Politics & Government

To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals head coach Dennis Green, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are who we thought they were. That was the biggest takeaway from the Senate candidates’ debate showdown at SMU on Friday night. Cruz displayed his patented blend of know-it-all smarminess, along with…

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz faces off against Democratic challenger U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke tonight at SMU in their first of three debates, and no doubt Texans everywhere will be glued to their screens to learn the answer to the race’s most pressing question: Will O’Rourke say the word? You know…

The picture at City Hall is coming into focus. Almost two years ago the old city manager got kicked out. It had become too obvious that he was subverting the public interest in favor of a small cabal of private interests. We got a new guy. His job was to…

For Beto O’Rourke supporters, Tuesday had to feel a little bit like the day the air got let out of the balloon. The El Paso Democratic U.S. representative trying to take down GOP Sen. Ted Cruz got his first piece of serious bad news in weeks. O’Rourke, according to a…

It’s a regular complaint from candidates every election: Someone, most likely their wicked opponent, is stealing the candidate’s signs from roads and yards. Jana Lynne Sanchez, the Democrat running to represent Texas’ 6th Congressional District, has come up with a plan to fight back. Her campaign recently started spraying road…

Monday afternoon, the Republican Attorney Generals Association (RAGA) sent out a proud email, patting one their most prominent members on the back. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has a new op-ed out, you see, in which he tells the Corpus Christi Caller-Times’ audience all the things he’s done to combat…

Sen. Ted Cruz is still the favorite in his race for re-election. He’s got plenty of cash on hand, has yet to trail his challenger, El Paso U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, in any publicly released poll and, according to the number-crunchers at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, has about a 66 percent…

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and his challenger for re-election, El Paso U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke will hold three debates over the six weeks-plus that remain in the run-up to the Nov. 6 election, their campaigns announced in dueling press releases late Friday afternoon. The first of the debates will be…

This is from way out in the boondocks here in Dallas, Texas, so far from the nation’s capital we have to take its existence on faith, but we’ve got feelings, too, you know. In fact I feel a very strong need to tell somebody how I’m feeling about the anonymous…

Ahead of November’s election, Texas Republicans have apparently found the hill on which they are willing to die. Late Thursday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who’s campaigning by flying around in a private jet and speaking in front of local TV cameras at airports, made his newest push for re-election,…

In a speech to the Dallas City Council on Wednesday, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, the longest serving and most influential black elected leader in the city, warned that the most serious threat to racial amity in the city comes from white liberals. It was vintage Price. The 68-year-old…

Did Zina Bash, a star of Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, flash a white power symbol while sitting behind Kavanaugh at his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday? Some people on Twitter think so, but then some people on Twitter think anything. Bash, who until recently worked for Texas…

Here it comes, the 2019 Dallas mayor’s race, and it is going to be a filthy replay of the 2005 “strong mayor” election in which the business oligarchy jammed its thumb down hard on the race button. The preview is playing now on social media. It’s a corny video with…

You are forgiven if you think it’s too early to talk about the May 2019 mayoral election in Dallas. In fact, I would forgive you if you still felt the same way in May 2019, because maybe you have other fish to fry. Is the next mayoral election going to…

First Baptist Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress deserves some credit. Motivations, politics and decency aside, he picked the right horse way back in the summer of 2015 when he decided to back then-candidate Donald Trump’s nascent presidential campaign. For his trouble — Jeffress frequently worked “Make America Great Again” into invocations and…

The GOP has a problem attracting women voters, at least among those women who think uninvited pussy grabbing is a bad thing. And they have a problem with younger voters, a depressingly small group but one that nonetheless tends to be passionate about things like civil liberties, the environment and…

Ken Paxton’s political ambitions, at this point, are probably best served by the attorney general staying out of the spotlight, and away from controversy, at least until his November general election contest with Justin Nelson is over. That’s reality for a public official with low name ID and a bunch…

Dr. Mark P. Jones is the fellow in political science at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies at Rice University and co-author of Texas Politics Today. We asked him to share his opinion on the Sen. Ted…