Could Texas Turn Blue, and South Carolina, Too?

0:29This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. South Carolina's Senate race gets unexpectedly competitive as Darlene Graham's challenger tries to reach out to Republican and independent voters. Plus, the GOP continues to worry about how much money it's spending in Texas as newly leaked video shows Senate nominee Ken Paxton partying in Dubai last year with alleged fugitives from U.S. prosecutors. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues on the WSJ's opinion pages, columnists Barton Swaim and Kim Strassel.

1:10Senator Darlene Graham has been on the job for three months now after being appointed to fill the seat of her late brother, Lindsey. But voters seem undecided about whether to keep her there after November. A couple of recent polls show her leading Democrat, Annie Andrews, by only a single percentage point, with 4 % or even 9 % saying they don't know they're undecided. Third-party candidates, including a libertarian, pulling a few points as well. On Sunday, the two nominees went head-to-head in their only scheduled debate. Here they are, first Annie Andrews and then Darlene Graham. My opponent is the only one on this stage who had the opportunity to vote to end the war.

1:50But three times in a row, she voted to continue it. And several days after one of those votes, she had the audacity to walk out onto this stage and admit that national security isn't really her thing. South Carolina, if your surgeon said that appendectomies aren't really his thing, would you still hand him a scalpel? No. So why would we hand Darlene Graham a full term in the U.S. Senate? She is unserious and unqualified. Again, I think the president wants to end the war. I know he does. We all want the war to end. But I support a strong military. I believe in peace through strength. But talking about not my thing, let's talk about what's not your thing.

2:33Your thing apparently is not being honest with the people of South Carolina. At least I'm honest. If I don't know something, I'm glad to say it. And I'll say it again tonight. But you have you You are deceiving the people of South Carolina. You have flip flopped on everything. There's so many social media posts out there to prove different. Shame on you. Barton, how do you size up these two candidates in this campaign? And for listeners, your most recent column is under the headline South Carolina could go blue. Well, to size it up, let me preface it by saying that Darlene Graham could win this running away.

3:10OK, I don't want to be made a fool of. It is South Carolina after all. And there was a lot of excitement for Jamie Harrison six years ago, which maybe we can talk about. And that proved a dud. Darlene Graham is nowhere to be found. I don't see any campaign events scheduled. There may be some. I'm on her email list, but there don't seem to be any advisories. Whereas Annie Andrews is doing campaign events all the time, all over the state. In that debate, and who knows how much to pay attention to debates, Maybe it was watched by six people. But in this debate, unlike the Republican primary debate of some weeks ago, Darlene Graham did not have any major faux pas, but she handled herself reasonably well.

3:59I don't watch a lot of television, but I'm told on good authority that Andrew's ads are all over the place and very few Graham ads. So it's hard to believe that the South Carolina electorate would vote for a Democrat statewide, which hasn't happened since 2006, I believe, the Secretary of Education. And before that, I think it was in the 90s sometime. However, Darlene Graham is a weak candidate. She's not versed. Granted, she is sort of the incumbent now, having been appointed by the governor. But she's not good on her feet. She seems not to know a lot of policy. And Annie Andrews, although she ran before for the first district in Charleston, seems a little more capable on her feet, has improved tremendously since last time.

4:56I watched her on a campaign in that earlier campaign. And my sense is that this is going to be a close election and it could go blue. I'm not sure about the viewership reported for this specific debate. One thing that happens often, though, is fewer people will watch the full debate than will watch the clips and the outtakes on YouTube. And one of the takeaways from this debate seems to be that there was no major knockout blow, nothing like that moment in the primary debate where Darlene Graham ducked a question about Taiwan. There was no more oops, Taiwan moment, though you heard Annie Andrews continuing to make reference to that in the clip we play at the top.

5:36One interesting facet of this, though, is the extent to which Andrews is making an effort to reach out to voters who are not part of the Democratic Party. Listen to this pitch. I told you my opponent was going to call me a socialist, and there she's done it again. She's been told to come out here and call me Bernie Ocasio Mom Donnie. That's what's in her script. But the truth is, my name is Annie Andrews, and there shouldn't be any confusion about that because unlike my opponent, I haven't changed my name recently. And the truth is, I support the Second Amendment. I believe we need a secure border, and we need to deport illegal immigrants who break the law.

6:15And yes, I want to lower taxes on the middle class. I'm a working mom. I'm a pediatrician. I was raised in a Republican household. The real difference between me and Senator Graham is that I will stand up to my own party, and I will always put South Carolina first. She seems to believe the job she has right now is to be the White House's ambassador to South Carolina. The job is to represent South Carolina. She considers the job to be to read their scripts and do their bidding, and we can do better. Kim, to my mind, the challenge of that kind of outreach, candidates sometimes try to do that without really changing the underlying issues, the substance of what they are saying they want to do when they get elected and go to Washington.

7:02And just to continue the service we provide here of reading candidates' campaign literature and their websites, here's a little bit of what Annie Andrews says she wants to do. She wants to restore protections for abortion, codify Roe v. Wade, advocate for policies like a public option, her website says. It does not go so far as saying she wants Medicare for all, but moving kind of in that direction of more government intervention in health care. She says she supports the Second Amendment. You heard there. Here's her website. She wants universal background checks. She wants to ban weapons of war from our streets.

7:38Kim, that is the kind of language that you often hear talked about, things like the AR-15 style rifles that are often also talked about as America's most popular rifles. And so it's interesting to me that she's attempting this outreach toward independent voters, Republican voters. But I question whether that's going to work without really modifying the kind of things that she is saying she believes in, probably really does believe in, and needs to bring those Democratic voters along as well. It's always tough if you are a Democrat running in a red state, just like it's always tough if you are a Republican running in a blue state.

8:13And the big hurdle you have to overcome is whether or not people believe you, if they won't make that leap of faith that you really do mean what you are telling them and that you really will represent them, as she said she would in that debate, when you go off to Congress. I think the problem she has, she's running a very savvy campaign, as you and Barton note in that clip, suggests saying all the right thing, modulating her views. But anyone who does any kind of investigation, and you don't necessarily have to go to her website, this stuff travels through voting communities, through word of mouth, is going to know that when she says, I support the Second Amendment, that there's an enormous caveat there and that actually she wants to ban entire categories of guns.

9:00When she says she wants a public option, everybody understands that that's step one out of two of having Medicare for all. And I think voters have also become very skeptical that Democrats, when they say that they're going to go and stand up to their party in Washington that that ever really happens. We've had a few examples of it, a Joe Manchin, a Kyrsten Sinema. You see the treatment those two former senators got. One reason why they are former senators, they didn't want to do it anymore. And most human beings, quite aside from why they're not Democrats or not, don't like to be in that situation.

9:39It takes an enormous amount of courage. And it's highly unlikely that Annie Andrews is the one character that's going to go to D.C. and stand up to Chuck Schumer. So I think all of that is what she has to overcome, and it's going to be difficult for her. I would just point out, I mean, look, I agree with Barton entirely that when the governor announced that Darlene Graham was going to fill the remainder of the term for her brother, I thought, oh, that's nice. A couple months, kind of a tribute. Great. When Donald Trump endorsed her, I was like, oh, whoa, Nellie, what are we doing here? And this was an example of just taking on an extraordinary, unnecessary risk.

10:20If you look at the numbers, I will point this out. Money is kind of a good guide. You have to trust the election pros a little bit in these campaigns to have a better feel than the average person for what's going on. And it's not as if Republicans aren't paying attention to some other red states where they didn't think they'd have a problem, but they are now worried. There's a lot of money flowing into Kansas and Nebraska, for instance. But I would just point out that when it comes to South Carolina, if this means anything, there hasn't been a huge on rush of Republican dollars in the state on behalf of Darlene Graham, which does suggest that they still feel she has a cushion.

11:00Doesn't mean that this won't be really close. Doesn't mean that she couldn't still lose it. But right now, it's not at the top of everyone's radar screen for urgency. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. Weren't agents supposed to take things off your plate? Building another to handle the others is a bit much. Don't make more work out of work. Gemini is one agent that knows all parts of your business and actually gets stuff done. You give it a project, close your laptop, and when you come back, the job's finished. No matter your industry or role, your agent has the skills to help every team stay in their flow.

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12:31Welcome back. Barton, you mentioned Jamie Harrison, his 2020 challenge to Lindsey Graham when he was the Democratic hope to take South Carolina and how much money was poured into that effort. This is a Charleston Post and Courier story from 2021 saying that he spent more than$130 million on route to losing. So that is the alternative. I mean, you could have Democratic hopes raised here and then dashed on Election Day if these polls showing Darlene Graham up by only a point turn out to be wrong. if there turns out to be some latent enthusiasm for Republicans or not enough Democratic enthusiasm for Andrews.

13:12On the other hand, the difficulty is often there are these warnings that a state is about to flip and it keeps not happening. And it only needs to happen sometimes once to eventually be proven correct. And as we sit here today, we have two Democratic senators from Georgia, which I think was not something anybody had on their bingo card, you know, five, six years ago. Exactly. And, you know, I mentioned the lack of campaigning from the Graham campaign. It really puts me in mind of David Perdue's campaign, if you want to call it that, back in 2020. He relied entirely on television advertising, as far as I could tell.

13:47I covered that race. I was down there looking for a Perdue event, trying to get in touch with the campaign, got no answer. Meanwhile, John Ossoff was everywhere all the time. Now, okay, 2020 was a very weird election. It went to a runoff and it was very, very close and Trump got involved. And so it's a different thing. But it does put me in mind when you can't find a candidate, there seems to be a problem. Also about the race in South Carolina six years ago, bear in mind too that Lindsey Graham had a lot of enemies on what I'll call the hard right in South Carolina. A lot of very sort of Tea Party oriented conservatives hated Lindsey Graham.

14:25But he kept in close contact with all of the county parties all the time, and he won by getting a lot of independent votes. As of right now, those independent votes are completely up for grabs. There's no attempt, as far as I can tell, on the Graham campaign's part to grab those votes. And just to emphasize the point, Annie Andrews is doing a pretty good job of reaching out to them. She has an ad that I've seen where she introduces her father, who is a registered Republican, but he supports her and so on. And he says he voted for Lindsey Graham six years ago. So that's pretty effective. And bear in mind, too, that Kim mentioned the weird circumstances of Darlene Graham's appointment, and then Trump endorsed her out of nowhere.

15:15There's a story behind that, but I can't confirm the details. So eventually, I hope to write on that. She ran against several Republicans on August 11th and only got 32 percent of the vote in a plurality, a weak plurality. And then she went into a runoff and beat Ralph Norman, a House member, 52 to 48. So in the Republican Party, there's never been a great outcry for Lindsey Graham's sister, all of which makes me think she could be in trouble. Speaking of states that repeatedly seem like they are just about to flip and then keep not flipping, Texas is another place where Republicans are worried about their nominee for the Senate, Ken Paxton.

15:57And Kim, that's a place where, unlike South Carolina, as you say, there is tons of money flowing in to defend Ken Paxton. And part of what makes that important is that that's money that's not being spent elsewhere in other races where Republicans are looking like they could be competitive, New Hampshire, or where Democrats looking like they could be competitive, Alaska. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, without a doubt. When the history books are written, people will look back. The decision by the president of the United States and Republicans in Texas to get behind Ken Paxton as their nominee is the single dumbest mistake Republicans have made in this election among a number of them.

16:38I mean, it's extraordinary to me. First of all, at the time they decided to get behind him, this was a guy who had more scandals than you can even begin to imagine. I mean, this is a guy who he was impeached by the members of his own party over alleged bribery and abuse of power and obstruction of justice. His own senior staffers, by the way, not just one or two of them, but eight of his deputies reported him to the FBI, accusing him of using the attorney general's office to help a top donor. He was indicted on security fraud charges, though they were later dropped, but only after he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution and completed community service.

17:24By the way, just what you want, a Senate nominee who as an adult had to complete community service, Like, that's our guy, right? So anyway, not surprisingly, yeah, it's taking an absolute ton of money to try to dig him, rescue him in this bid in, by the way, in a state that has not elected a Democrat to be a senator since the 1990s. So there's an organization out there called Vote Log. It's actually a left-leaning site. I want to point that out. It's put together by Wally Rashid, who is a big pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel guy. And it was originally put together to kind of track Israel-Palestinian issues.

18:06But they've got this, what purports to be up-to-date totals based on Federal Election Commission records of all the Senate races. And I took a look. It does seem to be decent data. According to that, by this point already, some$225 million has been spent in independent expenditures on Ken Paxton's bid, which is just just a stunning amount of money. There's also another, the Wesleyan Media Project tracked spending in Senate races for close to a three-week period at the end of September. Total spending in Texas equaled$112 million, a full 25 % of the$445 million that were being spent in the top nine most expensive Senate races.

18:5580 % of that$112 million was spent on Paxton's behalf. So meaning he got about 20%, one guy got about 20 % of all the top nine Senate race spending in that three-week period. That is the amount of dollars that Republicans are having to spend to, by the way, just keep him behind in the polls. He's still not ahead in a single poll, nor has he been in weeks. So there's still a very good chance, by the way, that this is a candidate who after sucking money away from every other state, because those dollars are dollars that aren't going to New Hampshire, where Johnson, Nunu is running a good race, or Maine, where Susan Collins is running a good race, or Alaska, where Dan Sullivan is running a good race, they could blow that bank and still lose this seat.

19:45So again, just going back to my original word, dumb. And also Trump himself, having waited to the last minute to endorse Paxton, which indicated that he really wasn't sure about this guy. Now he makes fun of his appearance, you know, calls him slovenly and not much to look at, which what does that do? That signals to anybody who is a fan of Trump in Texas. Well, I'm not sure about this guy either. So this looks really bad for the Republicans. Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. A t-shirt and jeans, mac and cheese, oceans and sunsets. Some things in life are an obvious match, like RIAs and Schwab Advisor Services, the number one choice for independent advisors looking for a custodian who can help them go further.

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20:58From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. Well, I appreciated Kim's survey of the Ken Paxson baggage carousel because all of the damaging information is kind of hard to keep track of at this point. What's amazing is that it just keeps coming. So in the last day or so, the journal's news pages have had a report. Previously unreported New Year's Eve 2024 celebration where Paxson partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn't his wife. These alleged fugitives had been indicted apparently on federal health care fraud charges but failed to return to the United States.

21:40And Barton, this story embedded in it is a video of Ken Paxton apparently on a balcony overlooking some fireworks. And it follows these leaks from his campaign fundraisers of audio of him speaking kind of in frank terms about how he's not making any decisions. those decisions about how to play this race are being made in Washington. It does not speak well, I think, of his campaign organization and his control of the people surrounding him, that all of this stuff just continues to drip, drip, drip out in the media. Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's more. This audio is from 2024.

22:19So somebody has been sitting on it all this time and only gave it to the media very recently. And yeah, I fully expect to see another. You know, there's there's a lot of pretty unflattering video of his opponent, James Tallarico. But that's been known for a while. That's sort of baked in, as they say. It's hard to believe any more is coming at a late stage. Similar sort of issue, though, for Tallarico, Kim, is I don't take him to be much of a centrist, a moderate candidate, sort of like Annie Andrews in South Carolina. But there may be a dynamic of people who, Republicans, conservatives, independents, who are not enthusiastic about James Tallarico and are not going to go vote for him, but also will not go vote for Ken Paxton.

23:05And in races that are close, that can be enough to decide the question in November. It's not necessarily that Annie Andrews or James Tallarico have to convince those conservatives to fill in the little oval next to their name. They just need to convince some of those voters not to fill in the other guy's oval. Add to this that, you know, James Tallarico is also now, in addition to all of his many crazy statements from the past, and again, just like Annie Andrews, his hurdle is trying to convince Texas voters that he's had some sort of magical transformation and doesn't believe any of those things that he said just a couple of years ago and is a different person now.

23:45But in addition to all of that, there's been this mysterious question of why he disappeared from the campaign trail for more than 10 days. There's some theories out there which I'm not going to go into. I think they have yet to be proven. But it is a case that he hasn't given, I think, an excellent explanation for why he was gone for all that time. It's also just not great if you're a candidate in a very buoyant Senate race to be absent from the campaign trail for that period of time either. So he certainly has some hurdles. One last just note of caution I would throw in on all of these polls and these races.

24:22I am not suggesting that the polls are wildly off, but what we have seen in many cycles is that they tend to be too far off this far out. And as we get closer and closer, then the polling companies become a little bit more rigorous about their models, who they actually are suggesting are going to turn out, how many members of the youth category are really going to make up the electorate. Some of those are still pretty wild. And, you know, there's a whole theory on the right that some of this is done purposely, that you kind of show Democrats always with this enormous lead that is somehow influences early voting, etc.

25:07But you don't also want to ruin your reputation. So the last poll you do, the last poll before everyone goes to the election, you make sure that's the good one. So you can say you were not really that far off. But let's watch closely over the next couple of weeks and see if these don't change a bit. Again, I'm not suggesting that they are massively off, but I do think that we aren't getting a full picture yet. Some of the challenges the Democrats are also facing in some of these races. Thank you, Kim and Barton. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button.

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