I am thrilled today to be joined by my friend Abby McCloskey, who is a columnist with the Dallas

Morning News and the host of the Beyond Talking Points podcast. I hope you subscribe to it.

Abby is smart. She is insightful, and I am really grateful that she is with us here today.

Abby, welcome. Wow, thanks, Steve. Glad to be here.

19 days left, two days ago in Texas. You're in Texas. So I have to start with the Colin

Al-Read-Cruz campaign and the debate and your impressions of it and where that stands, it looks like from outside of Texas

is a very, very close race. Could Ted Cruz lose?

Seems unlikely that Ted Cruz would lose. Texas is still a dominant Republican state.

But I like Colin Alderman, and he's running a good race, so we'll see what happens in a few weeks. What about like the extent to which that Ted Cruz

from a value set, right, from a cultural perspective, is I'm 54, so I'd I date myself a little bit,

right? That this ethos of Texas, right, that you don't

run away to Cancun during a crisis. You don't hide in the closet when the mob comes, you know,

from the insurrection. This is the state of James Earl Rutter, the state of Audie Murphy.

It's Texas. The state of the Alamo. We just came back from the Alamo. So I came to Texas, Steve, a decade ago. I'm from Cleveland,

did a stint in D.C. And when I came to Texas, Perry was governor, and you and I worked on his second

presidential campaign together.

And what drew me here was really the conservative economic focus. And it's a place of

opportunity because it's going to be a pretty light tax and regulatory environment. You can

kind of become who you want to be in this state. And over the last 10 years, I think what's happened in Texas is really a bellwether for

what's happened across the nation is that the heart of Republican and conservative politics

has moved from limited government, economics, opportunity focus, what really appealed to me into more of a red meat,

culture wars, guns, abortion, cancel culture, you name it. That switch has been really off-putting to me.

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