'Has to lose': GOP ditches imploding MAGA before it takes all of them down

Even after ugly primaries, Texas Republicans usually fall in line in November to carry the GOP candidate through the election. But The Atlantic reports Republicans throughout the state are feeling that President Donald Trump has planted them at a bridge too far this time.

Forty-three-year-old Texas entrepreneur John Huffman and Hillary Shepheard say they just aren’t willing to bail the party out of its poor choices and help carry Senatorial candidate Ken Paxton or Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French over the finish line.

“Our party needs a slap in the face,” said Shepheard, adding that for the long-term survival of her party, “Ken Paxton has to lose.”

Trump, they said, has remade the Texas Republican Party in his image, transforming it into a machine built not for winning general elections, but for allowing him to “dominate poisonous primaries.” This, they warned, is delivering up some of the worst candidates to soil a Texas election.

“What we have,” said Huffman, “is a fractured set of relationships that we are finding harder and harder to mend.”

Bo French is the former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party who once shared a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America. Now Atlantic writer Elaine Godfrey says French is a billionaire-backed GOP nominee who continues to post bigoted messages.

“Then there is Paxton. The three-term Texas attorney general is well known by now for facing accusations of securities fraud and bribery, for his alleged extramarital affairs, and for his less important but notable decision to pocket a $1,000 pen that did not belong to him,” reports Godfrey.

“I held my nose and voted for Trump three times, knowing that he didn’t share a lot of my moral compass,” but voting for Paxton “would be admitting to myself and my family and my friends that character truly doesn’t matter as long as your jersey is Republican,” said Huffman.

But when Godfrey pointed out to the pair that both Paxton and Trump have a “remarkably similar set of ethical problems” and asked them why “support one but draw a line at the other,” Huffman said the presidency matters more than a single Senate seat.

“There’s also part of me that understands the compromise I had to make to vote for Trump, and maybe this is my way of reclaiming a little bit of that.”

But Huffman and Shepheard said “it’s too late — that Trump and his allies ripped the door off its hinges years ago,” said Godfrey, with devastating results.

Last year, in a special election to fill a state Senate vacancy, Huffman lost a three-way fight between a self-described ‘ultra-MAGA’ candidate and a Democrat. Trump won that district by 17 points in 2024, said Godfrey, but it elected that Democrat by 14.

If Paxton tanks, Huffman said the Texas GOP might feel compelled to reform the way the party runs primaries, which could allow “more reasonable, less morally compromised candidates” to succeed in primaries.

“Ken Paxton losing may be the thing that could save the Republican Party in Texas,” she said.

Still, other Republicans are terrified at what could happen if Democrats start building inroads, no matter how deplorable the GOP’s options may be.

“We are exactly where we wanted to be 30 years ago,” said Jill Tate, a 53-year-old Republican activist and the president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women. “If we lose one statewide, the door is open. We cannot let it be open.”