Don and former Vice President Joe Biden are locked in a very tight race in Texas, with Trump receiving 44 percent of the potential vote and Biden receiving 43 percent in a general election matchup, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University poll released this week.
Another way of stating this is Texans have the chance to change the course of U.S. history in November. Turning Texas Blue will also lift many other down-ticket boats. One notch down ticket is the race for U.S. Senator. This November, the incumbent Big John Cornyn will face off against Royce West or MJ Hegar, depending on which Democrat prevails in July’s primary election runoff.
West is a State Senator from Dallas with lots of experience. He has a new commercial that picks up the topic of this time—police brutality and its lethal impact on black people and the community at large.
West, notably has been backed by five former primary opponents, including the close third-place finisher, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who had run as one of the most progressive candidates in the primary. According to the Texas Tribune, her support, along with a more recent endorsement from the national liberal group Democracy for America, gave West the opportunity to expand his progressive credentials while Hegar continues to stay on a relatively moderate path to the general election.
Hegar finished first in the 12-way March primary ahead of West. She is also backed by the DSCC and remains the top Democratic fundraiser.
“We will not have as much money as MJ has for the runoff, but I assure you that we’re gonna have the votes to win the runoff and not have to spend as much money per vote as MJ will have to spend,” West said.
Big John Is Big on The Old Ways
To contrast sharply with the above, let’s now turn to the sitting Senator’s YouTube. Here’s a video from March that commemorates the Battle of the Alamo:
Do you know why the Texans and the Mexican Army were fighting at The Alamo? Students of American and Mexican history know, but almost everyone else forgot or never knew to begin with. The fight was over slavery. Mexico outlawed it in 1829, but the wealthy white settlers of Texas—which was a Mexican territory at the time—did have slaves and no interest in giving them up.
Texans fought to keep slavery not once, but twice. The Texans won the first battle. Section 9 of the General Provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, ratified in 1836, made slavery legal again in Texas.
There were other factors in the fight for independence from Mexico, just like there was more than one reason behind the Civil War, but in both cases the battle over slavery was central. It’s just that slaveholders tended to wrap the idea in other more palatable ideas like self-determination, for them, not for the indentured human beings in their fields.
