Republicans are facing the worst-case scenario in Texas, and I've got three interviews,

Gavin Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Banta, and the Democrat running against Maryland

State Senate President Bill Ferguson, Bobby Lippin.

I'm Brian Taylor Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.

I'm not sure that the Texas primary could have gone any worse for Republicans.

So it looks like James Talariko will advance the general election.

Dave Washerman called this race early on for James, which is usually all it takes for this thing to be completely over.

Importantly, Tala Rico's path to victory was his overperformance among Latinos in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.

And Latinos will not only have an

outsized impact on the 26th election, they'll probably decide the 26th election, meaning it's helpful

to have advanced a Democrat who is supported by the most important voting bloc in Texas.

But the real problem for Republicans lies in what happened in their primary. Between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton,

both candidates failed to reach that 50% threshold, which means the Republican primary is

officially going into a runoff. So what does that mean? It means three more months of infighting

between Paxton and Cornyn, which means their favorability ratings will only be driven further down

after 90 days of infighting. And also, importantly, more money is going to be set on fire for

three months now. Already, this is the most expensive Senate primary ever. The Texas Senate primaries

cost almost $130 million, with about 90 million of that on the Republican side. So now, instead of spending

money going after Tel Rico, Republicans are going to dump God knows how much more money into

the Senate Republican runoff. So that is an absolute nightmare scenario. And let's be clear,

the fact that this much money is being spent in Texas, in Ruby Red, Texas is a testament to how bad the

environment is right now for the GOP. If a hundred million bucks is being spent in that state,

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