AUSTIN, Texas — By 10:40 Tuesday night, the White House had assembled a theory so efficient that it explained every loss and falsified none of them.
“If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,” the President said, using the term whose full expansion — Republican In Name Only — has always functioned less as an accusation than as a warranty. The theory works like this: a Republican loses an election; therefore, six months earlier, he had secretly become something else. The dates are flexible. The logic is bulletproof in exactly the way a closed door is bulletproof.
The losses needing explanation were substantial. Texas voters removed Gov. Greg Abbott in favor of state Rep. Gina Hinojosa of Austin, ending more than three decades of Republican control of the governor’s office and installing the first Latina governor in state history. Abbott’s fall delivered a stun even to the pollsters who had prepared for a stun: Hinojosa overcame a spending gap of more than four to one on a campaign built on public schools and a pledge to evict billionaire influence from the statehouse, an eviction that voters, apparently, wanted to witness in person.
In the Senate race, state Rep. and former middle school teacher James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton, a man who has survived impeachment, indictment, and a house that reportedly survives on loyalty and infidelity in equal measure, all of which voters had reportedly forgiven, until, it turns out, they hadn’t.
The White House explanation traveled faster than the returns. Aides spent Wednesday applying the RINO label to losing candidates with the brisk efficiency of a claims processor. Press aide Cal Whitmore, asked whether the theory also explained the state legislative losses, said: “Before Tuesday, every one of these people was the most conservative governor in history. What we needed was a new word. We have a new word.”
It is a generous theory, in its way. Under it, no defeat belongs to the defeated. A senator can lose by eleven points and still die conservative, the political equivalent of a man who drowns standing up. A governor can be outspent four to one, outvoted half a million strong, and still be told by his own party that the problem was his purity. This site applauds the ambition. Only in American politics can the word for “we lost” be shorter than the word for the man who did.
What the theory cannot do, in fairness, is explain the winners. By the standard circulating in Washington, Hinojosa did not win Texas because of schools, or money, or a statehouse that had grown expensive in both senses of the word. She won, under a rival theory this desk declines to endorse, because roughly six hundred thousand Texans walked into a polling place on a Tuesday and became, in the eyes of the party they just left, the only RINOs left in the building.
Hinojosa said Wednesday that her transition would begin Thursday. Talarico said he intends to be sworn in in January, the month with no elections in it.