and Josh Gottheimer was one thing. But Talarico immediately disassociated himself from Galindo, AOC gave a no-holds-barred denunciation, and Greg Casar publicly backed Garcia. This matters because on his own merits Johnny Garcia, a Blue Dog sort, is not the type of Democrat these Democrats tend to promote, and one can imagine a universe where they just try to skate past Galindo's "rougher edges" given the overwhelming importance of kneecapping Democratic moderates. That didn't happen here. A few gadfly commentators aside, nobody was treating Galindo as anything other than despicable.
Having said all of that -- and all of that is reason for good cheer -- I think we would be foolish not to recognize that there is a real appetite in some progressive circles for what Galindo represents, which is to say, for overt and uncompromising antisemitism dressed in the barest fig leaf of "anti-Zionism". It is not a majority, it is not even a large minority, but it isn't entirely trivial either. Whether this appetite is first-order commitment to Jew hatred, or whether it flows indirectly from a more inchoate lashing out at anyone and anything associated with "the establishment", I'm not sure. But we shouldn't pretend that this is not a force moving through American politics, and we shouldn't pretend it has no traction in Democratic circles. It does, and that's why it was so important -- and again, so heartening -- to see the party rally against it without reservation and turn it back.
Once again, the main difference between Democrats and Republicans isn't that they have cranks and we don't. The difference is that our cranks lose in our primaries, and theirs become presidential nominees. Let's keep it that way.
