The upcoming Republican Party primary race for Texas governor presents a serious conundrum for GOP voters.
They will get to choose from among three top-tier candidates, two of whom are nut jobs.
We have the governor, Greg Abbott; challenging him are former Texas GOP chairman Allen West and former state senator Don Huffines. I won’t vote in the GOP primary this March, but I do have a thought or two I want to share.
Abbott is being challenged on the right by West and Huffines. Those two clowns don’t believe Abbott is conservative enough. West is the former one-term Florida congressman who moved to Texas because his political career in Florida was shot; Huffines is another far right-winger who says we need to ban all immigration into Texas.
Then we have Abbott, the guy who is fighting with the Biden administration over mask mandates.
I believe Abbott will survive this primary challenge, chiefly because West and Huffines are going to carve up the nut-job vote, paving the way for Abbott to skate to the party nomination.
It reminds me of the Texas Senate District 31 race in 2018 that enabled Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo to win his party’s nomination in a three-man race. His foes that year were former Midland mayor Mike Canon and Amarillo businessman Victor Leal. Both men sought to outflank Seliger on the far right. Seliger ran as a true-blue, mainstream Texas conservative and won the primary fight with 50.4 percent of the vote; no runoff was needed.
Canon and Leal split the goofball vote in that year’s Senate GOP primary.
I see the same thing happening this year in the GOP primary for governor.
Texas politics is really weird, indeed.